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Sarah Jones Weicksel, "A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era" (UNC Press, 2026)
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Experian welcome to the New Books Network
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C
hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Sarah Jones Wyksel about her book titled A Nation Clothing, Culture and Violence in the American Civil War Era, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2026. Now, now, this is a really interesting part or way into Civil War history because obviously the US Civil War is like a big deal in terms of historiography. It's been analyzed from like every possible angle. There's photographs of it, which is perhaps one of the reasons it's kind of stuck in so many memories. But of course, those photographs kind of by definition have people wearing clothing of various kinds. And that's not incidental. Right. The clothing had a lot of meaning, and we actually still have some of that clothing, too. So we can make meaning of the physical objects even after the fact. And so it's probably worth analyzing that, which is exactly what this book does. Helps us understand clothing in all sorts of ways related to the conflict, kind of before, during and after. Gives us lots of things to talk about on and well beyond the battlefields as well. So, Sarah, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your work.
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B
Thank you so much for having me. Miranda, could you start us off by
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C
introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? I mean, why did you decide to combine, you know, clothing history and the US Civil War?
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B
Sure. Well, so as you know, I'm Sarah Weichsell. I'm a historian and a material culture scholar, and I have spent my years in both academic and public history work. And when I started researching this book, I actually had no intention whatsoever of writing about clothes. I was planning to write a history of looting. I wanted to delve into the meanings of material culture, the objects, the things that are lost to people and to us. I wanted to explore the thousands of objects that were in motion during the Civil War. But I'm also a historian who follows her sources. So as I started working through archival materials, I repeatedly encountered conflicts surrounding clothing. A formerly enslaved man who submitted a claim for his stolen hat to the Southern Claims Commission. Union soldiers who tore up an elite Southern woman's dress, torn into strips, and then tied it to a horse's tail. Women who were arrested on grounds of treason and deported from the south for producing cloth for the Confederacy. A black US Soldier who escaped death only by putting on a pair of civilian clothes that convinced Confederates that he was a local enslaved man. So ultimately, it was the sources that made me shift the project away from a focus on looting to instead attempt to understand why clothing was such a consistently contested object and how it might have shaped war, emancipation, and people's experiences of federal expansion in the 1860s. So the book, while it does end up dealing with looting, is a much broader history of clothing as a ground on which the Civil War was fought and as a tool people used in living through the conflict. And I wanted to offer a new way to tackle questions of how Americans learned to wage a civil war in a democratic nation and how they were confronting the many anxieties that were produced during and by the war. Anxiety is like, how could fate, patriotic fervor be instilled in a population that needed to rally to fight a war that many people didn't understand and didn't fully support? Or how would you maintain social hierarchies as slavery was at the precipice of collapse? How would you incorporate formerly enslaved people into a free society? How did women survive changes in their family's economic support when men went to war? And what I found was that clothing grounded these really abstract but pressing questions. And I and ideas in the material world. So it turned out to be one of the answers to how Americans waged war against one another and across a wide range of political, emotional, economic, and practical cultural battlefronts, too.
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C
I mean, those are some pretty good reasons to investigate. So thank you for outlining many of the things that come together in this book and many of which I'm sure we'll touch on in our discussion. I think the thread I most want to pick up on first is the role of women in this and their involvement in the war, not just in terms of kind of emotion, not even just in terms of, like, materially making things, but also sort of in the political sense as well as can we talk about the role of women in making the uniforms and what that kind of actually meant in terms of, like, there probably wouldn't have been uniforms otherwise, but also kind of how that was a sort of political way for women to be involved on both sides as well.
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B
Well, I mean, women's work in making the uniforms is incredibly important, but not necessarily for the reasons that people usually think. So. One of the images that often people conjure up is of women sitting in a sewing circle working together to make uniforms that are going to be sent off to the battlefront and worn by men at war, or that they're going to send directly to their. Their husbands and their. Their brothers or sons or men in their community. And that does happen. But that is a narrative that has really overtaken our understanding of what it meant to supply uniforms for men at war. And so in the case of the south, for instance, you do have these sewing societies that are formed. But what I found is that although elite Southern women often talk about themselves as making uniforms, in fact, what they are doing is they are instructing enslaved women on making the uniforms. So, you know, I have one woman who's literally talking about how she doesn't know how to sew, but she has sent off several shirts for soldiers. And it's because over time, an enslaved woman named Lulu is working with her and actually teaching her how to sew. And. And so part of it is actually the. These elite women, elite Southern women's ability to command enslaved women to sew. But where the majority of the clothing comes from are actually working class women who are seamstresses. Either before the war, that was their job, or they are picking up sewing as a way of making ends meet during the war. And that's happening both in the north and in the south. And it's highly political in both places. So in the north, at the Schoolkill Arsenal in Philadelphia, which is where much of the regular US Army's clothing was being made before the war, you have a fight that starts between women, between the people who had always worked for the arsenal and. And the women who are the wives of soldiers or daughters of soldiers. And they are making claims that that work should be for them as a form of public welfare, essentially that they have sent their family members off to war, and therefore the state should give them an opportunity to make money, to support themselves by giving them clothes to sew or, you know, fabric and clothing to sew. So there's a really tense sort of situation going on there. You also have some highly politicized incidents that are happening in the south, too. One of those that Was among the most surprising and. And most violent, really had to do with women who were working in roswell, georgia. Roswell's situated just a little bit north of atlanta, and it's a place where that is very particularly well situated for textile mills. And the roswell textile mills are running at completely full capacity in 1864. They are producing thousands and thousands and thousands of yards of gray woolen cloth that is being used by the confederacy. Well, when sherman's army comes into georgia on his eventual march to the sea, he encounters these mills working at full capacity. And There are over 400 women and children who are working there. These are primarily poor and working class white women. Many of them are immigrants from. From Ireland and Europe who have come to Georgia by way of the mid atlantic or new england. Some of them have picked up skills in textile mills in those areas, and they're working in these mills. For them, it was just the place where they were employed in many instances. They didn't necessarily see themselves as supporting the political cause of the confederacy, Though many of them may have. Well, Sherman decides that this is a huge liability. These women have extraordinary skills that are enabling them to support the confederacy's ability to win this war. They are helping keep these men clothed. And that means that he has to make a decision. He has to decide, is he going to destroy the mills? He decides yes. But then what about the women who are working there? Does he just, as he puts it, turn them loose to live in the area, Continue living there, or does he remove them from Georgia and thereby take their skills out of the state? And he decides that he's going to do that. And he says, let the women make a howl. They will make a howl, but you need to remove them and send them to points north. So eventually, these 400 women and children are taken by train and wagon to Tennessee. Eventually they end up in Ohio and Indiana. And many of them are illiterate. They have no way of writing to contact their family members without having someone else do it for them. And they're basically kind of turned loose in this area where they put a strain on local resources. And there's a lot of contestation about this, Both in northern and southern newspapers, because people think that this is a war upon women and that women should be set aside from the exigencies of war, when what Sherman has decided is that these women are political actors, that they are military actors, and therefore they're a threat. And what's really significant is he does this by arresting them on the charge of treason against The United States, whether or not they're ever actually tried, that's another story. They are not. But the charge of treason is really significant there and just shows just how important the ability to make clothes and ultimately clothing is for the success and eventual demise of these armies.
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C
Yeah, this is really interesting.
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B
Right.
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C
Because it is taking that narrative that you mentioned at the beginning of kind of sitting around with sewing circles and going, yes, and Right. There's so much more as well. So thank you for giving us a sense of the way in which women are involved and the importance attached to clothing in all of this, focusing then more on the clothing itself. What were these uniforms kind of meant to look like? Like, what sorts of ideas of manhood and masculinity were incorporated into these designs?
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B
So one thing that's worth noting is that there's a few different ways in which these uniforms are coming into existence. So when the war breaks out in 1861, neither the US nor the Confederate government has a great way of supplying hundreds of thousands of men. The regular army at the time that the war begins is, you know, just in the 10 in the, you know, around 20ish thousand people. So they're used to making uniforms, but not on such a grand scale. How do they immediately gear up? Well, they do need to have the women who are sitting around in their sewing circles. They also need to hire commercial manufacturers, and then they also have to set up quartermaster depot systems. And the way that those work is that women work from their homes primarily. There's male tailors and male cutters who are the people who literally cut out the pieces of cloth that will be sewn into clothing. Those are bundled up, and then women come and they get their bundle of cloth, they take it home, and then they sew it, and then they come back, they return it to the quartermaster depot. This is also similar to how the more commercial manufactory is working as well in some of the northern cities. So what with. With these various types of production processes, you're unsurprisingly going to get some variation. They do. Both the US and the Confederacy set out, this is how the uniform should look. But how well it can be executed is another question. But the interesting thing is that the one thing that everybody decides on is that the uniforms are going to incorporate brass and gold. And it ends up being such a significant theme in the way that women are talking about men in uniform, the way that men are talking about themselves in uniform, that I ended up needing to come up with a shorthand term to be able to talk about this really complex thing in the book. And so something I refer to as a brass manhood. Okay, so why were they so interested in this? Well, to us, the brass insignia and the brass buttons on a soldier's uniform from the Civil War era, that just seems normal. It's what we'd expect a soldier to be wearing. And we expect that because of how prevalent that image is through all the photographs that continue to exist. But for those soldiers, it was much more. Those brass buttons and the brass insignia on their caps and on their uniforms are part of a material way in which they are participating in a broader culture. They're turning to this same public means of defining manhood, and that manhood is defined by patriotic allegiance, virility, and social as well as military rank. So the levels of endornment, all the way down to the detail on the buttons themselves, tended to correspond to men's social class. In fact, because typically people received their officers commissions from the upper, middle and elite classes. And then you have, say, while you have lower ranking soldiers like the privates who are wearing flat brass buttons or those that are stamped with state seals, the officers are wearing gilt brass buttons, which means they're wearing brass buttons that are overlaid with gilt with gold. And they have more elaborate designs. Often they might include symbols that identify the soldier's state. So you have Louisianans who are sporting pelicans and New Yorkers who are wearing the state seal, and South Carolinians have on palmettos. But despite that variation in design, there's still this simple rule by which people are assessing uniforms. The more brass buttons and the more gold braid a man wore, the higher his rank. And that makes it easier for new recruits and civilians to recognize an officer. And they're actually pretty clueless about this. When the war starts off, they're not used to the military being such a presence in daily life. And so you actually end up with people of all classes receiving instructions on how to read uniforms through a really wide range of media, like newspapers, even playing cards. And I remember this one, and I feature this in the book. There's this one Philadelphia Enquirer article that pops up in newspapers across the north that details the very specific insignia that are worn by soldiers of different ranks. It's a full page, front page illustration. It has shoulder straps and sleeve badges and the different shapes and letters and stars and colors and materials from which all these insignia are made of. So they're really trying to learn how to decode and participate in that clothing culture. That surrounds them.
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C
This is really interesting to think about because it is so shiny in a way that we completely take for granted. But like, that had to start somewhere, right? So thinking about that in this context is really, really interesting. It does, however, raise kind of the obvious question of if we have so many different pieces going on and if many of the details are quite shiny, that's kind of hard to actually make happen. As, you know, a war goes on and supply lines are stretched, so what happens, you know, three, four years into the war, Are the uniforms still so shiny?
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B
Yes and no. So it really depends on who you are, where you're from, and what connections you have. So there's this one family, two brothers, the McFalls, and they're from South Carolina. And you know, entering this, I expected to basically find a sort of declension narrative of clothes. Like you start off the war in these fancy clothes and by the end of it you're wearing rags. Well, that wasn't what I found. And I actually found, found out that the image of the kind of ragged rebel soldier, of the, you know, tattered looking man who's marching back from war with bare feet and holes in his clothes and kind of shredded up looking, it's actually more of a lost cause creation than it is a reality. There are certainly men who are completely under supplied, who are wearing ragged clothes, who don't have good shoes or no shoes. But there are also soldiers who are completely well outfitted throughout the war. So, you know, One of the McFall brothers has a brand new uniform that he gets at the end of 1864, and there are men walking the streets of Tallahassee in the summer of 1865 wearing brand new confederate uniforms too. We also tend to think that the Union army was much more well supplied and that they didn't have these kind of supply chain issues that the Confederacy did. When, you know, you think about that the Anaconda barricade that's going around the coast of the United States, the Union, you think, oh, they're going to be better supply. They have access to all the manufactories. Well, actually there's a lot of Union soldiers who are finding it really difficult to get things from the federal government. This one man is so angry about the fact that it is taking him months to get a new pair of shoes that will actually fit him, and he is waiting for months to get a new uniform coat. And this is actually something that becomes a real sticking point for some soldiers because this is one of their first real experiences with dealing with the federal government and they aren't so happy about it. So what do you do when you aren't able to get your shoes from the quartermaster or your knapsacks have been shipped along with the rest of the gear to the point where you're marching to and it's raided along the way, or your, your boat sinks or something befalls it and you suddenly don't have that extra pair of clothes? Well, for many men who have the connections, they're writing home to their families and saying, I need these things. And for this matter, I really don't like how this, this shirt fits me that I got from the government and I don't like the pants. Can you talk to our tailor and have him make me up a new pair of pants? Here's my measurements, this sort of thing. And at home, both in the Confederacy and in the United States armies, you have men requesting from their families and women sending shirts that either they made or they had purchased that are more fitting for what they want. And it's actually becomes more of a way of self expression. So while they're typically wearing their uniform coats that are by and large more uniform, they are often wearing plaids or shirts with ruching. So kind of ruffly looking, or they have specifics about the kinds of buttons that they want and where they should be placed and how long the shirt should be and what the collar should look like. So they're actually finding ways to kind of create a style for themselves within camp. So it's a really much more heterogeneous sort of clothing culture that ends up existing on the battlefront as opposed to that very polished looking, brass sort of manhood that they were embracing at the beginning of the war.
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C
That's such an interesting aspect to this because the kind of idea of shortages seems quite predictable, but the sort of way people react is, I think, very interesting to understand sort of what that logistical issue actually means for people. And of course, if we're talking about shortages, that's going to affect civilians too, right?
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B
Absolutely. One of the interesting things about how people deal with the shortages is looking around them in the place that they happen to be. And so you have union soldiers who want to have their coats outfitted and this sort of thing. And so they're, you know, in the south and they're turning to local women and hiring them as seamstresses, and they are hiring them to do their washing. And there's, you know, an entire economy that exists around clothing and the movement of the army and opportunities for Women to make a bit of money in those cases too, which is extraordinarily important because as you say, like, these shortages are also going to affect civilians. And one of the things that they most need is funds to be able to purchase cloth that they can then make into clothing in many instances. But sometimes having the money isn't enough because the cloth shortages are too extreme. And one of the things that's really important to understand about this moment is that you have a lot of dry goods stores in the south that are very. They're fully stocked at the beginning of the war. They have bolts and bolts of cla. Of cloth of all sorts of varieties. Wool, delaine, calicoes, silks, all sorts of things. And so for a time, there's no real shift in what they are able to. What people are able to purchase. There's also a much more significant amount of local Southern cloth production than people typically expect. Like Roswell Mills, they're. They are producing for the Confederate Army. But it's an example of just how. How large these textile manufacturers were and how capable they were of putting out large quantities of cloth. Problem is, is that the cloth production is all reoriented towards the army. And so you have Southern women who are trying to maintain the. Their dress practices, and those are really important to them. Not. And it's not just in a sort of vain sort of way. It's not about only about what one looks like. It's also about how it makes them feel. And one really poignant moment that I came across and I include in the book is a woman who's talking about having worn really scratchy undergarments for a couple of years. And she's wearing it, it's locally made cloth, and it just feels rough and like it is not herself. And when she has an opportunity to borrow a pair of linen undergarments from someone, she just reflects on how important this is to her sense of self, the ability. She says, I'm all fine wearing homespun when it's above board. Meaning on the outside of her, like, as her outer dress. If people are going to see it, great. But wearing it underneath her dress as her undergarments is just completely disconcerting. And one of the ways that she most intimately experiences what war is costing her. I just find that so interesting.
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C
Yeah, it really speaks to kind of the importance of all of this, not just in terms of economics and politics, but in terms of people's own feelings and emotions and identity and kind of relationships with others. So can we maybe talk about that more and kind of how what clothing was and wasn't available was impacting sort of what people could wear, what people could choose, what, how people could present themselves to others.
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B
Yeah, I mean, they're, they get very creative. And something that's important to understand about the mid 19th century and the way that clothes work is that it's, it's not at all like, like we approach clothing today, we tend to get rid of clothing more quickly. It also tends to wear out more quickly. Clothing during this time period is really made to last, and people are really used to making it last longer. And so there's, if you look through household guides, you'll find all sorts of recipes for, you know, making your black clothing refreshed and different dyes that you can use different kind of chemical combinations to refresh clothes. They're also remaking it. So while a dress might seem worn out for a woman, she's going to take that and she's going to have it remade either by herself or by a seamstress into children's clothing. Or they might decide that they're going to use a, you know, rather than make a more extravagant dress, are going to use a simpler sort of style to, to stretch fabric further. So there's all sorts of ways that people have for decades been trying to find ways to make their clothing last longer. And they are employing all of those ways during the Civil War as well. And this is, this is something that is, you know, universal, like north and South. But the ability to purchase new dress goods is more difficult in the south, of course. So they're also experimenting more with clothing manufacture at home. So if we think about some of the plantations, you have women who are instructing enslaved women to card and spin and then weave and produce finished cloth. And some of them, most beautiful pieces of cloth that I feature in the book are those that are made by enslaved women using natural dyes and really intricate patterns, lots of beautiful plaids. There's a, on the COVID of the book, there's a bright teal and brown and cream colored fabric. And they're really, these are really skilled weavers and clothing and seamstresses. So they're also, you know, trying trying out new things. But in some areas, even the raw materials for producing clothing at home are missing. And in Georgia, we see an instance where women are directly writing to the governor of Georgia in search of materials to. Or preferably cotton cards themselves. So for cotton cards, you need to have a kind of wooden handle. You need some nice leather on it that is then covering and allowing metal to stick through. So you can take these cards and you draw them together with a. With the cotton in between to get out the burrs and to align the fibers. And all that has to be done before you can spin it. So if you don't have cards, you're going to have a lot of difficulty. Well, there are both wire shortages and leather shortages because all of that is being directed towards the use of the army. So you actually have the state of Georgia kind of make a deal that says if you bring leather goods to us, and it can be anything from a cow all the way to dogs, which was intended to also combat a feral dog problem that they were experiencing at the same time. So any type of leather could be brought and you could exchange that for cotton cards. Well, they also didn't have enough cotton cards to exchange for this. So this is another point of contention where women are really calling on the government to give them the materials that they need to be able to clothe themselves. And some of them are even threatening the government saying, you know, you need to keep us happy. We're the ones who have sent our. Our family members off to fight. And if you want them to continue to do that, then you had better take care of the people who are here at home. Yeah.
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C
Again, really interesting to think about the kind of political dimensions of something that seems like maybe it wouldn't necessarily have politics involved, but clearly, as you've described, it does. The next place I'd like to take our discussion is actually right back to the origins of what you thought this project was going to be about in the first place. So looting. Can we talk about clothing? And when it was stolen or even in some cases, purposely destroyed?
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B
There are a number of levels upon which the theft and looting up corroding occurs. And I kind of divided it up into battlefield versus what's happening on the home front. And I think one of the most poignant stories that I encountered while researching this was the story of Charlie Wheat, who was. He was a Confederate soldier, but he had not yet gone to war. And Charlie lived in Luray, Virginia, which is out in the Shenandoahs. And I encountered Charlie through a tintype of him. And in it he's wearing this really distinctive shirt. It's got an outline of tape, a kind of fabric around the collars, the cuffs, the pockets, the placket. They're all really defined. And he's wearing a bow tie and he has on a detachable white collar. Clearly really cared about the appearance of his clothes. He even paid, or his family paid a photographer an extra fee to apply little bits of gold to define the brass buttons on his shirt and the gold ring that he wears on his pinky finger. And on that on the mat of his tintype, it said, this picture was lost in 61, was found on the body of a dead Yankee at Sharpsburg 62, and that's the battle of Antietam. So Charlie gave the photograph to a relative, but then it was lost when her home was looted by Union soldiers along with other items in 1861. So how do we come to have this tintype? Well, years later, a Confederate soldier stops at this woman's home for dinner, and he shows her his collection of battlefield, quote, unquote, relics, Essentially things that he has picked up either off of the battlefield or by looting around in dead men's knapsacks and pockets. So you can kind of imagine her shock as he pulls these things out and shows her the stolen tintype of Charlie in the soldier's bag like that. She's sitting here looking at her relative whose tintype had been stolen from her. And I imagine that the pleasure of having it returned to her would have been diminished by the memories that it would have triggered by the knowledge that the tintype had been looted from the pockets of a dead soldier on the Antietam battlefield. And that's because Charlie's body, too, was looted when he died. So he had not gone to war, but rather was still in the Luray area. And Union soldiers who were passing through shot Charlie on the outskirts of town. And when his body was found, they described it as all muddy from the red clay and stripped of everything but the underclothes. So all of his clothing, minus his underwear, had been stolen. So it's this really, like, remarkable set of events where Charlie Wheat and his tintype both fall victim to looting during the Civil War. You have the tintype stolen by a Union soldier from a private house. It's taken again when a Confederate rifles through the pockets of that dead soldier. And then Charlie himself had been stripped of his clothing, shoes, and personal effects. So in every one of these instances, you have boundaries of property and a sanctity of sanctity of the body being violated. And while that is obviously a remarkable set of circumstances in terms of the number of things that occurred within a single, you know, individual's life, all of those things are very common across the Civil War. There is a lot of looting on battlefields, both for opportunities to get a better coat, to get a Better pair of pants or boots and to, you know, take trophies. Essentially, there are both Union and Confederate soldiers who are cutting off buttons from men's uniforms. There's one even who has a whole car that he assembles after the war where he puts each of his buttons that he's collected and whether he had taken it from a prisoner or from a body that was on the battlefield and where that was and those sorts of things. And so there's a lot of this produces a lot of angst about, you know, what is sanctity of the body. Are men becoming too callous? How are they dealing with this on a psychological level? There's also a really practical problem, which is that men are often, after they're killed, they're identified by their clothing. And that has to do both with core badges. It says, like, I'm in the 13th Virginia, or by their names that are written in the backs of their clothes for kind of keeping track of them. Sort of a laundry laundering system. So one example of this is the battle of Fredericksburg. A woman notes that all of the Union soldiers bodies have been stripped and that they're now, you know, lying in the winter. It's a winter, and they're completely naked. And she says there's no way that anyone will ever be able to identify these men. And so in some instances, as a result of the stripping of men's clothing from them, their identities are also stripped away, and their families might never know exactly what became of them, only that they had died on a campaign between this time and that time.
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C
Yeah, that's definitely both a short and long term impact of looting. That's definitely an important part of the conversation. But I want to talk a little bit more about some things that kind of came up in those examples you just gave us around the sort of mementos of it. Right. The fact that this clothing is important not just during the war, but afterwards on both sides. Sides. So why was that so important?
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B
The book that I wrote could only have been written because people decided to save things at some point in time. And the reasons for which they saved them are probably as numerous as the number of people involved. In some instances, many of these men and women understood that they were living through a truly momentous historical moment, and they wanted to document their participation in it, their having physically been involved with it. So you have that. You have other instances where people go. And there are lots of people, both civilians and soldiers, who pick up all of the bits and pieces of gear and personal effects that are strewn across the battlefield after, after the battles has, is over and the armies have begun moving out of the way. In some instances the civilians are going and they're picking up clothing or taking it off of dead bodies, they're washing it and then they're reselling it on a secondhand clothing market. In other instances, you know, somebody is like, this is a great pocket watch. I'm going to keep that. Others are intrigued by the stories and things that they imagine about the people whose letters or diaries and other kinds of bits and pieces that they pick up what those stories might be. So you have a lot of that. You also have people saving pieces of plantation may cloth as though they want to document that this actually existed. You have Southerners who are preserving things in part to be able to tell stories about them. And they might not at that moment know what story they're going to tell. But people are used to. If you think about even how we in the modern day engage with the things around us, we use things to tell stories. And clothing as something that is so close to the body, so intimate and so much a part of our self expression is one of those things that they really do want to save. They save it as a reminder of a person, as a way to evoke memories. And I think one of the really vivid ways in which to describe this has to do with. With the way that memory works. And this one particular woman who, she was a southerner, she had to evacuate her home when the armies were coming into the area. And she reflects in her diary about visiting through what she refers to as her mind's eye. Visiting through her mind's eye the rooms of her home and the things that she left behind her furniture. And she imagines who might now be using it or abusing it. And that is very much the way that people deal with, deal with memory sometimes it is that they are trying to evoke things through the objects when they look at them, but they can also evoke it through the memory of a lost object as well, which gets very tricky. But also is, I think, a really interesting question that's worth exploring further.
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C
Yeah, no, it's definitely interesting how the physical object and the lack of it can be linked to so many things both in the short and very much clearly in the long term as well. As we sort of bring a bunch of these things together then is there anything further that came up in this process of figuring this all out that was surprising to you or you want to put into our conversation?
- [44:34]
B
Absolutely. So as I was attempting to, you know, We've talked a lot about white Southerners and civilians, especially civilians, and how they dealt with the war. But I also, in the book, really look into great depth about the ways in which enslaved people are experiencing war through clothing as well, and the ways in which they are affecting the war through their clothing. And so one of the things that I found was that in the wake of emancipation, as people are self emancipating themselves, as they're making their ways into union lines, clothing becomes an immediate need. And there's some really amazing work on this, including by Amy Merle Taylor, about the needs of newly freed people on a whole host of practical levels. One of those is clothing. Oftentimes people had not been resupplied with their clothes, with clothing, which typically happened once or twice a year for a few years by the point at which they become free. So they are often in some pretty terribly terrible condition, the clothes that is. So they immediately need new clothes. But then there's the question of what clothes. So you have a number of white relief workers who come into the south in various points of union occupied areas. Some of them are missionaries, Many of them are actually Quakers, many of them are schoolteachers. And the schoolteachers are there to teach. But they also recognize that if they're going to teach, they must first attend to people's bodies. And so they are also handing out clothing. Much of this is secondhand clothing that's being donated from the North. Some of it is from. Some of it is purchased from more commercial manufacturers who were making this clothing for sale to the south for enslaved people prior to the war as well. So some of it's the same clothing that they would have been wearing previously. But these relief workers are very concerned about what free people in a free society look like, and they're very concerned about maintaining some of the social hierarchies that have previously existed. So they are trying to make determinations about how fine of a fabric a black woman is able to wear and what kinds of patterns she, she should have access to and whether or not it is acceptable for her to desire to have a hoop skirt. Meanwhile, they, these relief workers have made a whole bunch of assumptions about what formerly enslaved people's sense of fashion was. Now, remember, these are people who haven't in general gotten new clothes for quite some time. So the relief workers are seeing people who are severely under supply. They're not seeing the people who have, for, you know, decades worked to express themselves through a variety of, of fashionable choices, you know, ranging from colors to head wraps to, you know, particular kinds of patterns. And so the people enslaved, formerly enslaved people, bring with them their own sense of style that they want to exhibit and that they want to explore, and that is part of their sense of freedom. And so you end up with this real tension that exists between these relief workers and formerly enslaved people over who gets to wear what and in what context. And that is, I think, a really powerful aspect of the way that clothing is being used to deal with some of the anxiety and realities of what war and emancipation is, and again, makes
- [48:58]
C
it very clear that clothes are incredibly political in terms of the wearing and the decisions about them. So thank you for adding that into our conversation. As a final question, can I ask what you might be working on next? Is it a similar sort of going in with one thing in the archives or telling you something else or what?
- [49:16]
B
What.
- [49:17]
C
What have you got on your desk at the moment?
- [49:19]
B
Well, at the moment, I am working on a really amazing project for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It is focused on material culture, has to be about objects, if it's me. And that is a special issue of the American Historical Review that is called 76 objects. And it is an issue that brings together more than 60 authors who are contributing their expertise in telling the history of the Revolutionary era through individual objects. So we've got essays that are like 1200-1500 words that are exploring some aspect of the revolution, either in the now United States or more globally, and then a few essays that help to frame this particular moment in time. So it's another issue of war and clothing in some instances, but much more broadly about material culture at large. And so we have some really amazing objects that range from a scarlet red full length woman's cloak to Jefferson's chest set, to a scrap of Washington's tent, to the needle case that a woman made and used. Just a really wide range of objects of all varieties. The tail of the horse, of the equestrian statue of King George III that is often believed to have been entirely melted down into fullets. But in fact, there were loyalists who saved pieces of it. And so we have that interpreted and a sword used by a soldier in India, all sorts of wonderful things. And so I'm really excited about that and about the ability to help people to connect with the history of the Revolution through these extraordinary objects.
- [51:36]
C
Well, that certainly sounds like a very fun project. So best of luck to you and your team putting all of that together. And of course, while you're doing it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled A Nation, Clothing, Culture and Violence in the American Civil War Era, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2026. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [51:56]
B
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.