Confederate Enlisted Coat, ca. 1864
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GUEST:
My dad had this coat in his family, and it was given to him by his great-grandfather. And he had it in the family for many years hanging on the wall. When he died, we cleaned out the house, and this jacket was part of the house cleaning.
APPRAISER:
Has anyone looked at this to assess it for a value?
GUEST:
Many years ago, it was at a Civil War conference in, I believe it was Georgia. There was a man there that said he could give me a standing offer of $10,000.
APPRAISER:
Tell me about the individual who brought this home from the Civil War. What do you, what do we know about him?
GUEST:
Okay, he's my great-great-grandfather, C.N. Thorp, and he was a Union soldier. They went to war. He ended up in three prisons and survived them all. And the last one was Andersonville.
APPRAISER:
Well, he left us a note, which was very kind of him, in 1917. It says, "This jacket is part of a Confederate private soldier's uniform, traded while new, to the writer, for his ragged army blouse about April 20, 1865, as said writer was leaving Andersonville, Georgia, for delivery to U.S. authorities at Jacksonville, Florida, where he arrived April 28, 1865, after having been a prisoner of war in Richmond, Virginia; Danville, Virginia; and Andersonville, Georgia; from capture at Chickamauga, Tennessee, September 20, 1863, until released April 28, 1865, for a period of 19 months and eight days." That is a long time to spend as a guest of the Confederacy, especially considering the conditions that were involved.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
When you brought this up, the thing that grabbed me right off the bat was the fact that this is unquestionably an original Civil War Confederate soldier's jacket. This is exactly what it purports to be. This is exactly what your ancestor tells us it is. By the characteristics, looking at it, we can tell that it's a late war coat. It was most likely produced in Georgia. It has some of the characteristics of several of the different depots that were in operation down there, but a little more abbreviated than the earlier coats, which, frankly, as collectors and historians, makes it even more interesting to us. The material is wool jean. This color, a lot of people describe this as butternut, and it's referred to in period letters with Union soldiers writing home talking about the Johnnies and their butternut coats. It did not start out life as this color. This started out gray.
GUEST:
Oh!
APPRAISER:
And what has happened is that the dye that was used to make that gray has oxidized, and recent tests by historians have shown that that oxidation happens fairly quickly. So it went from a gray color when brand-new to this brownish, drab color very, very quickly. The other features that we like about this, you can tell that it's a hand-sewn coat. The buttonholes are hand-sewn. The lining is hand-sewn. It is everything that you would want it to be to be a correct Confederate coat. These are very, very rare on the market. Identified Confederate coats are scarce items.
GUEST:
Really?
APPRAISER:
So you said you had an offer of $10,000 on this.
GUEST:
Right. That was many, many years ago.
APPRAISER:
And conservative auction estimate for this item would be between $30,000 and $50,000.
GUEST:
I'm glad I didn't take the offer. (laughs)
APPRAISER:
This is a wonderful piece. It knocked our socks off when you brought this to the table.
GUEST:
I want to thank you very much.
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