family, who within a few years would build the great Belle Meade plantation
house, were still in their log cabin as late as the 1840s.
No houses had bathrooms. Water was brought in by bucket. Bathing
was infrequent even among the rich and fastidious. Thomas Jefferson
famously washed his feet almost every day, but he was probably as unusual
in that as in his more intellectual activities. And toilets, known as privies
(from the French word for private,privé) or outhouses, were usually simple
lean-tos over a pit. This arrangement was not particularly inconvenient,
except in the winter chill and in crowded cities. The answer for the well-to-
do was the chamber pot, known as a “necessary.”
The well-to-do also announced their status by their clothing. For men,
a ruffled shirt offset by a scarlet or yellow vest atop knee breeches joining
silk stockings fitted into elaborate shoes with silver buckles was the mark of
the “better sort.” And, having given up the long, flowing wigs of King
Charles’s era, they began to affect the shorter periwig, which is still worn by
English judges and barristers. In such an outfit, a man could never be
accused of having to stoop to sordid physical labor. For a woman, a billow-
ing skirt atop awkward high-heeled shoes and an occasionally fantastic
hairdo would prevent her from being taken for a scullery maid.
Clothes made in America were considered less desirable than those
made in England. On June 24, 1765, George Washington wrote in his diary
that he had ordered a suit of clothes of “fashionable coloured cloth...in
the best taste to sit easy and loose as Cloaths that are tight always look awk-
ward and are uneasy to ye wearer.” Benjamin Franklin wrote on May 9,
1759, that the better-off American colonists usually
wear the manufactures of Britain, and follow its fashions perhaps too
closely, every remarkable change in the mode making its appearance there
within a few months after its invention here [in London]; a natural effect
of their constant intercourse with England,by ships arriving almost every
week from the capital, their respect for the mother country, and admira-
tion of every thing that is British.
As they took each step forward, Americans looked back over their shoulder
toward England.
148 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA