National Museum of American History
https://www.si.edu/object/1843-1845-pink-phillipss-lily-album-quilt%3Anmah_556525
Album quilt with blocks dated 1843-1845 by family and friends in
Maryland, once the property of Pink Phillips. A relatively early
example of classic American quilt style that developed in the 1840s
with a red & green on white color scheme and blocks signed by many.
Patchwork quilts carry much meaning in America. Even early-19th-century writers were nostalgic about quilts as a reflection of old-fashioned family values, particularly the values assigned to British immigrants, the Anglo-Saxons. Mid-20th-century entrepreneur Eleanor Beard advertised her Kentucky business by describing her quilting employees as women who had inherited the "unspoiled AngloSaxon sturdiness of [rural Southern] people."
See a post here on quilt nostalgia in the 1830s:
Barbara Brackman's MATERIAL CULTURE: Nostalgia: Quiltings Are Not What They Used to Be
Quilt signed "L.W. 1844," advertised in 1986
L.W. must have embroidered the "E Pluribus Unum" mottoes
from the reverse as they are all backwards.
In the 1840s an explosion of interest in quiltmaking resulted in new style, new patterns and much rhetoric. It's not just the imagery that gives quilts an exalted spot in American myth. It's their connections with perceived national history and "true" American values. For a few clues as to how this strong association developed, we can look to the decade of the 1840s when the quilting art thrived in innovative ways.
1842 by Rachel VanSickle Knowlton of New Jersey
Eagles are found in quilts in the early century
but the 1840s saw new interest in the American symbol.
The 1840s was a decade of political instability. The "Era of Good Feeling" in the first quarter of the century's politics was long over.
Quilt dated 1846, Baltimore
President James Polk ran on a platform of territorial expansion in 1844, resulting in a war with Mexico declared in May,1846. Warhawks aimed to capture Texas to add a new Southern slave state to the Union.
General Zachary Taylor as one of the many military heroes of the
Mexican War supported by the Southern States and Westerners .
Here he seems to have lost his good arm" The Eastern states."
Ima Hogg collection, Bayou Bend
Baltimore, 1845-1855
Expansionists had little justification for the war but a sense of superiority and entitlement that we'd call White Supremacy today.
John Gast captured the attitude in "American Progress," an 1872
allegory of American values (appropriately blonde) driving out
indigenous people to make room for true Americans.
In 1845 American progress was neatly defined by editor John L. O’Sullivan as “Our Manifest Destiny." The United States had been given the American continent by God "for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” U.S. Citizens were considered superior to lesser races. Most superior of all were descendants of the English colonists who assumed the top of the pyramid. Darker people who didn't speak English and espoused Catholicism did not deserve that valuable land.
Frank Beard, 1885
By 1885 "Columbia's Unwelcome Guests" were Asians, Irish, Eastern Europeans etc.
Inside the temple comfortably eating supper were authentic Americans. Attitudes did not change.
Reverend John Newland Maffit
Methodist minister John N. Maffit had been chaplain in the House of Representatives. After losing the post in a scandal or two he made a career of preaching and lecturing about Manifest Destiny. Mexican conquest and conversion to Protestantism "is part of the design of Providence for reforming the religion and morals of that country," he avowed in 1847.
Maffit's popular theories were printed in various papers including the Louisville Herald.
Abraham Alfonse Albert Gallatin (1761–1849) wrote a reply.
Albert Gallatin, who'd been Secretary of the Treasury before the Era of Good Feeling, came out of retirement to contest Maffit's arguments. Polk's war had no justification, he wrote, except for the "most extraordinary assertion...that people of the United States have a hereditary superiority of race over the Mexicans....Is it compatible with the principle of democracy?"
Gallatin in the Louisville Courier, 1847
Julie Silber's Inventory
Baltimore, 1845-1855
John C. Calhoun (1782-1850)
Brady Studios Photo
But what of that Principle of Democracy, preserved in the Declaration of Independence declaring that All Men Are Created Equal? John Calhoun, born in South Carolina, assured Southerners in 1848 that Jefferson's writing about equality was a "hypothetical truism," but a "dangerous political error...Taking the proposition literally...there is not a word of truth in it."
In his Manifest Destiny & Mission in American History
Frederick Merk summarized the role of propaganda in
spreading ideas such as Manifest Destiny.
New York Herald, 1843, advocating war to
"imbue Anglo Saxon intelligence and culture."
Eagles in New Yorker Mary Simonson's sampler 1855
How did patchwork quilts become propaganda?
More in the next post.
