There is indeed a school of (mostly post-WWII, mostly French - e.g. Derrida, Foucault) philosophy that holds that all history is subjective, and that there is no such thing as historical fact. This reasoning leads to the conclusion that there is no point to research; anyone can simply claim as "history" whatever story s/he finds most "meaningful," with all such stories equally valid notwithstanding how much they conflict with primary, documentary evidence. By this logic, those of you laboriously tracing your family tree are wasting your time; you might just as well pick any ancestors you like and say anything you like about them, since it's the "meaning" of the underlying narrative that counts.

I have not found any research that's turned up a "quilt code" story in any primary source - or, for that matter, any such "code" story that dates from before the last decades of the 20th century. It has much in commmon with the "humility block" myth (the idea that quilters, particularly Amish, intentionally put an error into each quilt because "only God is perfect"), which despite extensive research by both quilt historians and folklorists, has no evidence of existing before it materialized in a 1949 quilt book. In fact, the history of the "code" story closely parallels the genesis of the Betsy Ross myth: a "good story" first appearing a century after the event supposedly occurred, promoted by those who would profit financially, directly contradicted by documentary evidence, dismissed by historians but widely accepted by the public. (Histories of both the Ross and humility block myths are on my site.)

One of the defenses of the "code's" absence from slave narratives is that a culture of secrecy prevented its revelation until now. Yet those same firsthand accounts provide remarkable details about other aspects of escape. And even if the ex-slave community remained silent, unless every "safe house" along the route was owned by a freedman, white URR participants would have to have known about and used the "code". Why, if we know about the "hiding places" in these folks' homes, and about the code words used in written messages, do none of these white participants mention anything about using quilts as signals? Are "code" proponents actually claiming that while methods of escape, "safe house" locations and hiding places could safely be revealed in the century following the URR, the "code" could not?

Whoa - we are having a whopper of a thunderstorm here, so I think I'll post this now rather than lose what I've written! Will address your quilt comments in a subsequent post.