Confederados #4: Strength in Union for Louisa and Clement Vallandigham

4 Strength in Union by Elsie Ridgley recalling

Louisa and Clement Vallandigham

During the Civil War Southern sympathizers spent time north of the border spying and working against the Union. After Southern surrender many Confederados sought refuge in Canada including members of the Jefferson Davis family. Much traffic, legal and illegal, crossed land and water borders in the 1860s.

Clement Laird Vallandigham (1820-1871)

One unwilling Canadian resident was Ohio politician Clement Vallandigham, deported in 1863 for treasonous activities as head of the “Peace Democrats,” nicknamed the Copperheads after a snake that bites without warning. Born in Ohio, Vallandigham married Louisa Anna McMahon (1820-1871), daughter of a Maryland plantation owner in 1846. They had two sons, one who died as an infant and Charles Noble Vallandigham, born in 1854.

Harper’s Weekly, February 28, 1863

During the Civil War Vallandigham attacked Lincoln and Union war goals. A May, 1863 speech infuriated Major General Ambrose Burnside so much that he broke into the "Copperhead's" Dayton home in the middle of the night and arrested him.

Lincoln banished him to the Confederacy, which did not want him either.

Dixie & the U.S. tossing Vallandigham across the line

After a few weeks in the Confederacy he found passage on a blockade-runner to the Bahamas, then on a ship north to Canada where he established a home in Windsor, Ontario, across from Detroit. 

Louisa and son Charles joined him in Ontario where he ran a losing campaign for Ohio’s governorship in absentia with all the trappings continuing back in Ohio: Song clubs, torchlight parades and speakers supporting "The Man in Exile."

Ohio is not far from Canada, just across Lake Erie

After a year in Canada he illegally crossed the border to Detroit in disguise (a pillow strapped around his waist added pounds) and surprised Ohio Democrats holding a local convention, who welcomed him and elected him a national delegate.

Strength in Union by Jeanne Arnieri 

Lebanon House (now the Golden Lamb) about 1930

After the war the Vallandighams resumed their lives in Dayton where he practiced law. In 1871 his life ended in a strange and dramatic fashion in Lebanon, Ohio when he was 53. Boarding at the Lebanon House above while defending a murderer he planned to clear his client by claiming that the victim accidentally shot himself. Vallandigham showed a friend how that might have happened using a pistol he did not know was loaded. He shot himself in the abdomen and died the next day.

A shattered Louisa visited relatives in Maryland where she died less than two months after Clement.

Louisa’s obituary widely copied from the Baltimore Sun August 15, 1871

Strength in Union by Denniele Bohannon

In 1928 author Elbert Benton looked back 70 years and considered the Copperhead/Peace Democrats a result of the politics of “perverted imagination”---perhaps we’d call it paranoid misinformation---a  personality trait all too familiar today.

The Block

Strength in Union

My Encyclopedia and BlockBase tell us that this simple repeat is called Strength in Union from the Nancy Cabot column in the Chicago Tribune of the 1930s. Burnside and Lincoln banished Vallandigham because they realized he was a grassroots force to weaken Union Strength.  In his treason he became The Man Without a Country, inspiring Edward Everett Hale’s famous story.

Ten inch & fifteen inch options

Post your progress in our Facebook Group ConfederadosQuilt.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1910891729507739

Read More

Biography by Clement’s brother:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Life_of_Clement_L_Vallandigham/eyYrAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=life+of+clement+vallandingham&pg=PA14&printsec=frontcover

Ye Book of Copperheads, Cartoons and Poetry

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45274/45274-h/45274-h.htm

The Man without a Country by Edward Everett Hale

The Movement for Peace without a Victory by Elbert J. Benton
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89062261854&seq=7

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #3: Monument Wreath for Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson

 

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #3 Monument Wreath for

 Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson by Becky Collis

Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson Post Shippen (1842-1926)

Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson, a prominent member of Baltimore society, showed her rebellion in Union Maryland by forming the Brown Veil Club, supporters of the Confederacy. 

When war began she lived with her parents Arinthea Darby Parker and James Macon Nicholson in the Mount Vernon Place neighborhood at 209 West Monument Street with a view of Baltimore's Washington Monument.

 

Maryland Historical Society

The Brown Veil Club or Monument Street Girls

Standing: Henrietta Penniman Carrington, Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson;

Seated: Sophia Sargeant, Alice Wright, Rebecca Gordon, and Ida Winn

The Monument Street Girls sewed clothing for rebel soldiers and sang in a glee club where they popularized James Ryder Randall’s poem, “Maryland! My Maryland” set to the tune of “Tannenbaum-O Tannenbaum.”  The women staged a small Confederate demonstration after the Southern victory at the Battle of Manassas in July, 1861, marching to Baltimore’s Washington Monument in their West Monument Street neighborhood.  

"The despot’s heel is on thy shore,

Maryland!

His torch is at thy temple door,

Maryland!

Avenge the patriotic gore

That flecked the streets of Baltimore,

And be the battle queen of yore,

Maryland! My Maryland!"

In her 1904 account of the club's activities Rebecca recalled they asked men associated with the poem to publish it as a song but they refused, worried about Union retaliation. Rebecca decided to do it herself. Although a Southern sympathizer father James was opposed to Secession inspiring her accurate idea that she could get away with treason. "My father is a Union man, and if I am put in prison, he will take me out." 

Emancipation Celebration Parade on Monument Street by 

Baltimore's African-American community

John Eager Howard Post (1840 -1876)

A year after the war ended Rebecca married Confederate Captain John Post of the First Maryland Cavalry. In the ten years they were married they had six children but only one son survived to adulthood. Her husband died at 36 at their home on West Monument Street. 

Dr. Edward Shippen (1827-1895)

Rebecca's second husband was Union veteran Edward Shippen (1827-1895), a Philadelphia surgeon who served with several Pennsylvania regiments and as superintendent of a hospital at the Capitol building in Washington. They married in 1878 and had a son the following year. Rebecca lived well into the 20th century, dying in 1926. 

Monument Wreath by Denniele Bohannon

The Block

This squarish wreath has become associated with 

Iowa but we see it first in Baltimore applique.

The Library of Congress has Shippen fanily papers, which

include a few embroidery patterns and a scrap of fabric.

https://www.loc.gov/collections/shippen-family-papers/about-this-collection/

Read more about the family:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2020/08/rebecca-lloyd-nicholsons-civil-war.html

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/237344414/rebecca_lloyd-shippen

 https://mdhistory.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/822

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