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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
The Block
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
No comments:
Post a Comment