Facts & Fabrications: Unraveling the History of Quilts & Slavery

By Barbara Brackman

“A renowned quilt historian . . . present[s] what she considers to be an accurate assessment of slavery, quilts and the Underground Railroad.” —Time

Recall an unforgettable phase of our nation’s history with America’s leading quilt historian. Barbara Brackman presents the most current research on the role of quilts during the time of slavery, emancipation, and the Underground Railroad. Nine quilt projects combine historic blocks with Barbara’s own designs.

Did quilts really lead the way to freedom?

• What role did quilts play? Barbara explores the stories surrounding the Underground Railroad.
• Read about the people who were there! First-person accounts, newspaper and military records, and surviving quilts all add clues.
• YOU decide how to interpret the stories and history, fabrication and facts as you learn about this fascinating time in history.
• Excellent resource for elementary through high school learners—curriculum included!

“Quilters interested in African American slavery and quilting will find many historically accurate, teachable moments within these pages. The first-personal accounts by slaves of their quilt making, quilt parties, and stolen quilts make emotional reading. A must-have book for your quilting library!” —Kyra Hicks, author of Black Threads

“Brackman skillfully assembles accurate historical evidence along with beautiful quilt examples infused with slave-era symbolism.” —Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi, author of Threads of Faith

“Many of persons featured or quoted are women with a connection to the ‘peculiar institution’: slaves, escaped slaves, freed slaves, plantation owners, abolitionists, and so forth . . . teaches history through quilting and offers fun projects for history-minded quilters . . . the stories offer good starting points for one’s own research and the projects are beautiful.” —Beth’s Bobbins

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 5, 2010
• ISBN: 9781607053866

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Facts and Fabrications

This book is based on facts and fabrications. The historical facts are the story of American slavery, told through the words of people who lived through that national shame. The fabrications are the symbolism I’ve attached to traditional American quilt patterns to tell the story.

The link between quilts and our Civil War has long been an interest of mine. I’ve written histories about quilts that were used to raise money for the Union and the Confederacy, quilts that generated funds and sympathy for the abolitionist cause, and quilts used as expressions of political opinion. This book focuses on a thread of Civil War history—the story of slavery and emancipation.1

While we must take many things on faith—miracles, placebos, and the endurance of true love—history requires evidence. For historical evidence, we can look to personal accounts written at the time, such as diaries and letters recording immediate events. We can also read memoirs told long after the fact, written words such as autobiographies, or interviews by people who lived through the era. Published records, such as newspaper accounts and military records, add pieces to the puzzle, as do objects like surviving quilts, which can tell us much about fabric, fashion, and women’s interests.

Historians require more than one fragment of evidence to support a fact. Oral traditions—for example, family stories— require the support of other types of evidence or numerous renditions of the same story from different sources. A family story that a quilt was made by a plantation’s slave is more credible if census records indicate the woman lived with that family. A tale that a quilt was buried to protect it from General William Sherman’s army has more authority if we find similar tales in other families.

Historians realize each source has limitations. A newspaper story is often colored by sensationalism or censorship; a memoir, by faulty memory or self-inflation; a diary, by bigotry or paranoia; and an interview, by miscommunication or lack of rapport.

Photographs are important historical documents, but pictures of African-American women living in slavery are hard to find. Their lives after the Civil War, however, are well-documented. Here, a group of women, possibly the daughters of former slaves, meet in a needlework society, about 1920. Photograph courtesy of Terry Clothier Thompson.

History, then, is puzzle solving, assembling evidence to create a picture of the past. Historians who sift evidence are often frustrated by lively stories that pass for history. A classic example is the tale of Betsy Ross stitching our first flag by cutting a simple star. This myth about the flag’s origins is repeated in classrooms every year, despite historians’ conviction that the tale is based on nothing more than a single dubious source. We have no historical evidence—no firstperson accounts, no memoir of anyone who witnessed the event, and no actual flag to back it up. Betsy Ross did indeed exist, but the only indication she made a flag for George Washington is a story told a century later by her grandson.2

George Washington’s own classic myth, his childhood confession about chopping a cherry tree, was the brainchild of one biographer who mixed fact and fiction with abandon. Despite the obvious lack of historical evidence, cherry trees and hatchets continue to symbolize Washington in the American heart.

George Washington Bicentennial Quilt by Carrie A. Hall. Leavenworth, Kansas, 1932. 86″ × 92″. Collection of the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.

The 200th anniversary of Washington’s birth in 1932 created a fashion for images such as cherry trees and hatchets, images reflected in this quilt. Hall wrote a label for the quilt’s reverse, which explains that the center portrait is "surrounded by two rows of hatchets. The row of cherry trees next and the outer row represents Washington Pavement.″ Her label is a bit confusing, but without it, we might not recognize the symbolic nature of the outer border and would not look for a second row of hatchets in the negative space—an image that is not apparent. Perhaps she means the white arrows (surrounding the center medallion) pointing north and south.

These popular legends capture our imaginations, becoming far more than mere falsehoods or fabrications. They are American myths, and no myth-buster, no historian, can stamp them out, because myths tell tales that define us as a culture. In some way, the story of a seamstress showing a general how to cut a five-pointed star thrives because it tells us something about American ingenuity and what being American means. The cherry tree episode and Washington’s confession, I cannot tell a lie, defines the character of the country’s founder and, we hope, the American spirit.

When confronted by historical facts, many refuse to believe these myths are fabrications. Some seem to view historians as a gang of bullies, ready to pounce on a charming, innocent story. Historians, frustrated by myths that will not die, find the best they can do is offer an alternative accurate history—one some people might choose to accept.

Over the past fifteen years, we’ve watched a new myth become as popular as the legends of the first flag and the cherry tree. The role of quilts in the Underground

Railroad has gained wide acceptance, becoming part of today’s classroom learning for children and adults. The questions that quilt historians are asked most often refer to the Underground Railroad: Is it true that Log Cabin quilts were hung on clotheslines to signal escaping slaves of a safe house? Were quilts read as maps to tell escapees the route to safety? Did runaways use quilt patterns, such as the Double Wedding Ring or Drunkard’s Path, as code to communicate escape plans?3

When asked these questions, I give a standard short answer: We have no historical evidence of quilts being used as signals, codes, or maps. The tale of quilts and the Underground Railroad makes a good story, but not good quilt history. Historical problems with these tales begin with the quilt patterns in question. They are usually an anachronism, as out of time as if Hattie McDaniel were wearing a wristwatch in the film Gone With the Wind. The Log Cabin as a pattern dates only as early as the 1860s. The Drunkard’s Path and the Double Wedding Ring developed long after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

Like other myths, however, these stories will survive because they help define our culture. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Americans are eager to discuss Black History. Quilts and the Underground Railroad are the perfect pair of bookends for chronicles of slavery. The story of black heroes risking their lives for freedom and white heroes risking their liberty to shelter escaping slaves has resounding appeal. American studies professor James Horton noted, With the Underground Railroad, you have a real Hollywood story. Everyone gets to be a hero.4

Harriet Tubman Leading a Family to Freedom by Michael Cummings, New York City, 2004.Photograph by Karen Bel.l

Michael Cummings was commissioned by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to create a quilt. His quilt has layers of meaning, much of which the viewer can easily interpret. The imagery is a literal telling of Harriet Tubman’s story. In an interview, Cummings said he wanted to create figures that would engage viewers of all ages, images that viewers could identify with.5

Symbolism works most effectively when both the artist and the audience are familiar with the meaning of the image. Many Americans know that escaping slaves navigated by the North Star. However, some imagery is more difficult to interpret. Without Cummings’ words to guide us, we don’t know why he chose the pieced border pattern. There may be no underlying message; however, part of the enjoyment of looking at the piece is speculating as to its meaning. Art is often a silent dialogue between artist and audience.

Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad by Terry Clothier Thompson, Lawrence, Kansas, 1999. 78″ × 90″.

Terry Thompson loves using quilt pattern names to construct a metaphorical story. In this quilt honoring Harriet Tubman, she chose Union Star, Slave Chain, and Underground Railroad blocks to create a narrative easily read by quiltmakers who are also familiar with the blocks. Other symbolism is so personal that we can only understand it by reading the words in her published pattern. The Dogtooth strip in the upper left, for example, recalls how slave owners used dogs to track escapees. The Snail’s Trail design below the Nine-Patch blocks refers to slave-tilled gardens.

Because we know today’s quilt artists express ideas through symbolism, we tend to look at nineteenth-century quilts with the same eye. There is very little evidence of nineteenth-century quiltmakers using pattern names symbolically. In fact, only a few of the names that we take for granted today were used in the nineteenth century.

This License is available to print from http://tinyurl.com/10474-patterns

This book, then, offers today’s quiltmakers an alternative framework to weave an accurate history of slavery into their quilts. From my Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns, an index to 4,000 blocks, I chose twenty poetic names to represent twenty chapters in the story from Africa to Reconstruction. Names like Catch Me If You Can, Lincoln’s Platform, and Lost Ship are perfect for symbolizing various events, but it is important to emphasize that these patterns have no historical connection to slave-made quilts. In many cases, quilts in these designs did not appear until the 1930s, when quiltmaking was a popular feature in newspapers around the country.6

We can look at my pattern choices as an exercise in poetic license. Every artist knows the importance of symbolism in personal expression. Quilt pattern names are a form of poetry—imagery that can evoke the past and words that can add layers of symbolic meaning to a quilt’s visual beauty. In this book, I present ideas for using pattern names, as well as color and fabric style, to create quilts that symbolize the story of slavery and freedom.

I am also giving you a poetic license (suitable for photocopying and framing to hang over your sewing machine). It’s something you really don’t need. Everyone is born with one, but having a paper certificate may encourage you to exercise your creativity more freely. Do read the fine print, however, which notes that your own poetic license doesn’t give you rights to interpret another quilter’s symbolism as history. You cannot use it to read a map into a nineteenth-century Nine-Patch or interpret a Log Cabin design as a code. Poetry is poetry; history is history. Mix the facts and fabrications in your own quilts if you like, but don’t make the mistake of confusing fiction or myth for American history.

A Time Line of Slavery and Freedom: 1619–1964

1619 Africans first brought to American colonies.

1641 Massachusetts