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

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

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)