Clothing

Dress in early North America indicated peoples’ CLASS and status, religious beliefs, and, at times, the impulse to escape these social categories. Europeans were used to a system of elaborate social meaning in dress, which was not lost on Native Americans, to whom adornments signified importance. Insensitive to indigenous cultures, the English viewed Indians, who wore “skins of beasts” when not naked, as wild and subhuman. African slaves, who often arrived in North America with virtually nothing on their backs, were allotted the roughest cloth as a mark of their inferior status. In time, Europeans on the frontier adopted pieces of Indian dress, New England women ignored sumptuary laws, Native Americans fashioned clothing out of European cloth, and slaves acquired dyes and tailoring skills to express individuality in dress.

Iroquois women and warrior. The latter carries a wooden shield on his back. The illustration is by Samuel de Champlain.

(Hulton/Archive)

Wealthy MERCHANTS imported most of their cloth from England and considered local homespun coarse and suited only for workers and servants. English sumptuary laws prohibited the use of fancy laces, ruffles, and embroidered cloth by any but the upper classes. Puritans, Quakers, and many Dutch, Swedish, and French Protestants believed that simplicity and order in dress reflected order in one’s relationship to God. Still, they adhered to the laws’ purpose of class differentiation and reserved the best materials for prosperous merchants. After a time colonial women refused to obey English dress laws, which were abolished in the 1680s, opening the way for Americans to imitate the wealthy in their attire. Virginia elites surpassed even the English in their fashionable dress styles, which they wore to display their wealth and power and to rebel against the Protestant clothing ethic.

Native Americans dressed in various styles according to tribal customs. In general, they wore clothing made from animal skins: boots, dresses, shirts, leggings, a fur cloak in winter, and hats. Ceremonial outfits were decorated with dyes, feathers, quills, and beadwork. Contact with Europeans introduced cloth that Indians adapted to their own styles and items of clothing, such as shirts and hats, that expressed their cross-cultural mobility. Frontiersmen similarly emulated Native dress, whether for practical reasons (leggings and moccasins worked better in the back-country) or to show their adaptive ability and “American” identity. Colonial militia, for example, wore fringed hunting shirts as a mark of patriotism when fighting the British “redcoats.”

The Euro-American workingman’s costume consisted of loose breeches, canvas jerkin, woolen hose, and felt or straw hats. Poorer women wore simple short gowns, which allowed for physical labor, and modest linen caps, although farm wives used vegetable dyes to create “Sunday best” outfits from homespun. Prosperous American men dressed in breeches of fine cloth, waistcoats, silk stockings, broadcloth coats with silver buttons, silver buckled shoes, heavy cloaks, and wool or beaver hats. Affluent women wore long broadcloth gowns with lace decorated petticoats in the latest European fashion. In the 18th century, when a greater variety of fabric and styles became available from the East India Company, a loose nightgown dress, turbans, and Spanish capes became fashionable.

Woodcut of a Puritan couple in daily dress (Hulton/Archive)

Slaves made inexpensive “negro cloth” into shirts and pants for men, dresses for women, and long shirts for children. Many abandoned their poorly fitting shoes in favor of bare feet. Women patched discarded items and sewed dressier clothes, dyed bright colors, for special occasions. Slaves often followed African customs of dress, such as breechcloths, wrap-around skirts, and a variety of headwear to express their individuality and origins. Runaway slave advertisements often described the missing person’s clothing in detail, suggesting that dress was an important identifier as well as a mark of personal identity.

Further reading: Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); Diana de Marly, Dress in North America, vol. 1 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990); Shane White and Graham J. White, Stylin: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).

—Deborah C. Taylor

Coddington, William (1601-1678) merchant, government official

William Coddington was born in Boston, England, in 1601. An assistant director in the Massachusetts Bay Company, he arrived in Boston as part of the great migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. For a few years he prospered in a variety of posts, including company treasurer (1634-36) and deputy in the colonial legislature (1636-37). Allying himself with the antinomian religious leader Anne Marbury Hutchinson, Coddington left Massachusetts Bay and went to Aquidneck Island (the largest island in Narragansett Bay in eastern Rhode Island) in 1638, where he helped found Portsmouth (then called Pocasset). After a dispute with Hutchinson, he moved to the south of the island and founded the settlement of Newport in 1639. The following year he managed to unite Portsmouth and Newport under his leadership, hoping to build an aristocratic fiefdom under his control. However, the British Parliament united Aquidneck with Roger Williams’s Providence in 1644. When a temporary victory undoing that decision (1651) was rescinded in 1652, Coddington returned to Boston for several years. He served as governor of the united colony of Rhode Island in 1674-75 and again in 1678, before he died on November 1, 1678.

Further reading: Sidney V. James, The Colonial Metamorphoses in Rhode Island (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 2000).

—Doug Baker

Colden, Cadwallader (1688-1776) scientist, colonial official

An important doctor and scientist, Cadwallader Colden was born in Ireland and raised in Scotland, where his father, the Reverend Alexander Colden of the Church of Scotland, had a church in Duns. Although meant by his father to follow religion, Colden instead studied medicine in London after graduating from the University of Edinburgh in 1705. He moved to Philadelphia in 1710. Like other educated gentlemen of the day, he was also interested in a variety of sciences, aspiring to achievements primarily in botany. He corresponded with Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Garden (namesake for the gardenia), and Carolus Linnaeus in Sweden. Colden also joined an international group that studied natural history, helping introduce new species and genera of plants found in America. In 1727 he wrote the History of the Five Indian Nations along with other treatises, including several on yellow fever.

His medical career gave way to one in politics and government when Colden moved to New York in 1718. In 1720 he became surveyor general for the colony, while the following year found him a member of the governor’s council. He rose to lieutenant governor in 1761 and served several times as acting governor. In the turbulent years leading up to the American Revolution, Colden continued to be a strong force in New York, repeatedly earning the enmity of patriots as he steadfastly remained loyal to the British Crown. After the Declaration of Independence, Colden retired to his Spring Hill estate in Flushing, New York, where he died on September 20, 1776.

Further reading: Alfred R. Hoermann, Cadwallader Colden: A Figure of the American Enlightenment (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002).

—Anita DeClue

Colden, Jane (1724-1766) scientist, artist Botanist and illustrator, Jane Colden was born in New York City to physician and scientist Cadwallader Colden and Alice Christie. Educated at home, Colden’s interest in botany was fostered and supported by her father, and she handled much of her father’s botanical correspondence. An early proponent of the Linnaean system of plant classification, she corresponded with and/or met many of the most prominent naturalists of her time, including Carolus Linnaeus, Peter Collinson, William and John Bartram, and Alexander Garden. An active participant in the growing colonial scientific community, she exchanged plant specimens with other collectors and compiled a substantial catalog of plants from the lower Hudson River Valley. Colden’s only publication appears to have been a description of the gardenia in the Edinburgh Essays and Observations, but she was widely known and respected in scientific circles for her skill in illustration. She developed a technique for making ink impressions of leaves and drew and painted plants.

Like many women of her period, Colden’s participation in the burgeoning of colonial SCIENCE was limited primarily to assisting in the researches of a male family member. She resolved the tension between running a household and maintaining scientific activity by abandoning science when she married physician William Farqhuar in 1759.

Further reading: Marica Bonta, Wo-men in the Field: America's Pioneering Women Naturalists (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1991).

—Monique Bourque