Introduction

Clothes have many functions, but in our everyday lives, they often serve as expressions of identity and identifiers for other people. Clothing as resistance or protest is not new or unique: consider the Congresswomen wearing “suffragist white” in the 2020 State of the Union address, or students protesting the Vietnam War with peace sign armbands. Against dress codes or rules that may prohibit self expression, people have always found ways to resist within and without its imposed framework. 

That story becomes a little different with slavery, where many enslaved people had little access to clothing and were subject to many rules imposed about enslaved persons’ dress. How did enslaved people dress, within or despite restrictions on their self-expression? Using archaeological evidence from Woodland Plantation and historical records of the time, we can begin to illustrate that answer.