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PRE-CIVIL WAR MILITIA WAISTBELT

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This waist belt comes from the Texas Civil War Museum and is typical of prewar militia belts that often show up in early Civil War photographs of Confederate volunteers equipped by necessity with whatever military gear was at hand or stored by local militia companies. The belt is plain black leather, fairly wide, appropriate for militia use in drill and parade, but likely not originally intended to take much stress or abuse in the field, being constructed of two lengths, turned slightly under and then stitched together.  Measures 35 ½” in length and 1 5/8” in width. This was a pattern designed to be worn either without a belt plate, or with a floating, non-functional belt plate having belt loops but no tongue, sometimes referred to as a French style. These are not common in US accoutrement plates, but O’Donnell and Campbell show one as Plate 195, used by the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, though they think it was fastened by end of the belt passing through the loops and hooking back on itself in some manner.

The belt could also be worn with no plate at all, making it rather appropriate for the theoretically subdued uniforms of a rifle company. The belt fastens with a small roller buckle attached to one end that takes a long, narrow latch tab or billet sewn on the inside of the other end of the belt some distance back from the tip. The belt can thus be buckled and adjusted with the wider main belt then passing over the buckle, concealing it and tucking into wide belt loops further back.

It looks to us like the buckle had pulled away and was repaired or replaced with a new tab to hold it and a fixed belt loop on the end. Some signs of other stitching on the inside of the belt indicate there were likely some other straps attached at one point, perhaps a shoulder support belt, bayonet frog, or something like that. In any case this is an interesting militia belt, likely thirty years old when the Civil War began, but which might have been taken out of the trunk again when the need arose. It displays well and would look great alongside some of the older militia muskets hurriedly converted from flintlock to percussion and rushed into service in 1861.  [sr] [ph:m]

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