“Homespun” Heroes Hailed

They did a lot more than keep the home hearths burning. 

During the Revolutionary War, patriotic American women produced vast numbers of domestic textiles or ​“homespun” coats, vests, and trousers for George Washington’s struggling army. They also wore homespun themselves — no fancy imported British stuff — to show their support for the cause of liberty, and they likely did so long after the war years to help establish a virtuous style for the fledgling republic.

Exploring such contributions of everyday female American patriots — working-class white women, servants, African-American, native, and enslaved –– was at the heart of Katherine Hermes’ illuminating lecture Wednesday night at the New Haven Museum.

Click here for one of Hermes’ related digital public history projects, ​“Forgotten Voices of the Revolutionary War: People of Color and the Redding Encampment, 1778 – 1779.”

The event drew 50 people and was part of an unfolding series telling lesser known stories as part of the museum’s programming to mark NH250, the museum’s celebration of the 250^th anniversary (that’s a semiquincentennial, folks, and we may as well get used to spelling it) of our Declaration of Independence that culminates on July 4 next year.

A veteran of a 25-year career teaching early American history at Central Connecticut State University and now publisher of Connecticut Explored, Hermes’ main point was far more complex and subtle than simply acknowledging women’s labor. 

That is, a household cannot be successful any more than an army could be without the contribution of food providers, cooks, laundresses, that is, the many ​“camp followers,” a few of whom, she pointed out, were prostitutes, and the vast majority wives or partners who pitched in as a kind of unofficial quartermaster corps.

“Patriot women,” she said, ​“believed in the same ideals [such as liberty] as the men, but they had different lives, so they had to imbue their lives with that meaning in cooking, raising kids,” in the choices they made in what they wore, or in how they took over, for example, a husband’s business. 

A case in point was Hannah Bunce Watson, who, when her husband died, assumed control of the Connecticut Courant (now the Hartford Courant) in 1777 and became one of the first women publishers in the country. By measure of the number of articles promoting liberty in the colonies during her tenure as boss, Watson, argued Hermes, may well have been far more committed to the American cause than her husband.

Or, as Hermes put it, ​“The women themselves had to develop an ideology of female patriotism.” 

One simple expression of that in the museum’s collection is a fragment of a beautiful silk wedding dress that belonged to Anna Guernsy of Watertown. She made known publicly that she would not wear that dress that had been imported from England, on her big day in 1778, because war had already broken out. Instead she walked down the aisle to become Mrs. Aner Bradley (he was a lieutenant from New Haven in the Continental army) wearing simple white muslin. 

“It was a principled stand,” said Hermes.

But Hermes’ true interest in the lecture was less in more privileged women and more in a Judith Lines, for example. Lines was the child of a free African-American woman and a native father who accompanied her husband to the battlefield. Her skills as a laundress were apparently so significant they came to the attention of General Washington who asked her, later, to come to Mt. Vernon.

That story, Hermes said, may be apocryphal. What is not, she added, is that getting laundry done in the military encampments was a serious business. While there’s no Revolutionary ​“Rosie the Riveter” on the Revolutionary War home front, there is ample evidence that women used their skills not only to do the traditional work but also, for example, to make musket balls for the Continental rifles.

Hermes’ showed a Hartford contract indicating Connecticut in 1777 had a quota to provide one thousand coats, vests, and trousers and 1,600 shirts to soldiers. 

And not all white women were doing this work, she added. Servant and enslaved labor was critical. ​“Without their labor the colonists could not have fought the Revolutionary War,” Hermes contended, ​“or founded a new government.”

But Hermes has wanted to go deeper in her research, she said, somehow to get into the minds of lower class or poor or enslaved women to ​“hear” or read what they were thinking about, for example, the revolutionary ideals. But that’s a challenge because while many, like Judith Lines, could read, even such readers, Hermes speculated, often could not write, a separate skill, and so the extant written record of their voices is small. 

Hermes’ solution: Dive into the legal records of divorces (legal and not infrequent in Connecticut at the time, she said), pore over pension application of the Revolutionary War widows, and find out what’s there.

Hermes background — she has a PhD in history from Yale but also a law degree from Duke — was good preparation for this kind of work digging through legal and business archives. 

Take, for example, the true significance of ​“homespun.” While historians have generally assumed or asserted the significance of ​“homespun” as a unique symbol of women’s expression of their particular take on ​“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” was it true? 

The small visual record extant — portraits of some women in the period wearing simple, unadorned ​“homespun” clothing — was not decisive evidence. 

So Hermes headed to the archives. ​“I looked at lots of probate records. What’s in the inventories [of estates] tells you what’s valued,” she said. And homespun items were there. ​“So was ​“homespun” a myth? No, it’s real.”

The role of African-American and enslaved women was also at the heart of Hermes’ talk and what she termed ​“the paradox of the symbiotic relationship” between freedom and slavery. That is, during the Revolution the many enslaved men (and women) fighting for liberty.

“Patriot Black women had both a personal and ideological stake in the Revolution,” she said. One reason Judith Lines may not have accepted George Washington’s offer to go to Mt. Vernon, Hermes surmised, is that she knew what might happen to her in the South. Another reason she did not go (if there was a real offer!) is that Lines is one of the few stories in which there are genuine love letters extant between a woman and her husband.

So many still unanswered and compelling questions. 

Why, for example, did the enslaved population of Africans in Connecticut during the Revolutionary period have proportionally fewer women, although plenty of men and children? Some historians, said Hermes, speculate that slavers had noticed that when the slave ships from Africa had too high a number of women on them, there were higher incidents of mutiny.

“Historians guess that men came to the defense of women,” she said, and that led to the mutinies. Or was it because women craved liberty more than men? 

In the lively Q‑and‑A following the talk, someone asked Hermes what, after all her years of research, is the one item she would thrill at finding that’s still gone missing.

“I’d love to find a cache of Black women’s writing that said what they were thinking. But it’s rare to find women’s writing if they are from the lower classes.”

One reason, among many, that she is fascinated with stories from the ground up and became an historian, Hermes, said, is that ​“I was adopted. I had [in the beginning] no history of my own.”