Larry Babits, BABITSLMAIL.ECU:

• For all of the Maryland Line (and probably the Delawares), the uniform was probably overalls, linen waistcoast, shirts (a little variety here is likely), blue coat with red facing, and military tricorn. This is based on the uniform issue they received in Mar/April 1780, just before heading south. It was supplemented due to shortage of wagons, but issuing more shirts at Petersburg.

  They were armed with French muskets and probably had the French cartridge box.

  I am not certain that they had garters or stocks. these do not appear in any post Camden inventories . The buttons on these men were USA buttons. The Delaware variants were gold tape on the hats where the Marylanders wore white tape. The Delaware [enlisted men] may have had DR pewter buttons based on battlefield finds. The officers had yellow metal DR buttons. The Maryland officers were supposed to have the number of their regiment and the letter M on their buttons.

• The Delaware Regiment was in Blue, not [brown]. After Camden, they continued to wear blue with red facings as that was the issue in Oct/Nov 1780. There is no documentation for the striped trouses. I've seen most of the Hillsborough issue records and don't recall a single instance of ticking (in all its permutations). They were issued clothing out of the Maryland stores which I can document from assembly up north to issue in NC. I can do the same for the 1781 issues. The American material [in the table below] is pretty fanciful stuff to my mind.

• For my study of the Southern Army supply, folks might want to check my article "Supplying the Southern Continental Army, March 1780 to September 1781" in Military Collector and Historian XLVIII(4):163-171. [47 (Winter 1995), pp. 163-171.] It cites everything I knew at the time.

Jay Callaham, callaham:

The Delaware Regiment was in Blue, not [brown]. After Camden, they continued to wear blue with red facings as that was the issue in Oct/Nov 1780. There is no documentation for the striped trouses. I've seen most of the Hillsborough issue records and don't recall a single instance of ticking (in all its permutations). They were issued clothing out of the Maryland stores which I can document from assembly up north to issue in NC. I can do the same for the 1781 issues. The American material is pretty fanciful stuff to my mind. -LEB

Now THAT is interesting, Larry. This is outside the scope of my research, so I've only been believing others who, I thought, had done their homework. They said that Kirkwood's was issued hunting shirts, and ticking trousers by the state of North Carolina sometime after Camden - - that's where the reenactment group gets the striped trousers with the fringed hunting shirts and still wear the cocked hat with yellow tape. So there's no evidence of the striped trousers? Interesting. I'd always questioned the style of stripes they had selected - modern mattress ticking rather than the older, wider stripes. That's very interesting.

Larry Babits, BABITSLMAIL.ECU:

The source for the striped trousers is Ward and an illustration in the Military Collector and Historian Plate Series. I have spoken at some length with Marko Zlatich and he told me that they could not find anything on the trousers either.

The reference seems to be that NC outfitted the Delawares (sp. Kirkwood's men) when they became part of the light infantry and went off with Smallwood to New Providence. If so, why didn't the MD and VA companies also get striped trousers? Well, one reason is that they were not available and I've seen most of that material. The second is that a resupply of clothing was coming - this from Maryland but it was issued to the MD/Del Division troops in late Oct/early Nov. I got the number of items issued to each company from the Otho Holland Williams Orderly Book and put the colors together from a variety of other sources, including Hessian and Virginia militia references.

It appears that the Delaware troops went to great lengths to keep their yellow hat tape. In Nov 1781, they were issued a new uniform that, as I recall was blue with yellow facings. The MDrs got Blue w/red and Red w/blue (In vol IX which is off my shelf right now.

The stripes on modern mattress ticking a very different from those in the past. I've got some repop British ticking that is twilled and browning greenish. That's from the 1830's though.