Overview

Confederate soldiers are often portrayed as wearing rags, and from time to time many of them undoubtedly were. Colonel Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards for instance recorded meeting "General Hood's ragged jacks" on the way to Gettysburg in June 1863. On the whole however the Confederate quartermaster department was actually very successful in "filling all requisitions" for clothing made by the army. This is borne out by informal photographs of dead and recently captured Confederate soldiers who invariably appear to be dressed in workingmens' clothes which are certainly very shabby looking, but are otherwise in reasonably good condition.

By the middle period of the war the Texas Brigade was receiving all of its clothing through the quartermaster department since the distance involved and the presence of federal troops along the Mississippi made it very difficult to obtain additional clothing from home.

Nevertheless although they were clothed from a common source the Texans, as Colonel Fremantle noted, were far from uniformly dressed. The Richmond clothing depot certainly produced trousers and jackets to a standard pattern – the most appropriate jacket for the 4th Texas being the so-called Richmond Depot II - but they were cut from whatever cloth was at hand at any given time.

Instead of the regulation 'cadet gray' - a distinctly bluish shade - most jackets and trousers were an ill-defined colour known as 'butternut'. Sometimes this started off as a perfectly respectable grey before very quickly turning brown on exposure to sunlight, but more often it was a rather light brownish or yellowish dust colour. Because this clothing was normally drawn as and when required it was very uncommon for any two soldiers to be dressed exactly the same. A further complication was that although the depots largely switched from making frock-coats to short jackets or ‘roundabouts’ early in 1862, some frock coats and loosely cut 'sack coats' continued to be made and issued right through the war. An analysis of prisoner of war photographs from 1864 onwards suggests that frock coats and sack coats were still worn by as many as 10% of soldiers.

Next: Essential equipment

[Article by Stuart Reid]