The Union Quilters (12 page)

“We’re in the front room,” called Anneke. When Dorothea joined them there, she found Gerda holding baby Albert and trying to distract the energetic twins in a corner while Anneke knelt on the floor, patchwork blocks of all colors and patterns spread out around her. “One hundred and eleven blocks,” she announced proudly. “Constance, Prudence, and I have already finished the borders and need only attach them to the center once we receive the last few blocks and sew them together. And the men still have to finish the roof and install the windows.”

“Wonderful,” praised Dorothea, amused by how much Anneke relished the competition. “I’m tempted to sew the last few blocks myself to make sure we don’t lose our lead.”

“I’ll help you, if it comes to that,” promised Anneke.

Gerda grimaced as she tried to herd the playful boys away from the center of the room. “As for me, I’ll cheer you on and admire your work. Anneke, would you please pick up the blocks now? I said I’d keep the boys away from them, but I had no idea what strong little wrestlers they’ve become.”

“Here, let me take Albert,” said Dorothea, and with a grateful sigh, Gerda handed her the baby. Holding him, Dorothea helped Anneke gather up the blocks, often pausing to admire a particularly lovely pattern. One simple but attractive design reminded her of the Boy’s Nonsense pattern, but longer, narrower rectangles than she was accustomed to seeing framed the central square. “Deborah Madigan calls that pattern Drummer Boy,” Anneke explained. “After her son.”

Dorothea nodded, remembering the boy she had taught at the Creek’s Crossing school many years before. He was too young to fight, but he had been determined to accompany his older brothers, so his father acquired a drum for him and made his other sons swear to protect him as best they could.

Another striking block resembled a traditional Churn Dash, with right triangles in the corners and narrow rectangles along the four sides, but instead of a solid, light-colored square in the center, there was a Turkey red square framed with two sets of concentric triangles. To Dorothea’s delight, Anneke informed her that it had been made by Joan Sheridan, the wife of the owner of the dry goods store on High Street. She had donated several bolt ends of fabric and spools of thread for the quilts they had made for the military hospital in Washington, and since she was also an intelligent, wellread woman, Dorothea had considered inviting her to join the Union Quilters after Eliza’s departure had left a vacancy. Joan had named the block Union Hall in honor of their “noble enterprise.”

“Show her Eliza’s block,” Gerda suggested, but in that moment of distraction, the boys darted around her skirts. Crowing with joy, they scrambled on their hands and knees to snatch up the nearest blocks, toss them into the air, and watch them fall to the floor.

“Two more minutes was all I would have needed,” Anneke admonished her sister-in-law. Searching through the blocks as they flew through the air or slid across the smooth wooden floor, she spotted the one she wanted and managed to pry it from Stephen’s grasp. “Eliza made this before Charley was killed,” she said, handing a blue, red, and light tan block to Dorothea. “Her mother found it while unpacking her things in Williamsport and mailed it to us.”

With a pang of regret for her absent friend’s loss, Dorothea studied the block. Four identical arrangements of blue squares and triangles in the corners framed a central red square set on point. “Did Eliza give it a name?”

“Campfire,” said Gerda, quickly snatching blocks off the floor before her nephews could scatter them further. “Her mother wrote that it reminded Eliza of Charley and the men of the Forty-ninth sitting around the campfire after a long march, reminiscing about loved ones back home.”

Dorothea sighed, missing Eliza, mourning Charley. He had been a childhood friend and classmate, and it pained her to think that he was put to rest hundreds of miles from those who loved him.

“It was good of Eliza to think of us, and Union Hall, in the midst of her grief,” said Anneke. “I think we should invite her to attend the grand opening of the hall as an honored guest.”

“Not as a guest, but as one of us,” Dorothea replied, shifting Albert to her hip. “Once a Union Quilter, always a Union Quilter, in my opinion.” And Union Hall must always belong to them. The town council did not fear that the Union Quilters would manage the hall badly because they were proven incompetents but because they were women. They could list their skills and accomplishments and qualifications until they were hoarse; it would do them no good. The town councilmen would not be persuaded because they would not listen. They had already made up their minds that the Union Quilters were incapable of making Union Hall a success. Dorothea refused to let an extraordinary opportunity to prove them wrong pass her by.

“Gerda, Anneke,” she said, handing the blocks she had gathered to Anneke, who put them on a high shelf near the window, out of the children’s reach. “I have a plan to discourage the town council from continuing their ridiculous demands for us to turn over Union Hall to them.”

“Good,” declared Gerda. “At first they were merely persistent, but lately they’ve become thoroughly annoying.”

“What do you think we should do?” asked Anneke.

“I think we should incorporate,” said Dorothea, “and I need your help.”

 

Gerda found Dorothea’s proposal astonishing, intriguing, and delightful. By writing up a list of bylaws and declaring themselves “a body corporate,” they would not secure themselves legal protection from the town’s power of eminent domain, but they would force the council to give them full due process under the law. “They will have to deal with us on an equal footing,” said Dorothea, “as rational adults, and not as dependent inferiors. If they want to seize control of Union Hall, they’ll have to do it the long, difficult, messy, ugly way—through the courts. I suspect they won’t do it.”

Gerda lacked Dorothea’s faith in the reasonableness of their neighbors. As she knew all too well, many otherwise sensible people took a certain malicious delight in slinging mud at others, realizing only after they found themselves in it up to their knees that they couldn’t avoid soiling themselves in the process.

“Why don’t we just put everything in Hans’s name?” asked Anneke. “That’s what we did to buy the property. Or, if that seems too self-serving, give equal shares to all of the Union Quilters’ husbands—the agreeable ones, anyway, the ones that won’t give us any trouble. The council won’t challenge a Union Hall board comprised of men the way they challenge us.”

“That’s probably true,” admitted Dorothea. “But don’t you see? That’s precisely why we can’t do it. We have to take a stand now, when it matters. We can’t keep waiting for another, better opportunity, one we can afford to lose. The men aren’t going to give us the vote willingly. We have to fight for that right little by little in battles such as this.”

“So you’ve chosen this battle,” said Gerda, “knowing that losing it would mean losing Union Hall as well?”

“If I’m not willing to work and fight and sacrifice to win equality for women, then I don’t really deserve it, do I?”

Gerda considered. “If it’s a question of what rights one deserves, I refer you to the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Jefferson and the Founding Fathers believed that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were granted to us by God, not any man. I would argue that you deserve your liberty implicitly and should not have to fight man for it.”

“Even our Founding Fathers had to fight for their rights.”

“Gracious, Dorothea, I believe we may see you in a soldierʹs uniform after all,” exclaimed Anneke. “Only what would you wear? Certainly not Confederate gray, but you sound like you want to pitch battle against our own government, so not Union blue, either.”

“I’ll wear a double-breasted frock coat in a lovely shade of pink, with gold epaulettes,” Dorothea retorted, smiling. “You know very well that I’ll never take up arms. My fight is intellectual—with a dash of cunning.”

The Nelsons’ lawyer would guide them through the necessary steps to acquire official legal status, but it was up to the Union Quilters to define themselves. They would need to compose a series of resolutions and bylaws, outline their purpose, and declare themselves a body corporate. “We shall become an official relief organization devoted to providing essential goods and services for active and veteran soldiers,” said Dorothea. “The town council will have a more difficult time convincing the public that they should wrest control of Union Hall from an official relief organization than from a simple sewing circle.”

Gerda thought Dorothea’s plan was a stroke of genius, but Anneke frowned and shook her head. “I don’t think all these machinations should be necessary,” she said. “Haven’t we done quite well as a sewing circle? Think of all the clothing and food the Union Quilters have provided the 49th. Think of the relief funds we’ve raised for our wounded veterans. Didn’t we furnish quilts to three wings of the new military hospital in Washington? Why must we pretend to be anything more than a sewing circle, when clearly a sewing circle can accomplish great things?”

Dorothea hesitated. “You make a very good point.”

“She does?” asked Gerda, looking from one to the other in surprise. “If men are impressed by fancy titles, then let’s give ourselves a fancy title. What’s the harm?”

Anneke found a stray block on the back of an armchair and smoothed out the wrinkles with her hands. “I only wish it weren’t necessary to demean sewing circles.”

“I wish none of this were necessary,” said Dorothea. “I wish the town council would trust us to manage Union Hall as well as we’ve managed the fund-raising and construction. I wish slave owners would voluntarily release their slaves and make sufficient reparations so they could make a good start in life as free people. I wish the Union could be preserved without resorting to war. I wish I would go home to find Thomas in his study with Abigail on his knee. There are many things that are not the way I wish them to be, but to save this one, important thing, I’m willing to compromise. I’m willing to publicly declare that we are more than a sewing circle, because, my dear friends, we
are
more than a sewing circle, and always have been.”

As she listened to her friend speak, so brave and impassioned and true, Gerda felt a strange spell come over her. Dorothea’s words made her feel as if she had tapped only a small wellspring of all the rich possibilities she contained, that she could accomplish anything she put her mind to if she believed in herself and refused to give up. “If you run for governor of Pennsylvania, I’ll vote for you,” Gerda declared, full of pride and amazement. “I would say president, except that I like Mr. Lincoln rather well.”

Dorothea laughed. “Mr. Curtin’s job is safe from me, and so is Mr. Lincoln’s.” She smiled and regarded her friends fondly. “Now. Will you help me?”

Gerda readily agreed, Anneke, more hesitantly. Dorothea explained that she wanted the three of them to draft a statement of purpose and bylaws, which they would present to the other Union Quilters at their next meeting. Gerda’s talent for writing made her indispensible. “But English isn’t even my native tongue,” she protested, although Dorothea’s praise flattered her vanity.

“That certainly hasn’t prevented you from expressing your opinions with bold eloquence in the
Water’s Ford Register
,” said Dorothea, “Mr. G. A. Bergstrom.”

“I never claimed to be a mister,” Gerda replied. “If people read ‘G. A.’ in the byline and assume the author is a man, that’s none of my doing.” It wasn’t even her choice. Concerned about propriety, Mr. Schultz had required her to conceal her gender, unwilling to offend their more conservative readers, or even worse, have her thoughtfully written articles dismissed unread as the uninformed prattle of a naïve woman. With Dorothea’s bold words fresh in her mind, Gerda wished she had insisted upon identifying herself as a woman regardless of the consequences. The fact that G. A. Bergstrom was indeed her name, and that so few Bergstroms lived in the county that anyone putting forth a modest effort could discover her identity, did not make her feel any less abashed.

“I know you didn’t ask me to help because of my flair for the written word,” said Anneke. Her spoken English, though heavily accented, had become quite fluent through the years, but the Bergstroms spoke German around the house, and Anneke rarely practiced writing in English.

“You’ll contribute ideas, if not specific phrases,” said Dorothea. “And then, when we’ve finished, you’ll help convince the others that our plan is sound.”

“I’m not so sure that it is.”

“That’s precisely why your opinions are necessary. Gerda and I think alike and everyone knows it. Of course she agrees with my plans and I with hers. If
you
believe in our bylaws, however, it will prove we’ve considered opposing points of view and accommodated them. If our proposals are sound enough to satisfy you, then they must be strong indeed.”

Anneke considered that for a moment. “Very well, but although I love you both dearly, I won’t stand up in front of our friends and claim to support any bylaws and resolutions that I don’t truly believe in. I’m also going to make it clear that if I had my way, we would remain a sewing circle, but that this step is necessary to protect Union Hall.”

Dorothea assured Anneke that she would expect nothing less. They gathered paper, pens, and ink and spread an old, faded quilt on the grass outside so they could keep watch over the boys playing nearby while they worked. Gerda thought they made good progress that first afternoon, but they continued to discuss and revise their bylaws and resolutions over the course of several days.

When they agreed upon a final draft and Dorothea took it home to copy it over in a fair hand in anticipation of the next meeting of the Union Quilters, Gerda resumed her other writing projects, letters to Jonathan and to Josiah Chester as well as opinion pieces for the
Water’s Ford Register
. G. A. Bergstrom had become one of the paper’s most popular authors, her thoughtful essays on the war, abolition, and the responsibilities of those on the home front as eagerly anticipated as her sharp, acerbic, but always accurate refutations of Meek’s editorials in the Bellefonte
Democratic Watchman
. Naturally, Meek retaliated in his own paper with mocking rebuttals of the “ill-informed Mr. Bergstrom’s feeble diatribes.” As Gerda went about her errands in town, she sometimes came upon readers engrossed in one of her essays, or others discussing with a spectator’s glee how soundly Bergstrom had thrashed Meek in the most recent issue. The
Register
did receive the occasional letter from an outraged reader who thought G. A. Bergstrom had crossed the lines of civility, but since most of these were postmarked from Bellefonte, Gerda didn’t let them trouble her. For his part, Mr. Schultz was delighted and regularly congratulated himself for taking his daughter’s advice and taking a chance on an unproven writer. Subscriptions were on the rise, and he need pay Gerda only half of what he would have paid a man in her place. Gerda never would have known this except for Mary’s whispered confession, but although she was displeased, she decided not to complain, either to Mr. Schultz or to the Union Quilters. Dorothea would have insisted she demand equal pay, and Gerda was not about to put her new job at risk. Not only was she writing and publishing and being read, she was earning an income. For years she had sold her fine preserves to Lawton’s Market to help contribute to the family and lessen the burden of remaining an unmarried woman in her brother’s household, but that was only seasonal work and, even at half wages, not nearly as lucrative.