By the beginning of the Civil War, American slaves were clothed with Northern manufactured material which was produced by some of New England’s most prominent families. One mill-owning family which produced slave or “negro” cloth was Bristol, Rhode Island’s DeWolf family, whose earliest fortunes were made in the transatlantic slave trade.
The cloth known as Negro Cloth, Slave Cloth, or Plantation Cloth were often cotton and wool mixed fabrics, of a coarse texture, durable but not comfortable, in solid colors of white, blue, brown, and gray. The cloth made by slaves, however, tends to be striped or checked, requiring a basic level of numeracy to weave and creativity in design that belies the commonly held racial stereotypes of the period. Why was uniformity in slave clothing preferred on the plantations of the deep South? How did enslaved workers fight back against the smothering of individual identity?
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Madelyn Shaw, an independent curator specializing in American social, cultural, and design history, will answer these questions in a lecture on slave cloth and its connection to Bristol and the DeWolf family, on Thursday, September 8th at 7 PM at the Roger’s Free Library at 525 Hope Street, Bristol.
This lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, please call the Linden Place office at 253-0390.
