Confederados #3: Wild Goose Chase for Jo & Betty Shelby

 

Confederados #3: Wild Goose Chase for Jo & Betty Shelby

by Denniele Bohannon

Joseph O. Shelby (1830-1897) & Elizabeth N. Shelby Shelby (1841-1929) 

A composite picture 

The Lost Cause has its heroes. Missourian Jo Shelby has come to personify all the “Confederados” who left the United States after Confederate defeat. He's still glorified today despite his traitorous behavior. “...the kind of chieftain that Dumas or Walter Scott would have delighted in, a figure of legendary derring-do.” “J.P.G” in the Kansas City Star in 1919.

The Star was at the heart of Shelby’s myth through his lifetime and beyond.

Born in Kentucky to a prominent family of Gratzes, Shelbys and Blairs,  J. O. Shelby moved to Waverly in Lafayette County, Missouri with half-brother Henry when they left Transylvania University. His Aunt Rebecca Gratz in Philadelphia was optimistic about his future: "So amiable affectionate & clever....he has gone to such a thriving place and where he has so many friends!"

Shelby brought dozens of slaves from Kentucky to work his Waverly Steam Rope company, a “Rope Walk,” where men wound hemp into rope in demand for baling cotton.

Twisting hemp on a rope walk was labor intensive work. In 1860 Lafayette County tallied more enslaved people than any other Missouri county. Shelby became committed to the extreme proslavery cause as Missourians defined it, alienating his brother who returned to Kentucky.

Kansas State Historical Society Collection

 Flag carried by Missourians while terrorizing Kansans.

 

In 1857 27-year-old Jo Shelby married 15-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Shelby, a distant cousin. When the Civil War began she had one boy to raise as her husband enthusiastically joined Missouri’s Southern sympathizing troops. Missouri did not secede but became the site for bitter guerilla mayhem.

Detail of an 1862 Thomas Nast illustration of guerrilla warfare

Jo Shelby must have been a charismatic charmer. During Missouri’s Civil War chaos his Union family continued to speak well of him and help him out. Kentucky Gratzes traveled to Waverly to escort Jo's wife and children (a boy was born in 1864) back to the safety of Lexington, Kentucky.

 Wild Goose Chase by Jeanne Arnieri

After Appomattox Shelby, following his habitual path of reckless narcissism, refused to accept Confederate defeat. He took troops and family on a wild goose chase that failed to live up to expectations, leading about 1,000 soldiers to Mexico, then in the midst of its own Civil War between Benito Juarez's Mexican troops and those affiliated with the Emperor Maximilian, installed by Napoleon III of France. 

Fanciful idea of a meeting between Shelby and the Mexican imperial pair Maximilian and Carlotta drawn for the Kansas City Star by Frank Miller to publicize the 1939 release of the Bette Davis movie Juarez. 

In reality Maximilian rejected Shelby’s offer of troops because he worried about a Union military response after the U.S. war.

Instead, the Emperor offered Shelby soldiers land grants in Mexico, proposing Confederate colonies in Cordoba and Tuxpan.

Unsigned letter in the New York Times, winter 1865-6

In Cordoba Shelby began business on a large hacienda, a coffee plantation, and Elizabeth gave birth to Benjamin Gratz Shelby born in July, 1866. Mexicans, whether Juarista rebels or not, were displeased with invading Yankees taking their land. Rebellion in the form of banditry, assaults and raids convinced most Americans to abandon the colonies in 1867.

A Correspondent for the New Orleans paper wrote about the failure.

St. Louis Globe, May 2 , 1867

Not every Missouri paper was a fan of the General.

The Shelby family returned to Missouri in the summer of 1867.

 Wild Goose Chase by Elsie Ridgley

Elizabeth in her widow’s weeds

The family remained in Aullville, Missouri until Joseph’s 1897 death. Although he avoided public life the Kansas City Star and other mythmakers lauded him before and after his passing. 

State Historical Society of Missouri

George Caleb Bingham's Portrait of Jo Shelby

His widow soon moved to Bovina in Palmer County, Texas to live with her only daughter Ann Boswell Shelby Jersig (1874-1943.) Elizabeth died there in March, 1929.

Elizabeth Nancy (Betty) Shelby's Find-A-Grave file:  https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/10032/elizabeth-nancy-shelby

The Block 

Error in first pattern. Updated---Thanks Sheila for the proofreading!

A popular block with many names.

Carlie Sexton called it Wild Goose Chase in the early 20th century.

Read More:
Daniel O'Flaherty, General Jo Shelby: Undefeated Rebel, 1954

Matthew C. Hulbert, Oracle of Lost Causes: John Newman Edwards and His Never-Ending Civil War, 2024

A post on the Kentucky/Missouri family

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/03/american-stars-3-gratzes.html

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #2: Baltimore Basket for Sidney Hall

 

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #2 Baltimore Basket by 

Becky Collis for Sidney Hall

Sidney Hall (about 1835-1921)

Winterthur Collection 

In 1857 painter Thomas Waterman Wood depicted 22-year-old Sidney Hall with her charges, Lily Tyson, 3 years old and Martha (Patty), 5.

1860 Census, Baltimore 

The household of Harriet Jolliffe Tyson &

James Ellicott Tyson (1816-1893), grain farmer, merchant & real estate investor.

Sidney here was 25. Her mother Rachel (65?) was also a servant in the Tyson home as was S. M. Duvall, a 31-year-old man. All three are classified by race as M for mulatto or mixed race. In 1860 Baltimore was home to the largest free black population in the U.S.: 25,700 people. We know these servants were considered free as the census did not list enslaved people by name. 

Their city home was on McCulloh Street, a once-elegant neighborhood of townhomes with the city’s characteristic marble stoops. 

We cannot find out much about Sidney herself. Was she a rebel? Her employers, the Tysons certainly had a family tradition of rebellion.  

Lily & Patty’s grandmother Martha Ellicott Tyson (1795-1873)

As you might guess by her subdued silk gown and white cap Martha was a Quaker.

James Ellicott Tyson’s mother was a well-known Baltimore rebel. Martha Ellicott Tyson’s family founded Ellicott’s Mills, a significant spot in Maryland agricultural history as the Ellicotts advocated grain over the tobacco that was so hard on the soil. They pioneered uses of fertilizers and refused to use slave labor.

 

Maryland Center for History and Culture 

Ellicott’s First Mills by Benjamin Latrobe

Martha married Nathan Tyson (1787-1867) and gave birth to twelve children yet found time to dedicate to causes such as abolition, women’s rights and education. She was a co-founder of Swarthmore College during the Civil War.

 

Stone meeting house built in 1843

Martha was a member of the rural Little Falls Friends Meetinghouse whose members had been required to free their slaves in 1800 as abolitionist ideas spread among the Quakers. She also attended the Baltimore Quaker Meeting where she was chosen an elder and later in life a minister. Martha lived to see the end of the Civil War and the fulfillment of her lifelong work towards abolition. Sidney outlived her by many decades. The 1920 census found Sidney one of 23 elderly residents of the African M.E. Church Home (the Bethel Home) at 207 Aisquith Street. 

1920 The Bethel Home

Sidney Hall died soon after that census at 86. Is this Sidney noted in a Find-A-Grave site with a clipping telling us about the funeral of a woman with five daughters and 48 grandchildren?

 

Baltimore Basket by Denniele Bohannon

The Block

Another classic Baltimore style of the simpler type 

Print these on 8-1/2" x 11" sheets.

 Piece, applique or cut stripes for the basket.

Bev Evans found a striped basket block

with a fussy-cut print.

Confederados #2: Double Cross for Ann & Matthew Maury

 

Confederados #2: Double Cross for the Maurys

by Elsie Ridgley

Ann Hull Herndon-Maury (1811-1901) & 

Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-1873) Composite Portrait

Matthew Maury, a well-respected oceanographer and astronomer, became a Confederate Navy captain who spent much of the Civil War in England negotiating with British ship builders for purchases.

Matthew's 1855 book was the first on marine science

Double Cross by jeanie Arnieri

Daughter Betty in her twenties kept a diary in the first years of the war in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Was Papa’s English appointment a good use of an experienced seaman and scientist or a plot by Jefferson Davis and Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory---a double cross--- to keep him an ocean away so he would not be meddling in the Navy's management?                        

Library of Congress

After Southern defeat Confederate officers feared returning home due to threats of imprisonment or execution. President Andrew Johnson had issued amnesty proclamations but high-ranking officers like Maury were excluded from pardons. 

Ex-President Jefferson Davis spent two years in a military prison.

Unable to return to the States Maury left wife and younger children in England (they had eight in all) and sailed for Maximilian’s Mexico where the Emperor appointed him "Imperial Commissioner of Colonization.” The plan was to develop emigrant colonies in the countryside with US emigrants given land grants. It’s estimated 5,000 Southerners, Black and white, left for Mexico from 1865 into the early 1870s.

Slavery had been illegal in Mexico for decades so those who hoped to build a copy of the Southern plantation system before the war were foiled. For many reasons the plan did not attract enough expatriates to make it work.  

January, 1866 feature widely copied describing

Maury's Colonization manifesto as a "Quack Advertisement"

Double Cross by Denniele Bohannon

Ann Maury and the children remained in England where Matthew, visiting them in 1866, was notified of Maximilian’s “collapse of imperial support,” just one aspect of the French-backed empire’s instability. Yet Maury’s alternative, a return to Old Virginia, seemed impractical. "Back to what? To poverty and misery..."

However, after President Andrew Johnson attempted to repair the post-war Union with a Christmas pardon for all in December, 1868 the Virginia Military Institute offered Maury a position, assuring him punishment would not be an issue and so he returned. 

 

October 30, 1868. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer opposed the exile’s

return calling him a "toady" and "a dead beat."

Maury died at 67 in February, 1873, at his VMI home in Lexington, Virginia, occasion for mourning in Virginia…

Norfolk Virginian, February 4, 1873

…and Northern regrets about the turn his once promising career had taken.

From an obituary in the Boston Globe, February, 1873

The Block 

Double Cross

Matthew Maury seems to have been double-crossed by the Confederate government

 and by Maximilian after the war.

The block is simple enough with its 2 pattern pieces, a square and a rectangle. Several unnamed variations are in my Encyclopedia and BlockBase. We might call this one Double Cross in memory of all the betrayals we find in Maury’s tale.

Oooops/ Wednesday's pattern had an error---the 10 inch version has a center square B that should be cut 2-1/2", which the pattern above now indicates. (Not 3-1/2".)