The Elysian Market: The Moral Rhetoric of Northern Silk

When the United States House of Representatives proposed a formal resolution in 1825 to "inquire whether the cultivation of the mulberry tree, and the breeding of silk worms, for the purpose of producing silk, be a subject worthy of Legislative attention," it did so in hopes of establishing within the United States production of a commodity that had hereto been provided almost entirely by foreign suppliers.1 The value of silk imports, from 1821 to 1825, was estimated at $35,156,494, a lucrative investment opportunity that prompted Congress's Resolution.2 For several years, Congress debated whether legislative action should be taken to encourage the cultivation of silk, though a bill was never passed. The Character of New England The American Silk Society saw the potential to monopolize the silk trade and become exceedingly rich, though more frequently these financial gains were passed off as benefits to the American worker, who would be given "active employment" that would provide both financial and spiritual rewards.26 Frequently in articles on silk that extolled the value of sericulture for workers, though, the benefits to the laborer are linked with a sectionalist ethos: the cultivation of silk brings increased utility and personal development to the unemployed in northern articulations of the debate, while in southern arguments, silk allows for increases to the labor and profits from slaves. According to some northern advocates and practitioners of sericulture, these moral benefits had the potential to extend beyond the individual laborer, as this labor was imagined to be a practical means of aiding the abolitionist cause. Silk eventually overtaking the profitability of cotton was, advocates of the industry claimed, inevitable. Besides the "ample testimony" that interest in silk was "steadily advancing with an increasing rapidity such that it was evident that it would soon have to dispute with every other staple within the limits of the Union," the articles published in JASSRE routinely viewed silk as filling an increasing void left by cotton.37 One such article, republished from The Knoxville Register, states, "We look forward with confidence to the time, not far distant either, when silk will become one of our most profitable staples.