Tartan under Union Blue

Tartan crossed the Atlantic long before the Victorian taste for Highland dress, and in 1861 it marched into an American war. Several volunteer regiments wore Scottish-pattern cloth, the best documented being the 79th New York Highlanders, whose tartan trews and kilts made them recognisable on any parade ground of the Army of the Potomac.

Which Civil War regiments wore tartan?

The 79th New York State Militia, raised in 1859 among the Scottish community of New York, is the clearest case. Its full dress included a tartan kilt and plaid, and the regiment carried that dress into federal service in 1861. Other formations borrowed pieces of the tradition: pipe bands attached to a handful of regiments, trews issued to some companies, and Scottish-style dress worn by militia units in Boston and elsewhere. The kilt was never regulation United States uniform, so each case rests on a unit's own choice and fund-raising rather than on any army order.

Photographs, uniform returns and museum pieces keep the record. The regiment's history is summarised on the 79th New York Infantry page, which lists its battles from First Bull Run to the siege of Petersburg and notes the Highland dress that made the unit distinctive.

What did the kilt mean to Scottish-American volunteers?

For the men who signed the rolls, the tartan stated a double loyalty. It declared Scottish descent inside an American cause, and it told the crowd on the parade route exactly who was marching. The same cloth that named a clan at home named a community abroad: weavers in Scotland supplied setts to families who had been gone a generation, and the pattern worked as a passport stamp in wool.

Recruiters understood the appeal. A regiment dressed like the 42nd or 79th of the British Army carried inherited prestige, and a young man of Scottish name could see himself in the recruiting posters. The dress was expensive to keep in the field, and by 1862 the kilts were largely confined to parade and photographs, but the identity outlasted the cloth.

How was the uniform actually made and worn?

The surviving photographs show a practical compromise. The kilt appeared in full dress and early-war portraits, while fatigue duty fell back to trousers or tartan trews, which kept the sett visible without the wear and cost of a pleated kilt. Feather bonnets, diced hose and plaids completed the picture for parade. Quartermasters disliked all of it: wool cloth in quantity, leather sporran straps, and hose that wore through on the march all strained a volunteer regiment's accounts.

The dress also drew fire, literally. A recognisable uniform made a recognisable target, and contemporaries noted that the Highlanders' appearance marked them out in the line. The men wore it anyway, which tells you what the cloth was worth to them.

A useful comparison sits closer to home: the same era produced festival dress codes across Europe, where sash, badge and plaid each announced a company or a rank. Whether the cloth declared a clan, a corps or a shooting fraternity, the grammar was the same.

How is that dress remembered now?

Memory keeps the tartan in three places. Re-enactment groups reproduce the 79th's dress with careful attention to the sett; regimental museums in New York hold surviving garments and photographs; and the written record keeps arriving in unexpected forms. The war these regiments marched through is also written in short verse: a small collection of poems on the Civil War arranges the conflict battle by battle, and the form's compression suits a war remembered in fragments.

What matters for the modern wearer is the precedent. Tartan in America was never costume alone; it was a declaration of where a family came from and what it had joined. That is the same logic that governs the pattern books at home, where a sett records a name, a district or an occasion, and where the clan tartan register still serves the purpose a recruiting poster once did.

Where does this leave the modern reader?

Two lessons carry over. First, tartan travels well because it is a notation, not a garment: the same threadcount can be woven in Edinburgh, worn in New York and read by a descendant a century later. Second, the meaning sits in the wearing. The 79th's men were American soldiers who chose to announce a Scottish origin, and the cloth did the announcing.

Anyone tracing a family connection to a Highland regiment can start with the explained structure of the Scottish Register and then look across the Atlantic, where the same setts were already doing duty in a different uniform.