After the War: A Glut of Goods

A ship from a Baltimore Album Quilt

ca 1845

The Quilt Complex

In New York City, so the story goes, a dry goods merchant named John Robins had been doing well during the War of 1812.

 

 "He purchased entire cargoes of such vessels as had successfully run the blockade and come into the harbor, or were smuggled through Canada." In early 1815 he heard "a large lot of dry goods was advertised to be sold at auction at the Tontine Coffee House... There were a thousand cases of dry goods to be sold. Whether they had run the blockade safely, or been smuggled through Canada, I cannot say. The goods were at a warehouse in Pine Street. They had been exhibited a week. There were buyers here from Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Albany and every city around.

 

The Tontine Coffee House by Francis Guy (1760-1820).

 The building on the left was a meeting place

 for trading and public auctions.

"The Saturday bidding was very spirited, and the highest prices of the war were reached; the commonest samples of unwashable calicoes brought fifty to seventy-five cents a yard, such as to-day would sell at three cents.

"Everybody outbid Mr. Robins...About dark the sale closed. Every package had been sold. John Robins had bought none. He felt annoyed. His stock of goods on his shelves did not amount to but a few dollars, a few remnants of calicoes, which he could have carried on his shoulder. He went to bed about eight o'clock, sick of his hard luck. He had just began to drowse, when he heard some one down William Street shout 'peace.' "

 "Henry Laverty['s] store was heaped up with goods bought at the auction...Mr. Laverty was walking rapidly up and down the store and swearing like a trooper....There were no buyers... He would sell for half price...

By Monday "every auctioneer was busy selling goods of all kinds for a mere song." Robins felt lucky enough to tell the story of his auction experience with a dig perhaps at Laverty, who'd taught him the drygoods business.

Battle of New Orleans by Esther Magafan

 

 The War of 1812 ended on Christmas Eve 1814 when English and American diplomats agreed in the city of Ghent to end hostilities and return to pre-war boundaries. The British returned Maine which they'd been occupying and the Americans returned the area near present-day Ontario to British North America.

 

News of the treaty and its February ratification did not reach the United States until weeks later. Andrew Jackson led troops against the British in New Orleans and won. Henry Laverty gambled on calicoes and lost.

 

Philadelphia Fourth of July 1819 by John Lewis Krimmel

Philadelphians feted the War's heroes for years.

John Robins was not the only New York dry goods merchant to benefit from the peace. The city, smaller than Philadelphia and Boston, enjoyed a post war boom. Robert Greenhalgh Albion in a history of the port of New York attributed part of the growth (much of it was due to the Erie Canal) to English imports.

 

"New York's rapid commercial rise...was stimulated when the British selected it as the center of their 'dumping' operations early in 1815. A huge surplus of textiles and other manufactures had been piling up in England during the years when the war had interrupted trade with America and the Continent; and manufacturers were naturally ready to sell them for whatever they might bring."

Ackermann's Repository in May 1810 included

swatches of fashionable fabrics of English manufacture,

 goods that had no market during the Napoleonic Wars.

 They piled up in English warehouses and

bankrupted weavers, printers and drapers.

What were they dumping?  The warehouses were packed with goods that had been waiting for peace.
I am guessing among the bolts---- many yards of panels, palm trees and small multi-color prints.

 

 

Textile historians have long characterized this print

 as one that was dumped after the War.

 

 

Ackermann's Repository July 1809

 The small multicolored calico prints.

 

Some references on the post-war textile trade

Joseph Alfred Scoville The Old Merchants of New York City, Volume 2, T. R. Knox, 1885.
http://books.google.com/books?id=IR2YOYMplbMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=cotton&f=false

 Robert Greenhalgh Albion The Rise of New York Port, 1815-1860. NY Charles Scribner; Sons 1939 (republished 1970)

 

Philadelphia Merchant and Quaker Quilts

Center of a wholecloth silk quilt made by Philadelphia Quakers

Hannah Callender, Sarah Smith and Catherine Smith,

Dated 1761

Collection of Independence Hall

Silk wholecloth quilts were a Quaker tradition.

Quaker Thomas P. Cope kept a dry goods store in Philadelphia in Pewter Platter Alley after the Revolution. In his diary he recorded the ups and downs of retail business through wars, embargoes, aggravating partnerships and ship wrecks.

Thomas P. Cope (1768-1854) in later life

 from the collection of the

Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Like many Philadelphians he was a Quaker.

Cope made far more money from the shipping business than from selling fabric and china in his store. He became an importer, a speculator in dry goods, and built a ship to sail between Philadelphia and ports in China, India and Europe.

Detail of a pieced silk quilt by

Quaker Rachel Goodwin Woodnutt,

Salem, New Jersey, late 1820s.

Collection of the Winterthur Museum.

Quaker dress relied upon plain colored silks, a commodity that Cope and other Quaker merchants imported for their customers.

Note the complex interlocked cable in the quilting, a pattern that became quite popular with later Pennsylvania quilters. See the whole quilt here:
http://content.winterthur.org:2011/cdm/singleitem/collection/quilts/id/351/rec/1

A month after the War of 1812 began Cope was lucky enough to have a ship's cargo released by the customs inspector. The Lancaster was carrying tea, silk and India goods from the port of Canton. "We sold the Cargo this day at public auction at a very large profit....Calicoes that cost from 5 to 7 1/2 went for 45 to 56 cts. per yard."

When I visited the Winterthur Museum for their exhibit Quilts in a Material World a few years ago I photographed another early silk Quaker quilt with similar quilting pattern.

 In October, 1813 Cope assessed the effects of the war on trade.

"The pressure of the war has been as yet but little felt by people in general. Those who had foreign goods on hand have mostly sold them at great profit, while the domestic manufacturers obtain large profits on what they make."

An advertisement from 1811 in a Philadelphia newspaper listing locally made fabrics. The Alms House was one of the public institutions where inmates manufactured fabrics. Note the "Fleece Cotton, for quilts, &c.," probably cotton batting.

The "Thomas P. Cope" by Edward Moran.

The artist and his artist brother Thomas Moran came to Philadelphia on this ship in the Cope Packet Line. This detail shows the ship on its way to Cope's wharf.

After the War of 1812 Cope's Line of Packets regularly sailed to Liverpool with passengers and freight. Once trade opened up again profits flowed and Cope began quite wealthy.

A few months after the war was over the Albany Argus advertised "Fresh Goods at Peace Prices". W.H. & J. Hoyt announced a post-war shipment of "seasonable goods, which they offer at a small advance from judicious purchases." Do note that New Yorkers were still selling slaves in 1815. In the lower right hand corner "For Sale, a negro boy, about 15."

Thomas Cope's diary was discovered in the 1930s and published in 1978.
Philadelphia Merchant: The Diary of Thomas P. Cope, 1800- 1851, edited by Eliza Cope Harrison (South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, 1978)

See a wool wholecloth Quaker quilt dated 1813, possibly made in Burlington, New Jersey in the collection of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum (# 2002.012.0001)
http://cdn.firespring.com/images/f4c4c237-ccae-4148-9422-ccbcfc388de8.jpg

Read Linda and Mary's blog on Quaker Quilt History here:
http://www.quakerquilthistory.com/

Another wholecloth quilt from the Winterthur collection.

See the catalog of the exhibit here:

http://books.google.com/books/about/Quilts_in_a_Material_World.html?id=PSpmQgAACAAJ

Drab Colors & Quercitron

Quilt with a ruffle of yellow-ground chintz

1800-1830

Spencer Museum of Art

University of Kansas

The long-lasting yellow dye may have been quercitron.

One fashionable chintz for furnishings and early quilts was known as drab style. My dictionary still defines drab as a light olive brown, but today's common meaning is dull or commonplace.

Detail of a whole-cloth quilt
from the Bidwell House Museum in Massachusetts

Camden, South Carolina, 1820

Wools in Drab or Bottle Green
 (Drab was olive green)

In 1812 drab style meant a color scheme of mustard yellows, olive greens and browns, a palette derived from a dye called quercitron, which can be printed with mordants similar to the way madder is printed. Different mordants produce different shades of green, brown and yellow.

Fabric sample from the Victoria and Albert Museum

Do a search for drab style in the Victoria and Albert database.

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O20190/printed-cotton/

Describing quercitron’s color scheme as drab style confuses us because there is nothing dull or commonplace about it. Bright mustards set against dark brown grounds with shades of olive green and touches of blue can be quite vivid.

The quilt on the cover of the Massachusetts Quilts

book has a border of drab-style chintz,

 a fashionable early 19th-century look.

Cut out chintz framed by a floral

with the distinctive quercitron yellow background.

Unlike other natural yellow dyes, quercitron yellow was colorfast.

The colors came from a dye new to Europeans.  About 1785 Englishman Edward Bancroft visited Massachusetts and found Americans using yellow dye from the bark of the North American black oak tree. He obtained an English patent for black oak bark and coined the word ‘quercitron" from the Latin quercus for oak and citrina, probably referring to a yellow fruit. When Bancroft’s fifteen-year patent expired in 1800, British mills created a rage for the dye called "bark" in the trade. It was inexpensive; it was colorfast and the color combinations were novel.

Drab-style dress print in the center

Fabric historians have defined drab style in different ways. Peter Floud, once curator of textiles at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, limited it to green, brown, yellow and blue derived from quercitron. Florence Montgomery at the Winterthur Museum wrote that it is really the absence of reds and purples that defines drab.

Drab roses and red roses

Dyers could print cotton in querictron's shades first and then print in madder to obtain the full range of colors from yellow and green through red and purple, but this doubling of techniques was expensive. Montgomery noted it was rarely done. However, Heather Hansen in her 2011 thesis The Quest for Quercitron cites Bancroft's own writing:

"In many cases, madder colours are mixed in the same piece with those of the bark..."

Mixing quercitron and madder printing methods was probably common, but the wide spectrum of color might have been thought of as a full-chintz palette. "Drab-style" defined a print with only quercitron or bark colors.

Jeremy Adamson dated the English fad for drab prints to 1800-1812 but it seem to have continued in American quilts through the first quarter and into the 1830s and ‘40s.

The idea of yellow and brown color combination, whatever the dyestuff, is often found in early patchwork.

Read Heather Hansen's 2011 thesis The Quest for Quercitron: Revealing the Story of a Forgotten Dye. She's studied the dye extensively and Bancroft's dashing life (he was a spy and has been accused of murder.) She also includes many samples of drab-style prints.
Click here and download the PDF:

http://dspace.udel.edu:8080/dspace/handle/19716/9800?show=full

Imported Prints: Rococo

Above: two rococo prints as quilt borders

Watching Downton Abbey occasionally inspires me to toss out the American walnut pie safe and buy a Rococo Revival armoire. It's highly unlikely---but I have been noticing more Rococo design in antique fabrics.

The Drawing Room at the real castle

was decorated in the 19th century,

an example of Rococo revival.

The footed vase is a staple of rococo design

Rococo (pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable) is a style of European decoration---high fashion in the 18th century there and lagging behind a few decades here.  It's characterized by a plethora of pattern---layers of decorated surfaces, in particular shell-like shapes. The word Rococo, applied in the 19th century when the revivals began, is thought be a combination of French and Italian from the French rocaille for stones and coquilles for shell, a play on the word Baroque.

My grandmother loved this look.  (Probably why I collect plain walnut pie cupboards.) William Morris was not fond of it either.

Characteristics include the scroll, the s-curve, the double s-curve, trailing ribbons, gold leaf, the illusion of net and the cartouche...

Cartouche- a scrolling frame

Cartouches & Baskets

Many of the furnishing-scale prints, the chintzes, of the 1800-1820 era show rococo influence.

Above are two small scraps from a quilt finished in the year Britain's Princess Charlotte died, 1817. The quilt was shown at the New England Quilt Museum last summer.

Wallpaper?

If you want a good stash of early prints look for cartouches, scrolls,

Nets

and curves.

Rococo detail is not a good clue to date since it's been revived so many times.

But it is a definite look in early 19th century chintzes

This John Hewson vase printed in Philadelphia

about 1800 shows a European rococo influence.

So where are you going to find rococo repros? The look is popular in decorating weight prints

and check out Kaari Meng's Paniers des Fleurs for French General and Moda.

The irony in the old quilts---in case you haven't noticed it---is the combination of the over-the-top rococo prints with simple and direct patchwork. 

A quilt probably from the 1840s

 with a border chintz in courtly Rococo style

 and blocks in Germanic folk art style

Read more about Rococo at these links:

The Cooper Hewitt Museum had an exhibit a few years ago:

http://archive.cooperhewitt.org/rococo/rococo.cooperhewitt.org/about.html

Heckscher, Morrison H. "American Rococo". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roco/hd_roco.htm (October 2003)

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roco/hd_roco.htm  

   

"Identifying Stylistic Trends in 18th Century Dress Silks" by Sherri Shokler

http://textilecollection.wisc.edu/featured_textile_articles/dress_silks.html

http://www.designsponge.com/2009/10/past-and-present-rococo-modern-rococo-roundup.html

Knowing more about Rococo style explains some of those strange shapes that float through chintzes.