Liberty's Birds #1: Bluebird

 

Liberty's Birds #1: Bluebird

by Denniele Bohannon

This year's applique Block-of-the-Month series features the diary of Sara T.D. Robinson written her first year in Kansas where she and her husband came from Massachusetts to fight slavery. Kansas; Its Interior and Exterior Life. A Full View of Its Settlement, Political History, Social Life, Climate, Soil, Productions, Scenery, Etc. was published in 1856.

Look for 9 free patterns on the last day of  months March to December in 2025.

Kansas Museum of History

Sara Tappan Doolittle Lawrence Robinson (1827-1911)

about the time she moved to Kansas in the mid 1850s

Sara lived on the same crest of a rocky ridge overlooking the Kansas plains that I do. One hundred and seventy years and a few miles separate our houses on Mount Oread (once called Hog Back Ridge.)

Our houses on the edge of the ridge.

This view from Sara's first Lawrence home looking north is a photo by Alexander Gardner taken ten years after her arrival. The town pictured on the Kansas River was more advanced than in Sara's initial years on Mount Oread. Many things changed since her first months here when she kept her diary. Birds and botany, however, are similar in my neighborhood today.

Bluebird by Elsie Ridgely

Emily Jane Hunt (1839-1921) came from Massachusetts.

Sara referred to her younger friend as "E." in the diary.

One major difference: I live in a comfortable '70s modern house; Sara lived in a primitive construction project---a frame house being built around her. Also living in the house, she mentioned a "family" of 5---husband Charles, friend Emily Hunt and a Mr. W. the "elderly" handyman working on the house and keeping the women company when Charles traveled, which was often. When Charles was home visitors came to talk politics with him and frequently spent the night.

Food and building supplies were at a premium. Note the lack of trees on the hill. The woods across the river on the Delaware Tribe's land were full of cottonwood and other trees unsuitable for lumber. 

Bluebird by Becky Collis

Sara from a well-to-do Massachusetts family was not one to complain. Easterners would pity us....

Eastern Bluebird

Eastern (not Western) Bluebirds are one of our spring joys, the

same birds that delighted Sara.

Bluebird by Susannah Pangelinan

The Block

The inspiration applique---looks 20th century

Cattle on the hill overlooking Lawrence, Sara's view

See the introductory post here:
https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2025/01/2025s-applique-block-of-month-starts-in.html

And read Sara's book online here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=bDIUAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=sara+robinson+kansas&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj_ps3A_6eMAxVf38kDHfwnGx8Q6AF6BAgJEAM#v=onepage&q&f=false

Mary Gaddy Inman's Civil War Quilt?

 

The North Carolina project recorded this quilt forty years ago. 

A great-granddaughter who'd inherited it attributed it

to Mary Gaddy Inman of Robeson County.

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=21-17-2936

Mary Catherine Gaddy Inman (1829-1902) is buried in the Whiteville Memorial Cemetery

with her husband Benjamin Hardy Inman (Inmon?)

(1825-1896.)

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/56346664/mary-catherine-inman

The couple had five children and the great-granddaughter recalled one was named Christian Orella. She also told the documenters that the squares were made during the Civil War by a group of friends and finished at a quilting party when the war was over.

That child was actually named Christine Orilla Inman (1863-1946) but that error is a small detail. The story of the quilt as an album stitched during the War and then quilted after 1865 is more than a detail. And it is not likely to be true as everything about the quilt's appearance, style, quilting and especially fabric look to be after the dominance of solid fugitive colors in Southern quilts.

The colors have lost their brilliance with the blue-green

 shifting towards tan and reds completely losing their color. The 

bright yellow-orange, chrome dyed, is one of the solids that 

was not so prone to fade, a rarity in Southern solids after the Civil War. 

Two post-1880 Southern quilts with similar color loss

and utilitarian quilting.

The Inman quilt is a beauty in its own right despite the wear.

 Quilts do not need a false connection to the Civil War to make them valuable artifacts. 

I drew a pattern I call Southern Crabapple, based

on one in Mary's sampler.

Print this out on an 8-1/2" x 11" sheet.

Petticoat Press # 3 Pathfinder for Jane Cannon Swisshelm

 

Petticoat Press # 3: Pathfinder for Jane Cannon Swisshelm by Elsie Ridgley

Minnesota Historical Society

Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm (1815-1884)

Jane was born in western Pennsylvania into a family of strict Scottish Presbyterians. She met her future husband James Swisshelm (a Methodist) at a quilting party.

"He was handsomely dressed...a man of giant strength," she recalled. He decided she would be his wife and they married in 1836. Religion, James's mother and two difficult temperaments were obstacles to happiness. If the traditional woman's novel relied on the "Marriage Plot" at the time, these tales of female writers rely upon the "Divorce Plot." Jane's story is no exception. She remembered her marriage as twenty years "without the legal right to be alone one hour."

She left her husband, taking their daughter Mary Henrietta. James divorced her for desertion in 1857. Our divorce plot here requires the talented woman to make a living for her family with her writing. Jane was drawn to newspaper editing, giving herself a platform for her strong opinions, which were primarily antislavery and pro-woman's rights. She moved to Minnesota and started a few newspapers in the fifties.

Pathfinder by Becky Collis

Jane's St. Cloud, Minnesota Democrat offices

Before the Democrat she edited the St. Cloud Visiter, which she insisted on spelling in odd fashion. The woman was stubborn.

Head of the household in Stearns, Minnesota, 1860

Pathfinder by Becky Brown

Woman listening to Congressional debate, later in the century

We might term all these female reporters pathfinders but who was first and who was significant are always debatable. We recall Jane Swisshelm, however, as a true pathfinder in the history of women reporters and columnists because it is well documented that she was the first female admitted to Congress's all-male Press Gallery.

Getting the news out of the Capitol

In 1850 she'd been listening and analyzing the rhetoric from the Ladies Section but there she had no access to telegraph lines and noisy chatter made hearing debate difficult. She asked editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune who had recently hired her to use his influence with the Taylor/Fillmore administration.

Just another day of violence in the Senate in 1850

As she recalled, she obtained a personal interview with Vice-President Millard Fillmore to successfully request entrance.

Greeley's clout must have been important.

With that important coup Jane played true to herself. She was, we have to say, her own worst enemy. She decided that in this new position of power she would further the antislavery cause by attacking revered Senator Daniel Webster, who'd betrayed the abolitionists and was well known to have mixed race children of mistresses he supported.

She published it. Greeley fired her as a regular columnist, she lost her pass after one day and a woman in the press gallery continued to be a rarity.

1915

Petticoat Press # 3 by Denniele Bohannon

During the Civil War she continued to write for Greeley, moved to Washington City where the action centered and obtained a clerkship in the quartermaster general's office while volunteering as a nurse in local hospitals.  After Appomattox she began another newspaper there The Reconstructionist. Never able to weigh her idea of right versus popular response Jane charged ahead with very few skills in reading the public mind.

Fired in 1866

After the war she moved to Chicago

Jane and Mary Henrietta (Zo) living on Vernon Avenue in Chicago, 1880

She wrote daughter Zo when a late-life visit was proposed that she would not be coming. Mother and daughter would just argue, she worried, and she took the blame: "You never know when I am going to hurt someone’s feelings or do something to make myself ridiculous."

Jane was an accomplished needlewoman, embroidering 

 Zo's 1881 wedding dress, now in the Minnesota Historical 

Society Collection.

But the woman seemed able to get into an argument at the drop of a needle. In 1956 a story about Jane recalled her anger when people wondered whether the hand embroidery was "self-trim" (purchased machine embroidered insertions.)

Jane was a talented writer and editor but she seems to have suffered from---shall we say today---a neurodivergent personality style. She really had a hard time reading other people and the consequences of her actions with them. A bit on the autism scale?

The Block

Pathfinder (BlockBase #2317) was published by the Chicago Tribune's Nancy Cabot column in 1935. The fictional Nancy told us it was from Southern Missouri but she is not a reliable source. Pathfinder is a good name for Jane Swisshelm who is remembered as the first woman writer given access to the Congress's press gallery, a "first" that may indeed be accurate.

Petticoat Press # 3 by Jeanne Arnieri

Further Reading

Hoffert, Sylvia D. Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815–1884. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

McCarthy, Abigail. "Jane Grey Swisshelm: Marriage and Slavery." In Women of Minnesota: Selected Biographical Essays, edited by Barbara Stuhler and Gretchen Kreuter, 55–76. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998.

Swisshelm, Jane Grey. Half a Century. Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, and Company, 1880.
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=lbViAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP1

Bathsheba Phillips Crane's Civil War

In my files of silk quilts I have one attributed to Bathsheba Howard Crane. Notes say 

it's in the Vermont Historical Society but I don't see it in their catalog.

An image search was of no help either.

In 1861 when the Civil War began 50-year-old Bathsheba Howard Crane was living in Boston, Massachusetts, married to Baptist minister Denzel Mansfield Crane (1812-1879) since 1837.

Bathsheba Howard Phillips Crane (1811-1895)

Frontispiece from her 1880 book

 Life, Letters, and Wayside Gleanings, for the Folks at Home. 

The Cranes had three living children, Helen A. in her early twenties and two sons Herbert Webster about 20 and her youngest George Merle about 8 (Charles had died as an infant.)

The 1855 census found them in Worthington with a resident maid Lucy M. Foster.

Bathsheba published an obituary of her husband:

"At the age of 18, he was impressed with the importance of the gospel ministry. He commenced study ... at Franklin and Pierce academies and Brown University, preaching and teaching to meet his expenses." 

A year after their marriage at her home in Newfane, Vermont he was ordained and began a series of Baptist pastorates in Vermont and Massachusetts, where local religious tradition disdained the Baptist faith.

Allison Lockwood (1920-2021) wrote several articles about the Cranes in Northampton for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

Allison Lockwood

Cannot find that journal.

In 1858 they left Northampton for Boston where he was well-known for his speaking style and conversions. His wife recalled that in the six years they spent in Boston he claimed 189 converts. Crane adapted Baptist ideology to New England mores, campaigning against alcohol and slavery. It is said he joined the free soil antislavery party in the mid 1850s. His church was called the Union Baptist Church because they supported the Union. Separating themselves from Southern Baptists the Union Baptists Missionary Magazine in 1862 resolved:

"That we believe the institution of slavery to have been the principal cause and origin of this attempt to destroy the government, and that a safe, solid and lasting peace cannot be expected short of its complete overthrow."

1863 was not a good year for the family. Nine-year-old George Merle died of diphtheria on January 2nd and the Union Baptist Church burned that year, requiring Rev. Crane to conduct services in City Hall.

The following year the Cranes left Boston for another pastorate and daughter Helen married John R. Haskins in May, 1864. Bathsheba began collecting her letters and writings with an eye to producing a book published in 1880.

 Son Herbert, living in New York City died there on May 14, 1869 of pneumonia at 28.

I doubt Bathsheba Crane made this quilt, which as a pieced, quilted

silk piece looks to be a Quaker quilt from the first half of the 19th century.

Bathsheba is associated with another textile, a woven

coverlet in the collection of the Vermont Historical Society.

The woven coverlet was given to the museum in 1955, where it was displayed in a textile exhibit the following year. It is doubtful Bathsheba wove the coverlet either. She was 14 in 1825 and coverlets were more an item of commerce than home needlework for teenagers. She may have owned this coverlet, woven by a professional weaver.

And perhaps a Quaker friend gave her this lovely quilt.