What to Wear to a Riot in 1765
Fifteen years ago, volunteers working with Minute Man National Historical Park came up with scrupulously researched clothing guidelines for the reenactment of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Those guidelines continue to be updated with additional information. But they don’t necessarily apply to 1765, ten years earlier.
For the upcoming sestercentennial reenactments of the Stamp Act protests in Boston and Newport, Hallie Larkin and Stephanie Z. Smith of At the Sign of the Golden Scissors prepared guidelines for dressing in New England in 1765. That document can downloaded from this page at the Newport Historical Society.
It’s a big download: a 31-page P.D.F. file with lots of illustrations. There are many upper-class portraits, of course, but also images and other documentation about the clothing of middling folks and workers.
From eyewitness accounts of the Stamp Act protests we know the crowd was mixed. In Boston the daytime crowd included both men and women, as well as “two or three hundred little boys with a Flagg marching in Procession.”
After nightfall, Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote, the effigies were paraded around town by “Forty or fifty tradesmen, decently dressed,” followed by “some thousands.” Gov. Francis Bernard later declared those leaders were actually gentlemen disguised in middling dress; friends of the royal government never let go of the idea that political opponents in the elite were manipulating popular opinion rather than that the populace might have political initiatives of its own.
(Image above from a reenactment of 1770 recorded on the website of Nick Johnson.)
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