Brass Tacks III – Historical and
Archaeological Evidence of Widespread Use of Brass Tacks on Coffins over a Long Period of Time
The idiom, “get down to brass
tacks,” dates to at least 1863. No one
has been able to establish, with any certainty, the underlying meaning or
origin of the phrase. Candidates
include counter tacks, used to measure out the length of fabric in a
dress-good shop, Cockney rhyming slang for “facts,” the old practical joke of
putting a tack in someone’s chair, the brass tacks on the hull of a ship, or
tacks used to secure upholstery to wooden furniture.
New evidence points in a different
direction. “Getting down to brass tacks,”
or “coming down to brass tacks,” as the idiom usually appeared during its early
years, may refer to the brass tacks, or “coffin tacks,” that were used to
decorate coffins.
One article, from 1868, makes a
direct connection between “coffin tacks” and the proverbial, “brass tacks.” One other early reference, from 1864, is
suggestive of the connection, but does not explicitely make the connection. Standing alone, it is unclear whether the
association between “coffin tacks” and “brass tacks” reflected the writer’s
personal point of view, or was in line with the general understanding of others
during the same period.
(You can read a more
comprehensive account of the early history of the idiom in my earlier post, Brass
Tacks, Counter Tacks, Furniture Tacks and Coffin Tacks – Nailing Down the
Deathly Serious History and Etymology of “Getting Down to Brass Tacks”.)
Historical and archaeological evidence
of the widespread use of brass tacks on coffins over a long period of time,
across different regions, cultures, and social strata, suggests that “brass
tacks” may well have been commonly associated with undertakers, coffins, and
the serious business of dying. To “get
down to brass tacks” is to get past all of the preliminaries, and deal with the
serious issues; nothing is more serious than death, and “brass tacks” were
evocative of death.
In 1992, archaeologists in
Maryland unearthed three Colonial coffins, but did not immediately find the
information they had hoped to find:
The initials or
date that scientists expected to find spelled out in tacks on the inner coffin
lid simply weren’t there.
Although the article is evidence
that brass tacks were not always used, the fact that the scientists expected to
find the tacks, indicates that even now, brass tacks are associated with early
American coffins. Perhaps people at the time could have associated "brass tacks" with death.
In 1997, a coffin, presumably
that of a slave, was disinterred from the African burial ground in Manhattan. It was decorated by 92 brass tacks, arranged
in a heart-shaped design. New York Daily News, December 7, 1997. When the coffin was first examined, some
assumed that the heart-shaped symbol was a “variation on the Western symbol for
affection. Later, others came to believe that the design was a Western-African
design, known as a Sankofa, which is said to mean, “look to the past to inform
the future.”
A later analysis of the debate,
left the question open; but also revealed how ubiquitous “coffin tacks”
were during the period:
The third
problem with seeing the heart as a Sankofa symbol is that hearts made out of
tacks were not uncommon on Anglo-American coffin lids. Nathaniel Harrison, for example, who died in
1727 in Surry County, Virginia, was buried in a pine coffin elaborately
decorted with brass tacks in the shape of a heart (and a skull and
crossbones). When the nineteenth-century
local historian Arthur W. Dowe entered the Wainwright family tomb in Ipswich,
Massachusetts, he found ten coffins in various states of disintegration. On five coffin lids “were hearts formed with
iron nails; and initials and dates with brass nails”; the dates ranged from
1731 to 1798. More recently, when
archaeologists removed thirty-four coffins from the Bulkeley family tomb in
Colchester, Connecticut, twenty of them (covering the period 1775 to 1826) had
lids with heart-shaped designs made out of tacks (Figure 16). Also relevant is further evidence from
Delaplaine. The busy New York coffin maker
included in his account book an order for a fancy coffin of expensive “bilsted”
or sweet gum wood, almost certainly for a wealthy white individual, for whom
Delaplaine had a heart with the deceased’s name, age, and date of death
“struck” on the lid, presumably with tacks.
This description sounds uncannily like the design on the lid of Burial
101’s coffin, which included not only a heart but what appear to be the
deceased’s initials and year of death (1769).
Erik R. Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural
Encounters, 1492-1800, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, page 213.
A biographical sketch of the
career of a coffin maker, who started making coffins in 1874, gives some
insight into how tacks were used on coffins:
Brass tacks were
the first materials employed for putting the name and age upon the coffin, but
very soon he used the round head or gimp tacks; the first were black, then they
were galvanized, and from that Mr. Burr advanced to the name plates, and
afterwards to plated handles and tacks for trimmings.
The History of Ludlow, Massachusetts: With Biographical Sketches of
Leading Citizens, Reminiscenses, Genealogies, Farm Histories, and an Account of
the Centennial Celebration, June 17, 1874, Ludlow Massachusetts,
Springfield Printing and Binding Company, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged,
1912, page 216.
In his paper on, The Historical Archaeology of Mortuary
Behavior: Coffin Hardware from Uxbridge, Massachusetts (Historical Archaeology, 24(3):54-78), archaeologist
Edward L. Bell suggests that the mass-production of easily affordable coffin
hardware, and the emergence of funeral directing as a profession, made access
to decorative coffins available to rich and poor, Black and White. He cites evidence of such hardware on coffins
from New England to Louisiana, and from Maryland to Oregon, to many places in
between, and beyond.
 |
| Historical Archaeology, 24(3):65 (Courtesy Ricardo J. Elia, Associate Professor of Archaeology, Boston University) |
Conclusion
The historical and archaeological
evidence of the widespread use of coffin tacks, often brass tacks, during the
eighteenth and nineteenth century, suggests that it is plausible that people at
the time may have understood, “brass tacks,” to be an allusion to death.
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