Mary Jane Lattner - A
Daughter of the Confederacy
written by Olivia T. Brazee;
Mary Jane Harrison (nee Lattner) (April 27th, 1844 - November
11th, 1919)
Mary Jane (“Mollie”) Lattner was born
on April 27th, 1844 in Franklin County, Georgia (or Starr, South Carolina?) to
merchant Thomas Jefferson Lattner (b. 1822 - d. 1884) and his first wife, who
remains unknown. T.J. Lattner moved with his daughters, Mollie and her younger
sister Martha (born c. 1849), to Chattanooga, Tennessee, around 1849 or 1850.
They lived at 110 East 1st Street, in a large frame house with a porch that was
constructed c. 1839 (by one account) and was allegedly among the oldest in the
city, situated on a bluff overlooking the Tennessee River. It remains unclear
whether T.J. commissioned the house prior to moving to Chattanooga (which would
suggest that he had established some sort of presence or business connection in
the city before relocating there permanently), or purchased it from a prior
owner- in any event, the house was thereafter known as the Lattner House and
became something of a local, and even national, landmark during the Civil War,
when General Ulysses S. Grant commandeered it for his military headquarters
from November 1863 until late in 1864.
The Lattners and the Civil War
The Union occupation of the Lattner
house began after the Battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga-which occurred
between September 19th to November 25th, 1863, and were among the most pivotal
of Civil War battles, marking a change of tide in favor of the North-and
continued after Grant’s departure, when General William T. Sherman used the
house as his headquarters to plan the capture of Atlanta. Presumably the house
was chosen as a headquarters for the strategic advantages offered by its
location on a high point of land overlooking a bend in the Tennessee River and
near the Walnut Street Bridge, now known as Veterans’ Bridge. The Lattners,
being Confederate sympathizers- Lattner himself served in the Confederate army
(although by then he likely would have been considered too old for combat)-
were forced to relocate to Atlanta for the duration of the war, but ultimately
returned to Chattanooga and petitioned the government for the restoration of
their house.
The Tennessee State Library holds a small collection of Thomas Jefferson Lattner’s papers, which
includes a letter from Thomas Jefferson Lattner to General Clinton Bowen
Fisk, a senior officer in the Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (an agency administered by the War
Department and charged with overseeing the transition from slave states to free
states in the South during Reconstruction), requesting his house back.
Lattner’s petition was granted, under Special Order 134, and the house was
returned to the family. The Lattner family owned slaves, as did many families
in the antebellum South, and according to a short story (date?) titled “Lil’
Ole Aunt Can”, written by T.J.’s granddaughter, Mildred Ray Harrison Stancliff,
after the war the Lattners gave their slaves the choice of freedom or to remain
with the family. In Ray’s story, “Aunt Can”, a house slave, was loyal to the
family until her death.
In 1896, in recognition of the
importance of the battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga to Civil War history,
the U.S. government designated approximately 7,600 acres of land encompassing
the battle sites as a national park. The Chickamauga-Chattanooga National
Military Park was subsequently transferred from the War Department to the
National Park Service in 1933, along with several other national battlefield
sites and military parks. In 1934 another granddaughter of T.J. Lattner, Mrs.
J.P. Pemberton, the daughter of Mollie’s younger sister Martha, donated some
family archives to the Chattanooga Museum Association- according to a newspaper
article, these archives included Special Order 134. Around this time, with
renewed public interest in Civil War history and with the recent opening of
Grant’s headquarters in Vicksburg, Mississippi, as a house museum, a proposal was
floated by a group of Union veterans to have the U.S. government purchase the
Lattner house and open it to the public as a house museum that would tell the
story of the Civil War period in Chattanooga and of General Grant’s wartime
occupation of the house. The house museum initiative included a proposal for
the Lattner house to become part of the Chickamauga-Chattanooga National
Military Park. Sadly, the initiative never bore fruit and the Lattner house was
demolished in 1966. Today a plaque near the house site commemorates the Lattner
house and other houses nearby that played a similar role during the Civil War-
the plaque declares it “Headquarters Row”.
A Daughter of the Confederacy
Back to Mollie’s story. In 1851, when
Mollie was 7 years old, her widower father remarried. His second wife, a Miss
Josephine Attaway from Franklin County, Georgia (1830-1867), was a mere 14
years older than Mollie. Josephine had three children with Lattner, the first,
a son, arriving c. 1857, and then two daughters born about four and six years
later, respectively. Mollie married at the age of 20, having met William
(“Willie”) Cole Harrison (1841-1926) in 1864, the year he was detached to
Chattanooga as a medical purveyor with the Crescent regiment, a Louisiana state
militia that joined the Confederate Army in March of 1862. They were married at
Talbotton, Georgia, on August 14th, 1864, with Mollie’s step-mother and sister
Martha as witnesses. By this time the Lattners had left Chattanooga and were
living in Atlanta; one wonders if Mollie would have preferred to be married in
her hometown, had the Union army not taken over her father’s house and forced
the family to leave. In 1866 the young couple moved to New Orleans- Mollie
probably never went back to Chattanooga after the war to live with her father,
step-mother, and siblings. Her step-mother Josephine died at the age of 37 in
1867, and T.J. never remarried. The U.S. census for 1870 lists T.J. Lattner as
a retired merchant living in Chattanooga with four of his children: Martha E.
(age 21), Thomas Jefferson, Jr. (age 13), Carrie S. (age 9), and Stella M. (age
7).
Mollie and her new husband settled in
New Orleans, where William was apprenticed to a druggist and then opened his
own drug store at the corner of Magazine and Thalia streets (the building no
longer stands). The first of Mollie and Willie’s children arrived on September
1st, 1865- little Claude, who died on September 28th, just shy of a month old.
Mollie and Willie had eight more children, three surviving into early childhood
and only two surviving into adulthood:
Stella May: b. October 14th, 1867 - d. August 1st, 1878 (10
years)
Claudia: b. February 9th, 1870 - d. August 11th, 1878 (8 years)
Infant daughter: b. November 4th, 1872 - d. November 7th, 1872
(4 days)
Pearl: b. January 23rd, 1875 - d. February 9th, 1875 (17 days)
Stella Claudia: b. August 18th, 1878 - d. August 24th, 1885 (7
years)
Hope Daisy: b. October 14th, 1879 - d. December 5th, 1973 (94
years)
May Willie: May 30th, 1882 - d. June 1st, 1882 (2 days)
Mildred Ray: December 17th, 1886 - d. November 17th, 1980 (93
years)
[the above is transcribed from a family Bible]
Mollie was obviously no stranger to
misfortune, having lost her mother as a child, then her family home during the
war, then her step-mother, and, most tragically, so many of her own children
over the course of her adult life. Letters she wrote also alluded to what must
have been another source of personal sorrow: Willie’s long love affair with the
remarkable Eliza Jane Poitevent (1849-1896), a self-made
woman who by her early 30s was editor-publisher of the Times Picayune newspaper and also somewhat of
a public figure for the poems she wrote under the pen name “Pearl Rivers”.
Evidently the
Harrisons enjoyed prominent social standing in New Orleans, attending
extravagant Mardi Gras balls, commissioning photographic and painted portraits
of their children and getting written up in the local paper upon the deaths,
ten days apart, of their daughters Stella May and Claudia, victims of a yellow
fever epidemic that no doubt left many bereaved parents in the city that year.
Some haunting posthumous portraits survive: an oil portrait of Claudia at age
eight, seated at a marble table and dressed in dark blue with a locket around
her neck, holding a violet to symbolize her death; and a tintype of Claude, in
cradle and swaddled in white embroidery, also clutching a flower in his small
hands. Other Harrison portraits display the family’s wealth and respectability
in the elaborate and fine clothing worn by the portrait-sitters, and in the
formal staging of the professional photo studio where the portraits were taken.
In 1887 Mollie
and Willie left New Orleans for good, settling with their surviving children,
Daisy and Ray, in Los Angeles, which may have held for them the promise of a
new beginning. At that time the great city of the future was still a sleepy
town, and the Harrisons must have adjusted to a less traditional, maybe less
stratified, social landscape than they were used to. Nonetheless, Mollie would
have enjoyed the security of being a doctor’s wife and the mother of two
flourishing daughters. Mollie died in Los Angeles on November 11th, 1919, at
the age of 75, survived by Willie, Daisy, and Ray.
