Cotton shirts were one of the first garments requested by the U.S. Sanitary Commission (USSC) for volunteer sewists on the home front to construct during the American Civil War. These early USSC shirt patterns had specialized features such as tie closures, bed gown lengths, and openings for wound accessibility that discouraged their use outside of hospital settings. By 1862, there were actions being taken by regional soldiers’ aid societies to make these shirts adaptable to the conditions volunteers encountered as they worked to provide comfort for United States soldiers, not only in hospital settings—but also in camps, on marches, and while holding battlefield positions.
Civil War Patterns has researched two of these regional shirt variations in depth for the development of patterns that can be used to help tell the stories of volunteers on the home front who stitched and distributed these garments—and those who wore them while serving in the U.S. military during one of the darkest periods in American history. Below are the two regional variations that were studied for this cotton hospital shirt project:
Western Theater of Operations Variation:
One of these adaptations to the USSC cotton shirt pattern was designed by the Cincinnati Branch of the United States Sanitary Commission, with the first specifications distributed to aid organizations on February 1, 1862. These specifications called for the shirt to feature sleeve cuffs and a placket front that closed with buttons. As a result, these modifications to the cotton USSC shirt pattern, provided a garment that could be worn by a suffering soldier in a variety of environments.
Home front distribution of this garment’s pattern and specifications seems to have been largely focused on the well-populated states of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. However, shirts of this style appear to have been widely provided to suffering soldiers serving in the Western theater, regardless of what state they originated from. This modified pattern, would have likely been one of the most common cotton shirts manufactured by soldiers’ aid societies in the Western Theater until the summer of 1864 when the USSC updated their requests for cotton shirt donations to follow a nationally distributed pattern. Learn more about the 1862 Cincinnati Sanitary Commission shirt by following this link.
Eastern Theater of Operations Variation:
In April of 1863, the New England Women’s Auxiliary Association (NEWAA) experimented with how to ease shirt distribution challenges resulting from separate patterns for wool or cotton fabrics, by publishing specifications for a singular shirt pattern that could be manufactured out of either cotton fabric or wool flannel. Based largely on an earlier USSC cotton shirt pattern variation that had wide distribution, this garment was designed to utilize the experience and supplies of essentially any sewing circle in the New England states of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
This experimental shirt featured buttons instead of ties but was somewhat awkward to wear in that it had a wide cut body to fit most soldier sizes, a large sized neck, no cuffs, and it opened all the way down the front to provide potential access to wounds if necessary. While this was an incredibly versatile garment, it lacked the styling and comfort of another shirt simultaneously piloted by the NEWAA that was wool-only with a placket style front. It was eventually phased out of production during the summer of 1864, when the USSC began nationally distributing updated patterns for specific cotton-only and wool-only shirts. Although this experimental shirt had a short lifespan, it contributed to the hundreds of thousands of shirts provided to suffering United States soldiers serving primarily in the Eastern Theater of operations. Check out this link to learn more about the experimental 1863 NEWAA shirt pattern.
Conclusion:
It’s very likely that these regional variations of cotton hospital shirts have not been sewn in over 160 years, and Civil War Patterns is excited to offer these patterns once again—but now with an increased range of sizes and over 100 pages of instructions. While the typical shirt of U.S. soldiers during the American Civil War was a government issue shirt, such as Civil War Patterns’ H.B. Lord contract shirt, cotton soldiers’ aid society shirts offer additional options for story telling through museum exhibits, actors, and living history interpreters.