The Stamp Act soon stirred all patriotic Philadelphians to the resolve to eat no “meat of the mutton kind,”—a resolve rendered still more stern in 1775. A wool-factory was fitted up, and, to quote Mrs. Alice Morse Earle,[2] “an appeal was made to the women to save the state. In a month four hundred wool-spinners were at work.” In the same year the Provincial Congress made an appeal to the people for thirteen thousand warm coats for the Continental army, to be ready for the soldiers when winter came. It was a time when all preparations for the war seemed to be in the most hopeless snarl, and army supplies were scarce and often lacking. To-day a contractor would make nothing of the job, possibly in more senses than one; but a hundred years ago the wool-wheels and hand-looms were set humming by hundreds of hearth-stones, and, writes Mrs. Earle again, “the order was filled by the handiwork of patriotic American women.” In the record book of some New England towns may still be found the list of the coat-makers.... Every soldier volunteering for eight months’ service was given one of these homespun, homemade, all-wool coats as a bounty. So highly were these ‘Bounty Coats’ prized, that the heirs of soldiers who were killed at Bunker Hill before receiving their coats were given a sum of money instead. The list of names of soldiers who then enlisted is known to this day as the ‘Coat Roll,’ and the names of the women who made the coats might form another roll of honor. The English sneeringly called Washington’s army the ‘Homespuns.’ They little knew the power and significance of that title. Well did Horace Bushnell call it “mother and daughter power.”