a church-going people are a dress-loving people

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American Society of Church History

"A Church-Going People Are a Dress-Loving People": Clothes, Communication, and ReligiousCulture in Early AmericaAuthor(s): Leigh Eric SchmidtSource: Church History, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Mar., 1989), pp. 36-51Published by: Cambridge University Presson behalf of the American Society of Church HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3167677Accessed: 22/10/2010 09:37

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"AChurch-goingPeople are aDress-loving People": Clothes,Communication,and ReligiousCulturein Early America

LEIGH ERIC SCHMIDTWhen the early nineteenth-century pastor William Henry Foote reflected

upon the eighteenth-century Christians who were his forebears in NorthCarolina and Virginia, he paused at one point to make an observation aboutthe clothes they wore. "A church-going people are a dress-loving people," hesaid; "The sanctity and decorum of the house of God are inseparablyassociated with a decent exterior; and the spiritual, heavenly exercises of theinner man are incompatible with a defiled and tattered,or slovenly mein. Allregular Christian assemblies cultivate a taste for dress, and none more so thanthe hardy pioneer settlers of Upper Carolina, and the valley and mountains ofVirginia." As they readied themselves for worship, Foote elaborated, thefaithful "put on their best and carefully preserveddress" in preparation for"theirapproachto the King of Kings." Foote's pithy observations are strikingand well worth considerable expansion and exposition, for in the complexreligious culture of early America church-going people demonstrated inmanifold ways that they were indeed dress-loving people.1Protestant cultures, like the one Foote was describing, are almost prover-bially cultures dominated by spoken and printed words, above all by thepreachedWord. In her recent bookImage as Insight, Margaret R. Miles hasreminded scholars anew of Luther's telling words: "The ears are the onlyorgans of a Christian."2 Religious understanding for Protestants, so thewisdom goes, was to come primarily through the hearing of the Word.Christianity in its purest form was a faith of the preached Word, unencum-bered by external rites and corrupt accretions. Thus have Protestant culturesoften been characterized, and no doubt with some truth. In enshrining thepreached Word Protestants denigrated traditional images and rituals andattemptedto turn their spiritual pilgrimages away from Catholic forms.Since the religious culture of early America shared to a large degree in this

1. William Henry Foote, Sketchesof North Carolina,Historical and Biographical, Illustrativeof the Principles of a Portion of her Early Settlers (New York, 1846), p. 203.2. Margaret R. Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity andSecular Culture (Boston, 1985), p. 95.Mr. Schmidt is assistant professor of religious studies in the University ofOregon, Eugene, Oregon.

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DRESS-LOVING PEOPLEProtestant ethos, historians not surprisingly have generally followed thiscommonline in their treatmentof religion in the British colonies. Two recent,far-ranging, and excellent studies of early American religious history revealthe prevalence of this guiding view. Harry S. Stout in his study The NewEngland Soul probes the centrality of the sermon in the religious culture ofcolonial New England. According to Stout, the sermon was the consummate"medium of communications"in New England, for the Puritans were aboveall else a "people of the Word." Patricia U. Bonomi in her book Under theCope of Heaven adopts a similar view for the colonies more generally. ForBonomi, as for others, spoken and printed words were the "quintessential"forms of religious expression in the colonies. Thus have the modes ofcommunicationin the religious culture of early America been consideredto beprimarily aural and textual, not ocular and visual. Preached words and readones have been taken to be the preeminent, almost exclusive, way that peoplemade sense of their religious world.3

Though attending closely to words, early Americans nonetheless did notclose off other avenues of communication but instead kept them open andtravelled them extensively. As Rhys Isaac and Dell Upton have averred andsubstantiatedin their recent studies of colonial Virginia, early Americans hadcomplex repertoires for communication at their disposal, and the variousProtestants among them-whether Anglicans or Baptists-hardly consti-tuted exceptions. In concentrating on verbalization, historians of Americanreligion have tended to neglect the many other ways in which religious peoplecommunicated with one another in the colonial and early national periods.Gesture, deportment, posture, and procession, as well as architecturalsettings, objects, and emblems-all these and more were employed to carryreligious messages. Nonverbal communication was a full and rich part of thereligious culture of early America; these media that aimed at the eyes insteadof the ears were indeed intricate, highly expressive, and often-used forms ofcommunication. In sum, while historians know a great deal about whatreligious people heard and read in early America, they have wondered far lessabout what they saw.4

3. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul:Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial NewEngland (New York, 1986), pp. 3, 7; Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven:Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York, 1986), pp. 3-4. See alsoHarry S. Stout, "Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the AmericanRevolution," William and Mary Quarterly34 (1977): 519-541.4. Rhys Isaac, The Transformationof Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), esp. pp.43-44, 323-357; Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches inColonial Virginia (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). For another seminal work on nonverbalelements in the religious culture of early America, see Allan I. Ludwig, Graven Images:New England Stonecarving and its Symbols, 1650-1815 (Middletown, Conn., 1966). Forsome comments on dress in American religious history, see Philip Greven, The ProtestantTemperament: Patterns of Child-rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in EarlyAmerica (New York, 1977), pp. 45-46, 60, 284-286, 296; Don Yoder, "Sectarian Costume

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CHURCH HISTORYClothing was one aspect of visual communication that was particularlyvital in early America. Though only a handful of historians have consideredits significance, dress was clearly instrumental in defining age, social status,

gender relations, and political authority. More than socially instrumental,dress was also highly expressive, for clothes were often invested with religiousmeanings and thus carried significancefor the spirituality of those who worethem. Interpreting this important but little-studied channel of communica-tion within the religious culture of early America should help us tounderstand better the way people constructed and experienced their religiousworld. In thus interpreting dress, this essay is not intended as a history ofcostume but instead as a small attempt at cultural history or historicalanthropology.5More suggestive, illustrative, and propositional than defini-tive, this article probes various layers of meaning that were contained inclothes in the religious culture of early America. In such an exploration thequestion of one Bostonian in 1714 about "the stiff starch'd Ruffs. .. of Yore"serves well as a guide: "What was their Meaning, what was their Intent?"6

Perhaps the first and most obvious point to be made is that dress andhierarchy were inextricably interrelated in the colonies. It was axiomatic, asCotton Mather said, that "the Ranks of People should be discerned by theirCloaths."Sumptuary laws, though in practicehard to enforce, were probablythe clearest embodiment of this wisdom, as such legislation attempted toregulate the dress that people of different stations and ranks were permitted

Research in the United States," in Forms upon the Frontier: Folklife and Folk Arts in theUnited States, ed. Austin Fife, Alta Fife, and Henry H. Glassie (Logan, Utah, 1969), pp.41-75. On the general dearth of interpretive studies of dress in American history, seeThomas J. Schlereth, ed., Material Culture: A Research Guide (Lawrence, Kans., 1985),pp. 167, 188.5. On cultural history, see, for example, Isaac, Transformationof Virginia; Peter Burke, TheHistorical Anthropologyof Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication(Cambridge, 1987); Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes inFrench CulturalHistory (New York, 1984). For standard reference works on the history ofearly American costume, see Alice Morse Earle, Two Centuries of Costume in America,1620-1820, 2 vols. (New York, 1910); Elisabeth McClellan, History of American Costume,1607-1870 (New York, 1942); Edward Warwick, Henry C. Pitz, and Alexander Wyckoff,Early AmericanDress: The Colonial and RevolutionaryPeriods (New York, 1965); Peter F.Copeland, WorkingDress in Colonial and RevolutionaryAmerica (Westport, Conn., 1977).These works, while useful in their illustrations anddocumentation,include little material onreligious matters. For a rare history of religious costume, see Amelia Mott Gummere, TheQuaker:A Study in Costume(New York, 1901).6. The Origin of the Whalebone-petticoat.A Satyr (Boston, 1714), p. 3. This question of themeanings contained in dress is obviously not exhaustive. A numberof other questions couldand should be asked, especially questions of change and development: How and why didplain dress decline in importancefor a number of groups (for example, the Methodists) andyet gain in significancefor others (for example, the Amish)? Did dress become less explicitlyhierarchical, more expressly egalitarian in function in postrevolutionary America? Didevangelical ideals of plainness in apparel merge with Whig contempt for luxury andostentationin the developmentof American revolutionary ideology? This article attemptstolay the groundworkfor moving on to such specific historical questions.

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DRESS-LOVING PEOPLEto wear. In 1651 officials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example,declared their "utter detestation & dislike that men or women of meanecondition, educations, & callinges should take uppon them the garbe ofgentlemen, by the wearinge of gold or silver lace, or buttons,or poynts at theirknees, to walke in greate bootes;or women of the same ranke to weare silke ortiffany hoodes or scarfes, which though allowable to persons of greaterestates, or more liberall education, yet we cannot but judge it intollerable inp[e]rsonsof such like condition." Fines were instituted for violators who were"judge[d] o exceed theire rankes & abillitie in the costlynesor fashion of theirapparrill in any respect." Thus were modes of dress understood as beingcritical to the definition of the social order and to the construction andmaintenance of social hierarchy.7The experiences of an eighteenth-century Anglican rector, DevereuxJarratt, give specificity to the interrelationship of dress and social status inearly America. Born into a simple farming family, Jarratt noted the greatsocial distance between his kind and what he dubbed "the richer sort." "Tosuch people I had no access," he related. "We were accustomed to look upon,what were calledgentlefolks, as beings of a superior order. For my part I wasquite shy of them, and kept off at a humble distance. Aperiwig, in those days,was a distinguishing badge of gentle folk-and when I saw a man riding theroad, near our house, with a wig on, it would so alarm my fears, and give mesuch a disagreeable feeling, that, I dare say, I would run off, as for my life.Such ideas of the difference between gentle and simple, were, I believe,universal among all of my rank and age." As Jarratt advancedin social statusfrom poor farm boy to esteemed parson, clothes clearly marked out hiselevation. At the first stage he obtained "an old wig" so that he might "appearsomething more than common,. . . and be counted somebody."Advancing inboth education and the social circles in which he travelled, he procured "atolerable suit of cloaths" and was then able "to think more highly of myself"than formerly. Finally, upon his ordination, he was given "a new suit of thebest black broad cloth" that clearly markedhis attainment of a new social andreligious status, his hierarchical elevation above the simple and the common.8Jarratt's repeated experience of social distinction and his sense of its clearembodiment in dress were basic parts of the mentality of many colonialAmericans. Perhaps this awareness found clearest and simplest expression inthe title of a pamphlet published anonymously in Philadelphia in 1772: The

7. Cotton Mather, Ornamentsfor the Daughters of Zion (Cambridge, Mass., 1692), p. 55;Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Recordsof the Govenor and Company of the MassachusettsBayin New England, 5 vols. (Boston, 1853-1854), 3:243-244. On sumptuary laws, see, forexample, Gary North, "The Puritan Experiment with Sumptuary Legislation," Freeman24 (1974): 341-355.8. Devereux Jarratt, The Life of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt, Rector of Bath Parish,Dinwiddie County, Virginia (Baltimore, 1806), pp. 14, 26-27, 41-42, 78.

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CHURCH HISTORYMiraculous Power of Clothes,and Dignity of the Taylors:Being an Essay onthe Words, Clothes Make Men. As this tract suggested and Jarratt'sexperiences confirmed, social status, station, and power were displayed,articulated, and sustained through dress.The interrelatedness of dress and hierarchy in colonial society investedclothes with considerable symbolic power-a power that dissenters werequick to tap. For various groups-Quakers, pietists, and evangelicals-plaindress became a central expression of social and religious protest. For thosedisaffected by the fineries of the genteel, religious groups that investedsimplicity with virtue and identified plainness with godliness clearly trum-peted an appealing and subversivemessage. Often not having the same accessto the printed word as did the elites, evangelicals and other dissenterstook upthe medium of dress and exploited this form of communication as a vehicle ofreligious and social protest. Early Methodists and Baptists, for example,regularly condemnedall superfluities in dress such as wearing gold or silver,putting on ruffles or bows, or sporting elaborate hairstyles. As with theevangelicals, various German groups such as the Amish, Mennonites, andSeventh-Day Baptists held to plainness as a central expression of analternative, more egalitarian, communal order, one characterized by "anequalization of rank and property." Wherever there was dissent from thehierarchical religious traditions of colonial America, dress became a pivotalform for expressing discontent with the existing order and for fostering amore egalitarian religious culture. The plain dress of Quakers, pietists, andevangelicals carried, in sum, significant social, economic, and religiousmessages in early America. It was invariably in tension with the pageantry ofhierarchy.9Forms of plain dress contributedto more than an expression of egalitarian-ism; they were also a way to define a community and to identify a people. Ofthe English groups in the colonies the Quakers were the most persistent intrying to preservetheir identity as a people through distinctivemodes of plaindress. With a vision of themselves as a holy people, the Quakers strove toconstruct clear boundaries that would distinguish the devout from theworldly. The importance of plain dress to their identity as a people is clearfrom the detailed attention that the issue of clothes often received. In 1695 thePhiladelphia Yearly Meeting counselled, for example,

That all thatprofess he Truth andtheirChildren,whetheryoungorgrownup,keep o PlainessnApparelas becomeshe Truthandthatnonewear ong-lappedSleeves,orcoatsgathered t theSides,orSuperfluousButtons, r broadRibbonsabout heirHats,orlongcurledPeriwiggs, ndthatnoWomen, heirChildren rServants ress heirheads mmodestlyr weartheirGarmentsndecently s is too9. RedmondConyngham, "History of the Mennotists and Aymenists or Amish," The Registerof Pennsylvania 7 (1831): 129-132, 150-153. On this point, see also Isaac, Transformationof Virginia,p. 164.

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DRESS-LOVING PEOPLEcommon; orwearlongScarves; nd that all be carefulaboutmaking,buyingorwearing(as muchas they can) strip'dor flower'dStuffs,or otheruseless &superfluous hings,and n orderThereunto,hatallTaylorsprofessingTruthbedealtwith and advisedAccordingly.

Very specific rules for proper clothes had to be maintained if the Quakerswere to remain identifiable as "a plain People."'?Plain dress as a marker of boundaries between saved and unsaved extendedbeyond the Quakers to the evangelicals. As a Methodist itinerant observedinhis journal in 1786, "The Sacrament came on, some of our Sisters withRuffles. Some with large ... beeds. Bowes on their heads. What, said I, areyou in Society? I set in to fence the Tables with the Sword of God in myhand[.] I gave such a warning that their kind kept at an awful distance " Theline between those truly within the Methodist fold and those outside it inworldly society was made apparent, for this itinerant and for others, throughdress. Clothes in early America were symbols by which religious communitiesdefined their membership, by which the boundaries of inclusion and exclu-sion were reified.11If whole religious communities could be defined in part through dress, thespecific pastors, priests, and prophets who led them could be as well. Clericalroles were given partial definition through clerical garb. To don the blackgown of the Congregational minister or the white surplice of the Anglicanpriest was to clothe oneself with moral and spiritual authority. An example ofthe interconnectedness of ministerial authority and proper forms of dress canbe seen in the eighteenth-century pastor John Rodgers, who spent most of hiscareer as a Presbyterian minister in New York City. Rodgers, it was said,carried himself with "a peculiar, apostolical dignity" that quelled any"frivolity, impiety, and profaneness" in those who saw him. This dignitystemmed in part from his solemn manner and in part from his being "alwaysattentive to his dress." "Like his manners and his morals," his earlybiographer Samuel Miller related, "[his dress] was invariable neat, elegant,and spotless." All ministers, Miller said, should follow Rodgers's exampleand neither be "a clerical fop" nor "a clerical sloven." Instead, dressing likeRodgers, pastors were to clothe themselves in such a way as "to inspirerespect," thus giving added weight to their verbal instructions. With Rodgersas a case in point, Miller suggested that the very authority of any ministerover parishioners or within a community was bound up with his dignifieddress. Finding considerable corroboration in gowns, bands, vestments, and

10. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, quoted in Gummere, The Quaker, pp. 32-33; Sophia Hume,An Exhortation to the Inhabitantsof the Province of South-Carolina,to Bring their Deeds tothe Light of Christ, in their own Consciences (London, 1752), p. 29.11. James Hinton, "Journal," unpaginated, in William Williamson Papers, Shane Collection,PresbyterianHistorical Society manuscripts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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CHURCH HISTORYother distinguishing marks of ministerial dress, this assumption carriedsubstantial credence in the religious culture of early America.12This sort of clerical authority, which was founded on elite notions ofdecorum and gentlemanly manner, was hardly a model throughout earlyAmerica. Evangelical itinerants and lay preachers worried little aboutgarnering traditional ministerial authority which they associated with anuntoward clericalism. Certain itinerants during the Great Awakening inNew England such as Samuel Buell, Andrew Croswell, and James Daven-port were actually reported to have stripped off a fair portion of their attirewhen preaching in some of the more effervescent assemblies, thus doingwithout a distinctive clerical badge and thus levelling one of the socialdistinctions that separated them from their auditors. Indeed, itinerantsthroughout the colonies showed little interest in the sort of clerical authoritythat Rodgers embodied. Their own forms of dress became in turn anexpression of their revolt from sacerdotalism and their solidarity with thecommon people.13The vast difference between the priestly and the prophetic was oftenstarkly revealed in dress. One Quaker prophet, for example, showed up in aBoston church "in a Canvas Frock, her hair dishevelled and loose like aPeriwigg, her face as black as ink." Other early Quakers, of course, had stillmore dramatic ways of establishing their prophetic status as they went, likeIsaiah, naked for a sign. Or there was the prophet who suddenly appeared inPhiladelphia in 1734 "in the Habit of a Pilgrim, his Hat of Linnen, his Beardat full Length, and a long Staff in his Hand," talking of a divine mission andwarning of "Vengeance against the Iniquity and Wickedness of the Inhabi-tants of this City and Province." Holding, it was said, "the Attention of aMultitude of People," this prophetic figure combined dress, words, andactions to create a religious spectacle. His role as prophet was in partsustained through his garb. The authority of religious leaders in thecolonies-whether priestly or prophetic-was fosteredthrough various formsof dress and undress.14Clothes were useful not only in displaying and reinforcing ministerial12. Samuel Miller, Memoirs of the Rev. John Rodgers, D.D. (New York, 1813), pp. 340-342.For a study of clerical costume, mostly in Britain but still useful in places for the Americanside, see Janet Mayo, A History of Ecclesiastical Dress (London, 1984).13. On the dress of itinerants, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, " 'A Second and Glorious Reformation':The New Light Extremism of Andrew Croswell," William and Mary Quarterly43 (1986):238; Milton J. Coalter, Jr., Gilbert Tennent, Son of Thunder:A Case Study of ContinentalPietism's Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (New York, 1986),p. 167.14. On the Quaker prophet,see Samuel Sewall, The Diary ofSamuel Sewall, 1674-1729, ed. M.Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York, 1973), 1:44. On the Quakers going naked for a sign, seeDavid S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution(Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 124-126, 130-131. On the Philadelphia prophet, seePennsylvania Gazette, 19-25 September 1734.

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DRESS-LOVING PEOPLEauthority but also in constructing gender and familial roles. Among theMoravians, for example, plain clothes were normative, and all frivolousadornment such asjewelry and lace was proscribed.Yet this plainness hardlyimpoverishedthe medium of dress among the Moravians. The dress of malesand females was carefully distinguished and demarcatedas it was throughoutearly American culture. But the Moravians were capable of making muchfiner distinctions through dress than this basic "separation of the sexes." Forexample, caps and cap-ties, according to one nineteenth-century chronicler,were uniformally worn by Moravian women in eighteenth-century Philadel-phia, but only married women tied their caps with blue ribbon, onlyunmarried women with pink ribbon, only widows with white, and only girlsof "twelve to sixteen years" with red. Such a subtle designation as "the colorof the cap-tie" embodied the fundamental divisions of Moravian women intodifferent "choirs or classes." Distinctions between the sexes and betweenwomen of different ages and familial statuses were in part constructed andpreserved through dress. Clothes were symbols that helped order and definethis religious community."5Clothes were fundamental as well in drawing the boundaries that delim-ited the spheres of women. Proper forms of dress reified the virtues anddispositions that were considered essential for a pious woman. Instructed toavoid "the smallest appearance of immodesty"in their apparel, godly womenwere to dress in such a way that their very appearance communicatedorderliness, humility, and devotion. "Their outward Garb" was to expresssuch inward virtues as meekness, submissiveness,and modesty. Female dresswas even seen to be constitutive of "this meek and quiet" disposition that was"so necessary a part of the female character." Taking their lead fromscriptural warnings-especially 1 Timothy 2:9-10 and 1 Peter 3:3-4-andfrom the early church fathers-especially Tertullian and Chrysostom-zealous advocates of modesty in apparel aimed their strongest efforts atchastening the sensuality of women and at instilling in them a piety ofmeekness and shamefaced obedience. Indeed, women, above all, were theobjectof concernin matters of dress. The Puritan Richard Baxter went so faras to see the sin of immodest apparel as being specifically "feminine." Andone eighteenth-century Quaker woman from South Carolina complainedthatmany preachers acted "as if this Folly and Weakness, was indeed incidentand peculiar to Women only." In short, devoted and constant reformers ofdress-whether Puritans or evangelicals-sought to control the way womenin particular clothed their bodies and in doing so to shape the values thatdefined piety and femininity.1615. Abraham Ritter, History of the Moravian church in Philadelphia, from its Foundation in1742 to the Present Time (Philadelphia, 1857), pp. 85, 145.16. The Vain Cottager:Or, the History of Lucy Franklin. To which Are Prefixed a Few Hints toYoung Women in Humble Life, Respecting Decency and Propriety of Dress (New Haven,

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CHURCH HISTORYSuch pious ideals for the dress of women were not easily achieved by thoseministers,moralists,or magistrateswho promotedthem. Struggle, as much assubmission, was evident in debates over the clothes of women. Thoughministers regularly sought to prescriberules for dress and fashion, they oftenfound that women paid little attention. As one moralist regretted in Boston,women "go on" in their own way in apparel despite all the enjoinders of"Modesty and Sense." This particular poetic satire was aimed at womenwho, in the Boston of the 171Osand 20s, were wearing whalebone or hooped

petticoats despite ministerial warnings. In prescient tones this versifierwondered where this struggle over female dress would lead:Shou'dall thisfail,and if you sillyWretchesWon'tbeperswadedocontract ourStitches,Yournextextravagance ill beourBreechesWiththis,perhaps, outhink okeepyouwarm,And aughat us andev'rynorthwest torm.

Pants, this writer insisted, men claimed "as our sole Prerogative," and ifwomen should ever overstep this sartorial boundary, he warned that "ev'ryMother's Son / Will take up Arms against the Amazon." Though thesuggestion that men's breeches-that great badge of male identity andauthority-might somehow be at stake was whimsical satire, this writernonetheless realized that the issue of whalebone hoops was not a triflingmatter. That women embraced such fashions over ministerial injunctionsuggested a challenge to male authority-to the prerogative to prescribe notsimply female fashions, but women's roles. In this context dress could embodyboth a male assertion of hegemony and a female struggle for autonomousself-expression.17Clothes in early America clearly helped order religion and society: theycontributedto notions of authority, hierarchy, community, and gender. At thesame time, dress evokedsignificant spiritual and theological meanings withinthe religious culture of early America. Images of the Sabbath,of ritual, of sin,of good works, of purity, of eschatology, of redemption-all were made vividthrough the medium of dress.

1807), pp. 3-4, 11-13; Hoop PetticoatsArraignedand Condemned,by the Light of Nature,and Law of God (Boston, 1722), pp. 4-6; A Just and Seasonable Reprehension of NakedBreast and Shoulders. With a Preface by Richard Baxter (London, 1678), preface(unpaginated);Hume, An Exortation, p. 77.17. Origin of the Whalebone-petticoat,pp. 6-8; Hoop Petticoats Arraigned. For another attackon "new fashioned Amazons," see Englands Vanity: Or the Voice of God against theMonstrous Sin of Pride in Dress and Apparel (London, 1683), pp. 62-65. For furtherdiscussion of genderand dress, see Greven, Protestant Temperament,pp. 284-286; JeanetteC. Lauer and Robert H. Lauer, "The Language of Dress: A Sociohistorical Study of theMeaning of Clothing in America," Canadian Review of American Studies 10 (1979):305-323; Jo B. Paoletti, "Clothing and Gender in America: Children's Fashions, 1890-1920," Signs:Journal of Women in Cultureand Society 13 (1987): 136-143; Alison Lurie,The Language of Clothes(New York, 1981), pp. 212-229.

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DRESS-LOVING PEOPLEHallowed in a variety of ways, the Sabbath was at the center of the

religious culture of early America, and dress in particular helped mark thesacrality of the day. People were concerned on the Sabbath, as Footesuggested, to dress themselves in their best clothes; Sunday best was alreadyproverbial. Even pietists and evangelicals who insisted on plain dressnonetheless made sure that their bodies were gravely and decently clothed.They made certain that pride and show were avoided and that insteadearnestness and devotednesswere clearly displayed in their modestly adornedbodies.18Two small examples of how reverence on the Sabbath was bound up withdress can serve as useful illustrations of this larger point. A first example canbe found in shoes and stockings-articles of clothing that many settlersdispensed with in the warmer months. Yet accounts of Presbyterian immi-grants in Maine and western Pennsylvania suggest that upon summerSabbathsshoes and stockingswere at times purposely carriedto the meetings,and then put on when the congregantsarrived at the place of worship. People,who went barefoototherwise, could affirm the solemnity of Sabbath worship,its uncommonness, through the simple act of clothing their feet. Conversely,the Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason was made all the more certainof irreverence and ignorance of backcountrysettlers when they showed up tohis services"barefootedand Bare legged"or without "shoesor stockings."'9Asecond example on this point can be found in the removal of hats. Reverenceon the Sabbath could be suggested in a variety of ways: in posture, in silence,in solemn visages, and also in uncovered heads. Particularly vivid testimonyto this effect comes from an early nineteenth-century Indiana preacher:

It was a uniform custom, broken with few exceptions, for every man to carry hishat upon his head-even after he entered the house. But as soon as I rose for theservice,everyhat was placed upon the floor beside and within reach of the owner'shand. And thus they sat while listening to God's Word, even though that Wordwas spoken by an almost beardless boy. It marked the reverence of thoseuncultivated men for this Word. Before it they would sit or stand uncovered andbefore nothing else. As soon as the service was at an end they seemed to feel thewant of a covering for their heads to assure them ease in social intercourse. Soevery one took naturally to his hat and he was himself again.20

In early America people had a variety of ways of communicating their18. Foote, Sketches, p. 203; Ritter, History, pp. 84-85, 145. See also John Demos, A LittleCommonwealth:Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970), pp. 53-54.19. See the accounts in Joseph Smith, Old Redstone; Or, Historical Sketches of WesternPresbyterianism,its Early Ministers, its Perilous Times,and its First Records (Philadelphia,1854), pp. 44, 154, 164-165; Cyrus Eaton, Annals of the Town of Warren,in Knox County,Maine, 2d ed. (Hallowell, Maine, 1877), p. 134; see Richard J. Hooker, ed., The CarolinaBackcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of CharlesWoodmason,Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill, 1953), pp. 31-32.20. Manuscript of missionary J. W. Blythe, quoted in L. C. Rudolph, Hoosier Zion: ThePresbyteriansin Early Indiana (New Haven, 1963), pp. 87-88.

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CHURCH HISTORYreverence for the Sabbath and the Word that was preached on it. Shoes,stockings, removed hats, and Sunday best were all ways in which earlyAmericans might attest to the sacrednessof the day.Not only were there proper clothes for the Sabbath, but other rituals alsodemanded special forms of dress. From birth to death, the major events inpeople's lives were marked by rituals that expressed diverse meanings inactions, words, objects, and settings. Dress was a vital part of the complexsystem of communication involved in ritual. Whether christening gowns,baptismal robes,wedding garb, sackcloth,winding sheets, or mourning dress,clothes gave partial expression to the complex meanings evoked throughritual. Different religious groups, of course, forged distinctive forms of ritualdress. The Moravians, for example, rejected traditional funereal costumes,for to them death was not an occasion for sorrow and grief but for thecelebration of the Christian's entrance into heaven. The Puritans, bycontrast, were elaborate in their mourning dress with special gloves, rings,and cloaks often worn upon the occasion. Or, on another note, several groupsused various forms of dress to turn sinners into public spectacles, into theshameful objects of rebuke. Most notorious in this regard were certainPuritan punishments of adulterers-shaming techniques that were giveninfamy in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. The various ritualized spectaclesin early America-whether funerals, shamings, or sacraments-took on partof their visual drama from the clothes of participants.21The expanse of ritualism in the religious culture of early America ishighlighted in the regulations surrounding dress. Extending beyond patternsof worship, this ritualism informed as well the diurnal routines of many of thefaithful. Numerous rubrics guided the way the pious lived, and rules aboutdress were often among the most important. An early Quaker from SouthCarolina, Sophia Hume, made this point: "Tho' Religion stands not simplyin Clothes," she argued, "yet true Religion stands in that which sets Boundsand Limits to the Mind with respect to Clothes,as well as other Things." As aQuaker Hume remained wary of "Formalities and Ceremonies" in religionand spoke oft and much of "spiritual Worship." Yet she, like other radicalProtestants, insisted that religion was not simply a matter of the spirit butalso a matter of ritual forms and regulations, that "trueReligion" shaped indetail the way one acted in the world. Thus the Quakers, for example, held to21. On the Moravians, see Ritter, History, p. 147. On Puritan shamings, see NathanielHawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ed. William Charvat and Fredson Bowers (Columbus,Ohio, 1962). The critical introductionto this edition discussesseventeenth-centuryexamplesupon which Hawthorne based his tale (pp. xxvi-xxvii). On mourning dress, see Ludwig,

Graven Images, pp. 59-60; Gordon E. Geddes, Welcome Joy: Death in Puritan NewEngland (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981), pp. 119-123; Barbara Dodd Hillerman, "Chrysalis ofGloom: Nineteenth Century American Mourning Costume," in A Time to Mourn:Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Martha V. Pike and Janice GrayArmstrong(Stony Brook, N.Y., 1980), pp. 91-106.

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DRESS-LOVING PEOPLErules not only about clothes-though plain dress was a principal concern-but also about household furnishings, diet, speech, and recreations. The"Bounds and Limits" with which so many evangelical Protestants hedged indress reflected a larger ritualism. Religion in early America was seen andacted out in a myriad of ways; it was embodied in various rituals and rubrics,of which rules about dress were but one revealing indication.22Besides its importance to ritualism, dress contained doctrinal significance.Clothes were regularly connected with notions of sin and pride; indeed, theywere regularly seen as tangible embodiments of such ideas. Ministers,inveighing against pride and vanity, saw gaudy apparel as a visible emblem ofinward corruption, "the Tokens of a Plague in the Soul." The very need fordress pointed to original sin and reminded people of their fallenness. Theshame of Adam and Eve and their need "to cover their nakedness" wereregularly invoked in warnings about depravity and pride and in calls forhumility and modesty. A Presbyterian divine suggested such symbolicsignificance for clothes in a characteristicexhortation:"A Christian should beso far from being proud or vain of his apparel, that the sight of his garmentsshould humble him, and keep him in mind how he came to need them. Was itnot sin that stript man of his glory, covered him with shame, and put him toseek clothes for to hide it? ... May not the thoughts thereof keep you humble,and teach you to come to the church gravely and decently apparelled?especially since you come into the presenceof that God, who resists the proud,but gives grace to the humble." Outward revelations of the inward, clotheswere ready symbols of sin, pride, and self-indulgence. Spiritual lessonsalways were to be learned from reflection on the way the body wasdressed.23

Beyond symbolizing the sin of pride and even more grandly the Fall itself,the wearing of certain clothes could also embody the sins of lust andsensuality. Women in particular (and not surprisingly, given that much of theliterature focused on their immodesty) were charged with exciting hellishfires in the hearts of "Male Spectators"by exposing, as Cotton Mather said,"unto Common View those parts of [the] Body, which there can be no GoodEnd or Use for the Exposing of"-notably, the back, shoulders, and breasts.In such sights the eyes betrayed the heart, for, as one British pamphletentitled AJust and SeasonableReprehension of Naked Breasts and Shouldersdeclared, "the Devil makes use of the windowes of our bodies, for Death bySin to enter into our Souls." The seeing of such provocativelydressed bodieswas especially dangerous on religious occasions as it distracted people fromdevotion and gave rise instead to lustful thoughts. For the pious this danger of22. Hume, An Exhortation, pp. 30, 38, 61.23. Mather, Ornaments, p. 53; Hoop Petticoats Arraigned, p. 2; John Willison, A TreatiseConcerning the Sanctification of the Lord's Day, (Philadelphia, 1788), pp. 273-274.Willison, perhaps the leading Presbyterian devotional writer of the eighteenth century, wasa Scot whose works were often reprintedin America.

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CHURCH HISTORYsexual distraction made modesty in apparel all the more needful. Thus diddress intertwine with sensuality and with religion. As potential symbols andembodiments of "Lust," clothes had to be carefully monitored by thefaithful.24For those Puritans, pietists, or evangelicals who saw sin in fine dress, theissue was foundedupon more than repressivefears of worldliness, sensuality,and distraction. To all those who made so much of plain dress it was apressing ethical issue; to many it even became an issue of compassion versushypocrisy, of good works versus negligent frivolity. Few made this point moreeloquently or urgently than did John Wesley:

The wearing [of] costly array is directly opposite to the being adorned with goodworks. Nothing can be more evident than this; for the more you lay out on yourown apparel, the less you have left to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to lodgethe strangers, to relieve those that are sick and in prison, and to lessen thenumberless afflictions to which we are exposed in this vale of tears .... [W]hatyou put upon yourself,you are, in effect, tearing from the back of the naked;as thecostly and delicate food which you eat, you are snatching from the mouth of thehungry. For mercy, for pity, for Christ's sake, for the honour of his gospel, stayyour hand Do not throw this money away Do not lay out on nothing, yea, worsethan nothing, what may clothe your poor, naked, shivering fellow-creatureWesley's prophetic thoughts on dress were keenly felt in the Americancontext. Not only did his reflections serve as a basis for early AmericanMethodist pronouncementson the matter, but Wesley himself, in one of hisfew successes in his brief sojourn in Georgia, carried out a reform of dressalong this prophetic line. Finding in Savannah a congregationas well dressedas those he had seen in London, he expounded at length his prophetic gospelof plainness. "All the time that I afterward ministered in Savannah," herelated, "I saw neither gold in the church, nor costly apparel; but thecongregation in general was almost constantly clothed in plain, clean linen orwoollen." Plain dress, in Savannah as elsewhere, was linked to propheticwitness.25

The visual, richly symbolic medium of dress was capable of communicat-ing a multiplicity of meanings. Thus could clothes point not only to sin, pride,selfishness, and sensuality but also to purity, redemption, and heaven.Saintliness as much as sinfulness might be communicated through clothes.White raiment, for example, was the covering of the saints, of angels, and ofthe transfigured Christ. Baptists, when they processed down to the river to

24. Mather, Ornaments,pp. 52-53, 57;Just and SeasonableReprehension, p. 16.25. John Wesley, The WorksofJohn Wesley, A.M., 14 vols. (London, 1872), 7:20-21, 11:474.See also The Nature, Design, and General Rules of the Methodist Societies (New York,1809), pp. 7-16; [John Wesley], Advice to the People Called Methodists with Regard toDress (Baltimore, 1808); John Wesley, On Dress (Boston, 1811); Peter Cartwright,AutobiographyofPeter Cartwright,ed. Charles L. Wallis (New York, 1956), pp. 61-63,73,334.

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DRESS-LOVING PEOPLEimmerse new believers, dressed those to be baptized in white linen, clearlypointing to the purity and righteousnessof the saints and suggesting initiationinto that communion. Among the Seventh-Day Baptists at Ephrata, memberswere required to clothe themselves in white year-round. "In summer-time,"one observerreported, "the clothes are of linen or cotton, and entirely white;in the winter-time they are white woollen cloth." Dressing themselves "whiteas snow" for worship, members of this Protestant cloister expressed throughclothing their union with the saints in heaven and their readiness and longingto meet with Christ. A revealing pictorial image producedat Ephrata showedheaven crowded with saints dressed in this distinctive white garb-a graphicillustration of how this earthly community connected itself through dresswiththe heavenly communion of saints. The religious meanings of dress, far fromstopping with notions of sin and pride, spreadoutward and upward to signifysaintly purity and heavenly attainment.26Clothes could intertwine as well with ideas, and even experiences, ofrepentance and awakening. The eighteenth-century Quaker Sophia Hume,for example, connected her initial experience of "Unworthiness" to therecognition of the sinfulness of her "splendid Apparel." For her therenunciation of extravagant dress and spiritual awakening coincided andcoalesced. In the next century, evangelist Charles Grandison Finney revealeda similar conjunctionin relating a storyof a woman under conviction at one ofhis early revivals in the 1820s. The woman was only able to pass through toconversion when she finally laid aside her "ornaments"-that is, herembellished apparel-for good. "I renounced [these ornaments]," she said,"and hated them as things standing in the way of salvation. As soon as Ipromisedto give them up, the Lord revealed himself to my soul; ... This wasreally the great difficulty with me before, when I was under conviction, myfondness for dress; and I did not know it." Similarly, Methodist itinerantPeter Cartwright told of a gentleman of fashion at a camp meeting in 1810who, though "much engaged" at the mourners' bench, still seemed impededfrom accepting Christ. "I was praying by his side, and talking to him,"Cartwright related, "when all [of] a sudden he stood erect on his knees, andwith his hands he deliberately opened his shirt bosom, took hold of his ruffles,tore them off, and threw them down in the straw; and in less than twominutes God blessed his soul, and he sprang to his feet, loudly praising God."Thus did clothes become caught up in the process of repentance and

26. For a good, if unsympathetic, description of the spectacle of baptism, see Hooker, ed.,Carolina Backcountry, p. 103. On dress at Ephrata, see Peter C. Erb, ed., Johann ConradBeissel and the Ephrata Community:Mystical and Historical Texts (Lewiston, N.Y., 1985),p. 96; Felix Reichmann and Eugene E. Doll, eds., Ephrata as Seen by Contemporaries(Allentown, Pa., 1953), pp. 44, 48, 53, 61, 77, 98, 115, 136, 147, 156, 159. The lattercollection, produced by the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society, includes an earlynineteenth-century descriptionof the drawing of heaven (p. 168).

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CHURCH HISTORYconversion. A way of concretizing and externalizing the abstract, interiornotion of sin, dress became interwoven in such spiritual relations withtransformation.27

Some early Americans went farther still and saw in clothes densetheological symbols through which more complex, abstract religious ideasmight be expressed. Nearly everywhere they looked, the faithful saw in thevisible world innumerable symbols ready for allegorical and spiritual read-ings; the mundane could readily speak to the transmundane. Among "thethings of this world," clothes were particularly conducive to religiousmeditation, to "shadow[ing] forth spiritual things." Jonathan Edwards, forexample, provided this suggestive gloss: "Whatsoever God has provided formankind to cloath themselves with," Edwards suggested,

seems to represent esus Christ and his righteousness,whether t be anythingmadeof skinor thecoatsof skins... or the fleecesof sheep, t representedherighteousnessf him who is the Lambof God andwho was dumb as a sheepbeforehis shearers.Andthebeautiful loathingrom he silk-wormhat hewormyieldsupat his deathrepresentsheglorious lothingwe have orour soulsbythedeathof him who becamea man,whois a wormandthe son of man.... And theflax with which we areclothed eemswell to representhespiritual lothingwehavebyChrist:hatsmall,weak, eeble,andmildewedplant]butwellrepresentshim whogrewup as a tenderplant,as a rootout[of]a dry ground,whereinwasno sin orguiltiness;theflax]is exceedingly ruisedand brokenand beatenwithmanyblows,andso yieldsus its coatto be ourcloathing.AndChrist, hroughexceeding reatsuffering, ieldsus hisrighteousness,hat is as finelinnen,cleanandwhite,andpresentsus withouta spottothe Father.

Edwards could see in clothes a compendium of the gospel. Throughmeditative reflection clothes became compact symbols of atonement andredemption, purificationand righteousness.28The symbolic meanings that early Americans could fathom and expressthrough the medium of dress were manifold. Clothes, to play upon ananthropological trope, were good to think with. They helped people expressideas about hierarchy, equality, gender, clerical authority, community, ritual,purity, repentance, redemption, sin, pride, shame, and last things. Theyoffered a powerful channel of communication through which people-whether literate or illiterate, lay or clerical-conveyed various messages toone another.An examination of the importanceand versatilityof this mediumof communicationsuggests that historianshave allowed the preachedWord tomonopolize unduly their understanding of the forms of religious expressionin early America. Verbal texts were critical, indeed, essential parts of thereligious culture of early America, but they were hardly the sum of the

27. Hume, An Exhortation, p. 30; Charles G. Finney, Memoirs (New York, 1876), pp.173-174; Cartwright, Autobiography,p. 63.28. Jonathan Edwards, Images or Shadows of Divine Things, ed. Perry Miller (New Haven,1948), pp. 43-44, 50-51, 56-57, 101.

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DRESS-LOVING PEOPLE 51culture. The religious culture of early America was thicker than that.Resources for communication went well beyond words, and these resourceswere used fully and creatively. Understanding the religious culture of earlyAmerica in something approaching its fullness requires probing the variousways people found to give meaning, order, and shape to their lives. It requiresseeing how people constitutedtheir religious world through more than words;how they used their eyes as well as their ears to understandthemselves, theirneighbors, and their God.

a church-going people are a dress-loving people

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