If you are familiar with the painting " Prisoners From the Front" by Winslow Homer, you will notice the Federal private who is guarding the rebels is wearing his socks bloused. From this they appear to be a grayish brown color. While not really proof , it was painted by an artist who was an eyewitness and shows a good eye for detail. Therefore IMHO you can't go wrong using a color similar to them. But as Karin states, undyed natural wool comes in all shades.
I've been a big Winslow Homer fan for a long time, but somehow overlooked this painting. He also did an etching of a sharpshooter in a tree who has his socks bloused. Don't remember whether that was made into a painting as well, but if so, that could be another source for color options.
Personally, I think the contractors supplying the armies were looking for every opportunity to shave a few cents off their cost of production. Undyed yarn, since it didn't have to go through the additional step of transport to a dyer's vat and transport from there to the manufacturing site, would seem to be a logical thought. However, some of those contractors were likely picking up yarn through jobbers who would buy up leftover lots from other manufacturers (i.e. a weaving factor that has gone belly up). That yarn could cost less than new, undyed yarn. Sometimes if you are going for the bottom dollar, you'd get some wierd combinations.
Another point that I totally forgot to mention last night is "shoddy." Shoddy, before the war, was solely a textile term, and it refers to old clothing that has been used past the point of any further use. It is then sold to a jobber who puts it through a shredder, reducing it back to loose fiber. That fiber is called "shoddy." It would be sold to a spinning mill, to be combined with new wool and respun. Even though it can be spun with new fiber, the shoddy "bits" always retain the dye they were originally dyed with. So the resulting yarn has little flecks of different colors in it. As does the resulting fabric. Depending on how much shoddy was mixed in, it could increase the total weight of fiber to be spun, thus increasing the amount of resulting yarn, and the cloth to be made of it. Sort of like when you have a 3 pounds of ground meat and 18 kids -- two pounds of bread crumbs, 8 cups of mashed potatoes, five onions and three peppers mixed in will help to stretch it into a sizable meatloaf. But it's all in the proportions -- add too much breadcrumbs and you've got a "breadloaf" with little flecks of meat in it.
Period people knew about shoddy and could recognize it at a glance. Before the war, a pair of pants made out of shoddy was a perfectly respectable item of clothing. Mind you, it wasn't something you'd wear to church, but wearing them to go haying, to slop the hogs, to wear to the foundry, the blacksmoth shop, or the sugar bush was a perfectly respectable, perhaps commendably frugal, thing to do. Sort of like a pair of "no name" jeans from Target today -- an adult might wear those to buy groceries, take apart a car, slop hogs, muck out the horse barn. Of course, the average 15 year old young woman would prefer death over wearing a pair of Target jeans -- she's only going to wear Guess, or Jordache, or Aeropostale.
Fabric made with shoddy is a little bit weaker than fabric made with all new wool. But if you keep the proportion of shoddy fairly low, it's not going to be a noticable difference. You will be able to see the shoddy, and get a relative guess as to it's proportion by the number and variety of flecks of different colors in the sock. Problem is that as the war wound on, contractors were in a "race to the bottom" to figure out ways to shave cents off their material costs. If you add 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80% shoddy, you'll have a ton of fiber to spin into yarn. The resulting yarn will look like an explosion in a paint factory, and not stand up well to too much punishment. For example, a 20 mile march in a pair of poorly made brogans. And that is how the soldiers of the 1860s re-defined "shoddy" so that it became known as "poorly made, likely to fall apart on you when you're depending on it. Trust me, after your new socks with all that shoddy literally disintegrated in your shoes at mile 1, you'd do your best to avoid another pair of socks, another blanket, another shirt that had lots of shoddy in it.
It's my suspicion, from knowing lots of real life soldiers, that when a new sock issue was pending, some of them plied the quartermaster with whatever he liked best so that they could pick over the incoming socks. And those with the highest amount of shoddy got left for the fresh fish. Just my suspicion, no documentation.....
Hope that's helpful,
Karin Timour
Period Knitting -- Socks, Sleeping Hats, Balaclavas
Atlantic Guard Soldiers' Aid Society
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