Surrow boots, sharpshooter shoes and latest pages

Plodding through Volume II of R S Guernsey’s interminable New York City and Vicinity During the War of 1812-15 (1895),  I came across a claim by Sergeant Elias Conklin, of a New York militia rifle company, for reimbursement by the state for the cost of his uniform. His long list of items, with Yankee thoroughness, included one ‘pair Surrow boots’ at five dollars. But what’s a Surrow boot? 

Suwarrow in pointy boots

A good question. Google throws up just one more mention, from the Recollections of a Rev Dr Jeter, excerpted in a couple of US papers in 1879:

The dandies wore boots of a different style. Their legs were stiff, reaching rather more than half-way to the knee, cut at the top and in front in the form of a heart, with a black silk tassel suspended from the lowest point of the indentation. They were called “Surrow boots”; why I know not, nor am I sure that my spelling of them is correct.

So, what we uniformologists term a Hessian boot, but corruptly spelt. What was the original? ‘Suorrow’ brings up a couple more references, and ‘Suwarow’ many more, but switching the ‘w’ to a cyrillic ‘v’ reveals that ‘Suwarow’, or ‘Surrow’ for short, was none other than Alexander Suvorov, the Russian general who, dying in 1800, seems to have lent his name to generations of snazzy boots, at least in the imagination of the cartoonists. 

A Hompesch …

… and his boots

Given that Sergeant Conklin had been a rifleman, I had wondered if a Surrow boot might be front laced, in the manner of the elusive sharpshooter’s high-laced shoes pondered in this post, but sadly not. However, just such a boot does turn up in a watercolour by Charles Hamilton Smith in his uniform compendium at the V&A. (Thank you, as always, Ben Townsend for the photo.) A small figure of a Hompesch rifleman circa 1800, on close inspection, wears not gaiters but short brown boots, laced zig-zag up the front. Sharpshooter shoes indeed. Somewhere there will be a better image, if I can ever find it.

Latest pages on this site deal with the Shropshire Militia of 1762 to 1805 (later years still to come), and the Provisional Cavalry of 1797, covering a wide range of counties and trying to put some cloth on the neglected bones of those much disparaged horsemen.