Confederados #10: Nocturne for Eliza McHatton Ripley

Confederados #10: Nocturne recalling Eliza McHatton Ripley by Elsie Ridgley

"Nocturne" represents the dreamy view of Eliza Chinn McHatton Ripley who spent 

fifteen years as an exile in Mexico and Cuba.

Eliza Chinn McHatton Ripley (1832-1912) & first husband

James A. McHatton (1813-1872)

Composite picture. Their 1852 wedding may have been the occasion for these portraits.

Eliza, born in Kentucky and raised in New Orleans, was conservative in her thinking, thoroughly believing old Southern ways were the best and any modernisms were changes to be deplored and ignored. She was one of the generation of Southern women who believed it necessary to record nostalgic memories of pre-war society, child raising and slavery, a system where, as she put it: "The whites suffered more from its demoralizing influence than the blacks." 

She published two memoirs. From Flag to Flag: A Woman's Adventures & Experiences in the South During the War, in Mexico, & in Cuba recalled her exile. A later contribution to southern nostalgia Social Life in Old New Orleans was released in 1912.

The McHattons, antebellum plantation owners in Louisiana, saw more opportunity in Mexico in the first years of the war. James shipped cotton through Texas from a base in Matamoros. “ My husband, whose energy was all-controlling, and who knew no such word as fail, rose above every emergency. It seems now, when I recall it all, the heavier were the blows, the stouter his resistance.”

Nocturne by Jeanne Arnieri

Nocturne by Jeanne Arnieri

Eliza accompanied him with son Henry born in 1856 and an infant, a “Dear baby [who] succumbed to the first illness he ever had” while they were living in Houston in April. They brought Delia and Zell, young enslaved servants who once in Mexico must have realized they were free. Delia disappeared and settled in Mexico, across the river from San Antonio, Texas. She was soon replaced by Martha sent from the Louisiana plantation. Zell remained with them as he grew up until he married.

Eliza gave birth to daughter Annella in Matamoros a few months before War’s end. After Confederate surrender the McHattons sailed to Havana, Cuba where they joined “Several Confederate officers, induced by fear of imprisonment to leave the country.” Eliza listed officers Benjamin, Breckinridge, Toombs, Fry, Magruder, Bee, Preston, Early, and Maffitt. “Many were accompanied by their wives. Exiles though all were, they enjoyed today, not knowing what the morrow had in store. One by one, as assurance of personal safety was secured, they drifted back to their old [U.S.]homes.” 

 

Havana’s harbor in the distance, 1860s

In thriving Havana, “Salons and balconies were thronged with Confederates as homeless as ourselves, but I found difficulty in recognizing in some of the belaced and befrilled beauties gliding about, the women who scarce had stockings and handkerchiefs when I last saw them in Texas.”

James decided against return to ravaged Louisiana, buying a sugar plantation and refinery about 60 miles from Havana. ”We closed the bargain, and in May moved our little belongings, Martha and Zell included, to ‘Desengaño.’ “

 

Workers who harvested the sugar cane and worked the plantation included Cuban slaves & Chinese immigrants, treated as slaves.

 

[Cuban] Lady on a Horse by Víctor Patricio de Landaluze

 As a woman who did not welcome change Eliza was predictably unhappy in a new culture. Her primary complaint was boredom. With Martha and many Cuban servants to run the household and care for her two children Eliza spent her leisure hours at needlework as she had done in Louisiana. But:

  “We had very little fancy-work. No Berlin wools work was needed in that climate, so the materials were not procurable. The laborious drawing of thread-in fine linen and embroidering over the drawn places in delicate, cobwebby designs, so intricate that it makes one's eyes ache to look at them, had no charms for us, though it was the favorite occupation of Cuban señoras. We embroidered conventional morning-glories and wheat on pillow-shams; scalloped flounces and dress-waists, and made yards upon yards of senseless tatting, till we wearied with the work. Sewing-thread could be had in abundance, and our busy fingers produced wonderful tidies and spreads, for which we had no use.”

Is this traditional Cuban ruffled dress a ”tombo” dress?

The resourceful “Martha had time to ‘take in’ sewing, and [we] amused ourselves by designing - even frequently helping in the work itself - tombo dresses for the African belles on the plantation. “

 After being shot by neighborhood bandits husband James’s health deteriorated. He died in March, 1872 of “Nervous Exhaustion” at 58. Sixteen-year-old Henry was in a U.S. military school; Eliza, Martha and Annella returned to the states. Within the year the 41-year-old Eliza married wealthy former Confederate Major Dwight Ripley (1829-1907) and settled in New York. She signed “The Oath” of allegiance to the Union in 1874, the year she gave birth to her last child Elise (1874-1941).

Dwight Ripley’s 1907 obituary from the Brooklyn Eagle. Eliza died five years later, undoubtedly decrying a Brooklyn full of Irish immigrants like my grandparents.

Eliza’s Findagrave File: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/79633410/eliza-moore-mchatton_ripley

 The Block

Nocturne by Denniele Bohannon

Nocturne was pictured in the Chicago Tribune’s Nancy Cabot quilt column in 1934. A nocturne is a rather wistful musical composition---like the life Eliza dreamed up for herself.

Cutting Sugar Cane by Cuban artist Víctor Patricio de Landaluze, 1874

 Read More:

“Too South of the South: A Louisiana Family Searches for Community in Cuba,’ Robert C. Poister in Southern Communities: Identity, Conflict, and Memory in the American South, edited by Steven E. Nash, Bruce E. Stewart.

https://books.google.com/books?id=eS2bDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA195&dq=james+mchatton+cuba&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjUtMzsiZWOAxXM4skDHQ6fG20Q6AF6BAgEEAM#v=onepage&q=james%20mchatton%20cuba&f=false

 Eliza Moore Chinn McHatton Ripley's Social Life in Old New Orleans. Being Recollections of My Girlhood, Eliza Moore Chinn McHatton Ripley.  https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/ripleyflag/ripley.html

 From Flag to Flag: A woman's adventures and experiences in the South during the war, in Mexico, and in Cuba, Eliza Moore Chinn McHatton Ripley. https://www.amazon.com/Flag-Womans-Adventures-Experiences-during/dp/1718991495

Baltimore Belles & Rebels: #9 Baltimore Basket

 

Baltimore Belles & Rebels: #9

Baltimore Basket by Denniele Bohannon

 

Jane Claudia Saunders Johnson 1832-1899

Jane Saunders Johnson was living in Baltimore when the Civil War commenced. As a North Carolina native there was no doubt on which side her loyalties would lie. 

General Bradley Tyler Johnson 1829-1903

Her husband attorney Bradley Tyler Johnson soon raised a pro-Confederate militia “The Maryland Line” in his home town of Frederick. Forty years later, a short biography in the magazine The Confederate Veteran, clarion of the Lost Cause, gives an account of Jane’s “manly” rebellion in Union Maryland. 

To outfit his pro-Southern troops she returned to North Carolina and secured supplies, a mission noted at the time and lauded by the Lost Cause press ever after.

Her mission South was conducted during the convention to determine Maryland’s loyalties, a timely  inspiration to those in favor of Secession.

Following Confederate defeat the Johnsons spent the rest of their lives in Baltimore and Virginia as voice and symbols of the old South.

 

Here a Kentucky newspaper disapproved of Johnson’s 1888 speech that the Reconstruction federal government “is controlled by Confederate soldiers.” "Alas! 'tis true."

 

The Block

Baltimore Basket by Becky Collis

Gross Collection/Dolph Briscoe Collection

Julia Ann Pentz, top dated 1847

A typical Baltimore basket recalls the Baltimore rebel gathering supplies.

International Quilt Museum (2005056.0001)

Top dated 1847

Blocks 1 to 9. Three to go.

Confederados #9: Single Chain & Knot John & Mary Burch Breckenridge

Confederados #9: Single Chain & Knot recalling 

John & Mary Burch Breckenridge

by Jeanne Arnieri

John Cabell Breckinridge (1821-1875) & Mary Cyrene 

Burch Breckinridge (1826-1907) in Canadian exile, 1866

Lexington society must have made note of the 1843 marriage of two Kentuckians, attorney John C. Breckinridge and Mary Burch of nearby Georgetown. John soon went off to fight in the Mexican War of the late 1840s, playing that card into a political career.

Library of Congress

At 36 he became the youngest man ever elected to the U.S. Vice-Presidency running with James Buchanan in 1856. Their campaign poster promised state sovereignty---code for a proslavery policy. By then Mary with six children under the age of 12 (one had died as an infant) was busy enough to leave little mark on Washington society.

Western Kentucky University

After four divisive years of a Buchanan/Breckinridge administration Breckinridge ran for President in the election of 1860.

“Dividing the National Map” shows 1860’s four Presidential candidates (L-R: Lincoln, Douglas, Breckinridge and Bell.) Breckinridge is tearing off the Southern states, which he did, but Lincoln won the four-way election. South Carolina reacted by leading the Secession movement soon after.

Although Kentucky remained in the Union Breckinridge fought with the Confederacy, becoming Jefferson Davis’s last Secretary of War before surrender in April, 1865.

Mary Burch Breckinridge & John Cabell Breckinridge, a composite portrait

After the triumphant Union government indicted him for high treason he fled to Florida and with a son and two friends sailed in a rickety boat across the Gulf of Mexico for Cuba. After commandeering a larger boat they arrived in Cardenas, Cuba in June, 1865. He soon fled to Europe accompanied by Charles J. Helm, a Confederate agent in Cuba, 

Single Chain & Knot by Denniele Bohannon

He was next reunited with the family in Ontario, Canada in the fall. They spent the winter in Toronto greeting other Confederate exiles such as the Jefferson  Davis family, James Mason, Jubal Early--- enough, according to Mrs. Breckinridge, "to form quite a pleasant society among ourselves.”

John & Mary standing left with friends in Ontario,

August, 1866. Behind them Niagara Falls and the U.S.

They found a house in the town of Niagara with a view of the United States but soon took the children to France where they remained for two years. John spent his exile traveling in Europe and the Middle East.

Breckinridge in Parisian exile

"Pardons for all"

Pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in his 1868 general amnesty the Breckenridges were free to return to Kentucky. Johnson was impeached for that Christmas Day pardon but the controversy was not enough to actually motivate Congress to remove him from office.

The family rented a Lexington house on Second Street and John found profitable work in railroad building and the law. He never sought political office again, which would have required him to ask for approval with a 2/3 majority from Congress, a humiliating and perhaps futile move.

Mary took up the post-war cause of elite Southern women, creating the durable myth of the Lost Cause with stone and bronze public statuary. 

She was president of Lexington’s Ladies’ Memorial & Monument Association formed in May, 1869 to fund a sculpture of a cross draped with a Confederate flag on a broken staff unveiled in 1875.

1975 feature about Lexington’s Confederate Memorial

About 3,000 Confederate Memorial Associations attracted female volunteers. Above, an outdoor meeting in Macon, Georgia in the late 1870s.

Two years after the cemetery memorial installation a bronze sculpture funded by The John C. Breckinridge Monument Association was placed before the Fayette County Courthouse. John himself had died seven days before the statue’s dedication.

Breckinridge’s Memorial has been moved from its official public site. In 2018, the Mayor and the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council relocated it to the Lexington Cemetery near the family burials.

The sculpture on a new base

Single Chain & Knot by Elsie Ridgley

Mary was living with her daughters in New York at the time of her death.

Owensboro Messenger, October 1907

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Baltimore Belles & Rebels: #8 Wreath of Hearts for Harriet King Hyatt

 

Baltimore Belles & Rebels: #8 

Wreath of Hearts by Becky Collis recalling 

Harriet Randolph King Hyatt (1814-1901) 

 

Among the wealthy merchants of Baltimore when Civil War began was Alpheus Alfred Hyatt (1794-1865) who lived in the mansion above named Wansbeck with wife Harriet Randolph King Hyatt (1814-1901). They had three children but only 15-year-old Ida was living at home. Son Alpheus II was enrolled at Harvard and Harriet's stepdaughter was married.

The large house was not empty; eleven residents counting Irish-born servants were listed in the 1860 census. Anne Breman, born in Ireland, was a live-in seamstress.

It appears these Hyatts were not slaveholders, yet Harriett and her son were considered Union rebels in the "Secesh" family. Alpheus II’s biography notes he and mother Harriett were not in accordance with the rest of the Hyatts when he acted upon his conviction that he should join the Union, “although he should thus estrange himself from those who were nearest and dearest to him, for his relatives in Maryland sympathized with the South…It was not until thirty years after that his relatives became reconciled to their Union veteran.”

Alpheus Hyatt II (1838 - 1902)

Alpheus joined the 47th Massachusetts Volunteers where he mustered out at war’s end as a captain and resumed his studies, becoming a well-respected paleontologist at Harvard.

Frank Leslies's Illustrated Newspaper, May 14, 1864

Baltimore’s Union fundraising fair was held for weeks in April and May, 1864. Organizers were Union-sympathizing society women such as Fanny Turnbull, Elizabeth Kell Bradford and Annie M. Gilman Bowen. Harriet among them had charge of several artistic departments such as the Tableaux Vivants ---costumed theatrical scenes in which the actors assumed a static pose.

Tableaux Vivant depicting the doomed Mary Queen of Scots and her ladies

Robert W. Schoeberlein, Baltimore City Archivist, tells us: "Despite the apparent solidarity of the state’s loyal population, the Maryland Fair could only be termed a modest financial success when compared with similar 1864 events. The final tally exceeded just over $83,000. In contrast, both the New York and Philadelphia fairs each cleared over $1,000,000.....While competition for donations from other cities most likely affected Maryland’s net amount, both economic realities and the state’s political division did factor largely."

Perhaps Alpheus Senior was the family member with Confederate loyalties. He died a few weeks before the war was over in New York and was buried in Washington City. Was he estranged from his wife and son? And if a Confederate sympathizer why was he in New York? 

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington by Marion Boyd Allen, 1915

A biography of her famous son notes mother Harriet was “a woman of strong and decided character and an amateur artist of considerable ability, some of her copies of old masters and tapestries being noteworthy.” Her granddaughters inherited that artistic talent. Both Harriet Randolph Hyatt Mayor (1868-1960) and Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) were professional artists with Anna a prominent sculptor of monumental pieces in the 20^th century.

The Block

 Despite rumors of family dissension we are giving the Hyatts a wreath of hearts.

Read More:

Schoeberlein, Robert W. "A Fair to Remember: Maryland Women in Aid of the Union. Maryland Historical Magazine 1995.

civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2020/01/baltimore-marylands-sanitary-fair-union.html

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/147518940/harriet_randolph-hyatt