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

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

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)