Hi, it's lovely to be here.
My name is Laura Edwards.
I teach in the History Department
here at Princeton University and
my official title is kind of long.
It is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial
Professor in the History of
American Law and Liberty.
And I'm excited to be talking with you
about my new book, which is just coming out.
So, I want to begin with six women
and a sheet. All of them, the women
and the sheet, appeared in New York
City's municipal court in 1804.
But actually it was a
sheet that started it all.
One of the women, Sarah Allingham,
charged another woman,
Judith Friel, was stealing the sheet.
Although the charges vastly oversimplified
the situation. Judith Friel was a
washerwoman, who just happened to have
the sheet among the dirty laundry
she was collecting that day.
So, imagine her consternation
where Sarah Allingham waylaid
her in the street, grabbed up all
her bundles, and began rummaging through them.
When Allingham found what
she insisted was her sheet,
she announced her discovery, loudly,
and marched off with it to file
charges, Friel following in her wake.
So, once in court it became clear that
Friel was merely transporting the sheet.
She had not actually stolen it.
It was another woman, Sally Riley,
who had taken it nearly a year earlier.
Riley then had sold it to Rosanna
Marara whose bundle of laundry
was the one that contained the sheet.
So, both of those women joined the other
two, making four women and a sheet in
court. Two more then appeared as witnesses
to support Rosanna Marara's claims that she
had purchased the sheet from Sally Riley,
bringing us to six women and a sheet.
Ultimately, the court awarded the
sheet to Rosanna Marara. Case closed.
But actually not so fast. Given conventional
historical wisdom, this dispute never
should have made it to court at all.
These were poor women, mostly Irish women
actually, squabbling over a very cheap sheet.
And, more to the point, they were married,
encumbered by coverture, a collection
of legal principles that limited wives'
legal rights and
subordinated them to their husbands.
Among other things, coverture prohibited
wives from owning property and prosecuting
court cases in their own names.
And more than that, coverture actually
gave husbands legal rights to property
their wives brought into marriage
and anything they acquired afterward.
So by those rules, Sarah Allingham
could not own a sheet at all,
let alone prosecute a case to claim
ownership. Yet, in Sarah Allingham's
case officials accepted both the
women's claims to property ownership
and their access to the legal system.
They did give a nod to
coverture's rules, identifying the
prosecutor as Allingham's husband,
attributing the ownership of the
sheet to him as well on the forms.
But after filling in the obligatory boxes,
officials dispensed with this fiction
that the matter had anything to do with
the husbands. For court officials, as well
as the women involved, the question was
which married woman possessed the sheet,
not whether a married woman could possess it.
To make things more interesting,
this case was not unusual. Between the
Revolution and the Civil War, courts in the
United States regularly dealt with similar
cases: cases involving claims by people on
the legal margins, claims often by people
without property rights at all, claims
that they made to clothing and related
accessories, such as hats and handkerchiefs,
also uncut cloth, and bed linens like this sheet.
So how could people without property rights
claim property? That is the question that
I explore in my new book,
Only the Clothes
on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History
of Power in the 19th-Century
United States.
The answers lie in the legal qualities
attached to clothing. People without
property rights, including married women
and enslaved people, relied on longstanding
legal principles that attach clothing
to the person who wore it. But they did
not stop there. Through use
these people expanded
those principles to make
legal claims to all kinds
of textiles and accessories that they
made or that simply passed through their hands.
And then they went further still, using the
security provided by law to turn these
goods into currency, into capital, and
into collateral, which gave them an entry
point into governing institutions and the
economy. People like Sarah Allingham
were not on the outside looking in as we
usually assume. Instead, they use textiles
to include themselves in governing
institutions and the economy.
They actually made law, insisting on the
recognition of commonly held legal principles
that, unlike property rights,
apply broadly to everyone.
The fuss over Sarah Allingham's
sheet was not unusual.
Once you start looking for textiles, you
realize that textiles were everywhere.
People made them, they sold them,
they fought over them all the time.
Yet scholars have tended to dismiss such
property as merely consumer goods, not
valuable, and focused instead on the kind
of property; land, slaves, commodities owned
by the minority of the population; but
assumed to have wide
reaching economic affects.
Textiles,
however, we're hardly just consumer goods.
They, too, were valuable property, valuable
property that unlike other forms of property,
most Americans could actually own in law.
By the time of the Revolution, the
economics of textiles had hit a real sweet spot.
What had once been luxury goods were now
more affordable and more available, but not
so cheap as to be completely worthless.
Quality mattered and people really knew
quality. A broad range of Americans,
including the poor and enslaved, could spot
fine linen, silk ,and wool at 10 paces.
And they could assess trimmings such
as ribbon and braid just as accurately.
That knowledge was on prominent display
in theft cases across the United States.
Parties to these cases would describe
cloth and clothing in great detail,
distinguishing cheap goods from expensive
ones, and rattling off information about
fiber content, colors, and patterns that most
people today would never notice
let alone remember.
Now all those details about patterns
and colors actually function
just like figures on a bank note.
And in fact, textiles were
preferable to bank notes
for most Americans. Possession of bank
notes was suspect for poor people and
people without property rights, the
presumption was that they could not have them.
Not so with the possession of
textiles, because of all the legal
principles associated with them.
Textiles also had economic advantages
over bank notes because they held
their value far more reliably.
The material qualities of textiles
also suited them for use as currency.
There was considerable
consensus as to their value;
they were extremely liquid; and they
came in different denominations;
which ran the gamut from handkerchiefs,
cheap, to expensive lengths of cloth.
When people traded in these
goods, they were not bartering.
They valued items in pounds and later
in dollars and then bought and sold
accordingly; or leveraged the value of
textiles as people did with other kinds of
property. They pawned them, they lent them,
they saved them to fund other ventures.
The result was this vast secondary
market, which provided not just access to
goods, but also the means to circulate them.
This part of the market was
everywhere and included
pawnbrokers, auctioneers, peddlers, grocers,
tavern keepers, tailors, dressmakers, and
vendors in open air markets, as well
as individuals who simply sold on the
streets and from their homes. To say that
this market was underground or informal
misconstrues its institutional underpinnings,
which depended on widely recognized rules.
Ownership was established through
an actual relationship to the goods,
as witnessed by other people: through
possession, through use, through display.
So wearing items actually
established ownership, but so
did securing them in trunks.
Although then the goods still
had to be seen by others.
Sarah Allingham lost her sheet because
Rosanna Marara had exactly the kind of
evidence that proved possession and took
the place of the information on a receipt.
She had witnesses who could describe the
property and value it, connect it to her,
the purported owner, provide the date
of purchase and verify the transaction.
There were rules for exchange as well.
People pawned cloth,
if they wanted it back; they loaned it,
if they did not. In pawning, people use
clothing as collateral against which they
borrowed paying fees/interest each week.
People charged with theft would often point
out that they had actually pawned the goods,
which meant that they could get them back,
and which meant that they
didn't actually steal them.
Loans, however, were different. With loans,
the owner expected return of the
textiles value plus interest, not
the goods themselves, which declined
in value with use over time.
You don't want a used handkerchief
back. Value of the item, the interest
or fee, and the length of the loan
were agreed to at the time of the loan,
usually verbally.
That was what Sarah Allingham's
case was actually all about.
The testimony suggests that she had loaned
the sheet to her neighbor, Sally Riley,
not because Riley was in desperate need
of bed linens, but because both women
were leveraging the sheets value. Riley
then sold it to Rosanna Marara, which was
an accepted practice and did not negate
her obligation to repay the value of the sheet.
It was only after Allingham believed that
Riley had reneged on the loan, that she took
matters into her own hands and seized the sheet,
hoping to recoup at least some of her loss.
Then she went to court because
it was not just about the sheet.
The rules of exchange also mattered,
enormously. Expectations of enforcement
ran deep and kept local courts
in both rural and urban areas busy.
It is remarkable that people without property
rights felt confident in pursuing cases
that looked an awful lot like assertions
of property rights. Even more remarkable
is the response of local officials who
dutifully sorted through evidence involving
sheets, shifts, shirts, hankerchiefs,
and shoes to figure out whose property
was whose. The legal qualities of textiles,
however, only went so far.
People without property rights could
not make claims through civil actions,
the usual means of reclaiming property
because such suits required the possession
of rights. Even people with rights, but
on the legal margins because of race and
class, found civil actions difficult because
they did not have the resources to pursue them.
So officials shifted these claims to public
law, an area of law where they could be
tried as criminal offenses, usually as theft.
The point in this area of law was to
right wrongs, to put things back where
they belonged, and that included sheets.
So in this area of law court officials
could act on complaints by people without
rights by treating their complaints
as matters involving the public order.
Matters involving claims to textiles
fit particularly well within this area
of law, because the legal principles
that allowed everyone to own and trade
these goods were so well-established, so
much a part of the public order already.
Prosecution affirmed those practices
and restored the property to the place
where it belonged without recognizing the
rights of the particular people involved.
But there were costs.
The legal charge, theft, was a convenience,
but it made varied property claims that
people without strong claims to rights
seem different and illegitimate from other
kinds of property claims. It criminalized them.
The implications, while ominous in the
decades following the Revolution, would
become inescapable later in the 19th-century,
as the balance of legal authority shifted
towards those areas of law that focused on
the rights of individuals and away from those
areas of law that could accommodate textiles.
So rights had definite advantages over textiles, though.
Where claims to textiles stayed in
particular context, rights-based
claims to property travel freely.
If individuals had rights, they could
claim property across all the mess of
jurisdictional lines within the United
States, within states, from state to
state, from states to territories,
and pretty much in all bodies of law.
Portability mattered a lot in a world
where people moved and goods flowed freely.
In fact, rights particularly property
rights, were a rare constant across
all the jurisdictional lines of
local, state, and federal courts.
The situation was challenging for
merchants and businesses who were
working across state lines or even just
working within many localities because
the rules were always different. But
the problems were even more fundemental.
Those laws also determined a person's
status and how they could move through the world.
People of African descent, notably were
presumed to be enslaved in some places,
some states, and free in other places,
other states. No wonder, then that the
elimination of restrictions on rights,
particularly the property rights of
women and African-Americans became
key political issues in the decades
leading up to the Civil War.
The problem, though, was that the extension
of rights did not allow for the kinds of
claims made with textiles. Nor did they
eliminate other legal restrictions that
kept all women, African-Americans, and even
poor white men from claiming rights in
practice. Textiles had given them legal cover
and without them, they were vulnerable.
To be sure, the extension of rights helped.
In fact, it was impossible to navigate either
the legal order or the economy without them.
But the possession of rights only went so
far as long as other restrictions remained in place.
By the late 19th-century, many
Americans still had little more than
the clothes on their backs, which had
become pretty flimsy legal coverings
by then. Still, this is
a story of hope as well.
People on the legal margins did not just wait
around for rights to be extended to them.
They used legal materials that they had
at hand to work toward a world where they
could claim their labor, possess their
property, and define their own destinies.
Those legal materials in the
early 19th-century were literally
the clothes on their backs.