Seafaring Dress Mentioned in New Jersey Runaway Ads 1734 - 1782

Detail from The Embarkation by John Collett,
circa 1760s, Nation Maritime Museum (UK)

Then as now, 18th century mariners were a distinctive fraternity.  Seafaring dress was clearly recognizable to contemporaries as such, though not all who wore it were active seamen and plenty of waterman plied their trade in landsmen's clothes. 

A detailed, ongoing study of documentation for sailor clothing of the period can be found at the excellent British Tars blog, and there has been fine research as well by such living history groups as Munro's Battoe- men and H.M.S. Somerset.

To add to this body of knowledge, I have analyzed colonial and revolutionary era newspaper references to sailor clothing between 1734 and 1782 as compiled and recorded in the New Jersey Archives.  I offer here a short assessment of these data, followed by every clothing description listed by year.

Blue was the most common, but by no means the only sailor jacket color. There are 16 references to blue sailor's jackets, most of which date from the mid 1760s or later.  There are also five references to brown sailor jackets, only one of which from the revolutionary-era.  There are four green, four light coloured, two black, two grey or lead coloured, one snuff-coloured, two that were either striped or spotted, one dark coloured, one black and blue and one striped red and white. 

Men from the same ship sometimes wore clothing of the same color and material provided from the ship's store.   In 1766 two murderers wore "light coloured sailor's jackets lined with white", while in 1763 six Scotsmen who had recently been transported from Leith on the Ship Boyd, Captain Dunlop, subsequently ran away taking with them "sailor's new short blue jackets, lined with white flannel."  Five men who ran from the Hannah, James Mitchell, Master, in August 1773 were wearing very poor and ragged clothing, but one is described as an apprentice and the others are unlikely to have been sailors, for the overcrowded Hannah had just crossed from Londonderry to Philadelphia with 520 Irish passengers.

Men Loading a Boat With Barrels by Samuel Scott (1702-1772)
Yale Center for British Art

Various textiles were used for sailor jackets.   Outer clothing made sailor fashion was often coarse or napped wool fabric like bearskin or kersey with properties suitable for resisting wind and water.  Thick cloth, Duffield, German serge, homespun and broadcloth are also mentioned in the New Jersey runaway ads, as is a swanskin flannel jacket.  Buttons when mentioned are quite varied.  Where a lining material is described, flannel or woolen is mentioned, colored either white or red.  Where a binding is noted, it is either white or a lighter color than the coat material.  Since jackets with binding along the edges and sleeve placets were commonly associated with seafaring dress, these may be under-represented in the runaway descriptions that simply mention sailor jackets.  

There were no Pea Coats, but there were Pea Jackets.   Possibly derived from the Dutch or Frisian "pijjekker" meaning a coarse cloth jacket, pea jackets have been associated with American and European sailors for centuries,  first referenced in the Boston Gazette in 1720.  The earliest reference to sailor clothing in my New Jersey study is to "an old sea-pea jacket, lined with red, and the skirts somewhat cattle eaten" worn by a runaway in 1734.  Two more references in the 1740s describe pea jackets and they continue to appear in these records through 1772.  There are nine in all. How a pea jacket at this time differed from a sailor's jacket is not apparent from the newspaper ads, nor whether they were broad lapelled and double breasted as was typical of later Pea Coats. One runaway servant in 1772 wore a long surtout over his pea jacket.  They are described in many different colors, but the only reference to cloth is a "dark kersey pea jacket, without lining."

The Sailmaker ticketing the hammocks on board [the Frigate] Pallas
by Gabriel Bray, November, 1774, National Maritime Museum (UK)

There are some early mentions of short jackets, But not enough to discern a trend. Short jackets, which may or may not have had skirts, are mentioned as early as 1763 in the NJ runway ads, and again in 1768.  On the other hand, a runaway in 1772 wore "a large blue sailor jacket, lined with white flannel, somewhat tarry."  Most descriptions do not mention jacket length at all.  Likewise, there are just two mentions of double breasted sailor jackets.

Other items of distinctive sailor dress are infrequently mentioned.  Since most of the newspaper ads in this study describe runaways who happened to be wearing sailor's jackets but were in service on land, caution is needed when assessing their other clothing as indicative of nautical wear.  Three wore "sailor trowsers", one described in 1751 as wide sailor trowsers and fustian breeches under them.   The two murderous sailors who waylaid a man on the road in 1766 left behind their incriminating clothes: "one shirt and sailor's frock, both bloody, two pair of trowsers, one bloody, and two small marling spikes".  In 1768 A horse thief in a sailor jacket wore "long striped Cotton trowsers" and was described as having served on a man of war. 

There are just a couple of references to caps or hats.  Two of the hats have bound edges, one that is probably not cocked,  and another very unusual one worn by a slave from Barbados in 1769 who was apprehended in seafaring dress wearing "a white hat with red lining, yellow loop and button."  Two men wore caps - one of the murderers in 1766 had on "a sailor's cap", and  an Irish servant in 1768 who wore "a regimental cap turned up with red".

There are plenty of watermen in these NJ runaway ads who sailed and/or stole boats and wore regular clothing. Any sailor clothing that was described is listed below.

Scott Lance, Munro's Battoe-men
Washington Crossing, 2013

Sailor Clothing mentioned in NJ Runaway Ads 1734-1782


1734 an old sea-pea jacket, lined with red, and the skirts somewhat cattle eaten

1742 an old black pea jacket, mohair buttons, lined with white flannel
1744 a dark kersey pea jacket, without lining
1749 Blue Duffield sailor’s jacket, and a striped under jacket
1750 a snuff coloured pea jacket
1751 A brown pea jacket, and a blue one under it..
         ...wide sailor trowsers and fustian breeches under them
1756 an old bearskin [vest] made sailor fashion, patched on the elbows
1762 a redish brown sailor’s jacket
1763 a kersey sailor’s double breasted jacket, with horn buttons
1763 [a number of] sailors new short blue jackets, lined with white flannel
1764 an old lead coloured pea jacket, pieced on the sides with black
         (to make it big enough for him)
1765 a thickset coat, sailor’s trowsers, a great coat, and old hat
1766 [Murderers, two men dressed like sailors]
         light coloured sailors jackets, lined with white, the tallest
         had a sailor’s cap, the smallest a hat
        (leaving in the field one shirt and sailor’s frock, both bloody,
         two pair of trowsers, one bloody, and two small marling spikes)
1766 Irish servant an old blue sailor’s jacket, bound with white,
         with horn buttons, a red under jacket without sleeves, bound with white
1768 a sailor’s blue waistcoat and under waistcoat, a pair of new buckskin
         breeches, new fulled stockings, and a felt hat.
1768 a short blue sailor’s jacket, with the sleeves taken out, blue half thick
         trowsers, linen ditto
1768 a sailor’s napped vest
1768  a regimental cap turned up with red, an old brown jacket made
          sailor fashion, tow trowsers
1768  black and blue homespun vest, made sailor fashion, slashed sleeves,
          lined with flannel, with horn buttons, long striped trowsers
          (later described as: a new double breasted jacket, black and blue
          broadcloth, with slash sleeves, lined with flannel, and
          horn buttons…long stripped Cotton trowsers)
1768 a blue sailor’s jacket
1768 a thick cloth jacket light colour’d, lined with woolen, made sailor fashion
1768  a check shirt and a pair of white tow trowsers, a sailor’s brown jacket,
          a streaked vest
1769 a swanskin flannel jacket, made sailor fashion
1768  a sailor’s jacket with lace over the seams
1769 a blue sailor’s jacket, much worn and faded
1769  he was taken up in a seafaring dress, with a white hat, red lining,
          yellow loop and button, who says he is a slave of John Christian,
          of Bridgetown, Barbados,
1770 coarse light coloured cloth jacket, lined with red, made sailor’s fashion
1771 four sailor jackets, two blue, the others striped or spotted
1771 a large blue sailor jacket, lined with white flannel, somewhat tarry
1771 Green pea jacket and a check shirt
1771 a blue pea jacket
1772 a blue cloath sailor’s jacket
1772 an outside green pea jacket, and a red under one, a long blue
        surtout coat, long Oznaburg trowsers, and new shoes, a checked shirt,
        a very small rimmed beaver hat, and a Black silk handkerchief
        round his neck
1773 two waistcoats, sailor fashion made, one green the other grey
1773 a blue sailor’s jacket
1774 Two green cloth jackets, the upper one a sort of nap, made in the
          sailor fashion
1774 one homespun bearskin [ships] black jacket, one light coloured
         worsted and wool ditto, no lining in either, two ozenbrigs shirts,
         one new, the other half-worn, one pair of old leather breeches,
          new tow trowsers, black yarn stockings, two pair of shoes,
          about half worn, a good felt hat, almost new, and an old ditto,
          has been bound round the brim
1777  a brown sailor jacket, and an under ditto, near the same color,
          of German Serge, bound with binding something lighter; homespun
          shirt and trowsers, an old castor hat.
1777 a blue jacket made sailor fashion, blue breeches, a round hat
1778 thickset coat, striped linen jacket, sailor’s trowsers and thread stockings
1779 a sailor’s blue jacket and breeches
1780 striped red and white sailor’s outside jacket

"So that the subscribers may have the child again, and the parents convicted of the theft"

Sometimes a single reference in an old newspaper underscores how very different the mindset of an earlier time was from that of our own time.

"Lost from the subscriber, living on Raccoon Creek, in Woolwich township, Gloucester county, West New-Jersey, on the night between the 9^th and 10^th of this instant October, an indented female child; her name is Polly Murphy, very near five years of age, pretty tall for her age, of a fair complexion, has ruddy cheeks, grey eyes, light hair, and a small scar on her forehead; had on an almost new homespun lincey petticoat, with red, brown and yellow stripes, turned up round-about, a red ragged woolen short gown, and a coarse ozenbrigs shift...¹ "

As a parent reading this notice from 1775, my heart went out instinctively to that lost child, remembering a cold November when my not yet three-year-old daughter went out into the night in her stocking feet - having decided to follow her mother's car to the library - and the panic I felt until she was found, safe, but half a mile away.  My sympathy is naturally with the parents of Polly Murphy, but they were not out looking for their child.  Her master was.


"...It is supposed she has been taken away by her parents, who stayed that night with the subscriber, and with the child disappeared that morning.  The father’s name is Henry Scharff, has a lean face and thin hair, had on an old, worn out blue coat; the mother is a lusty, hearty woman, of a fair complexion, has big lips, and black hair, and is big with child.  Whoever takes up the above persons with the above described child, and secures them, so that the subscribers may have the child again, and the parents convicted of the theft, shall have five pounds reward, or for the child alone three pounds, and all reasonable charges paid by   ANDREW MINTZ"
[Pennsylvania Gazette October 18, 1775]

18th Century America's cultural and class distinctions are stark in this run-away advertisement.  From Mintz's perspective, the poor white parents of Polly Murphy have taken advantage of his hospitality and broken a binding contract by removing their five-year-old daughter from her indenture.  Readers of the newspaper would be expected to view the father, with his different surname, and the pregnant, probably Irish mother, as dishonest as well as unfit parents from a societal underclass. 
Hard information about Andrew Mintz is very hard to come by.  This single newpaper ad from 1775 is all that I have been able to find .  Intriguingly, Mintz is an Ashkenazic or eastern European Jewish surname.  Sephardic or "Spanish" Jews were more common in 18th Century America than the Ashkenazim, though there were a few of these.  He could have converted to Christianity, as did my ancestor Eleazer Cohen, a merchant from Amsterdam who lived in Philadelphia at this time. 

More likely Mintz could just be a German name like Müntz that happened to be spelled like a Jewish one.  There was a Benedict Müntz who died in Philadelphia in 1764 whose name was also spelled Mintz.  These Mintz's were not Jewish, and intermarried with Moravians.


Sometimes even very young children like Polly Murphy were bound to service when their families could not afford to support them.  These indentures were long, and did not include niceties such as the option for early termination if the circumstances of the parents improved.  They had no recourse if they just wanted her home again.  Their child became chattel.

This was a common condition in 18th Century America, a form of long-term white slavery at a time when the permanent enslavement of black people was well established.  Appallingly, it is also a form of slavery that exists in different but still recognizable forms today, with bonded debt slavery and child labor affecting millions of people around the world.

________________________________________________________________________

1.  Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, First Series --Vol. XXXI
Extracts from American Newspapers Relating to New Jersey for the Year 1775, Edited by A. Van Doren Hon Eyman, Somerville, N.J. : The Unionist-Gazette Association, Printers, 1923.

Button, Button, Who's Got the Wooden Buttons?

It is difficult for an historian to generalize about the folkways of colonial New Jersey, with its two Provinces, East and West, and distinct populations of Dutch, German, Swedish, English, Scottish, Irish, African and Native American origins.  Add to that the Quaker influence in West New Jersey, and divided  Dutch Reformed congregations in East, and the overall demographic impression in the years leading up to the American Revolution is of a remarkably heterogeneous society with sub-regional characteristics and a solid middle class.

There is the odd reference in a traveler's letter to respectable Jersey women who sewed in their shifts.¹

Cyder spirits such as "Jersey Lightning" or Apple Jack would be a strong candidate for the regional alcoholic beverage of the era.  Still, there is not much else that would support an endemic material culture in colonial New Jersey in the 1770s distinct from that of the wider Delaware Valley in the West, or New York and the Hudson Valley in the East.  Fully half the breeches described in New Jersey runaway notices in period newspapers were made of leather, but this was a common working class garment in other colonies.  Short gowns may have been more common in the Middle Colonies than in the Eastern ones, but not just in New Jersey.

Whenever I do come across a contemporary reference that seems to make a general claim about colonial New Jersey's material culture, I look for evidence to substantiate or refute it.  Consider this fascinating newspaper advertizement from 1770:

                Benjamin Randolph
                takes this method to inform his customers, and the public
                in general, That he has for sale, at his ware room of
                carving and cabinet work &c., at the Sign of the Golden Eagle,
                in Chestnut-street, a quantity of Wooden buttons, of various
                sorts, and intends, if encouraged, to keep a general
                assortment of them...The people of New-Jersey (in general)
                wear no other kind of buttons, and say they are the best and
                cheapest, can be bought, both for strength and beauty, and
                he doubts not that they will soon recommend themselves to
                the public in general.
                                             [The Pennsylvania Gazette Jan. 18, 1770]

Benjamin Randolph
by Charles Willson Peale
(Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Mr. Randolph was born to a Quaker family in Monmouth County, New Jersey and had set up business in Philadelphia.  He seems to be pitching his buttons to the West-New Jersey market, or perhaps also to customers in Philadelphia with a cultural or religious affinity for those on the far shore of the Delaware.  Another ad that year reportedly described his desire to purchase "apple, holly and laurel wood, hard and clear-grained" for button manufacture. 

Was he right that "The people of New-Jersey (in general) wear no other kind of buttons", or was he inflating their generality to build a new customer base, and perhaps also to appeal to domestic purchasing impulses while many British goods, including gold and silver buttons, were subject to non-importation embargo?

One place to look for verification of the wooden button claim would be those New Jersey runaway descriptions in contemporary newspapers (albeit that until 1778 all of these were published outside New Jersey).  At least for the lower third of society, these notices of absconded apprentices, prisoners, servants and slaves should provide a useful way to compare button descriptions for evidence of any discernible trends. 

As it happens, I can run that analysis, for I have been compiling a database that currently has 627 individual male New Jersey runaways with clothing descriptions between the years 1767 and 1782.  My sources are those colonial and revolutionary-era newspapers from which extracts were transcribed and published in multiple volumes of the New Jersey Archives between the late 1880s and the First World War.  The volume that covers late 1774 through 1775 contains incomplete transcriptions and substitutes ellipses for clothing descriptions for all but nine runaway notices, but the other years appear to be faithful and comprehensive reproductions of the 18th century text.

There are 142 button descriptions among the clothes worn by these 627 men that offer insight into the materials from which there were made.  Five of these are military uniform buttons (one worn by an escaped slave), leaving 137 that could conceivably represent lower class clothing worn in New Jersey during this time. 

Buttons (sometimes their notable absence) are only described for visible outer clothing - surtouts, coats, jackets and breeches.  These runaway notices tell us virtually nothing about shirt buttons, most commonly made of thread.  It is possible that only those articles of clothing that were clearly seen and well known to the subscriber were described right down to the buttons.  It is also possible that only buttons considered unusual or distinctive were included in the descriptions.  It is prudent to bear these alternative hypotheses and qualifications in mind as we examine the evidence.

Among these 137 button descriptions, I find 15 that are wooden buttons, including one fellow who wore a suit of clothes with wooden buttons on both the coat and jacket.  I also find 25 simply described as metal, and another 28 that were either white metal or pewter.  There were mohair or thread basket  buttons (13 and 6, respectively, although some of the latter may have been metal), as well as 10 brass and 8 more of yellow metal.  There were 9 references to horn, and 8 to covered buttons, though the latter could be under represented as most of these were the same color fabric as the clothing and might not have been readily discernible.  There are handful of other types of button mentioned with low representation (bone, tortoiseshell, glass, composite materials, gilt) and even one described as "Philadelphia buttons", made by one of the two local manufacturers of metal buttons in that City.

Wooden buttons, it seems, were worn by these New Jersey runaways  slightly more than some other common types but considerably less than white metal.  Even if we sorted these 15 references to wooden buttons by East and West New Jersey and compared them to other button types found on runaways from these places, it is unlikely that there would be a strong enough correlation  to back up Mr. Randolph's claim of general use.  One could further speculate that wooden buttons could have been favored by some rural Quakers in plain dress, but simple white metal cloth covered buttons were also available to them.

The most interesting conclusion from the New Jersey Runaway descriptions is not that wooden buttons were the norm, but that nearly two dozen different types of civilian button were described, some in sufficient quantities to be considered something more than rare occurrences.  Noting once again that cloth covered buttons may be under counted in these descriptions, there is much to suggest that white metal, mohair, brass, and, yes, wooden buttons were regularly worn by the lower classes in New Jersey at this time.  Perhaps the market was not as great as Mr. Randolph imagined or hoped might come to be, but there was a market nonetheless.

Benjamin Randolph went on to serve in the First Philadelphia  City Troop of horse at Trenton and Princeton in 1777, but today he is better known as a  talented colonial furniture and cabinet maker.  Thomas Jefferson's writing desk - the one on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence - is thought to have been made in May, 1776, by Benjamin Randolph.

________________________1.  De Pauw, Linda Grant, Fortunes of War: New Jersey Women and the American Revolution (Trenton, NJ, 1975).