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.