Without a shirt on his back.

A week ago, I was fortunate in being included in a small group of volunteers from Red Bank Battlefield who were attending a lecture and demonstration on the art of turning flax into linnen given by Barbara Johns, noted fiber arts expert at the Lyceum in Mount Holly.

After the fascinating demonstration during which Ms. Johns took harvested field flax and 'hatched it' and stripped it and spun it into linen thread for weaving, there was a discussion.

Flax and linen played a part in the Revolution.  Cotton was one of the items from England that were being boycotted along with tea and paper.  There is a story, known to many who volunteer at Revolutionary War sites about Benjamin Franklin's daughter Sarah Franklin Bache collecting $200,000 pound with the help of a woman's organization and buying linen to make shirts for the soldiers who were literally shirtless, shoeless, hungry and freezing in Valley Forge.  Scott Flannigan set the story straight.

It was Esther de Bert Reed who actually got the ladies organization to go door to door to collect the money used to buy the linen to make the shirts, but she died and Sarah Franklin Bache took up the cause and followed through.  George Washington had been offered the money but told the Ladies Aid organization that the men needed shirts more, so they made the shirts.  I wonder how many shirts can be made from $200,000 worth of linen?

Behind the scenes stories are fascinating to me.  There are so many war maxims about the desperate need for material support such as: "for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of the shoe the horse was lost, for want of the horse the battle was lost" and the Napoleon quote (?) "an army travels on its stomach" and it is always worth acknowledging the part paid by so many unnamed and unrecognized background supporters.  It brings to mind Clara Barton, famous for creating the Red Cross during the Civil War, but who also created an office in the government for the collection of the names and ranks and locations of soldiers who died in battle so their families could be notified.  

By the way, on another topic, Clara Barton also created the first publicly funded school for children in New Jersey, in Bordertown, and her one-room school is still standing there.  She was hired to teach according to the custom of the time which was that those could could afford it, paid into the hiring of a teacher who tutored the children of the subsscribers  Clara lobbied the local government to provide funding for all the children, including the children of the poor whose parents couldn't afford to pay into the subscription plan.  Her school enrolled over 500 children, but Clara was replaced as head of the program by a man, which in the custom of the time was considered more 'seemly' and Clara left and went to Washington to help in the war effort, first as a battlefield nurse, and then as a collector of the names of the deceased, and finally as the founder and organizer of the Red Cross.