Welcome to our Pants Department.
In the 18thcentury, there were only three pants patterns: trousers, breeches, overalls. Ankle length trousers were issued to convicts and were very rare and super low status, below even field servants. Most people, including servants, wore breeches, which are pants which came down to the knee and fasten around the upper calf. “Overalls” were a specialized military garment, a combination of breeches and leggings/gaiters that came down below the ankle.
Through the first half of the 1700s, pants used a French fly front, much like the ones in modern button fly jeans, to provide a closeable opening in the front of the pant for calls of nature. This was simple and therefore cheap to make. In the late 1700s, a new opening design hit, the Bavarian/drop front design. Instead of one opening, the drop front has two, making a flap that drops down to make the opening. The Bavarian/drop front was really just a French fashion thing; it was basically two flies instead of one to do the exact same thing, but the two-fly design was extremely complicated and difficult to sew, making it an expensive design. As such, it was a high-status design, and rare among common folk, who stayed with the cheaper, tried and true fly front. The states were not about to pay for their enlisted men to have what amounted to designer pants fly, let alone train the shearmen to cut it out, nor train the sewers how to hand sew it.
Period images of rev war enlisted men’s crotches are naturally quite rare, and fly design is not exactly the focus of the image itself. The best sources are the 1779 von Germann watercolors, but most of them are rendered from the side, not the front, and neither the flies nor the waistband buttons can be seen. The examples in Colonial Williamsburg’s Works reveal that the Bavarian/ drop front fly design arrived among superwealthy Americans about 1775, and reached common folk in the 1790s. In de Verger’s “Yorktown” images of Washington’s Northern Army, only one man out of three is wearing one is wearing red Bavarian/drop front overalls, and these are probably the French Marine version.
Our breeches and overalls use the inexpensive and reliable fly front, because we believe it to be more authentic for enlisted men. Soldiers did not get haversack buttons nor pockets; why should they get fancy crotch openings?
In the Fall of 1775, Virginia issued her troops French fly wool breeches in the colors of blue, green, and gray, and with a simple button adjustment at the knee. It also issued them leggings as to cover their stockings.
When sent north, Virginia’s troops encountered a garment that combined the breeches and leggings, called “overalls.” Covering the stocking clad lower leg and instep was an European idea that dates at least to the late 1600s and are the basis for the British and French “gaiters.” In contrast, the American version stems from Southeastern Indian leggings, which come only to the ankle joint. The moccasins then have a collar that folds UP as needed to cover the ankle-foot joint. Accordingly, the American pattern does not have the extended foot cover.