39 Hovering Hawks

Hovering Hawks

by Becky Brown

Hovering Hawks can symbolize foraging soldiers on both sides. Hawks are predators that keep a hawk-eye out for a breakfast of smaller birds and rodents, so one can see how their name was appropriated for predatory scavengers during the Civil War.

Red-tailed hawk

Best known are the Jayhawks or Jayhawkers who swooped in during the pre-war days of the Kansas Troubles. In Kansas lore Jayhawker is an Irish term, brought by an immigrant (one mythical Pat Devlin) who explained:

"In old Ireland we have a bird we call the jayhawk that when it catches another bird it takes delight in bullyraging the life out of it like a cat does a mouse...You call it 'foraging off the enemy,' by, begobs I'll call it jayhawking."

Senator James H. Lane on the cover of

Harper's Weekly in November, 1861

Once the Civil War began, jayhawking took place under cover of war strategy. In September, 1861 Kansas troops under U.S. Senator James Lane sacked the town of Osceola, Missouri. Captain Edgar Poe Trego wrote his wife that the Kansans returned,

 "having had a brush with the enemy, scattered them, took the town, obtained all the horses, mules, wagons and [Negros]; loaded the wagons with valuables from the numerous well-supplied stores and then set fire to the infernal town."

Many Southerners blamed Jayhawkers for any and all raids, down into the deep South. Roxanna Cole in North Carolina complained about a Colonel Lee and his Jayhawkers for local depredations:

" 'subsisting on the enemy' they call it. But they don't tell that they take the bread from women and children (for men are long since gone) while they also take the only means to make more---the horses, stock, and negroes. They, as usual, took our scanty supply of food and make us cook it, Christmas day though it was. They came and demanded quilts and comforts. I told them that I had none that I could spare. They answered insolently that 'It makes no difference about that, Go and get two. I almost cried that I had to give up my nice comforts to such swine and I had none but nice ones."

Hawk seems to have meant a thief of any kind. In 1861 Anne S. Frobel in Northern Virginia instructed her slaves to bury the silver, a common precaution, exclaiming in her diary,

"What spoonhawks these Yankees are!"

Hovering Hawks is BlockBase #1323, given that name by Ruth Finley in 1929.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 2 dark and 4 blue squares 2-1/2".

B - Cut 1 dark, 3 light, 2 orange (or brick red) and 4 blue squares 2-7/8". Cut each in half diagonally. You need 2 dark, 6 light, 4 orange and 8 blue triangles (20 in all).

 

See a lovely applique quilt that was probably jayhawked from a Southern family. It eventually wound up in the Kansas State Historical Society. Click here:

http://www.kshs.org/p/cool-things-civil-war-quilt/15368

What quilthawks those Yankees were!

28 Next Door Neighbor

Next Door Neighbor by Becky Brown, who writes:

"I think the more fabrics in a block the better."

The Next Door Neighbor block can remind us of war's tendency to turn neighbors against each other. Few victims of our Civil War represent a splintered community better than Bursheba Fristoe Younger whose haunting face on the left is a signature of this blog. Born in Kentucky, she moved to the new state of Missouri as a child and married Henry Younger, a drover, livery operator and trader in the western part of the state neighboring on the Kansas Territory. Her slave-holding family played a part in nearly every act of the Kansas-Missouri border conflict that grew into Civil War.

Henry Washington Younger

Bursheba and Henry had fourteen children and a prosperous home in the mid-1850s, but when the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitted settlers to vote the territory as free state or slave state, Henry felt compelled to act for a proslavery Kansas and  established a town and residence just over the border. He was elected to the new territorial legislature, often called the Bogus Legislature because voters and members were actual Missouri residents.

When free-state Kansans gained political control, Missourians abandoned their Kansas settlements. Henry opened a general store in Harrisonville, Missouri, and became mayor.

After war was declared in 1861 he supported the state's Union government. Neutrality was as dangerous as partisanship and Henry was shot dead on a Kansas road in 1862.  His murder was probably revenge, either for his proslavery politics or for his sons' reputations. Some say Jim and Cole Younger became bushwhackers to avenge their father's death; others believe Henry  was killed as a lesson to parents who let their boys run wild.

The widowed Bursheba could find no peace in guerilla-torn Missouri. The Union Army and the Kansas Jayhawkers harassed her, burning her house and then the neighbors' houses where she sought refuge.  Her sons were among Quantrill's Raiders who attacked Lawrence, Kansas in 1863, an act avenged by the Union Army's Order Number 11 creating a no man's land in western Missouri. With her Southern neighbors Bursheba and her youngest children walked south to Texas, settling near Sherman.

Four of Bursheba's 14 children

Henrietta with Jim, Bob and Cole Younger.

Bob died in prison in 1889. Jim committed suicide in 1902 and Cole lived to join a Wild West Show in the early 20th century.

Bursheba's boys refused to surrender. With a few other guerillas who turned to crime, Cole and Jim Younger became Missouri folk heroes. Their mother was periodically terrorized by lawmen looking for the gang. She returned to Missouri in 1870 where she died shortly after at the age of 54.

Bursheba's portrait from a 1906 book.

Worse things happened to her than

 being remembered as the mother of outlaws.

The Next Door Neighbor block was given that name by the Ladies' Art Company of St. Louis in the early 20th century. It's BlockBase #2787.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut 1 very dark, 1 medium and 2 background squares 2-7/8". Cut each in half with a diagonal cut. 

You need 2 very dark triangles, 2 medium triangles and 4 background triangles.

B Cut 1 light, 1 medium and 1 background squares 5-1/4". Cut into 4 triangles with 2 diagonal cuts.

You need 4 light, 4 medium and 4 background triangles.

Piece this block in diagonal strips.

5 Kansas Troubles

Kansas Troubles by Jeanne Poore

This week's block commemorates Kansas Day. Kansas entered the Union 150 years ago this week on January 29th, 1861. For years the territory had petitioned Congress for statehood, but Southern politicians refused to add a new free state in the West. After Southern Senators paraded out of the Senate Chamber, the remaining majority finally had the votes to create the 34th state in the Union.

Elizabeth Blair Lee wrote to her husband in the Union Navy of her visit to the Senate chamber, January 20, 1861:

Mother & I went to see Kanzas enter the Union---before she was allowed to do [so] the Senators from Ala Florida & Mr. [Jefferson] Davis [Senator from Mississippi] announced the exit of these States out of it---These gentlemen were deeply moved but I never saw such an aroused audience when they left their places simultaneously---the Democratic side rose & surrounded them---But the Republicans ignored the whole scene & except 3 of them, all kept their seats & went on with business---looking stern & solemn...The ladies [in the gallery] sat calmly---thro the whole---I wished in my heart for Old Hickory to arrest them all--it might save thousands of precious lives, so I thought & felt & so I did not weep tho' my head ached and so does my heart....

A few days later the House passed the Kansas statehood bill and on the 29th President Buchanan signed it.

President-elect Lincoln

with a 34-star flag signifying

Kansas statehood in Philadelphia

February, 1861

Fair Maid of Kansas in the Hands of the Border Ruffians

Kansans (free white men who were Kansans) could vote on whether to be slave-state or free-state,

an idea that encouraged Northerners and Southerners to use voter fraud and terrorism to advance their agendas. The territory became known as Bleeding Kansas.

The Kansas Troubles increased tensions between North and South in the seven years leading up to the formal declaration of War in 1861.

Kansas Troubles quilt, about 1850, by L.B.

Collection of the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas

The quilt pattern goes back to the time of the Kansas Troubles, but we have no idea what women called the design then. The pattern name appears in print about 1890. It doesn't matter how many little triangles there are; it's the rotational repeat that makes it a Kansas Troubles.

Karla Menaugh, Kansas Troubles, 1998

We Kansans love the pattern. Lots of triangles!!!

Pam and Jean and a Kansas Troubles quilt top

Cutting for an 8" block

A - Cut 2 light squares 4-7/8". Cut each into 2 triangles with one cut. You need 4 triangles.

B - Cut 4 light squares 1-1/2".

C - Cut 8 light and 12 dark squares 1-7/8". Cut each into 2 triangles with one cut. You need 16 light and 24 dark triangles. (You might be happier cutting the squares larger---say 2-1/2" and then piecing the small two-part squares, and finally trimming each to 1-1/2" squares.)

These little squares finish to 1" for an 8" block

D - Cut 2 medium squares 2-7/8". Cut each into 2 triangles with one cut. You need 4 triangles.

The hardest thing about putting this block together

 is keeping the small triangles lined up in the right direction.

Kansas Troubles by Becky Brown

Read more of Elizabeth Blair Lee's letters to her husband in Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee, edited by Virginia Jeans Laas.

See a pattern for a 14" version of the Kansas Troubles on page 41 in my Borderland in Butternut and Blue, available from Kansas City Star books. Click here for more information:
https://www.pickledishstore.com/productDetail.php?PID=765

Or see this version in Civil War Women, page 42. Michelle Marvig used that pattern for her quilt with a border of Kansas cottonwood trees and New England pines. They'll print you a copy of the book on demand at C&T Publishing. Click here:
http://www.ctpub.com/productdetails.cfm?PC=1857

See the quilts at the Spencer Museum of Art by clicking here: http://www.spencerart.ku.edu/collection/
and then typing the word QUILT in the search box---hundreds of quilts and quilt blocks.