PATCHWORK POCKET
The Stamp Act soon stirred all patriotic Philadelphians to the resolve to eat no “meat of the mutton kind,”—a resolve rendered still more stern in 1775. A wool-factory was fitted up, and, to quote Mrs. Alice Morse Earle,[2] “an appeal was made to the women to save the state. In a month four hundred wool-spinners were at work.” In the same year the Provincial Congress made an appeal to the people for thirteen thousand warm coats for the Continental army, to be ready for the soldiers when winter came. It was a time when all preparations for the war seemed to be in the most hopeless snarl, and army supplies were scarce and often lacking. To-day a contractor would make nothing of the job, possibly in more senses than one; but a hundred years ago the wool-wheels and hand-looms were set humming by hundreds of hearth-stones, and, writes Mrs. Earle again, “the order was filled by the handiwork of patriotic American women.” In the record book of some New England towns may still be found the list of the coat-makers.... Every soldier volunteering for eight months’ service was given one of these homespun, homemade, all-wool coats as a bounty. So highly were these ‘Bounty Coats’ prized, that the heirs of soldiers who were killed at Bunker Hill before receiving their coats were given a sum of money instead. The list of names of soldiers who then enlisted is known to this day as the ‘Coat Roll,’ and the names of the women who made the coats might form another roll of honor. The English sneeringly called Washington’s army the ‘Homespuns.’ They little knew the power and significance of that title. Well did Horace Bushnell call it “mother and daughter power.”
Thus we see that in New England the culture, spinning and weaving of wool, as well as flax, was as religiously encouraged as in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York. The great wool-wheel was as necessary an implement in every household as the little flax-wheel, for every home had by law to contain one spinner. Children of all classes were required to learn to spin wool, and met on equal footing over their work. Homespun became so universal a commodity that imported woolens were not missed when the time came to forbid them the country. It was a process of many months of hard labor to convert the raw fleece into the “all-wool goods a yard wide” which we cut up so recklessly to-day. Another old saying, “dyed in the wool,” represents another laborious process, that of dyeing the wool with homemade dyes. All kinds of homely flowers were used for these dyes, a beautiful green being made from goldenrod mixed with indigo. Blue, made from the blue paper that wrapped the old sugar-loaf, and from indigo bought from travelling pedlers, was the favorite color, possibly because the easiest to obtain; and the old blue dye-pot stood constantly in the chimney corner like the Frenchwoman’s pot-au-feu. We cannot help wondering if the coats of the “Homespuns” were blue. And the familiar blue of the patriot army? Was that also women’s work?
After the dyeing came the carding, a very deft process, and also a very dirty one, for the wool had first to be rubbed with melted swine’s grease—three pounds of grease to ten of wool. This process corresponded in purpose and method to the hetcheling of flax, as the wool was drawn into parallel fibres through bent wire teeth set in a leather or wooden rectangle, called a wool-card. Here are the wool-cards of Maria Tallmadge, second wife of Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge, the famous major of Connecticut’s Second Light Dragoons, the friend of Lafayette and confidant of Washington; they belong to the valuable collection of the Litchfield Historical Society. By these clumsy-looking implements the wool was twisted into little rolls, and was then ready for spinning.
CARDS
This wool-spinning called for the most alert and graceful series of movements, to which our foremothers owe in large part their poise and dignity of carriage. The little roll of wool was placed on the spindle, the great wheel was given a quick turn, and the spinner stepped quickly backward three or four steps, holding the twisting yarn in her left hand high above her head: then with a quick forward movement she let it wind around the bobbin, and the process was repeated. An active spinner could spin six skeins a day, and to do this it is estimated that she walked with her backward and forward steps over twenty miles.