“When we were kids we didn’t have much but we had what we needed. And my father always told us we were not to go outside barefoot. That was what hillbillies did. We would ride downtown, on Saint Paul for instance, and you’d see all the poor white kids out there in their bare feet. We called them city hillbillies.”

-Betty, about Baltimore, circa 1950

Most listings of servants list nothing about footwear and those that do are very specific, for shoes were a rarity among servants and when they had them they were often stolen or just issued [on credit] from their master. Part of the reason for this was the master and authorities did not want the servant to be able to escape into the woods. Walking the fields and dirt tracks in toughened bare feet was one thing, but negotiating the root-bound and rocky slops of the Appalachians was another. A listing of a jailbreak from Baltimore in 1869 states about the seven escapees:

“As many of them have been long confined, they appear pale, and their skins tender, tho'they are tolerable well in Flesh, [9] their cloathing is uncertain, as many of them had scarce any, and most of them barefooted.”

94 years later Robert E. Lee would have hoped that his soldiers would have been in such good shape. Most of Lee’s men had no shoes and were so thin they were called “scarecrows.”

At the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia the rebel soldiers awaited the Yankee onslaught just out of artillery range from behind their wall encouraging the floundering enemy as they staggered forward to their death with such taunts as, “A little closer, Yank, I don’t want to crawl far for my new shoes!”

Indeed, Lee’s worse performance as a General, the fateful Battle of Gettysburg was fought because he was trying to take a shoe factory for his men.

In the previous age of Irish Slavery in the 1700s, even when one had shoes they were often terrible. British soldiers did not have adequately fitted shoes and they did not even come in “right” and “left” but in one foot-deforming design.