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."

 

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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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