Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards (review)

As material displays of identity, markers of class and status, or symbols of political persuasion, clothing's power to convey a variety of cultural messages has been of increasing interest to historians. Certainly, the economic significance of clothing and textiles for both trade and manufacturing in early America is widely recognized. Vastly underappreciated, however, is the place of law in those dynamics. As Laura Edwards demonstrates in her newest work, both the social and economic value of textiles derived from the legal principles that attached to this form of property: "the legal principles associated with textiles involved foundational cultural values and social customs that defined the good order of society" (20). Everyone knew the value of clothing and textiles, generally knew who the owners of those items were in their communities, and recognized that court protections of those possessions were necessary to uphold public order. Clothing, cloth, linens, drapes, and even accessories like hats thus represented a unique type of property that allowed the people who produced them, traded them, and wore them to make claims to property, even if they lacked strong claims to other legal rights. For dependent persons, including married women, free Blacks, and enslaved peoples, textiles could be owned and traded, used as currency, credit, and capital. Proceeding in three parts containing thematic chapters while charting a chronological narrative, the book demonstrates how marginalized people could rely upon the legal principles that attached to textiles to both engage in the economy and access the governing institutions of the new nation, at least for a time.

The legal principles attached to textiles, as shown in the book's first part, pre-dated the American Revolution and were minimally altered by the establishment of the U.S. federal system. In line with recent scholarship demonstrating the extent to which people on the margins were engaged in commercial exchange, Edwards elucidates how the legalities of textiles superseded the laws of coverture and slavery to allow people with no formal rights to enter the textile trades in the decades following the Revolution. Rebecca Coles, for instance, established a successful textile business in Virginia around the same time as the Revolution, producing fabric to be used not only by the household on the plantation, but for sale. That Coles might be considered a manufacturer defies the assumptions many of us hold regarding the power of a rights-based legal framework: How could a married woman with no legal claim to the things she produced be a successful manufacturer? The answer resides in the legal qualities of textiles, qualities lodged especially in public law where concern for the public good had long allowed claims to textiles by those whose property rights would not be recognized under private law. Non-rights holders adopted an array of creative strategies to obtain the legal recognitions that allowed them to tap into textiles' full economic potential as currency and capital to trade, pawn, lend, or save. From the tale of prisoners at Philadelphia's Walnut Street jail selling the clothing they had been gifted to obtain alcohol between 1789 and 1820, to the story of Rosenah Gray, an enslaved woman who invested in fabric for resale and saving but was accused of theft in 1802, the rich examples in the book's second part demonstrate the various ways textiles functioned as financial instruments as well as consumer goods. Careful to note that racial and class privilege structured the range of opportunities available to marginalized peoples, Edwards nonetheless demonstrates the extent to which people facing structural inequalities could use the creation and circulation of textiles to their own benefit within the legal order of the republic.

Ultimately, Edwards argues, a series of shifts in the decades leading up to the Civil...