His Dress. “In teacup time of hood and hoop And when the patch was worn”

If you have any curiosity to know what clothes these first Colonial Cavaliers wore, you may learn very easily by reading over the “particular of Apparrell” upon which they agreed as necessary to the settler bound for Virginia.

The list includes: “1 dozen Points, a Monmouth cap, 1 waste-coat, 3 falling bands, 1 suit of canvase, 3 shirts, 1 suit of frieze, 1 suit of cloth, 4 paire shoes, 3 paire Irish stockings, and 1 paire garters.” Besides these he would need “1 Armor compleat, light, a long peece, a sword, a belt and a Bandelier,” which may be reckoned among his wearing apparel, for it would be long before the settler could be safe without them when he ventured outside the palisade.

Englishmen in those days were fond of elaborate dress. It was the period of conical hats, and rosetted shoes, of doublets and sashes and padded trunk-hose, which his Majesty, James the First, much affected because they filled out his ill-shaped legs. Suits of clothes were a frequent form of gift and bequest. Captain John Smith’s will declares, “I give unto Thomas Packer, my best suite of aparrell, of a tawney colour, viz., hose, doublet, jerkin and cloake.”

The peruke began its all-conquering career in England, under the Stuarts. Elizabeth, it is true, had owned eighty suits of hair, and Mary of Scotland had varied her hair to match her dresses. But a defect of the French Dauphin introduced the use of the wig for men as well as women, and false hair became the rage throughout the world of fashion. A London peruke-maker advertised: “Full-bottom wigs, full bobs, minister’s bobs, naturals, half-naturals, Grecian flyes, Curleyroys, airey levants, qu perukes and baggwiggs.” The customer must have been hard to please, who could find nothing to suit his style in such a stock.

The settlers in Colonial America did not allow themselves such luxuries of the toilet as a variety of wigs, though a well-planned peruke or “a bob” might have been a good device to trick the tomahawk of the savage into a bloodless scalping. With the poorer people, a single wig for Sunday wear sufficed, and was replaced on week days by a cap, generally of linen.

The Colonial dames, being too far from Court to copy the low-necked dresses, the stomachers and farthingales of the inner circle of fashion, wore instead, huge ruffs, full, short petticoats, and long, flowing sleeves, over tight undersleeves. Even in the wilderness, however, they retained a feminine fondness for gay attire.

John Pory, a clever scapegrace intimately acquainted with gaming-tables and sponging-houses in London, but figuring in Virginia as secretary to Governor Yeardley, wrote home to Sir Dudley Carleton, “That your Lordship may know that we are not the veriest beggars in the world, our cow-keeper here of James Cittie, on Sundays goes accoutred all in fresh flaming silk, and a wife of one that in England professed the black art, not of a scholar but of a collier of Croydon, wears her rough beaver hat with a fair pearl hat-band and a silken suit, thereto correspondent.”

Lively John was probably lying a little in the cause of immigration, but it is certain that the desire for fine clothes early called for a check, and at an early session of the Virginia House of Burgesses, a sumptuary law was passed “against excess in apparell,” directing “that every man be ceffed in the church for all publique contributions—if he be unmarried, according to his own apparrell; if he be married, according to his own and his wives, or either of their apparell.” Here, surely, is a suggestion from the past, for the fashionable church of the present.

A later law in the provinces enacts that “no silke stuffe in garments or in peeces, except for hoods or scarfes, nor silver or gold lace, nor bonelace of silke or thread, nor ribbands wrought with silver or gold in them, shall be brought into this country to sell, after the first of February.” A Maryland statute proposes that two sorts of “cloaths” only be worn, one for summer, the other for winter. But this was going too far, and the law was never enforced.

It was permitted to none but Members of the Council and Heads of Hundreds in Virginia to wear the coveted gold on their clothes, or to wear any silk not made by themselves. This last prohibition was intended not so much to discourage pomp and pride, as to stimulate the infant industry of silk production, which from the beginning had been a pet scheme of the colonists. They had imported silk-worms and planted mulberry trees; and as an inducement to go into the business, the Burgesses offered a premium of five thousand pounds of tobacco to any one making a hundred pounds of wound silk in any one year.

His Gracious Majesty, Charles the Second, sent to his loyal subjects in Virginia, a letter, still to be seen in the college library at Williamsburg. It is written by his Majesty’s private secretary and signed with the sacred “Charles R.” It is addressed to Governor Berkeley, and runs:

“Trusty & Wellbeloved, We Greet You Well. Wee have received w^th much content ye dutifull respects of Our Colony in y^e present lately made us by you & y^e councell there, of y^e first product of y^e new Manufacture of Silke, which as a mark of Our Princely acceptation of yo^r duteys & for y^r particular encouragement, etc.—Wee have commanded to be wrought up for y^e use of Our owne person.”

From this letter has sprung the legend, dear to loyalist hearts, that the robe worn by Charles at his coronation was woven of Virginia silk.

So much material was needed “for y^e use of our owne person,” that the offering of silk was no doubt very welcome. The King’s favorite, Buckingham, had twenty-seven suits, one of them of white uncut velvet, set all over with diamonds and worn with diamond hat-bands, cockades and ear-rings, and yoked with ropes and knots of pearls.

It was an era of wild extravagance. Not satisfied with the elegance of the time of Charles First, his son’s courtiers added plumes to the wide-brimmed hats, enlarged the bows on the shoes, donned great wigs, loaded their vests with embroidery, and over their coats hung short cloaks, worth a fortune.

The women dressed as befitted the court of a dissolute king. Their artificial curls were trained in “heart-breakers” and “love-locks.” The whiteness of their skin was enhanced by powder and set off by patches. Their shoulders rose above bodices of costly brocade hung with jewels which had sometimes ruined both buyer and wearer.

The Puritans, by their opposition to the Court, escaped the evil influences of these extravagances. But the Colonial Cavaliers, who bowed before the King lower than the courtiers at home, of course imitated his dress, so far as their fortunes allowed. Every frigate that came into port at Jamestown or St. Maries brought the latest London fashions. A little before Colonel Fitzhugh in Virginia was ordering his Riding Camblet cloak from London, Mr. Samuel Pepys was writing in his journal, “This morning came home my fine camlete cloak with gold buttons.” While this gentleman was attiring himself in his new shoulder-belt and tunique laced with silk, “and so very handsome to church,” Sir William Berkeley and Governor Calvert were opening their eyes of a Sunday morning three thousand miles away, and making ready to get into their rosetted shoes, and to lace their breeches and hose together with points as fanciful as his, and, like him, perhaps, having their heads “combed by y^e maide for powder and other troubles.” No doubt Lady Berkeley, in her fine lace bands, her coverchef and deep veil, was as fine as Madam Pepys in her paragon pettycoat and “just a corps.”

With the beginning of the eighteenth century, the hoop appeared, and carried all before it, in more senses than one. “The ladies’ petticoats,” I read in the notes of a contemporary of the fashion, “are now blown up into a most enormous concave.” Over this concave the ladies wore, on ceremonious occasions, such as a ball at Governor Spotswood’s or an assembly at Annapolis, trailing gowns of heavy brocade, many yards in length. Dragging these skirts behind, and bearing aloft on their heads a towering structure of feathers, ribbons and lace, it was no wonder these dames preferred slow and stately measures. At their side, or as near as the spreading hoop permitted, moved their favored cavaliers, their coat-skirts stiff with buckram, their swords dangling between their knees, their breeches of red plush or black satin, so tight that they fitted without a wrinkle.

Men of that day took their dress very seriously. Washington, who had doubtless gained many ideas of fashion from the modish young officers of Braddock’s army, ordered his costumes with as much particularity as he afterward conducted his campaigns. Shortly before he started with his little cavalcade of negro servants on his five-hundred-mile ride to Massachusetts, in 1756, he sent over to a correspondent in London an order for an extensive wardrobe. He wanted “2 complete livery suits for servants, with a spare cloak and all other necessary trimmings for two suits more.” He omits no detail. “I would have you,” he writes, “choose the livery by our arms; only as the field is white, I think the clothes had better not be quite so, but nearly like the inclosed. The trimmings and facings of scarlet, and a scarlet waistcoat. If livery lace is not quite disused, I should be glad to have the cloaks laced. I like that fashion best, and two silver-laced hats for the above servants.”

In addition to this, he wishes “1 set of horse-furniture with livery lace, with the Washington crest on the housings, etc. The cloak to be of the same piece and color of the clothes, 3 gold and scarlet sword-knots, 3 silver and blue ditto, 1 fashionable gold-laced hat.”

It is not strange that the gallant young officer made a sensation among the dames and damsels of Philadelphia and New York as he journeyed northward, nor that Mistress Mary Phillipse nearly lost her heart to the wearer of the gold and scarlet sword-knots and the fashionable gold-laced hat.

All society went in gorgeous array in those gay days, before color had been banished to suit the grim taste of the Puritan, and to meet the economical maxims of Poor Richard. Judges, on the bench, wore robes of scarlet, faced with black velvet, exchanged in summer for thinner ones of silk. Etiquette demanded equally formal costume for advocates at the bar. Patrick Henry, who began by indifference to dress, even rushing into court fresh from the chase, with mud and mire clinging to his leather breeches, at length yielded to social pressure, and donned a full suit of black velvet in which to address the court; and, on one occasion at least, a peach-colored coat effectively set off by a bag-wig, powdered, as pompous Mr. Wirt observes, “in the highest style of forensic fashion.”

A satirical description sets forth the dress of a dandy in the middle of the eighteenth century, as consisting of “a coat of light green, with sleeves too small for the arms, and buttons too big for the sleeves; a pair of Manchester fine stuff breeches, without money in the pockets; clouded silk stockings, but no legs; a club of hair behind, larger than the head that carries it; a hat of the size of a sixpence, on a block not worth a farthing.”

In October, 1763, the free-school at Annapolis was broken into by robbers, and the wardrobe of the master stolen. When I remember the scanty salaries paid to these schoolmasters, I look with surprise on the inventory, which the victim of the robbery publishes. Here we have a superfine blue broadcloth frock coat, a new superfine scarlet waistcoat bound with gold lace, a pair of green worsted breeches lined with dimity, besides a ruffled shirt, pumps, and doe-skin breeches. A very pretty wardrobe, I should say, for the teacher of a Colonial village-school!

It was a picturesque world in those days. The gentry rode gayly habited in bright-colored velvets and ruffles; the clergy swept along in dignified black; the judges wore their scarlet robes, and the mechanics and laborers were quite content to don a leather apron over their buckskin breeches and red-flannel jacket. The slaves in Carolina were forbidden to wear anything, except when in livery, finer than negro-cloth, duffils, kerseys, osnaburgs, blue linen, check-linen, coarse garlix or calicoes, checked cotton, or Scotch plaid. This prohibition was quite unnecessary, as the slave thought himself very lucky if he were clad in a new and whole garment of any sort.

Even paupers had their distinctive badges. A Virginia statute commands that every person who shall receive relief from the parish, and be sent to the poorhouse, shall, upon the shoulder of the right sleeve of his, or her, uppermost garment, in an open and visible manner, wear a badge with the name of the parish to which he, or she, belongs, cut either in blue, red, or green cloth, at the will of the vestry or churchwardens. If any unfortunate were afflicted with pride as well as poverty and refused to wear this badge of pauperism, he was subject, by the law, to a whipping, not to exceed five lashes.

The students of William and Mary College were required to wear academical dress as soon as they had passed “y^e grammar school,” and thus another costume was added to the moving tableaux on the street of Williamsburg.

In the college-books, I find it resolved by the Faculty in 1765 that Mrs. Foster be appointed stocking-mender in the college, and that she be paid annually the sum of £12, provided she furnishes herself with lodging, diet, fire, and candles. Considering the length of stockings in those days, and assuming that the nature of boys has not materially changed, I cannot help thinking the salary somewhat meagre for the duties involved. Stockings, however, were less troublesome than shirts. A Mrs. Campbell sends her nephews back to school accompanied by a note explaining that she returns all their clothes except eleven shirts, not yet washed.

If the clothes of boys were troublesome, those of girls were more so. Madam Mason, as guardian of her children, sends in an account, wherein the support of each child is reckoned at a thousand pounds of tobacco yearly. Her son, Thomson, is charged with linen and ruffled shirts, and her daughter, Mary, with wooden-heeled shoes, petticoats, one hoop-petticoat, and linen. We may be sure that the needling on those petticoats and ruffled skirts would be a reproach, in its dainty fineness, to the machine-made garments of our age.

Little Dolly Payne, who afterward became Mrs. Madison and mistress of the White House, trotted off to school in her childhood (so her biographer tells us), equipped with “a white linen mask to keep every ray of sunshine from the complexion, a sun-bonnet sewed on her head every morning by her careful mother, and long gloves covering the hands and arms.”

Gentlewomen, big and little, in y^e olden time, seem to have had an inordinate fear of the sunshine, as is evidenced by their long gloves, their veils, and those riding-masks of cloth or velvet, which must have been most uncomfortable to keep in place, even with the aid of the little silver mouthpieces held between the teeth. But vanity enables people to endure many ills. In a correspondence between Miss Anna Bland in Virginia, and her brother Theodorick in London, the young lady writes: “My Papa has sent for me a dress and a pair of stays. I should be glad if you will be peticular (sic) in the choice of them. Let the stays be very stiff bone, and much gored at the hips, and the dress any other color except yellow.”

No doubt, the consciousness of looking well, sustained the young martyr, as she gasped through the minuet, in her new dress and her stiff stays, drawn tight at home by the aid of the bed-post. The first directions to the attendant in a case of swooning, so common in our great-grandmothers’ lifetime, was to cut the stays, that the imprisoned lungs might get room to breathe once more.

Human nature is oddly inconsistent. These people, who found it incomprehensible that savages should tattoo their bodies, hang beads round their necks, and wear ornaments of snakes and rats hung by the tails through their ears and noses, decked themselves with jewelry, wore wigs and patches, and pierced their ears for barbaric rings of gold or precious stones. I protest I don’t know which would have looked queerer to the other, the Indian squaw or the Colonial belle of the eighteenth century; but, from the artistic standpoint, the advantage was all with the child of nature.

In a grave business letter, written to Washington on matters of state by George Mason, the correspondent adds: “P.S. I shall take it as a particular favor if you’ll be kind enough to get me two pairs of gold snaps made at Williamsburg, for my little girls. They are small rings with a joint in them, to wear in the ears, instead of ear-rings—also a pair of toupÉe tongs.”

It is a pleasant glimpse we thus gain of one great statesman writing to another, and turning away from public enterprises to remember the private longings of the two little maidens at home, whose hearts are to be gladdened, though the flesh suffers, by these bits of finery.

It was not little girls alone who were willing to endure discomfort in the cause of personal appearance. Washington’s false teeth still remain, a monument of his fortitude. They are a set of “uppers and unders” carved in ivory, inserted in a ponderous plate, with clamps in the roof that must have caused torture to the inexperienced mouth. The upper set is connected with the lower by a spiral spring, and the two are arranged to be held in place by the tongue. No one but the hero of Trenton and Valley Forge, could have borne such an affliction and preserved his equanimity.

Tooth-brushes are a modern luxury. In the old times, the most genteel were content to rub the teeth with a rag covered with chalk or snuff, and there was more than a suspicion of effeminacy in a man’s cleaning his teeth at all. It is not strange that there was such a demand for the implanted teeth which Dr. Le Mayeur introduced toward the end of the century.

I think it may be fairly claimed that the nineteenth century has marked a great advance in personal cleanliness. To this, as much as anything, except perhaps the use of rubber clothing, we owe its increase of longevity. It is impossible to overestimate the importance to modern hygiene of water-proof substances, keeping the feet and body dry. Pattens and clogs were of service in their day and generation, but they were a clumsy contrivance as compared with the light overshoes of India-rubber. It was not till 1772 that the first efforts were made in Baltimore to introduce the use of umbrellas. “These, like tooth-brushes,” writes Scharf, “were at first ridiculed as effeminate, and were only introduced by the vigorous efforts of the doctors, who recommended them chiefly as shields from the sun and a defence against vertigo and prostration from heat. The first umbrellas came from India. They were made of coarse oiled linen, stretched over sticks of rattan, and were heavy and clumsy, but they marked a wonderful step in the direction of hygienic dress. Before their introduction, ministers and doctors, who, more than any one else in the community, were called to face the winter rains, wore a cape of oiled linen, called a roquelaire.”If the dress of the period before the Revolution was not hygienic, it was handsome, and eminently picturesque, as the old portraits of the last century show. The universally becoming ruffles of lace were in vogue, and women still young wore dainty caps, whose delicate lace, falling over the hair, lent softness and youth to the features. Old ladies were not unknown as now, but, at an age when the nineteenth century woman of fashion is still frisking about in the costume of a girl of twenty, the Colonial dame adopted the dress and manners which she conceived suited to her age and dignity. Here, for instance, is the evidence of a portrait, marked on the stretcher, “Amy Newton, aged 45, 1770, John Durand, pinxit.” The lady wears an ermine-trimmed cloak draped about her shoulders, over a bodice, lace-trimmed and cut square in the neck. The lace-bordered cap falls as usual over the matron’s hair. There is, to me, something rather fine and dignified in the assumption of a matronly dress as a matter of pride and choice. In one respect the Colonial dames, old and young, were gayly attired. Their feet were clad in rainbow hues of brilliant reds and greens and their dresses were generally cut to show to advantage the high-heeled slipper and clocked stocking of bright color.

Washington’s order-book forms an excellent guide to the prevailing modes of the day. The orders call for rich coats and waistcoats and cocked hats for himself; and for Mrs. Washington, a salmon tabby velvet, fine flowered lawn aprons, white callimancos hoes, perfumed powder, puckered petticoats, and black velvet riding masks. Master Custis is fitted out with two hair bags and a whole piece of ribbon, while the servants are provided with fifty ells of osnabergs (a coarse cloth made of flax and tow manufactured at Osnaberg, in Germany, and much in vogue for servants’ wear).

The goods of the time, for high and low, were made to outlast more than one generation. Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, was betrothed in his youth to a beautiful young lady. The wedding-dress was ordered from London, but before its arrival the bride elect had died, and the dress was laid aside. A century later, it appeared at a fancy dress ball, its fabric untarnished, and untouched by time. It was worth while to pay high prices for such stuffs. In many a household to-day is cherished some bit of the brocades, sarcenets, shalloons, and tammies worn by our great-grandmothers and their mothers.

In the Maryland Gazette, somewhere in the middle of the last century, Catherine Rathel, milliner, from London, advertises a tempting assortment of white satin, India and other chintzes, calico, gingham, cloaks, cardinal’s hats, flowered gauze aprons, bonnets, caps, Égrettes, fillets, breast-flowers, fashionable ribbands, buttons and loops, silk hose, superfine white India stockings, box and ivory combs.

The firm of Rivington & Brown present an equally attractive display for gentlemen: “An importation of hats, gold and silver-laced, and cocked by his Majesty’s Hatter. London-made pumps and boot-garters, silk or buff sword-belts and gorgets, newest style paste shoe-buckles, gold seals, snuff-boxes of tortoise-shell, leather, or papier-machÉ.”

Whatever luxuries or elegances of the toilet a man of fashion might possess, his snuff-box was his chief pride. This was the weapon with which he fought the bloodless battles of the drawing-room and, armed with it, he felt himself a Cavalier indeed. The nice study of the times and seasons when it should be tapped, when played with, when offered or accepted, and when haughtily thrust into the pocket, marked the gentleman of the old school. But one use of the snuff-box, I am certain, was never devised by either Steele or Lilie, but was left for the brain or nerves of a Colonial dame to invent. A widow, left alone and unprotected, occupied that ground-floor room generally designated in the Colonial house as the parlor-chamber. Fearing firearms more than robbers, she armed herself with a large snuff-box, which, in case of any suspicious noise in the night, she was wont to click loudly, in imitation of the cocking of a gun. The effect on the hypothetical robbers was instantaneous, and they never disturbed her twice in the same night.

Colonial dress, as we advance toward the time of the Revolution, grows simpler. Wigs fall by their own weight, and men begin to wear their own hair, drawn back and fastened in dignified fashion with a bow of broad ribbon, generally black. Except for ruffled shirts and deep cuffs, the costume of society approaches the sobriety of to-day, and the lack of money and threat of war subdue the dress even of the women. The military alone still keep up the pomp and circumstance of costume worn by all men in the Stuart era. In 1774, the Fairfax Independent Company of Volunteers meet in Virginia, and resolve to gather at stated seasons for practice of military exercise and discipline. It is further resolved that their dress shall be a uniform of blue turned up with buff, with plain yellow metal buttons, buff waistcoat, and breeches, and white stockings; and furnished with good flint-lock and bayonet, sling cartouch box and tomahawk.

Washington’s orders from Fort Cumberland, dated the seventeenth of September, 1775, prescribe the uniform to be worn by the Virginia Regiment in the opening struggle: “Every officer of the Virginia Regiment to provide himself, as soon as he can conveniently, with suit of Regimentals of good blue Cloath; the Coat to be faced and cuffed with scarlet, and trimmed with Silver; a scarlet waistcoat, with silver Lace; blue Breeches, and a silver-laced hat, if to be had, for Camp or Garrison duty. Besides this, each officer to provide himself with a common soldier’s Dress for Detachments and Duty in the Woods.”

In looking back to the beginning of the Revolutionary War, when that great wrench was made which separated America from the parent country, we have a feeling that men’s minds were wholly occupied with the tremendous issues at stake; yet, as we study the old records, we find the same buying and selling, the planting and reaping, the same pondering and planning of dress and the trifles of daily life going on much in the old fashion. In Jefferson’s private note-book, under date of July 4th, 1776, the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I find, entered in his own hand, the item: “For seven pairs of women’s gloves, twenty shillings.”

Even so do great things and small jostle one another in this strange world of ours, and a woman’s glove lies close to the document which changed the fate of nations.