Sometimes as a historian, I find it’s necessary to play the role of a detective and ask “whodunit” and “what’s the motive,” when working with the mysteries of Civil War material culture. One of these mysteries is the mismatched shirt sleeves that are occasionally encountered on Civil War era men’s shirts.
These occasional mismatches are not in fabric color or printed/woven designs, but rather in how many pieces of fabric were used to construct each sleeve. For example: a shirt may have a left sleeve that is of one-piece construction (sewn with a seam on the underside of the sleeve, and a fold on the upper side), and a right sleeve that is of two-piece construction (sewn with seams along both the upper side and underside of the sleeve). Was this the result of an accident, or by design?
The Evidence:
Many surviving nineteenth century shirts feature one-piece sleeves. This appears to have been a common style of shirt design, based on Antebellum publications that served as guides for (predominantly women) sewists on cutting and stitching shirts as a type of home-based business. However, not all shirts of the period were designed to have a one-piece sleeve.
The April 1857 issue of “Godey’s Lady’s Book” mass distributed a shirt pattern that was designed to include two-piece sleeves. To explore how widely distributed this pattern was, we need to consider the circulation numbers for “Godey’s” during the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1860, there were over 150,000 subscribers to “Godey’s,” which was more than twenty-times the average subscription rate for magazines in the United States. There are also historic accounts of past issues of “Godey’s” being curated by subscribers to be used for future reference (on topics such as sewing projects), which prolonged the period of this shirt pattern being utilized to beyond 1857. It is also likely that there may be additional patterns for shirts designed with two-piece sleeves that have yet to be discovered or brought to the attention of larger audiences.
So, there is evidence of shirts that were designed to have matching sleeves—whether those sleeves were meant to be one-piece or two-piece. But, what about evidence for mismatched sleeves by design?
One of the best exhibits of evidence for mismatched shirt sleeves by design is in documents published by the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC). In 1864, there was a mass distributed bulletin from this organization that detailed construction for wool flannel shirts to be manufactured and dispensed to U.S. soldiers.
The cutting instructions for these USSC shirts specified a wool flannel that was only 26 inches wide, a common width that was the result of narrow looms. After stating how many yards would be required for the garment, the cutting instructions state the following:
“One sleeve and a half can be cut out of the width of the flannel, and in cutting a number of sleeves, one may be made to fadge into the other.”
You read that right, the instructions are only for a shirt with 1 1/2 sleeves! The other half sleeve is to be obtained through cutting multiple shirts and “fadging” (to piece together) another half sleeve in an almost assembly line-like atmosphere.
In recreating the USSC wool flannel shirt pattern for Civil War Patterns, I found that the sleeves were designed to be one-piece to match the fitted style of armscye as printed in the original bulletin. A “fadged” sleeve requires the simple addition of a seam allowance on the upper side of the sleeve to accommodate the two pieces of fabric being sewn together, otherwise the fitted style of armscye would need to be redrafted.
Would this addition of a seam allowance have seemed out of place to a Civil War era cutter or sewist? Probably not. The practice of “fadging” or piecing together sections of fabric to make up enough for a garment component was historically common, based on surviving textiles from the period. In a well-organized cutting operation, the shirt components for stitchers could have been intentionally bundled as kits to have matching sleeve components, such as one shirt having two one-piece sleeves and another shirt having two, two-piece “fadged” sleeves. However, based on the material culture record, it’s very possible that a shirt with mismatched sleeve construction during the Civil War period might not have drawn that much attention—it was just another pieced garment.
The practice of “fadging” is somewhat similar to elements of the current fashion design strategy of “Zero Waste.” In which through pattern design and cutting, as much fabric is utilized as possible. Not only is “Zero Waste” good for the environment, but it also saves money by reducing the amount of fabric needed to produce garments. The savings from this practice might not be that impactful when making a single garment, but if an entity was making multiple garments in the tens, hundreds, or thousands—then those savings add up both material-wise and monetarily.
Closer to Solving the Mystery:
For historic pattern developers and cutters, mismatched sleeves were designed as a matter of economy, whether it was the small-scale efforts of a home sewist creating shirts for family members, or the large-scale manufacture of shirts to clothe soldiers in one of the darkest periods of American history.
This moves us closer to solving the mystery of the occasional mismatched sleeves of Civil War shirts. It appears the answer to “whodunit” is the pattern developer and/or garment cutter, with the motive being to design a garment pattern that utilized as much fabric as possible.
The occasional shirt with mismatched sleeves is a small detail in reproduction Civil War material culture. But the depth resulting from small details can contribute to a deeply impacting story when part of a museum exhibit, a historic interpreter’s clothing, or an actor’s costume.