The Union Quilters (13 page)

Nor did Gerda want to stop publishing and allow Meek to believe he had won their ongoing debate. Even when the
Watchman
printed the truth, which was rare, Meek selected pieces and slanted the language to lambaste the Lincoln administration and endorse a Copperhead point of view. A recent article, purportedly the firsthand account of a recent German immigrant tricked into enlisting, especially irked Gerda. Leonhardt Kraus (or so the article called him, if such a man existed) claimed to have arrived in Castle Garden in August of 1862, eager to begin a promising new life in the American West. On his first night in the country, when he informed his innkeeper, a German like himself, that he planned to join his brother in Wisconsin, the man offered to show him around New York before he departed. The next day, Mr. Kraus accompanied the man through the city and eventually into a basement room where a lone man sat behind a desk. Turning to his new friend, Mr. Kraus discovered that he had quietly departed and a guard leveling a bayonet at him stood in his place. Not speaking a word of English, Mr. Kraus did not understand what the man behind the desk was saying to him as he held out a pen and gestured for him to sign the papers lying on the desk, but Mr. Kraus refused and demanded to be released, his meaning perfectly clear in any language. More than an hour passed before another German entered the small, dark room and explained that the nation was divided by war and that both sides were determined to fill their ranks one way or another. In German he advised Mr. Kraus to go ahead and sign the enlistment papers. The guard would release him until they had enough recruits to muster in an entire company, and in that interval, he could flee to Wisconsin. Thus assured, Mr. Kraus signed the papers, but rather than releasing him, the guard led him to an office a few blocks away where Mr. Kraus and several other bewildered immigrants were briskly examined by a doctor and taken under armed guard to a steamer that delivered them to Rikers Island. There, over the course of a week, they were formed into a company, provided with muskets and gear, and shipped off to Annapolis, where they relieved a Pennsylvania regiment charged with guarding Confederate prisoners. Desperate to be released, Mr. Kraus wrote to his brother in Wisconsin as well as to the German Consul in New York, but nothing could be done for him, since he had signed the enlistment papers knowing full well what they said. If the translator had unwisely advised Mr. Kraus to sign the papers but flee before mustering in, it was all to the better that Mr. Kraus had been unable to follow that advice, because the penalties for desertion were severe.

Gerda wasn’t sure what outraged her most: the depiction of her countryman as both gullible and duplicitous, or the suggestion that German immigrants were not eager to support their adopted country. In response, she had hoped to prove that Leonhardt Kraus’s account was entirely fictional, but when her research turned up similar tales of dubious recruitment practices, she decided instead to pen a tribute to the many recent immigrants—German, Irish, English, and otherwise—who had gladly chosen military service as a way to achieve citizenship. With the help of Dorothea’s Eastern relations, she had collected several inspiring anecdotes to support her thesis. She only wished her brother had a story of loyalty and patriotism she could include among them.

 

Spurred on by the competition with the Union Quilters, Abel’s men put up Union Hall with impressive speed, and yet with an attention to the finer details of craftsmanship appropriate for a building intended to become a city landmark. Constance had never been prouder of her husband, or more worried about him, not even during those hazardous days when he had traveled into the South to sell cheeses and help desperate slaves escape to freedom in his wagon. Now he faced different dangers, as exhaustion, anger, and frustration took their toll. He wanted to fight, and each time a new call went out for soldiers and the state scrambled to meet its quota with volunteers rather than resort to a draft, he took his rifle out to the firing range he had set up on the far edge of their property and practiced his marksmanship with fierce determination, his jaw set and eyes glinting as if he contained a thunderstorm.

“They need us,” Abel told her and sympathetic friends, the Grangers, the Nelsons, and the Bergstroms. “They need us to win this war. But all along they’ve denied men of color the vote because they say voting is a privilege reserved for those who accept the full responsibilities of citizenship. We’ve been clamoring for those rights as well as the responsibilities for years. We’re prepared to take them on. But no matter how much they need us to shoulder those responsibilities, they’d rather lose the war than give us the privileges.”

His words filled Constance with fear. She believed what he said about the Union’s reluctance to enlist men of color as soldiers, but she prayed he was wrong about the Union’s willingness to sacrifice the country rather than allow men like Abel to fight. She followed the war in the papers and listened intently as letters from the 49th were shared among the Union Quilters, but those sources could not confirm how closely matched the two sides truly were, how near or far one side or the other was from victory. Some battles went to the Union, others to the Confederacy. The Union seemed perpetually short of troops and supplies, but she had heard that the Rebels suffered even more severe deprivations. The colored newspapers had reported rumors that slaves were being used to support the Confederate troops as cooks and laborers. Why wouldn’t the Union do at least that much, and free the white soldiers in those positions to fight? She knew better than to mention this to Abel; he wanted colored men to be allowed to enlist in any capacity for which they qualified. She just wanted to win the war. The thought of a conquered North, with slavery brought up from the South and imposed upon them by cheering, malicious overseers, was more than she could bear. Perhaps at the outset the Southern states had only wanted to withdraw from the Union, but after so much violence and with such hatred on both sides, who was to say what the Rebels would do in victory, driven by vengeance and want?

She wanted to believe that Mr. Lincoln would put rifles in the hands of colored men long before he would let the nation perish, but in the meantime, she could only work with the Union Quilters to support the 49th and offer what comfort and encouragement to Abel she could. The construction of Union Hall was a source of great pride to him, and she had heard him declare more than once that he was honored to wield hammer and saw in support of his country. She wondered what he would do when the hall was complete, and found herself hoping that the construction would fall behind schedule and prolong his service to the 49th—for that’s what it was, in her opinion—but Abel was too good a foreman to allow that to happen.

The quilt was also coming along beautifully, and it seemed as if the women might win the race. Throughout June, the quilters of Elm Creek Valley stole moments from their busy days tending to farms, shops, and families to piece blocks for the Loyal Union Sampler. Patchwork patterns commemorated battles the 49th had fought, places they had seen, tasks performed on the home front, and people dear to the quilters’ hearts. One of their own provided the one hundred twenty-first and final block—Charlotte, recently returned to their circle after recovering from the difficult birth of her daughter. Cradling baby Jeannette in her arms while Dorothea held up her block for all the friends to admire, Charlotte explained that she called the pattern Jonathan’s Satchel in tribute to the noble services her husband provided the ill and wounded men of the 49th. It was true that numerous letters read aloud at their meetings included soldiers’ praise and admiration for their hometown physician. Several soldiers had declared that the men of Company L would rather trust in Providence and go without medical care than be treated by any other physician. From what she had heard about some of Dr. Granger’s colleagues, Constance figured that decision had saved many a life.

As both quilt top and hall neared completion, the Union Quilters decided that they would celebrate the grand opening of Union Hall with a Summer Fair and Quilting Bee on the Fourth of July. They would solicit donations from the bounty of their neighbors’ spring gardens—herbed vinegars, pickled vegetables, fruit pies and preserves—and sell them to raise money for the Veterans’ Relief Fund. Subscription sales, which they would feature prominently at the event, would pay off their last construction debts. To encourage sales, the same lovely young women who had participated in the pageant the previous fall would lead potential donors on tours of the building, ending at the observation balcony at the top story, where visitors could enjoy a bird’s-eye view of the Independence Day celebrations in the streets below. At the heart of the fair would be the Loyal Union Sampler, its three layers held snug and smooth in a quilt frame in the center of the spacious performance hall. Every quilter present would be allowed to take at least a few stitches, and those with a finer hand would be encouraged to do more. Anneke anticipated that they would be able to finish the quilt, binding included, by evening, so the drawing would be held at the conclusion of the fair. The lucky winner would have to return the following afternoon to claim the prize, however, since Anneke had arranged for a photographer to come the morning after the fair to take a picture of the quilt hanging proudly from the lower balcony. Afterward, he would take an image of the Union Quilters gathered on the front stairs of the hall. Dorothea intended to display the photograph on the foyer wall beside a framed copy of their charter.

For to Constance’s amazement, the Union Quilters and Soldiers’ Relief Society had become a body corporate. Dorothea received the official documents from her lawyer in the middle of June, and as word spread, the town council’s persistent inquiries about placing Union Hall under their authority dwindled and disappeared. For a while, there were rumors that the mayor wanted the town to construct an even grander hall of its own, but after the
Water’s Ford Register
ran an editorial questioning whether this was the best use of tax dollars, considering the ongoing demands of war and the existence of an excellent new hall that could be rented for town events, the rumors faded away.

As the men of the 49th toiled in far-off Virginia, the women anxiously awaited news from the front. Casualty lists brought new heartbreak to the Elm Creek Valley almost every week, while calls for new troops came again and again. Constance was torn between relief that her husband would not be called upon to fight and distress for him, to see him rebuffed again and again when the need for men was so great. Since being sent away from Lewistown, twice more he had tried to enlist and twice more he had been rejected. Newspaper reports that in May, Union major general David Hunter at Hilton Head, South Carolina, had ordered the emancipation of all slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and had authorized the arming of all able-bodied men of color in those states sent Abel’s spirits soaring, even though Hunter’s unauthorized order had never been approved by Congress and was soon disavowed by President Lincoln. “Our time is coming,” Abel insisted. “Officers in the field wouldn’t put rifles in the hands of colored men if they didn’t believe the men capable and the need urgent. Eventually, Mr. Lincoln will believe it too.”

“I hope so, Abel,” she replied, and she did, although she feared for him.

The quilt top and the hall were completed within hours of each other on the first day of July, the winner’s margin so narrow that both teams agreed to declare the race a tie. Proudly the men escorted the Union Quilters on a tour of the glorious building their efforts and vision had wrought, Abel in the lead pointing out features of the concert hall and distinctions between the two galleries, one that would be ideally suited for art exhibitions, the other for smaller lectures or musical performances. Passersby on the streets below waved up at them in delight as they strolled along the observation balcony, admiring the view of the gardens Mrs. Granger and Mrs. Claverton had so beautifully planted around the hall. The exterior architecture was rendered in the Greek Revival style, simple but elegant and refined, sure to stand the test of time. In the grand hall, the Union Quilters tested the plush chairs, which had arrived from Harrisburg only two days earlier, and proclaimed them the most comfortable seats they could imagine, and praised the decision to use movable chairs rather than permanent installations so that the seating could be altered to accommodate a variety of events or removed altogether to convert the space into a ballroom. Abel showed them storage closets and offices, dressing rooms and stairwells. All that remained was to hang the luxurious velvet draperies, lay rugs upon the floors, and give every piece of woodwork a final dust and polish before the grand opening.

After much planning and a flurry of eleventh-hour activity, the Union Quilters welcomed friends, neighbors, and visitors from throughout the Elm Creek Valley and beyond to the inaugural gala at Union Hall. Constance wore a new summer dress of a blue foulard print with a gathered bodice and a lace collar attached to the jewel neckline. Abel and the boys wore their best suits, as befitted the occasion. As they rode into town, Abel seemed in better spirits than he had been in months. Although Constance was glad to see him so cheerful, she worried how he would feel the next morning, when he had no construction site to report to and only the usual chores of dairying and tending crops to occupy him.

The streets of Waterʹs Ford were at least as crowded as they had been on the day of the enlistment rally so many months before. The band played a stirring march, drawing the people to the block in front of Union Hall. While the boys ran off to join friends, Abel and Constance met the Union Quilters and the leaders of the construction crew on the portico. Charlotte and Prudence had tied a long, broad red ribbon around the two center pillars and had set a podium in front of it. Anneke carried a gleaming new pair of shears in her pocket, and she fidgeted so nervously as she fussed with last-minute details that Constance feared she would injure herself.