Although English elegance was much sought after, even the rich had
few clothes. In the new cities, the “middling” class had only a “Sunday
best” outfit and work clothes. Along the frontier, clothing was even more
simple. For shoes, when they wore any at all, frontiersmen and their fami-
lies usually had moccasins. Men wore buckskin “hunting shirts” and leg-
gings, suitable for work in newly cleared fields; women spun wool, flax, or
cotton cloth from which they cut and sewed their own dresses. Women
were used to nursing and tending numerous children and to continuous
heavy labor not only at the cooking hearth but alongside men in the fields;
such style as a frontier woman affected was strictly utilitarian. Whatever
they had to wear, Americans usually wore it long after we (or our near
neighbors) would have insisted it be washed.
Along the Atlantic coast, more effort was made at cleanliness. A
recently arrived Scots tutor in the house of a Virginia grandee was aston-
ished at the ostentatious show of cleanliness. “They wash here the whitest
that ever I seed,” wrote John Harrower in his journal in 1774, “for they first
Boyle all the Cloaths with soap, and then wash them, and I may put on
clean linen every day if I please.” If he did, he must not have worn it next to
his skin. Soap was so harsh that the rags used for babies’ diapers were usu-
ally just dried in front of the fireplace rather than washed. Perfume had not
come into fashion in America, so the body odors that we have been adver-
tised into believing objectionable were accepted as normal. Along the fron-
tier, the use of bear grease as a hair “conditioner” did not help, particularly
as it became rancid; and a diet of heavy, fatty meats with few vegetables
other than corn contributed to bad breath.
Bad breath also arose from the almost total lack of dental hygiene: few
people, even among the rich, had good teeth or, in later adulthood, any
teeth at all. Yet, overall health, as Charles Woodmason found on the fron-
tier, was surprisingly good. Compared with the incoming English troops,
even poorer Americans were tall (probably about 5 feet 7 inches would be
the average for an American soldier, about 2 inches taller than a British sol-
dier), sturdy, and well built, because, poor as they were, Americans ate and
were housed better than Englishmen.
The colonists paid a price for what they acquired from England. By the
time of the Revolution, southern planters were in debt to London mer-
The Growth of the Colonies 149