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".)