The following story was found by Jean Dubois at the University of Wyoming library as she was researching women on the frontier, first shared with QNM (some quilting magazine) in 1976.

THE CONFEDERATE QUILTER a true story

by Jean Dubois

In Oxford, Ohio, Judge Clark's household had fallen under suspicion. He belonged to a club with known Confederate sympathies. His wife, Lottie, a Southerner, was often gone on unexplained trips. His mother-in-law had come up from Memphis with his sister-in-law, Ginnie Moon, apparently experiencing no trouble getting through the lines, and they had stayed for an unaccountably long time. The federal authorities decided to infiltrate the household and assigned their best counterspy to the job.

The counterspy accomplished his assignment easily. Ginnie was young, flirtatious, and immediately responsive to his attentions. Once within the household, however, he could find nothing complain of. The judge and his wife never let slip an incriminating word. Ginnie and her mother, according to the agent, did nothing but quilt, working from dawn to dusk. Judging by the piles of quilts, he reported, they must have been doing it even while they slept.

What he didn't know was that Ginnie Moon was an accomplished Confederate agent who had come north to Ohio, not to visit her sister or to develop her quilting technique, by to deliver messages to Confederate sympathizers and to acquire medicines for the Confederate troops. Caught in the North at the beginning of the war, she had made her way back to Memphis, where she and her mother rolled bandages and nursed wounded soldiers. At one time, in the interests of army morale, Ginnie was simultaneously engaged to 16 Confederate officers. When Memphis fell to the Union in 1862, she began charming information out of Union officers and became a Confederate courier.

When Ginnie finally had the answers to her secret messages, she and her mother wrangled traveling papers, Judge Clark installed the two aboard the _Alice Dean_, an Ohio riverboat. But before the boat left, a customs officer came aboard to search their trunks. Finding the enormous stack of quilts unnecessarily heavy, he ripped them open and found that small vials of drugs had been quilted in with the batting. Questioned, Ginnie answered without blinking an eye that her mother (an unbending Presbyterian lady) was an addict and could use as much in a day.

The officer then noticed that Ginnie's hooped skirt and petticoats were also quilted and announced his firm intention of searching her. She refused to be searched by a man, but he locked the door and started toward her, asking how she thought she would prevent it. "There was a list in my skirt," she wrote in later years, "and in my petticoat I had a Colt revolver. I put it in my hand and took it out, backed to the door and leveled it at him. 'If you make a move to touch me, I will kill you, so help me God.'" The customs officer backed off and went for help. While he was gone, Ginnie ate the incriminating messages she was carrying and thought all would be well.

She was taken to the provost marshal's office, however, where a woman was assigned to search her. A close look at her clothing revealed that she had quilted 40 bottles of morphine, seven pounds of opium, a quantity of camphor, and 50 letters to various Confederate officers into her clothing.

True to the chivalrous notions of the time, Ginnie was released on parole, with the simple requirement that she report daily to the federal authorities. She caused so much commotion among the officers, however, and got so much information out of them, that the provost marshal eventually sent her back to the Confederacy under flag of truce.