Slave clothing and African-American culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Shane White & Graham White,
Past & Present, August, 1995

In December 1852 the thirty-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted arrived in Washington at the beginning of the first of three expeditions that, by the end of the decade, would make him the best-known of the myriad travellers who criss-crossed the South in the years before the Civil War. From the outset Olmsted evinced a keen interest in the appearance and demeanour of the African Americans he encountered. Attempting to have a fire lit in his freezing hotel room, he had to deal with a cantankerous old slave, who was "very much bent, seemingly with infirmity", and who quickly demonstrated that he was "more familiar and more indifferent to forms of subserviency than the Irish lads". Later, during a visit to a nearby farm, Olmsted recorded that the slaves "appeared to me to move very slowly and awkwardly". An early-morning trip to the Washington market prompted further reflections on this subject. For the first time Olmsted found himself among a throng in which African Americans were in the majority, and what immediately struck him was the difference between black and white. This was not just a matter of skin pigment, Olmsted noted, for the "dress, language, manner, [and] motions" of the blacks distinguished them from the whites almost as much as did their colour. Nor had the poverty of the African Americans set them noticeably apart. The whites too seemed poor - "a mean-looking people, and but meanly dressed", was how Olmsted described them - but they were clothed, this shrewd observer pointed out, "differently . . . from the negroes". (1)

Olmsted's fascination with the way slaves looked and moved - a fascination that would continue to surface through his writings on the South - hints at an aspect of slave life that, for all the intensity of historians' scrutiny over the last few decades, has gone largely unnoticed. To be sure individual scholars have commented in passing, often with considerable acuity, on slave clothing or on various aspects of communicative movement and bodily display, but there has hardly been a systematic evaluation of the cultural significance of these matters.(2) Yet, as Olmsted and many other observers discerned, the way in which slaves presented their bodies both to themselves and to whites was, to them, a matter of considerable importance. Our intention in this article is to provide an assessment of perhaps the most important aspect of bodily display, the way in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slaves clothed themselves. We begin by examining how eighteenth-century slaves tested the boundaries of the system not only by appropriating items of elite apparel, but by combining elements of white clothing in ways which whites often considered startlingly inappropriate. We then demonstrate how nineteenth-century slaves, by now heavily involved in the manufacture of slave garments, were able to introduce a distinctly African-American aesthetic into textile and clothing design. By exploring a significant facet of slave life over a century and a half in both the North and the South we hope to provide new insights into the nature of African-American culture in the years before the Civil War.

I

Between 1619 and 1808 around 400,000 Africans were imported into British mainland North America or, as it later became, the United States of America. For all the scholarly enquiry into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century slavery, remarkably little is known of the initial experiences of these men, women and children as they attempted to reconcile themselves to their fate not only as slaves, but as slaves within a strange and threatening Euro-American world. Historians have done wonders with such seemingly intractable sources as tax-lists, inventories and runaway advertisements, revealing much about the lives of colonial slaves, but at the point of initial contact the record is particularly fragmentary, and even more opaque than usual. It is hardly surprising, then, that our understanding of this crucial moment in African-American history has been formed largely by Olaudah Equiano's compelling account of his capture in Africa, transportation across the Atlantic and experiences as a slave in the New World.(3)

What seems reasonably clear, however, is that newly arrived African slaves were quickly clothed in European garb and made to conform to European concepts of decency. In the notices of the Charleston gaoler, which for the most part described slaves who had escaped and been recaptured within days of their arrival in South Carolina, there are occasional descriptions of Africans' who wore mere scraps of clothing (one man taken up in 1736 had "only an Arse-cloth"), or wrapped themselves in blankets, or even went stark naked.(4) But this was relatively unusual. Generally, African slaves, even those only a few days off the slave-ship, wore European apparel. An advertisement appearing in the Virginia Gazette in November 1751 stated that a "new Negroe Man . . . imported this Summer", and unable to tell "who he belongs to", had on, when he went away, "a new strong Oznabrig Shirt, a blue Pennystone Waistcoat, sew'd up the Sides, the whole Breadth of the Cloth, and a new Scotch Bonnet". Though, for most of the eighteenth century, recently arrived African slaves were a more sizeable proportion of the slave population in South Carolina than they were in the Chesapeake, much the same pattern seems to have emerged in the latter region as well.(5)

Prompted by Equiano's account, we are inclined to assume that accustoming the African body to the wearing of European garb was just one more facet of a painful process of adjusting to an alien culture. That ordeal could still be recalled in the 1930s by Chaney Mack, who said of her father, "a full-blood African" brought to the United States when he was about eighteen, that "it went purty hard wid him having to wear clothes, live in houses and work".(6) Like Equiano, Bonna, a "New Negro Fellow" who ran away in 1772, came from "Ibo Country, in Africa" (although, as a "Canoe Man" in his homeland, he must have been rather more familiar with expanses of water than Equiano, in his autobiography, claimed to be). At the time of his escape, Bonna wore "a new Felt Hat, new Cotton Waistcoat and Breeches, and new Shoes and Stockings", the last-mentioned being "knit, and spotted black and white" - an outfit which, in its newness, sounds particularly uncomfortable.(7) But while this may well have been (and indeed probably was) the case, to newly arrived Africans items of European clothing would not necessarily have been all that strange. For all the power of Equiano's account of his enslavement, his depiction of an Africa relatively unsullied by European influences does not accord well with recent scholarship. In the area of dress, for example, John Thornton has suggested that, in the wake of European penetration, Africans, particularly the elite, quickly adopted some European fabrics and clothing styles, and that by the mid-seventeenth century the possession of European-style clothing had become an established sign of status.(8)

But, of course, donning an individual item of European clothing in the context of a developed and known set of African values was one thing; wearing such a garment in the New World was quite another. African slaves were thrust into a society with its own set of ideas about the appropriateness of clothing for various social groups, ideas that, in the fineness of their discriminations between various forms of European apparel, bore little relation to those current in the slaves' native land. Though by the eighteenth century the earlier elaborate dress codes, occasionally set out in various pieces of sumptuary legislation, were breaking down, it was still the case that a glance could generally distinguish members of the elite from those who made their living by their hands. As laid down in the so-called courtesy books, which were published in England, but to which, as Richard Bushman has shown, the higher social orders in the eighteenth-century colonies and later America paid close attention, the clothing of the genteel had to be close- rather than ill-fitting, clean and brushed rather than soiled and, above all, smooth in texture rather than coarse. Garments for the genteel were made from silk, chintz (a fine cotton cloth) and superfine wools, rather than from plain cottons or poorer quality wools or from osnaburg (a coarse, inexpensive linen), fustian (a cotton and linen mix) or linsey-woolsey (a blend of wool and flax), from which the clothing of those lower down the social scale was cut. Specific items of genteel apparel differed too, the tailored shirts, stylish coats and velvet breeches of the gentry contrasting with the loose shirts (which freed the arms for the kind of physical labour that would have been inappropriate for the genteel), short jackets, and trousers or leather or osnaburg breeches worn by the lower orders. In the same way, the silk gowns and lace accessories of elite women were easily distinguishable from the coarse dresses and aprons of their social inferiors.(9)

In such a schema it was clearly intended that slaves would wear loose-fitting garments made of the coarsest available cloth. South Carolina's Negro Act of 1735 actually went so far as to prescribe the materials suitable for slave clothing, allowing only the cheapest fabrics. As newspaper advertisements make clear, during the colonial period, when most cloth and clothing was imported, the materials used for slaves' garments fell into a separate category: for example, the freshly imported "white welsh plains" which the Charleston firm of Hill and Guerard was offering for sale in 1736 were said to be "for Negro cloathing". A good proportion of the runaway slaves advertised as having been "Brought to the Work-House in Charlestown" were described as wearing clothes made of this sort of material. For example, a slave incarcerated there in 1765, who "calls himself Tom, but can't tell his master's name", and who had country marks on his face, shoulders and back, had on "an old white negro cloth jacket and trowsers", while a "new negro fellow of the Jalunka country, who speaks no English" wore an "old white negro cloth jacket and breeches".(10) For the most part, slaves were either given ready-made clothes or used "negro cloth" to make trousers, petticoats and the like.

In a context in which most clothing had to be imported, garments doled out to slaves throughout the American colonies tended to be drab, uniform and limited to relatively few items. So basic was the apparel of many blacks, particularly that of ordinary field hands, that in many runaway notices the nature of the miscreant's clothing was not even the main identifier. Will, who escaped from the plantation of Jordan Anderson in Chesterfield, Virginia, in October 1768, would more readily have been recognized by the so-called "country marks" on his face, arms and chest, and by his manner of speaking, than by his relatively standardized dress - "a new osnabrugs shirt, Virginia linen short trousers, old cotton jacket, and felt hat". Some owners felt it unnecessary even to specify particular garments. George, who ran away in Albemarle County, Virginia in 1767, was merely said by his master to have worn "the usual clothing of labouring Negroes".(11) Benjamin Latrobe's 1798 drawing of a pair of female field hands at work in Virginia probably gives a fair idea of the simple and plain clothes that were commonplace among slaves. [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 1 OMITTED] Whether or not this is so, descriptions in the runaway advertisements suggest the existence, in the eighteenth-century American colonies, of a pretty clear-cut notion as to how slaves, particularly field hands, should look, at least as far as their clothing was concerned.
Yet slaves repeatedly contested this idea. The South Carolina Negro Act of 1735 proved to be unenforceable, partly because of white indifference, but more importantly because of black determination not to be limited by it. Every now and again, in the wake of some scare or other, whites worried about controlling the appearance of slaves, but generally sumptuary legislation and complaints about slave clothing did little more than reveal the idle dreams of the slave-holders. They are certainly no guide to the way eighteenth-century slaves looked. The best source for examining this aspect of slave culture - the thousands of runaway advertisements printed in both northern and southern colonies - reveals an almost bewildering variety in slave apparel and demonstrates that, through the ways they fashioned their appearance, African and African-American slaves discovered an often surprising degree of social and cultural space.

Bacchus, the trusted personal servant who escaped from Gabriel Jones's plantation at Augusta, Virginia, in June 1774, was a highly acculturated and politically aware man; Jones labelled him "cunning, artful, sensible" and "very capable of forging a Tale to impose on the Unwary", and surmised that he would probably attempt to pass himself off as a free man, obtain a passage to Great Britain, and try to secure his freedom under the precedent recently established in the Somerset case. Perhaps with these ambitious aims in mind, Bacchus had taken away with him:

two white Russia Drill Coats, one turned up with blue, the other quite plain and new, with white figured Metal Buttons, blue Plush Breeches, a fine Cloth Pompadour Waistcoat, two or three thin or Summer Jackets, sundry Pairs of white Thread Stockings, five or six white Shirts, two of them pretty fine, neat Shoes, Silver Buckles, a fine Hat cut and cocked in the Macaroni Figure, a double-milled Drab Great Coat, and sundry other Wearing Apparel.(12)

If, as Richard Bushman and Jonathan Prude have suggested,(13) the notion of genteel appearance was capable of reasonably precise definition, stylistic infractions by those lower down the social scale must have been apparent. Jones's description of some items of Bacchus's clothing suggests that, however blurred the boundary between elite and non-elite clothing may have become, Bacchus had transgressed it. Of course, his stylish waistcoat and hat may have been well worn, but presumptuous intrusions of the kind he had made into the realm of the elite must still have constituted an affront.

Particularly among house slaves, Bacchus's case was far from unique. After commenting that his female slave Road, who ran away in North Carolina in 1775, "wears her hair combed over a large roll" and "[a]ffected gaiety in dress", Josiah Hall itemized her clothing thus: "a homespun striped jacket, a red quilted petticoat, a black silk hat, a pair of leather shoes, with wooden heals, a chintz gown, and a black cloak". Two years later, Charles Alexander Warfield, of Anne Arundel County, Maryland, offered eighty silver dollars reward for the return of the runaways Dick and Lucy. Dick, Warfield noted, had taken with him:

a green cloth coat, with a crimson velvet cape, a red plush do [i.e., ditto], with blue cuffs and cape, a deep blue camblet jacket, with gold lace at the sleeves, down the breast and round the collar, a pair of Russia drab overalls, a white shirt, two osnabrig do, a pair of pumps and buckles, with sundry other cloaths,

while Lucy:

had with her two calico gowns, one purple and white, the other red and white, a deep blue moreens petticoat, two white country cotton do, a striped do, and jacket, and black silk bonnet, a variety of handkerchiefs and ruffles, two lawn aprons, two Irish linen do, a pair of high heel shoes, a pair of kid gloves and a pair of silk mitts, a blue sarsanet handkerchief, trim'd with gauze, with white ribbon sew'd to it, several white linen shirts, osnabrigs for two do, hempen rolles petticoat, with several other things that she probably will exchange for others if in her power.(14)

Not only is the sheer quantity of clothes owned by these slaves striking, but it is also clear that many of the items acquired by them - for example, the "crimson velvet cape" and the "blue sarsanet [fine silk] handkerchief", let alone the intriguing "high heel shoes" - were recognizable insignia of gentility.

Slave artisans, too, could assemble impressive wardrobes. According to his owner, the "proper Dress" of Abraham, a bricklayer, who ran away in South Carolina in 1771, "consisted of a Coat, Waistcoat, and long Trowsers of blue Plains, good Stockings, Shoes, Silver Buckles, and an old Beaver Hat". On special occasions, demanding still more extravagant display, Abraham would don a "dark Olive-coloured Coat, and blue Breeches, both of superfine Cloth". Jachne, a cooper, also of South Carolina, who absconded in that same year, wore unremarkable clothes, but also carried with him "a suit of scarlet camblet, faced with green, a scarlet cloth waistcoat, trimmed with gold lace, and a gold laced hat".(15) These slaves, too, had managed to incorporate items of elite costume into their dress.

It was not uncommon for slave-owners to remark on their slaves' great love of fine clothing. Anthony, a young slave "handy at most any kind of business", who ran away from his master in Talbot County, Maryland in 1787, was "very fond of shewy dress". George, "a likely fellow" who went missing in Richmond, Virginia in 1788, was not only "very fond of dancing and playing of his antic tricks", but also "fond of dress". "[H]is cloaths I can't recollect", his owner Robert Rawlings conceded, "as he has a great variety of them, and of the best kind". Not surprisingly, Jenny, who ran away in Philadelphia in 1782, taking with her:

a bundle of cloaths, consisting of one light chintz gown, a small figure with red stripes, one dark ditto with a large flower and yellow stripes, seven yards of new stamped linen, a purple flower and stripe, a pink-coloured moreen petticoat, a new black peelong bonnet, a chip hat trimmed with gauze and feathers, four good shifts, two not made up, and two a little worn, four aprons, two white and two check, one pair of blue worsted shoes with white heels, [and who] had in her shoes a large pair of silver buckles,

was said by her master to be "very fond of dress" and, more opaquely, "particularly of wearing queen's night-caps".(16)

For many whites, the sight of a well-dressed slave, particularly one displaying expensive items of apparel, aroused suspicion that the wearer might be involved in some sort of illicit activity: framers of the South Carolina Negro Act of 1735 referred disapprovingly to the number of Negroes who wore "clothes much above the condition of slaves, for the procuring whereof they use sinister and evil methods".(17) There is ample evidence that many blacks did steal clothes. Sometimes they took garments belonging to other slaves; the owner of Cloe, who had run away in 1783, surmised that her "unwillingness to return now, is not less owing to the shame of seeing the negroes whom she deprived of their cloathes, than the dread of correction". More usually, however, African Americans stole from whites. Tom, who ran from Arthur Neil of Charleston in 1765, wore his own clothes, but took with him "a dark coloured jacket with vellum button holes, a linen jacket" and several other items belonging to his master.(18)

More significant than theft, as an avenue for the acquisition of extra clothing, was white complicity. In 1735, the South Carolina legislature had specifically forbidden slaves to wear the cast-off clothes of their owners,(19) but this section of the Negro Act became little more than a dead letter, ignored by whites who had something to gain by exploiting the sartorial desires of their human property. Clothing was embedded in the system of rewards and punishments designed to make the plantations and, indeed, the whole institution of slavery, run smoothly. In the 1780s, the Revd Henry Laurens told John Owens, his overseer, that "Sam, Scaramouche, or any other Negro who has behaved remarkably well" should be rewarded, and suggested that Owens "distinguish them in their cloathing by something better than white plains". The overseer then saw to it that Laurens's most faithful slaves received quantities of blue cloth and metal buttons. Owners also allowed slaves to earn small amounts of money on the side, either through doing extra work on their own or adjoining plantations, or by raising vegetables, poultry and the like on small plots of land not needed for commercial production. Though this happened particularly in the South Carolina low country where the task system was in operation, many slaves throughout the mainland colonies had similar, if more limited, opportunities. Slaves were able to spend much of this extra money on clothing, which, as far as owners were concerned, was certainly preferable to having them buy alcohol.(20)

The result was a quasi-licit trade in apparel that in many ways mirrored the colonial elite's and middling classes' concerns with consumption and fashion. Not only was clothing valued by slaves for its own sake but, since it was so readily disposable, it could function as a form of currency. The Maryland owner of the twenty-one-year-old Jacob was unable to say which clothes his slave was wearing, as Jacob had "lost his own at cards just before he went away". Jack's owner did not bother itemizing his runaway slave's clothes as he had doubtless disposed of all but those he needed immediately. Indeed, Jack had "offered some for sale, a little before he went off, for hard money".(21) Slaves bought, sold, bartered and traded garments in an underground economy that easily and quietly absorbed items of questionable origin. Little wonder, then, that many slaves, as they departed, grabbed an armful of their owners' clothing in order to finance their flight, or that many of these often expensive items ended up on the backs of other slaves.(22) Some of the clothes that Erskyne, the "Guiney Country" slave who ran away in South Carolina in 1773, took with him were, his master noted tartly, "really too good for any of his Colour".(23)

Opportunities for acquiring additional clothing were always more numerous in urban areas. Here, the scope for conspicuous display was larger, and the ability to earn extra money greater. Particularly was this true of Charleston. In 1772, the "Stranger" perceived "a great Difference in Appearance as well as Behavior, between the Negroes of the Country, and those in Charles-Town". Although the former were "generally clad suitable to their Condition", the latter were "the very Reverse - abandonedly rude, unmannerly, insolent and shameless".(24) The concentration of several thousand African Americans, many of whom were allowed virtually to fend for themselves, hiring out their own time and hustling around the markets, contributed to the often-commented-on dress and demeanour of Charleston blacks. Slave-owner John Garden, for one, recognized the link between hiring out a slave in the city and her consequent control of her own appearance. When he advertised for his runaway Amey in 1773, Garden simply noted that she "had a variety of cloaths" as she had "been hired out in Charles-Town for some years past".(25)

It was in Charleston too that concerns, often veiled elsewhere, about the connection between well-dressed African-American women and the sexual depredations of white men were made explicit. In 1744, less than a decade after the passage of the Negro Act, the Grand Jury complained that clothing restrictions were being ignored: "it is apparent, that Negro Women in particular do not restrain themselves in their Cloathing as the Law requires, but dress in Apparel quite gay and beyond their Condition". The source of this unseemly display, the Grand Jury suggested, was either theft or "other Practices equally vicious". A quarter of a century later, the "Stranger" lamented that "many of the Female Slaves [are] by far more elegantly dressed, than the Generality of White Women below Affluence", a state of affairs which he attributed to "scandalous Intimacy" between the "Sexes of different Colours". In a later letter to the South Carolina Gazette, the "Stranger" again complained that no one seemed interested in enforcing the regulations about slave dress: indeed, this anonymous correspondent expostulated, "there is scarce a new mode [of fashion] which favourite black and mulatto women slaves are not immediately enabled to adopt".(26)

Any attempt to discover the significance of slaves' clothing forces us to grapple with an African-American culture whose relationship with the dominant culture was necessarily characterized by ambiguities and ambivalences. Such an enterprise is daunting not only because we are trying to grasp at something that was seldom if ever consciously articulated at the time, but also because the sources are fragmentary and one-sided. There were at least two different and competing value systems operating in eighteenth-century America, and while it appears that many slaves were well aware that their actions had meaning in both Euro-American and African-American worlds, only a few whites even dimly perceived this to be the case. Most colonists - and of course they are the source of virtually all our knowledge of this aspect of the black past - were content to dismiss what we call African-American culture as little more than the often unsuccessful attempts by an inferior group to imitate white ways.

Nevertheless, and for all their lack of interest in enforcing sumptuary legislation, whites can hardly have welcomed the arrogation by slaves of elements of elite dress. Such actions disturbed the nuanced social order that clothing was supposed to display, blurring the borderlines between black and white, slave and free. Mention has already been made of Bacchus's lavish and, to whites, clearly inappropriate apparel and of his owner's expectation that he was off to Great Britain to take advantage of the recent Somerset decision, an audacious plan that would doubtless have confirmed the slave-holders' worst fears. But generally the point of slaves wearing such clothes was not so much that they were adopting white values, but that they were subverting white authority. Often, it seems, there was a light mocking touch to the activities of slaves, an elusive characteristic that is extremely difficult to discern two hundred years later. On a Saturday night in 1772, the "Stranger" attended a gathering of about sixty slaves who had assembled a few miles outside Charleston for a dance. As the festivities commenced, he noticed "the men copying (or taking off) the manners of their masters, and the women those of their mistresses".(27) At least some slaves, we are suggesting, through the way they shaped the appearance of their bodies, were intentionally indulging in a similar activity. Like many other blacks, John Jackson, who ran away in New York in 1794, was fond of clothes, often dressing in "rather beauish" fashion, and wearing his "wool turn'd up and a comb behind". According to a postscript to the advertisement seeking his return, Jackson had been seen on the Kingsbridge Road resplendent in a "dark blue coat, with a velvet collar and his wool powdered". The "beauish" clothing of this slave, and his powdering of his hair to resemble a wig, must have created an effect dangerously close to parody. Such use of clothing and appearance might, as Jonathan Prude has perceptively noted, "reveal a further way deference came to be interrogated during the eighteenth century".(28)

But although it is likely that many slaves were aware of the import of their actions in the white world, they were also wearing such clothing in the context of another set of values. Just as the African elite happily appropriated items of European clothing, so eighteenth-century slaves on the American mainland may simply have added to their ensemble any garment that caught their fancy or that they managed to acquire. Among many blacks there appears to have been little if any sense that such an item should co-ordinate in style, colour or anything else with the rest of their garb; it was precisely this characteristic of wearing what appeared, to white eyes, to be odd combinations of clothing, of lumping together, say, an elegant jacket with a pair of trousers fashioned out of coarse, drab material, that whites found risible. Yet at the same time, whites were probably unable entirely to dismiss the suggestion that their own behaviour was being held up to gentle (albeit often very public) ridicule.

Consider, for example, the hats that some slaves fashioned for themselves. Erskyne, the runaway from the "Guiney Country" mentioned above as having clothes "really too good for any of his Colour", completed his ensemble with a handkerchief tied around his head and a hat on top of it. Will, a twenty-year-old runaway, and according to his owner a "great thief and lyar", wore a hat whose band was yellow and whose crown was "covered with the skin of a large bird".(29) Consider also the way in which slaves incorporated items of military garb into their dress.(30) In part, slaves may have worn these items of military apparel because they were all that was available during periods of shortages - many of the relevant descriptions date from the Revolutionary War - but it also seems likely that colour, cut and cloth made such garments desirable at any time. Dick, "a stout elderly Angola fellow" who ran away in December 1771, had on a coat and trousers made of blue negro cloth, but also wore, under the former, a soldier's jacket that was coloured red.(31)

This aspect of African-American culture probably attained its most heightened expression in the garb of the principal characters in Pinkster, Negro Election Day and General Training. These slave festivals, which occurred sporadically in the eighteenth century throughout New England, New York and New Jersey, usually lasted for one or two days in May or June, although Pinkster could occupy up to a week. The rituals varied considerably from place to place and over time, but typically an African American - usually called a king or governor - was in charge of proceedings and slaves from the surrounding area gathered to drink, eat, gamble, listen to music and dance. Generally, all slaves attending attired themselves in their best clothes but, inevitably, most attention was focused on the candidates for office and on the black kings and governors, who often borrowed items of clothing, and even swords and horses, from their owners in order to create a spectacular visual display. Cyrus Bruce, the slave of Governor John Langdon in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was well known for appearing at Election flamboyantly dressed, wearing a massive gold chain, cherry-coloured small-clothes, silk stockings, ruffles and silver shoe buckles. But few would have managed to cut a figure quite as striking as King Charles, who officiated over Pinkster in Albany, New York, in the 1790s and early 1800s. His ceremonial garb consisted of a British brigadier's broadcloth scarlet jacket covered in bright gold lace and reaching almost to his heels, fresh and new yellow buckskin small-clothes, blue stockings, highly burnished silver buckles on well-blackened shoes, and a three-cornered cocked hat also trimmed with gold lace. This slave's carefully constructed appearance was an act of cultural bricolage, the imaginative mediation of an African-born slave in a new, European-dominated environment.(32) But it was also merely an extravagant example - deliberately exaggerated for festival and, because of that, obvious even to us - of the way in which individual slaves throughout the American colonies managed to incorporate items of clothing into a "look" that whites found strange and occasionally even unsettling.

II

As far as we can tell from the occasional glimpses of slaves the sources allow, it appears that in the eighteenth century the creativity of Africans and African Americans in shaping their appearance lay not so much in the manufacture and dyeing of their own garments, but in the way they combined in their clothing ensembles items made elsewhere. Strange as it may seem, slaves too were consumers in the new and wondrous "empire of goods", an empire that, as T. H. Breen in particular has shown, was by the middle of the eighteenth century so besotting the colonists.(33) Since most of the cloth and clothing in which slaves dressed was imported, the slaves' as well as the owners' normal pattern of consumption was considerably disturbed by the non-importation movements of the 1760s and 1770s and, of course, by the Revolution itself. In 1774 Ralph Izard cautioned Henry Laurens that should "our disputes with England continue, which I am inclined to think, they will", it would become "very necessary for us to think of the means of clothing our negroes". Izard's fears proved to be well founded. During an exchange of correspondence with Laurens the following year, he confessed that "no part of your last letter ... affects me so much, as the want of clothing for the negroes".(34)

The pragmatic solution to this problem, as Joyce Chaplin has convincingly shown, was a move away from monoculture and commercial production towards a more diversified plantation economy. Driven by the political crises of the 1770s, planters turned to cotton, flax and wool for the raw materials that would enable them to clothe their slaves. The result was a scramble for the equipment necessary to process these raw materials and a demand for slaves capable of using it. During the Revolutionary War, overseas markets for rice and indigo closed and, as Chaplin has noted, many planters in the South Carolina and Georgia low country simply allowed slaves to raise crops for their own subsistence in an attempt to keep them on the plantation, a development with important implications for the degree of autonomy the region's slaves enjoyed. Commercial production rapidly resumed at the end of the war, but the changes wrought by its disruptive influence could not be undone.(35) Increasingly from this time, plantation slaves were given the job of making their own cloth and clothing, a trend that received renewed impetus during the Napoleonic Wars and, of course, culminated in the emergence of the cotton kingdom. Surrounded by the raw stuff of clothing, cotton planters in particular saw little sense in parting with hard cash for textiles and apparel which they could easily compel their slaves to produce.

By the 1840s and 1850s, a time when our knowledge of the details of plantation life increases exponentially because of the Works Progress Administration interviews with ex-slaves, the manufacture of slave clothing had, to a significant extent, passed into the hands of female slaves.(36) White women had some involvement in textile production, but, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has pointed out, "[m]istresses might supervise or even participate in making the slaves' clothing, but their efforts, which figure as such a burden in their accounts, seem diminished when viewed from the perspective of the slaves' work".(37) Lizzie Norfleet, a young slave on a Mississippi plantation during the Civil War, remembered that "[a]ll of our clothes was made on the place", a refrain that echoes through interview after interview conducted in the 1930s with former slaves. Similarly, a large number of interviewees commented on the amount of time that her or his mother and the other female slaves spent, often communally, weaving cloth. Tempie Durham from North Carolina told how "[d]e cardin' an' spinnin' room was full of niggers. I can hear dem spinnin' wheels now turnin' roun' an' sayin' hum-m-m-m, hum-m-m-m, an' hear de slaves singin' while dey spin".(38)

Drawing on a rich botanical lore, much of it probably derived from Africa and adapted to local circumstances in the American South, these women also manufactured and used the dyes that would give slave clothing a distinctive appearance. Durham remembered the skill of Mammy Rachel with a sense of awe: "[d]ey wuzn' nothin' she didn' know 'bout dyein'. She knew every kind of root, bark, leaf an' berry dat made red, blue, green, or whatever color she wanted". Some of the W.P.A. interviews resemble nothing so much as a pharmacopoeia of the American South. After more than seventy years, the same former slave could still vividly recall Mammy Rachel hunched over steaming pots of "roots, bark an' stuff", using a stick to stir around hanks of wool or cotton in the boiling liquid. "[A]n' when she hang dem up on de line in de sun", she added proudly, "dey was every color of de rainbow".(39)

Slave women used this dyed thread to enhance the look of the cloth they made. Julia Woodberry, a former slave from South Carolina, remembered that "dey would take dat colored yarn en weave all kinds of pretty streaks in de cloth". Bettie Bell, emancipated in Alabama at about the age of eight, told how her mother was particularly adept at "makin' two an' three color'd cloth by putting diff'rent color'd thread on de shuttles", and Hagar Lewis, another former slave, could also recollect that her mother put coloured thread in the woven material that she used to make her Sunday dresses and that "they was pretty". Lizzie Norfleet, too, could remember that the dresses slave women made for themselves out of this cloth were "beautiful", with "one dark stripe and one bright stripe". "Folks them days", she averred, "knowed how to mix pretty colors".(40)

The role of slave women in fashioning the appearance of the slave community did not end there. Benjamin Johnson, an ex-slave from Georgia, told his interviewer that although slaves' clothes were just "ol' plain white cloth", they "wus patched fum de legs to de waist", and that "[s]ome wus patched so till dey looked like a quilt". In part, of course, this mending was a matter of necessity, but something more was involved. Hattie Thompson recalled that as soon "as the washing was brung in the clothes had to be sorted out and every snag place patched nice", but she also added, significantly, that during her childhood, during the latter stages of the Civil War and into the early years of Reconstruction, "patching and darning was stylish".(41) Such testimony hints at the existence of an underlying aesthetic at some remove from that of the slaves' owners.

This aesthetic comes more clearly into focus if we look at the way these women remade second-hand items of clothing. It was not uncommon for favoured slaves, often those working as servants, to receive their owners' discarded garments. Gabe Emanuel remembered that:

[c]ourse, all de time us gits han'-me-downs from de white folkes in de Big House. Us what was a-servin' in de Big House wore de marster's old dress suits. Now dat was somep'n. Mos' o' de time dey didn' fit - maybe de pants hung a little loose an' de tails o' de coat hung a little long. Me bein' de house boy, I used to look mighty sprucy when I put on my frock tail.(42)

In the slaves' eyes, such clothes often needed adjusting, and not only because they did not fit all that well. A good example of this process of adaptation appears in Elizabeth Botume's First Days amongst the Contrabands, an account of this northern schoolteacher's experiences as she ministered to South Carolina slaves in the closing stages of the Civil War and at the beginning of Reconstruction. To the delight of her African-American pupils, thirty new plaid worsted dresses, already cut and basted, arrived at Botume's sewing-school, but when the young black women took the dresses home their mothers looked askance at them. The new garments, Botume would soon learn, were considered far too short, it being "highly indecorous to have the feet and ankles show below the dress". So the pupils "pieced them out, often with the most unsuitable material, putting old cloth with the new, and a cotton frill to a worsted skirt". In one case, the mother obtained some new material "which she inlaid to widen and lengthen and enlarge her child's gown", creating an effect "like a modern 'crazy quilt'".(43)

What lay behind these differences was an African-American aesthetic, the use not only of varied materials and patterns, but also of contrasting colours in a manner that jangled white sensibilities.(44) Reflecting on the cultural gap between black and white, Olmsted astutely pointed out that the slaves took "a real pleasure, for instance, such as it is a rare thing for a white man to be able to feel, in bright and strongly contrasting colours, and in music, in which nearly all are proficient to some extent". This juxtaposition of colour sense and music was not accidental; intuitively, Olmsted understood the way in which both expressive forms were linked by an underlying rhythm, one that was alien to Euro-American cultural forms. The more sensitive of observers often reacted to slave clothing much as they did to African-American music, dance or other forms of cultural display, disdaining the individual elements but being impressed, in spite of themselves, by the total performance. For example, although the famed southern diarist Mary Chesnut concluded that an African-American sermon she heard was devoid of content - "There was literally nothing in what he said. The words had no meaning at all" - the manner of its delivery not only moved her to tears, but also excited her to the point where she "would very much have liked to shout, too", just as the black worshippers were doing. Similarly, Elizabeth Botume, confronted by the young contraband woman's quilt-like dress described above, thought that it looked very odd, but almost grudgingly had to concede that it was "really not ugly".(45)

It was African textile traditions, handed down and adapted by African-American women, that helped to shape the appearance of the ante-bellum slave community. As Robert Farris Thompson has pointed out, in the widely influential Mande or Mande-influenced culture of West Africa, "visual aliveness" and vibrancy are achieved in textile production by the deliberate clash, not only between colours, but between the variously patterned and unpatterned narrow strips of which the material is made. In relation to what he calls "rhythmized textiles", Thompson writes that "as multiple meter distinguishes the traditional music of black Africa, emphatic multistrip composition distinguishes the cloth of West Africa and culturally related Afro-American sites". Although West African narrow-strip looms were not available in the slave South (they would hardly have been suited to the kind of textile production slave-holders required), it seems likely that on occasions African-American women, by weaving irregular patterns into the broad-strip cloth they made, incorporated West African principles of design. The former South Carolina slave Mary Scott told her W.P.A. interviewer that she "could weave it [cloth] with stripes and put one check one way and nother strip nother way".(46) In relation specifically to colour, Thompson writes that "African cloth has for centuries, as it is today, been distinguishable by deliberate clashing of 'high affect colors', . . . in willful, percussively contrastive, bold arrangements". He quotes Ma Apina, whom he interviewed in the Djuka maroon capital in Suriname in 1981, as saying that "[w]hen Djuka paint something, the colors must clash [kengi, literally 'argue'], and where you stop, there must be another color not looking like the one you end with but far away from it".(47)

Folklorists, students of material culture and, more recently, historians have recognized that such principles were at work in the making of African-American quilts. Maude Southwell Wahlman and John Scully suggest that, in ways that differ markedly from those of Euro-American quilt-makers, these black craftswomen played with colours in order to "create unpredictability and movement". They continue:

A strong color may be juxtaposed with another strong color, or with a weak one; light colors can be used next to dark ones, or put together once and never again. Comparisons are made between similar and opposing colors at the same time in the same quilt ... Contrast is used to structure or organize.(48)

In a similar vein, Margaret Adams, a black quilt-maker of Hazard, Kentucky, explained to an interviewer in 1979 that "[y]ou don't want no two reds together, no two blues together. Try to get those colors separated". Recently, Elsa Barkley Brown, impressed by the pervasiveness of these principles, has even suggested that quilting may provide a framework for conceptualizing African-American women's history.(49) It is hardly surprising, then, that African-American clothing was, as we have already seen, sometimes described as looking like a quilt. The same people were involved in both quilting and clothing manufacture and were using much the same materials. As one female ex-slave from Kentucky remembered: "I been knitting socks and sewing and piecing quilts every since I was eight years old".(50) Almost inevitably the same aesthetic principles that animated African-American quilts carried over into the making of clothing. As we have seen, Mary Scott explained that she "could weave it [cloth] with stripes and put one check one way and nother strip nother way". Similarly, Martha King, a former Alabama slave, remembered that "[w]e made fancy cloth. We could stripe the cloth or check it or leave it plain". It was this aesthetic that created the striking and alien effect commented on by whites and often fondly remembered by ex-slaves. Another young woman, who was a child when she was freed, recollected that "my mother used to quilt my skirts from way up here 'round the thigh down to the bottom". Although such a garment, she conceded, now seemed "funny", her "nice warm quilted skirt" had once protected her against the cold.(51)

It was the involvement of African Americans, in the last decades of slavery, in the making of their clothes that allowed them the scope to fashion a distinctive appearance, most obviously evident in their Sunday dress. It is possible to find an occasional eighteenth-century slave wearing garments that fit this later pattern: Cyrus, who ran away in Maryland in 1780, took with him "a very remarkable coat, having a great number of patches of different colours".(52) But if not quite unique, Cyrus's coat was extremely atypical, its design and multi-coloured, quilt-like appearance a harbinger of some nineteenth-century slave clothing, but not at all representative of eighteenth-century garb.

It seems clear from the W.P.A. interviews with ex-slaves that the whole process of clothes-making - the fashioning from cast-off clothing and scraps of material, the spinning, weaving, dyeing and sewing typically completed in poorly lit cabins after a day's work in the fields or around the Big House, and the infusing of all this with an African-American aesthetic sensibility - was almost entirely the achievement of slave women. The only part of the slaves' apparel that was made by the male slaves was the shoes; and they, it was almost universally agreed, were a disaster. Fashioned from cowhide and usually clumsily fitted with a wooden sole, plantation-made shoes were tough, unforgiving encumbrances burdening black feet. Over seventy years later, the former Texan slave John Ellis still vividly remembered his shoes: "Lawdy! Dey was so hard we would have to warm dem by de fire and grease dem wid tallow to ever wear dem 'tall".(53)

Joyce Chaplin has eloquently pointed out that a "terrible irony" lay at the heart of the South Carolina and Georgia planters' response to the crisis of the Revolution. Cotton, the crop that "briefly characterized slaves' wartime liberation from planters' full authority", became the staple that "would characterize the bondage of their children and grandchildren". In the response to this crisis, too, lay the seeds of slave involvement in the production of their clothing. While that involvement increased considerably the burden borne by slave women, it also allowed slaves greater scope to fashion their appearance, to shape the visual impact of their bodies in ways that differentiated them from eighteenth-century African-Americans and nineteenth-century whites. Thus the movement away from reliance on the "empire of goods" towards that of dependence on slave-made textiles for slave clothing supports Rhys Isaac's perceptive suggestion that in late eighteenth-century Virginia the cultural rift between black and white was widening.(54)
III

The clothes of children and the ordinary working clothes of adult slaves on the ante-bellum plantation would not necessarily have displayed to any great extent the irregular patterns and clashing colours of Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. Until young slaves reached the age of twelve or even fifteen, their clothing was androgynous, both males and females wearing only a long shirt or smock, which prompted the expression "shirt-tail nigger", often used by ex-slaves in the W.P.A. interviews. At some time in their teens (not necessarily at puberty) males began to wear a shirt and trousers and females a dress. Yach Stringfellow from Texas remembered that "I wore shirt tail till I's fourteen, den de homespun britches and shirt". On his travels through South Carolina, Olmsted came across a gang of about thirty mostly female slaves repairing a road. They were dressed in "coarse gray gowns", that were "very dirty" and "were reefed up with a cord drawn tightly around the body, a little above the hips" in order to enable the women to work relatively unencumbered.(55)

The material used for everyday working clothes was, as it had been in the eighteenth century, coarse, tough and, if bought, cheap. Felix Haygood, an ex-slave interviewed in the 1930s, remembered, doubtless with only slight exaggeration, that if someone got "caught by his shirt on a limb of a tree, he had to die there if he weren't cut down". Garments were also often uncomfortable. In the part of Virginia where Booker T. Washington was raised, slave clothing was often made from flax. Washington states in his autobiography, Up from Slavery, that the "most trying ordeal" he had to endure as a slave was "the wearing of a flax shirt", an experience which he likened to having "a hundred small pinpoints, in contact with his flesh". He described his elder brother John's action in wearing his [Booker's] new flax shirt for several days until "broken in" as "one of the most generous acts that I ever heard of one slave relative doing for another".(56)

Whites continued to use clothing, and their slaves' liking for it, in an attempt to create a clear-cut slave hierarchy. Favourite slaves, black drivers, domestic slaves and those who had been particularly productive picking cotton were among those encouraged by a system of rewards that often included items of clothing, both hand-me-downs and new garments. Writing in the Southern Agriculturalist in 1836, "An overseer" claimed that he always made the black driver "dress himself better than the other negroes", encouraging him in this way "to maintain a pride of character before them, which was highly beneficial".(57) The black driver whom Basil Hall used his camera lucida to depict in 1827 or 1828 is garbed in an outfit that, particularly in the case of the cutaway coat, a field hand would hardly have worn to work. [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 2 OMITTED] Although the photograph of a group of blacks on Woodlands plantation returning from the fields was probably taken around 1870, after the end of slavery, it is noticeable that the driver is wearing an outfit remarkably similar to the one Hall portrayed and is clearly differentiated from the labourers he leads. [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 3 OMITTED]

The major differentiation in African-American dress in the ante-bellum South, though, was not that between individual slaves, but between what slaves wore from Monday to Saturday and what they wore on Sundays. No matter how poorly they were treated, most southern slaves had a few special items of clothing with which to dress up, and it was here that the slave women's handicraft skills with cloth and dyes were displayed to full effect. One South Carolina bondsman told Olmsted that, although the local slaves were "a'mos' naked, wen deys at work", it was a different case on the sabbath. With some pride the old man remarked that "Sundays dey is mighty well clothed, dis country; 'pears like dere an't nobody looks better Sundays dan dey do". Julia Larken was only a young girl when freedom came, but she could clearly remember the grown-up slaves heading off for church from the Georgia plantation where she was raised: "[d]ey was dressed in deir best Sunday go-to-meetin' clothes and deir shoes, all shined up, was tied together and hung over deir shoulders to keep 'em from gittin' dust on 'em". The men wore "plain homespun shirts and jeans pants", and while some of the women wore homespun dresses, "most of 'em had a calico dress what was saved special for Sunday meetin' wear".(58)

In many cases this Sunday go-to-meeting apparel was sufficiently striking to provoke in white observers feelings of bemusement or contempt. Fanny Kemble, resident on her husband's Georgia plantation in the late 1830s, pronounced the "sabbath toilet" of the slaves to be "the most ludicrous combination of incongruities that you can conceive ... every color in the rainbow, and the deepest possible shades blended in fierce companionship". In 1859, a visitor to the rice lands of the South labelled the Sunday clothing of a group of blacks waiting to enter a church as "a rainbow pot pourri".(59) The most spectacular effects, though, were found not on the plantations, but in the urban centres of the South. In 1845 a Canadian visitor to Charleston, witnessing a Sunday congregation emerging from a "fashionable" African-American church, reacted with incredulity: "[s]uch exquisite dandies, such gorgeously dressed Women, I never saw before - howling swells, all of them! All slaves!"(60) Even during the Civil War, Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, a Sandhurst graduate and southern sympathizer, out for a Sunday afternoon drive in Houston, Texas, found "innumerable negroes and negresses parading about the streets in the most outrageously grand costumes" - apparel which he contrasted, doubtless with a certain degree of hyperbole, with the "simple dresses" of their mistresses.(61)

Olmsted observed the same phenomenon. After spending several hours in Richmond on a Sunday, he noted that a considerable number of the blacks were "dressed with foppish extravagance, and many in the latest style of fashion". On the better streets "there were many more well-dressed and highly-dressed coloured people than white; and among this dark gentry the finest French cloths, embroidered waistcoats, patent-leather shoes, resplendent brooches, silk hats, kid gloves, and eau de mille fleurs, were quite common". Nor was it only outsiders who commented on this feature of African-American life. Mary Chesnut overheard a southern lady in a Columbia, South Carolina, hotel in 1862 declare that it was "one of our sins as a nation, the way we indulged them [the slaves] in sinful finery. We let them dress too much. It led them astray. We will be punished for it".(62)

Rather than "indulging" their slaves, as this lady suggested, it was, as we have seen, more often the case that slave-owners used clothing as a means of reinforcing paternalism. Olmsted speculated, correctly, that many of the garments he had seen in Richmond were the "cast-off fine clothes of the white people", and he also surmised that many of the slaves were buying clothing from shops in Richmond. If anything, the internal economy that had existed in the eighteenth century was flourishing even more strongly in the ante-bellum years, and it was very common for slaves to spend the money they managed to accumulate on clothing or other accessories. Tom Singleton's master allowed him to work at night time, cutting wood and mending fences for local non-slaveholding whites. With the cash he earned Singleton "bought Sunday shoes and a Sunday coat and sich lak, cause I wuz a Nigger what always did lak to look good on Sunday". In the sugar-growing regions of Louisiana, a correspondent of Harper's Magazine reported in 1853, local pedlars grew rich at Christmas time by selling to the slaves "ribbons and nick-nacks, that have no other recommendation than the possession of staring colors in the most glaring contrasts".(63)

Whatever the origin of individual items may have been, and however disdainfully whites such as this Harper's correspondent may have viewed black apparel, clothing constituted an important element in the remembered life of slavery, a point made abundantly clear in the W.P.A. interviews and other sources. At times it is the language the former slaves used to describe their appearance - one ex-slave from Alabama claimed that he was '"bout the mos' dudish nigger in them parts", and Silvia Dubois, who had been enslaved in New Jersey, told C. W. Larison of her desire "to look pretty sniptious"(64) - but more commonly it is the way in which fond references to clothing are embedded in the mosaic of little incidents they recall, fragments of their earlier lives given in answer to the interviewers' questions about slavery, that underlines the generality of this characteristic.

Although African-American testimony makes clear to us the importance of clothing in the life of slaves, it is white reactions, and principally those of outsiders such as Kemble and Olmsted, that emphasize what was distinctive about the slaves' appearance. Their comments, which fall into three broad and overlapping categories, amplify points made earlier in this article. First, and most importantly, they noted that slaves wore colours that were not merely bright and vivid, but that, in Euro-American terms, clashed violently. Secondly, they observed that slaves combined not only different pieces of material in the one garment, but also various items of clothing within one ensemble in what were seen as odd, even bizarre, ways. Thus, for example, when Fanny Kemble declared that the Sunday clothing of the slaves on her husband's plantation displayed "the most ludicrous combination of incongruities", she had more than startling colour contrasts in mind. She was particularly taken by a young black man, the son of her washerwoman, who "came to pay his respects to me in a magnificent black satin waistcoat, shirt gills which absolutely engulfed his black visage, and neither shoes nor stockings on his feet".(65) To Kemble, the outfit seemed strange, but to the black youth the items of elite clothing he had appropriated signified differently. Lastly, travellers and other commentators often complained about the propensity of slaves to dress "above themselves", to engage in forms of conspicuous display inappropriate to their lowly station in life. When Daniel, resplendent in his best clothes but denied a full weekend pass, ran away from George Swain, his North Carolina owner, he visited several other plantations, going "as far along that road as he could possibly find black audiences to exhibit his finery to". According to Swain, this was but one more demonstration of the fact that his slave's love of finery "made a perfect fool of him". As with "all other Dandies who measure their importance by their dress he [Daniel] had entirely forgotten who he was, or what grade and station he ought to fill", a sentiment that many slave-owners would have found unexceptionable.(66)

On any Sunday throughout the ante-bellum South these characteristics could be observed to varying degrees. The variation or exact mixture depended, in part, on whether the slaves gathered together in an urban centre such as Richmond or Houston or on a plantation, but it also was influenced by other factors, such as the predilections of individual slaves. In the eighteenth century Sunday had become the slaves' day off because of their owners' religious and cultural traditions, but by the 1840s and 1850s the vast majority of slaves, too, had become Christians. For many of them Sunday was a day to attend some form of religious service if at all possible. If that activity in itself represented some sort of accommodation, a coming to terms with the culture of their owners, the content and form of slave religious belief and, importantly for our present purpose, the way in which slaves chose to display themselves revealed elements of a different set of cultural imperatives, harking back to an African past.

There were occasions other than the Sunday "meeting" on which clothing and appearance were extremely important for slaves, when the manner in which they dressed revealed something of the complex relationships between white and black cultures. Probably the most important of these - one that was raised repeatedly throughout the interviews with ex-slaves whenever they were discussing clothing - was the slave wedding. To these events, some slaves wore cleaner and newer versions of their everyday garments, often augmented with a few accessories.(67) But many African Americans did rather better than this. Although some slaves did jump across the broomstick - a staple of recent slave historiography - many were wed by a preacher or their master in a Euro-American ceremony. Indeed, our reading of the interviews suggests that this ritual (but not the celebrations afterwards) may well have been the point when slave behaviour on the ante-bellum plantation most nearly corresponded to that of whites. A surprising number of slaves were not only married by a preacher but also wore the type of apparel whites associated with weddings. The former Georgia slave Addle Vinson explained that:

My weddin' dress was jus' de purtiest thing; it was made out of parade cloth, and it had a full skirt wid ruffles from de knees to de hem. De waist fitted tight and it was cut lowneck wid three ruffles 'round de shoulder. Dem puff sleeves was full from de elbow to de hand, all dem ruffles was aidged wid lace and, 'round my waist I wore a wide pink sash. De underskirt was trimmed wid lace, and dere was lace on de bottom of de drawers laigs. Dat was sho one purty outfit dat I wore to marry dat no 'count man in.(68)

From what we learn in the W.P.A. interviews, slave brides generally wore white dresses, which in many cases were quite elaborate garments. Indeed, it was not that unusual for the mistress to loan a slave a dress for the occasion. Harriet Jones, for example, had on "one of my Mistis dresses wid a long train, hit is a white dress an I wear a red sash an' a big bow in de back, den I has on red stockings an a pair of bran new shoes, an a big wide brim hat".(69) These slave weddings were clearly modelled on those of their owners, whose example provided the idea of what was suitable attire on such occasions. But although slave dress at some ante-bellum weddings, especially that of the brides, resembled that of their owners, there were still the same small but significant differences that generally characterized African-American clothing. It is highly unlikely, for example, that Harriet Jones's mistress would have worn a red sash to her wedding; it is certain that she would not have donned the red stockings in which her slave was proudly attired.

But the most interesting and revealing use of clothes by antebellum slaves occurred during Jonkonnu. This slave festival took place only within a small area of North Carolina and in parts of southern Virginia, and between the 1820s and the Civil War, but if, as we have argued, the garb worn at the northern festivals only represented in its most extreme form the style of eighteenth-century slave clothing in general, much the same can be said of Jonkonnu in the ante-bellum years. According to Dr Edward Warren, a visitor at Somerset Place in North Carolina in 1829, the festival's "leading character" was the "ragman", whose costume consisted of "rags, so arranged that one end of each hangs loose and dangles; two great ox horns, attached to the skin of a raccoon, which is drawn over the head and face; sandals of the skin of some wild 'varmint'", the whole outfit being capped by cow- and sheep-bells which made a noise whenever he moved. The second slave was the "best looking darkey of the place", who wore "no disguise, but is simply arrayed in what they call his 'Sunday-go-to-meeting suit'." Then followed "some half a dozen fellows, each arrayed fantastically in ribbons, rags, and feathers", and bringing up the rear was "a motley crowd of all ages, dressed in their ordinary working clothes", who seemed to be a "guard of honor to the performers".(70)

Here in microcosm - for although only males are included in Warren's description of Jonkonnu, we would suggest that the cultural principles involved applied to slave women as well was the full spectrum of slave clothing from working clothes through to go-to-meeting clothes and the quilt-like appearance of the "ragman" and his six epigoni. Almost inevitably, it is to the last seven men that most of our attention is attracted. Indeed, as Peter Wood and Karen Dalton have shown in a brilliant reading, it was to one of these figures that Winslow Homer was drawn for the subject of his painting Dressing for Carnival.(71) [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE 4 OMITTED] The picture may have been completed in 1877, but in its depiction of a "ragman" clothed in an outfit of brilliant and clashing colours, and even in the way the African-American woman wielding a needle and thread administers a last-minute touch or two, it evokes both the Jonkonnu of slavery times - times that were still in the very recent past - and more generally, the role of women in fashioning slaves' appearance. Like the garb of King Charles on Pinkster days, the clothing of the "ragman" was the deliberate, festive exaggeration of the African-American cultural principles that animated slave apparel, particularly on Sundays.

What then was the significance of the way in which antebellum slaves clothed themselves? Occasionally, slaves made the meaning of their garb so clear that no one could have been in any doubt as to their intentions. During the Civil War, Madison Bruin's mother, a Kentucky slave, displayed the "Yankee flag" on top of her dress, although a modicum of discretion did dictate that when "de 'federates come raidin'" she wore it "under her dress like a petticoat". More usually, however, meaning is elusive, blurred and ambiguous rather than certain. James Washington, a Mississippi slave born in 1854, clearly remembered a dress worn by his mother: "[i]t wus blue en had picturs uf gourds in it en mammy sed I wus 3 years old when she hed dat dress".(72) In this case, Washington's mother was wearing a dress of Euro-American cut, but the combination of the colour - blue was a frequently used element in the African palette - and the motif of the gourd, an emblematic African and African-American utensil, suggest that the design and the overall effect displayed an African-American sensibility. Washington's mistress would never have worn such a dress.

At times slaves felt impelled to conceal their choice items of clothing from whites, but this was relatively unusual. Generally, as numerous commentators attest, slaves were only too keen to display, even to flaunt, their finery both to other slaves and to whites. This was particularly the case in the cities, where the Sunday promenade of well-dressed slaves attracted the whites' rapt, almost voyeuristic, gaze. There can be little doubt that blacks intended to create such an effect. The vivid, visual presence they established was an emphatic repudiation of their allotted social role. By not merely appropriating valued items of white clothing but reassembling them according to a different aesthetic code, slaves garbed in their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes blurred racial and social boundaries and intruded, in a disconcerting fashion, into the world and consciousness of their supposed betters. Some whites ridiculed such "over-dressed" slaves as little more than imitators; others, predictably, were outraged at the slaves' presumption; but, especially among more sensitive and acute observers like Mary Chesnut, there was an edginess underlying the white response to this black style, a sense that white control was, at least obliquely, being challenged.

The contours of the African-American aesthetic that helped to fashion slave clothing are certainly difficult for us, at this remove, to discern; indeed, at times they seem almost chimerical. But that is more a function of the paucity of evidence and the difficulties historians face in trying to construe its meaning than of anything else. Slaves on the plantations and in the cities had no such difficulties. If the intention of slave-holders was, as one of them asserted, not to allow their slaves "to do anything for themselves[,] in order to cultivate attitudes of absolute dependence",(73) then clothing proved to be a lapse of some significance. This was the case throughout the history of the institution of slavery in America, but it was particularly true in the three-quarters of a century leading up to the Civil War. Slave-holders may have forced slaves to fashion their clothes, originally because of shortages during the Revolutionary era, and later, when most plantations were abundantly supplied with cotton and wool, in order to save money, but slaves made the most of this extra burden and created something that a surprising number remembered many years later with pride and a sense of achievement. The way in which slaves combined both colours and individual items of clothing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revealed the polyrhythmic nature of their culture - a characteristic that also infused other expressive forms ranging from quilting, dance and music, through to speech, and that was illustrative of a particular way of seeing and ordering the world. This understanding derived from African cultures but, by the ante-bellum years, American-born slaves had adapted it to life in the New World. It is properly labelled "African-American". In short, clothing was a vital and integral part of a culture that, fashioned out of adversity, made the lives of African Americans during the time of their enslavement bearable. But with the coming of freedom, and the consequent dispersal of the slave community, African Americans were increasingly drawn into an economic system that left them with neither the time nor the facilities to fashion their own cloth and clothing and that forced them to buy cheaply manufactured goods. This engagement with the market and consumption represented not novelty but a return to the patterns of the colonial past, an irony that was doubtless lost on African-American share-croppers and labourers as they struggled to find a secure place in a hostile, post-slavery world.

Shane White Graham White University of Sydney

1 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York, 1953), pp. 25, 28 (our emphasis).

2 See, for example, John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972), p. 192; John B. Boles, Black Southerners, 1619-1869 (Lexington, Ky, 1983), pp. 86-7; Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974), pp. 116-18; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988), pp. 120-8, 178-83; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), pp. 550-61; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, 1984), pp. 106-17. Elsewhere, we have attempted to begin charting the outlines of what we have labelled a black or an African-American style: Shane White and Graham White, "'Every Grain is Standing for Itself': African-American Style in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries", Australian Cultural Hist., xiii (1994), pp. 111-28; S. White and G. White, "Slave Hair and African-American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries", Jl Southern Hist., lxi (1995), pp. 45-76.

3 Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), p. 88; Olaudah Equiano, "The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written By Himself", in Great Slave Narratives, ed. Arna Bontemps (Boston, 1969), pp. 1-192. This autobiography was originally published in 1789.

4 South Carolina Gazette, 5 June 1736, 5 June 1756, 31 Jan. 1736.

5 The research for this article would have taken years longer were it not for the publication of Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790, comp. Lathan A. Windley, 4 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1983). Here we will cite the references to the original newspapers and then, in brackets, the references to the Windley volumes. Several southern newspapers published under the same title, and (with the obvious exception of n. 28 below) the names in brackets are those of the printers. In the present case the footnote should read: Virginia Gazette [Hunter], 14 Nov. 1751 (Runaway Slave Advertisements, comp. Windley, i, p. 24). See also South Carolina Gazette and Country Jl, 12 Nov. 1771 (ibid., iii, p. 339).

6 The Works Progress Administration interviews with ex-slaves were conducted in the 1930s and then published in several series in the 1970s: The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, ed. George P. Rawick, 1st and 2nd ser., 19 vols. continuously numbered (Westport, Conn., 1972); 1st suppl. ser., 12 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1977); 2nd suppl. ser., 10 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1979). In this case the reference is: American Slave, ed. Rawick, 1st suppl. ser., ix, Mississippi Narratives, pp. 1415, 1417.

7 Virginia Gazette [Purdie and Dixon], 24 Dec. 1772 (Runaway Slave Advertisements, comp. Windley, i, p. 126).

8 John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (New York, 1992), pp. 230-4.

9 Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992), pp. 70-4; Jonathan Prude, "To Look Upon the 'Lower Sort': Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750-1800", Jl Amer. Hist., lxxviii (1991-2), pp. 129-30.

10 Quoted in Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1975), p. 232; South Carolina Gazette, 28 Aug. 1736, 8 June, 20 July 1765.

11 Virginia Gazette [Purdie and Dixon], 20 Oct. 1768, 15 Jan. 1767 (Runaway Slave Advertisements, comp. Windley, i, pp. 65, 48).

12 Ibid., 30 June 1774 (ibid., pp. 149-50).

13 See n. 9 above.

14 Virginia Gazette [Pinkney], 15 June 1775 (Runaway Slave Advertisements, comp. Windley, i, pp. 331-2); Annapolis Maryland Gazette, 16 Aug. 1777 (ibid., ii, pp. 170-1).

15 Charleston South-Carolina Gazette [Timothy], 11 Apr. 1771 (ibid., iii, p. 299); Charleston South-Carolina Gazette and Country Jl, 5 Nov. 1771 (ibid., pp. 668-9).

16 Maryland Jl and Baltimore Advertiser, 25 May 1787 (ibid., ii, p. 361); Virginia Gazette and Weekly Advertiser [Nicholson], 4 Sept. 1788 (ibid., i, p. 242); Maryland Jl and Baltimore Advertiser, 17 Dec. 1782 (ibid., ii, p. 276).

17 Quoted in Wood, Black Majority, p. 232.

18 Annapolis Maryland Gazette, 9 Jan. 1783 (Runaway Slave Advertisements, comp. Windley, ii, p. 133); Savannah Georgia Gazette, 1 Aug. 1765 (ibid., iv, p. 15). Obviously, the vast bulk of slave crime would not have been reported but, in colonial Virginia at least, clothing and fabric were among the most common items stolen in those cases that were settled by a court: see Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (Baton Rouge, 1988), pp. 126-7.

19 Wood, Black Majority, p. 232.

20 Quoted in Joyce E. Chaplin, "Slavery and the Principle of Humanity: A Modern Idea in the Early Lower South", Jl Social Hist., xxiv (1990-1), p. 309; on the task system, see Philip D. Morgan, "Task and Gang Systems: The Organization of Labor on New World Plantations", in Stephen Innes (ed.), Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1988), pp. 189-220.

21 Annapolis Maryland Gazette, 15 July 1784, 3 Sept. 1782 (Runaway Slave Advertisements, comp. Windley, ii, pp. 144-5); Maryland Jl and Baltimore Advertiser, 3 Sept. 1782 (ibid., p. 271).

22 For an account of this market in used clothing in New York City, see Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810 (Athens, Ga, 1991), pp. 195-6. A similar situation appears to have obtained in England: Beverly Lemire, "The Theft of Clothes and Popular Consumerism in Early Modern England", Jl Social Hist., xxiv (1990-1), pp. 255-76.

23 South Carolina Gazette [Powell and Co.], 10 May 1773 (Runaway Slave Advertisements, comp. Windley, iii, pp. 323-4).

24 South Carolina Gazette, 27 Aug. 1772.

25 Charleston South-Carolina Gazette and Country Jl, 24 Aug. 1773 (Runaway Slave Advertisements, comp. Windley, iii, p. 689).

26 South Carolina Gazette, 5 Nov. 1744, 27 Aug., 24 Sept. 1772. On the Charleston blacks, see Philip D. Morgan, "Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston", Perspectives in Amer. Hist., new ser., i (1984), pp. 187-232.

27 South Carolina Gazette, 17 Sept. 1772.

28 Daily Advertiser [New York], 30 July 1794; Prude, "To Look Upon the 'Lower Sort'", p. 156. See also White, Somewhat More Independent, pp. 198-9.

29 South Carolina Gazette [Powell and Co.], 10 May 1773 (Runaway Slave Advertisements, comp. Windley, iii, pp. 323-4); Charleston Royal Gazette, 6-9 June 1781 (ibid., p. 581).

30 See, for example, Maryland Jl and Baltimore Advertiser, 25 Sept. 1781 (ibid., ii, p. 253); Virginia Gazette or Amer. Advertiser [Hayes], 25 Jan. 1783 (ibid., i, p. 346).

31 Charleston South-Carolina Gazette and Country Jl, 24 Dec. 1771 (ibid., iii, pp. 670-1). For a discussion of the African propensity to combine European garments in apparently haphazard fashion, see William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, 1988), p. 11.

32 Shane White, "'It was a Proud Day': African Americans, Festivals and Parades in the North, 1741-1834", Jl Amer. Hist., lxxxi (1994-5), pp. 13-50.

33 See T. H. Breen, "'Baubles of Britain': The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century", Past and Present, no. 119 (May 1988), pp. 73-104; T. H. Breen, "Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution", William and Mary Quart., 3rd ser., 1 (1993), pp. 471-501.

34 Letters quoted in Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Chapel Hill, 1993), p. 213. On the extent of reliance on Britain - and its discouragement of plantation self-sufficiency in the colonial years - see Carole Shammas, "Black Women's Work and the Evolution of Plantation Society in Virginia", Labor Hist., xxvi (1985), pp. 5-28, esp. p. 24; C. Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990), esp. pp. 65, 69.

35 Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, pp. 208-20.

36 In West African societies the weaving of cloth had been the work of men, but in nineteenth-century America slave women performed this task, probably because their owners followed traditional European labour practice: see Maude Southwell Wahlman, Signs and Symbols: African Images in African-American Quilts (New York, 1993), pp. 21, 25.

37 Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, p. 181.

38 American Slave, ed. Rawick, 1st suppl. ser., ix, Mississippi Narratives, p. 1640; ibid., 2nd ser., xiv, North Carolina Narratives, p. 286. On some large plantations textiles were produced in special buildings: see John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1993), pp. 84, 100-1.

39 American Slave, ed. Rawick, 2nd ser., xiv, North Carolina Narratives, p. 286; cf. ibid., 1st ser., viii, Arkansas Narratives, pp. 243-4.

40 Ibid., 1st ser., iii, South Carolina Narratives, p. 240; ibid., 1st suppl. ser., i, Alabama Narratives, p. 48; ibid., 1st ser., v, Texas Narratives, p. 6; ibid., 1st suppl. ser., ix, Mississippi Narratives, pp. 1641-2.

41 Ibid., 2nd ser., xii, Georgia Narratives, pp. 324-5; ibid., x, Arkansas Narratives, pp. 315-16 (our emphasis).

42 Ibid., 1st ser., vii, Oklahoma and Mississippi Narratives, pp. 44-5.

43 Elizabeth Hyde Botume, First Days amongst the Contrabands (Boston, 1893), pp. 236-7.

44 The vivid colours and multiple design patterns of West African textiles signify social status and wealth; only the wealthy can afford such elaborate cloth. The bold and contrasting colours in such garments allow them to be "read" at a distance, ensuring that the wearer will be treated in an appropriate manner: Wahlman, Signs and Symbols, pp. 35, 48, 110.

45 Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, ed. Schlesinger, p. 467; Mary Chesnut's Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, 1981), p. 214; Botume, First Days amongst the Contrabands, p. 237.

46 Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African Art and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York, 1984), pp. 209-10; American Slave, ed. Rawick, 1st ser., iii, South Carolina Narratives, p. 82.

47 Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, pp. 209, 217.

48 Quoted in Elsa Barkley Brown, "African-American Women's Quilting: A Framework for Conceptualizing and Teaching African-American Women's History", in Micheline R. Malson et al. (eds.), Black Women in America: Social Science Perspectives (Chicago, 1990), p. 11. See also Wahlman, Signs and Symbols, pp. 12, 16, 17, 35.

49 Quoted in Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, p. 220; Brown, "African-American Women's Quilting", pp. 9-18. On quilts, see also John Michael Vlach, By the Work of their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife (Charlottesville, 1991), pp. 36-40.

50 American Slave, ed. Rawick, 2nd ser., xviii, The Unwritten History of Slavery, p. 229.

51 Ibid., 1st ser., iii, South Carolina Narratives, p. 82; ibid., vii, Oklahoma and Mississippi Narratives, p. 170; ibid., 2nd ser., xviii, The Unwritten History of Slavery, pp. 313-24.

52 Maryland Jl and Baltimore Advertiser, 27 June 1780, suppl. (Runaway Slave Advertisements, comp. Windley, ii, pp. 240-1).

53 American Slave, ed. Rawick, 1st ser., iv, Texas Narratives, p. 22.

54 Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, p. 219; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), pp. 305-8.

55 American Slave, ed. Rawick, 1st ser., v, Texas Narratives, p. 68; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, ed. Schlesinger, p. 161.

56 American Slave, ed. Rawick, 1st ser., iv, Texas Narratives, p. 132; Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (New York, 1967; first pubd New York, 1901), pp. 20-1.

57 Quoted in Norrece T. Jones, Jr, Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina (Middletown, Conn. and Hanover, N.H., 1990), p. 98.

58 Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, ed. Schlesinger, p. 164; American Slave, ed. Rawick, 2nd ser., xiii, Georgia Narratives, pp. 40-1.

59 Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, ed. John A. Scott (New York, 1975), pp. 93-4; T. A. Richards, "The Rice Lands of the South", Harper's New Monthly Mag., xix (1859), p. 734.

60 Quoted in letter from E. D. Worthington to David Ross McCord in Louisa McCord Smythe, For Olde Lange Syne (Charleston, 1900), introduction (unpaginated).

61 Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, Three Months in the Southern States: April-June, 1863 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1991; first pubd Edinburgh, 1863), p. 75.

62 Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, ed. Schlesinger, p. 37; Mary Chesnut's Civil War, ed. Woodward, p. 316.

63 Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, ed. Schlesinger, p. 37; American Slave, ed. Rawick, 2nd ser., xiii, Georgia Narratives, p. 266; T. B. Thorpe, "Sugar and the Sugar Region of Louisiana", Harper's New Monthly Mag., vii (1853), p. 767. On the ante-bellum internal economy, see Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Urbana, 1990), pp. 30-6.

64 American Slave, ed. Rawick, 1st ser., iv, Texas Narratives, p. 205; C. W. Larison, Silvia Dubois: A Biografy of the Slav who Whipt her Mistres and Gand her Fredom, ed. Jared C. Lobdell (New York, 1988; first pubd Ringos, N.J., 1883), p. 91.

65 Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, ed. Scott, pp. 93-4.

66 Quoted in John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville, 1989), pp. 99-100.

67 See, for example, American Slave, ed. Rawick, 2nd suppl. ser., vii, Texas Narratives, p. 2493.

68 Ibid., 2nd ser., xiii, Georgia Narratives, p. 113.

69 Ibid., 2nd suppl. ser., vi, Texas Narratives, p. 2096. The other obvious occasion was slave funerals, but space precludes any analysis of these here.

70 Edward Warren, A Doctor's Experiences in Three Continents (Baltimore, 1885), p. 201. The best account of this festival is Elizabeth A. Fenn, "'A Perfect Equality Seemed to Reign': Slave Society and Jonkonnu", North Carolina Hist. Rev., lxv (1988), pp. 127-53.

71 Peter H. Wood and Karen C. C. Dalton, Winslow Homer's Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (Austin, 1988), pp. 98-106.

72 American Slave, ed. Rawick, 1st ser., iv, Texas Narratives, p. 170; ibid., 1st suppl. ser., x, Mississippi Narratives, p. 2198.

73 Quoted in Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1756-1831 (Urbana, 1992), p. 152.