Behind The Fight: Quilts of the Civil War by Jo-Ann Roberts

 Both Union and Confederate women rallied to the war effort when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Patriotic fervor abounded, with both sides certain the war would be short and decisive. Unfortunately, the war that was supposed to "only spill a thimble-full of blood" dragged on for four long and bloody years. Shortly after the siege of Fort Sumter, it became clear there was a desperate need for blankets, clothing, linens, and bandages.

Northern and southern women, forbidden by the cultural norms and decrees of the day were "forbidden" to enlist in their respective armies. Ever resourceful, these women "fought" the war and healed its wounds in their own way...from the home.

U.S. Sanitary Commission

Northern women, accustomed to gathering and sewing for a cause, changed their focus from abolitionist causes to helping soldiers. Established in 1861, the U.S. Sanitary Commission supported the sick and wounded soldiers of the Union Army. Soon the need for bedding became apparent and the commission added the collection of donated quilts to their activities.

At first, family quilts were donated but very quickly women began to sew quilts--seven feet by four feet--specifically for a military cot. Most quilts were made from available fabric, but sometimes were made by cutting up existing quilts then sewing them into three cot quilts.

Each quilt distributed by the Sanitary Commission had a patch, similar to the one below, sewn on the back of each quilt.

Soldiers' Relief Societies

In the South, where the population was smaller and more dispersed, and loyalties were more attached to individual states rather than the Confederacy, women's aid societies were scarce, and somewhat hindered in producing bedding for soldiers because they did not have a tradition of sewing for causes. In addition, wealthy women were accustomed to having slaves do the everyday sewing. Soon, these women, too, learned to sew. With the war being fought literally in their yards and fields, and their Confederate economy devastated by the Union blockade, the arrival of all goods was severely curtailed.

Although the South grew cotton, so entwined with the causes of the war, the North manufactured the cloth. Once pre-war textiles were depleted, fabric became scarce, with calico costing as much as $25 a yard by 1865. Many rural women and slaves turned to the art of spinning and weaving, as a popular song of the times proclaimed,

"Three cheers for the homespun dress the Southern ladies wear."

Homespun, once worn only by slaves and the very poor, was now worn proudly by Southern women.

  

Bazaars for the Northern Cause

Bazaars were held in the North where quilts were made with expensive fabric and donated to raise funds. These bazaars had already been established to raise money for churches and various causes. Now those funds went to the war effort. Although some publicly disapproved of women "working" in any commercial venture, patriotism won the day as a great deal of money was raised for Union supplies.

 

Southern Gunboat Quilts

   "The cause is a noble one, the effort is sublime, and the moral effect will reach far beyond the deadly projectiles which the contemplated gunboat can send. If the women take it up with a will, there is no word as fail."                        

The Mobile Register & Advertiser, 1862 

When the war shifted to the rivers, Southern women did what they could to buy desperately needed gunboats. Enthusiasm was high as communities vied to raise funds. Some of these more elaborate quilts used cuts from printed fabric in a medallion-style floral pattern. These motifs were appliqued to fabric in a method called broderie perse (Persian embroidery), requiring very fine sewing skills. Through the women's efforts, raffles, donations, and fairs, enough money was raised to pay for three gunboats.

By the spring of 1862, when Confederate defeats appeared likely that their seaports would fall to the Union, enthusiasm for this project waned. Instead, the women's efforts went to aiding their soldiers.

 

Everything and Anything Went into Making the Quilts

Quilts were generally made with basic fabrics and very simple block patterns. As the war progressed, time was an issue. The quicker the quilts could be made, the better.

Men's clothing, feed and fertilizer sacks, wool, twill flannel, old uniforms, sleeves, pocket-flaps, and pant legs were all used to make quilts. They were roughly put together with large "hen tracks" stitching. Practical and functional rather than beautiful, these quilts were made for warmth and comfort.

Old mattresses were torn apart for fiber to spin. Carpets, curtains. lengths of toweling were cut up and made into blankets.

Symbols of Allegiance

During the war, quilting became a necessary source of warmth for soldiers, as well as a significant source of revenue on both sides of the war effort. "Voting with her needle" was a common practice as some women would leave clues inside their quilt designs that might reveal their political opinions.

Confederate Silver, a basic patchwork design recalls the deprivations that started to appear in Louisiana. After a year and a half of war, even the basics were hard to come by.

Quilts of Gee's Bend

Boykin, an isolated, rural community in Alabama, is home to one of the most enduring examples of post-Civil War quilting. In 1816, Joseph Gee established a cotton plantation in the area. Gee left in 1845, and the property was sold but the name and slavery remained.

In recent times, Gee's Bend quilts have gained a worldwide following for their simplistic and improvisational style. Whether it was their isolated location or being forced to use whatever materials were on hand, their creations were a stark departure from classical quilts.

Unfortunately, very few original Civil War quilts made for soldiers have survived. As most of the quilts were hastily made and poorly constructed, many were used to the point of disintegration. These quilts got a great deal of wear, and more than likely not worth saving. Added to the fact that many soldiers were buried in their quilts, it is understandable why these quilts are quite rare.

By the war's end in 1865, more than 250,000 quilts and comforters were made for the Union soldiers. While the number of Confederate quilts made was far less due to the scarcity of material, Southern women rallied, continuing to raise funds for the sick and wounded any way they could.

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The Underground Railroad Quilt Code

Americans hold a fascination with the Underground Railroad. A few years ago, a TV series titled Underground ran for a couple seasons. Then Colton Whitehead’s book The Underground Railroad won the Pulitzer and National Book Awards. The book is now a series on Amazon Prime that I anticipate watching. Plus recently a series was done on Harriet Tubman’s life. I read the afore-mentioned award-winning book plus a non-fiction title called The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom. 

But the research book that struck me the most was one called Hidden in Plain View: The Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. How the book came to be is fascinating because it started with a happenstance meeting in 1994 between an historian named Jacqueline Tobin and an elderly Black woman, Ozella McDaniel Williams, selling quilts in a market building in Charleston, South Carolina. Jacqueline recorded Ozella’s stories of how quilts with messages sewed into the patterns had been used in the U.S. underground railroad and that the tradition came from slaves’ native African countries where the whole cloths themselves contained symbols. Most of us learned about symbols—a particular shape of a weather vane, a lit or unlit coachman’s lantern at the end of a lane, or a painted design over the door of a barn—escaping slaves were told to look for. Or that they used the Big Dipper constellation (the drinking gourd) to guide their path. 

What was shared with Ms. Tobin was how quilts set in a prominent place (a fence rail, a clothes line, an upstairs window) and in a certain position helped escapees along the trail. A quilt of a certain pattern (Jacob’s Ladder was renamed the underground railroad pattern) hung meant the slave had reached a safe place and would be sheltered for the night. A pattern like Flying Geese with multiple triangles could be positioned to point toward the safest route. The Bear’s Paw pattern told of following bear tracks through a mountainous area. Or a quilt with a preponderance of red fabrics could signal danger. In the storytelling tradition of her grandmother and mother, Ozella revealed the Underground Railroad Quilt Code. 

I relied on this information when I wrote Freedom’s Path and had my heroine, Sidonie Demers, doing her small part to aid those along the path from where she lived in Vermont, not far from the Canadian border. For those who like learning about history in an entertaining way, I recommend Hidden in Plain View. 

Blurb Working as a maid in the Deerbourne Inn gives freedom-fighter Sidonie Demers the perfect cover for helping escaping slaves travel farther along the Underground Railroad. The patterns in her quilts serve as messages directing them to the safest route. The cause is a personal one for octoroon Sidonie whose mother and grandmother escaped bondage years earlier. Army Corporal Colin Crawford arrives in Willow Springs, in disguise as a salesman, to ferret out abolitionist activity. Raised in a state that forbids slavery, he's conflicted about upholding the Fugitive Slave Act but believes in laws and fulfilling his duty. The attraction between Colin and Sidonie is evident and irresistible, but what will happen when their true identities are revealed? 

Link for several formats https://books2read.com/FreedomsPath 

As a young girl, Linda was often found lying on her bed reading about fascinating characters having exciting adventures in places far away and in other time periods. In later years, she read and then started writing romances and achieved her first publication--a confession story. Married with 4 adult children and 2 granddaughters, award-winning author Linda now writes heartwarming contemporary and historical stories with a touch of humor and a bit of sass from her home in the southern California mountains. 

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Quiltmaking as a Necessity

Not every quilt made by our foremothers was a piece of beauty. Some were utilitarian and so necessary to ward off the cold in log cabins or sod houses or clapboard houses with no insulation in the walls. Often, they were constructed of the scraps left from when dresses or shirts were cut from whole cloth or the salvageable parts of ripped or worn clothing. Many quilts were of uneven fabric weights and the corners of the squares didn’t exactly match, but on a cold night, any cover was welcomed.

Some women (apologies to anyone whose male ancestor was a quilter) enjoyed a higher standard of living and purchased yard goods for the express purpose of designing and sewing a quilt. Those are the items that have most often been passed down within families or which have survived more than a hundred years and are curated in a museum. Women used quilts as an outlet for their creativity—inventing patterns around sights or events important to their lives. Patterns are named Rocky Road to California, Flying Geese, Tumbling Blocks, Mariner’s Compass, and Pinwheel.

In my latest release, Freedom’s Path, I included a plot thread of how quilts were used on The Underground Railroad. Although a federal law existed that forbade people from aiding an escaped slave, many people disagreed with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1852. Not much could be done if a slave was apprehended because the bounty hunters wanted their fee, as did the crooked judges. But abolitionist women set out quilts either on a fence or hung them on a clothesline to be a signal to escaping slaves as to which path was the safest and/or if the way was clear for them to proceed farther along the route. After reading Hidden in Plain View about these efforts, I couldn’t wait to include this fact in a story.

Abolitionist Sidonie Demers must keep her efforts secret in her work as a mail at the Deerbourne Inn. Corporal Colin Crawford searches for abolitionist activity while posing as a salesman. What will happen when their secret identities are revealed?

Amazon link

Cowboy Quilts: Sugans

by Kristin Holt

When researching my new release, Pleasance'sFirst Love, and the significant aspect of quilts from Grandma Mary (Grandma's Wedding Quilt Series), I came across a fantastic book titled The Quilt That Walked to Golden. This non-fiction book is filled with details of Colorado's quilting history (Territorial days and Statehood days), why and how certain types of quilts made their mark in this frontier location, and stories about important (or at least noteworthy) people in Colorado's history.

On page 52 to 53 of this book, I learned about a kind of quilt that hadn't been on my radar before. I'd heard of cowboys' bedrolls, tied to the back of their saddles. I knew cowboys often slept out on the range, on the ground, and roughed this way, especially during round-ups. What I didn't know is that their "bedrolls" may have been more accurately called Sugans.

"

If the Mountain West made a contribution to American quilting, it is the sugan--also soogan, soogin, suggan, sugin, or sougan--a crude, undersize quilt used by cowboys and "gyppos," as independent loggers in the Northwest were called. A sugan, derived from an Irish word, was also known as a "parker" or a "henskin" when it was stuffed with feathers. Elsewhere, it was known as a hired man's quilt. Usually made of large patches cut from pants and coats, the sugan often was tied rather than quilted, and it weighed about four pounds--"a pound for each corner." It could be square and "'drove cowboys crazy' trying to decide which was length and which was breadth, as the saying went.

In fact, sugans drove everybody  crazy. "We had all these big--they called them sugans--quilts, and they were made out of old overalls and old clothes, old woolen coats, you know, patchwork quilts, and then there would be a batt, a cotton batt in between." remembered Jennie Brown Spence, who slept under one during a fall roundup near Meeker, Colorado. "We had about three of them over us, and I couldn't turn over. They weren't eiderdown, like they are today, or sleeping bags. It was just those heavy sugans."

The sugans were a source of mirth for cowboys, who loved practical jokes. They would tell greenhorns they had slept in a bed "infested with soogins." One visitor, recalled Agnes  Morley Cleveland, who grew up on a New Mexico ranch, got the last laugh on the cowboy prankster and retorted, "You should laugh. I happen to know that you slumber in  your bed." The enraged cowboy told him, "No man can say that about me and git off with it." The other hands hustled the visitor off before the cowboy could find his gun."

" 

Cowboys prepare to bed down under their sugans. Image: p 52 of The Quilt That Walked to Golden

Upon reading about this true-to-life (accurate historically) sugan, I immediately knew that Pleasance's first love, Jacob Gideon, must have one. Jacob worked as a ranch hand for other men until he was able to scrape together the money to buy a ranch where he raises horses. Years earlier, Grandma Mary, knowing that Jacob Gideon belonged with her granddaughter, Pleasance, (and the young people would eventually figure that out) she made a sugan for Jacob--but not out old clothes and coats. Jacob's sugan matches Pleasance's quilt top in the Flying Geese pattern. Just wait 'til you see Pleasance's response when she learns, for the first time, that her grandmother made a cowboy quilt for Jacob--not just in the Flying Geese--but in the exact same fabrics!

Sources cited by author Sandra Dallas (The Quilt That Walked to Golden), p 52.

Pleasance'sFirst Love is book #6 of the Grandma's Wedding Quilts series. This title, with all remaining 11 in the series, is available for preorder. It's just 99-cents until a few days after release (January 13th), when it will increase to the regular price of $2.99. Grab it while it's 66% off!

Don't forget the BIG Official Contest associated with this exciting new series! You'll find the details right here on Sweet Americana Sweethearts!

 

Kristin Holt, USA Today Bestselling Author, writes Sweet Victorian Romance set in the American West. She writes frequent articles about the nineteenth century American west--every subject of possible interest to readers and amateur historians. She contributes monthly to Sweet Americana Sweethearts (first Friday of each month) and Romancing the Genres (third Tuesday of each month). 

Sweet Romance Appropriate for All Audiences

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Copyright © 2017 Kristin Holt LC

Grandma, Genealogy, Quilts & Cover Reveal

If you have been paying attention to recent posts by Sweet Americana Sweethearts authors, you are aware there is something in the air. And I'm not talking about Birds In the Air, which is a well-known quilt block pattern.

It involves quilts. It involves wedding quilts. It involves Grandma’s Wedding Quilts.

Who is Grandma?

Shhhh! It’s not up to me to tell her story. However, as the author of the book about Grandma’s oldest grandchild, Kizzie, I feel within my rights to give you a few hints.

Grandma’s first name was Mary. She had three surnames during her lifetime. That must have been fun for future genealogists to find since two of the names she had before the wonderful 1850 census which was the first time the government called for enumerators to list everyone, male and female, who lived in a household. Good thing Grandma Mary left us some other clues.

Grandma was born in 1805 and raised in Ohio. Those of you who do genealogy may recognize that Ohio during Colonial days was Indian Territory. It was definitely on the frontier west of civilization. After the American Revolution, along with most of the Great Lakes region, it was designated as bounty land and used to pay soldiers who fought the war. In a country where money was scarce and land was plentiful, that is just how it was done in those days.

However, by the early 1860’s, the time in which her granddaughter I write about, Kizzie, was almost of age to marry, the Louisiana Territory had been purchased. The war against Mexico had been won and a big section from that nation added to the United States. The question of who would own the Pacific Northwest had been settled. California and Oregon were states, and the land between them and the Mississippi River were territories. And, before the century was over, Grandma Mary’s children and grandchildren found themselves living from north to south, east to west. Some even spent some time right smack-dab in the middle—Kansas and Missouri.

So, how does Grandma keep track of her far-flung family? Genealogists know if they are lucky, to fill their pedigree charts, they may find their ancestors on the census and marriage records kept back in the day. Or on land records. If they are really lucky, they may find a family Bible with the family details listed. However, Grandma Mary used her talent for quilting to leave clues about her posterity.

Perhaps when Grandma Mary started quilting, she used homespun. Above is a photo of an easy quilt out of green, red and tan homespun I am currently working on. Originally, homespun was, well—spun at home. Threads were created using a spinning wheel and then woven into fabric at home on a loom. In fact, although many people think of Civil War Confederate soldiers dressed in gray, reality was, many were dressed in butternut-colored uniforms made from homespun fabric woven and sewn by family members.

By Civil War times, fabric was produced en masse back east in commercial fabric mills. The cotton threads were finer and the weave tighter. Detailed designs were often printed on the finished fabrics. 

Since I am a retired rural letter carrier, one of my goals in life is to make a “Civil War Notes from Home” quilt such as the one above from Civil War Reproduction fabrics. In 1862 through 1865, the time period of Kizzie’s story, Grandma Mary would have had access to fabrics in these colors and designs.

The following quilt design by Barbara Brackman of Civil War Quilts blog (used with permission) was included in my cover design. This four-square on point design was popular during the Civil War era.

And, one last clue about Grandma Mary: Many quilts are made of blocks in all one pattern. Some are what are called a sampler quilt. In other words, the colors may be the same, or at least coordinated, but each block design is different, An example is this modern sampler quilt by an unknown artist/quilter. The stories of Grandma Mary’s Wedding Quilts involves a sampler quilt.

And now—Ta! Da!—I present to you the cover of Kizzie’s Kisses about the oldest of Grandma Mary’s grandchildren.