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. Throughout the 1830s and into the early 1840s though, state governments and many Americans, especially in the North, saw in silk the prospect for more than just financial gain. Advocates of northern sericulture saw a potential way to minimize complicity with the slavery-driven cotton economy.

As historians point out, silk never became as lucrative a market as Congress had hoped; it registers as only a blip, a speculative bubble, in the history of northern agriculture and investment.³ The primary contribution to the bursting of this bubble, historians Paul Gates and Marjorie Senechal note, was that silk advocates enflamed the "multicaulis mania" by driving up the prices of trees they themselves were selling, promoting the profitability of silk only to increase their own sales.⁴ During the height of "the silkworm craze," speculation for Morus multicaulis, a newly discovered genus of mulberry tree that provides the leaves that silkworms feed on, drastically increased tree prices, and when blight in the early 1840s destroyed most of Morus trees, economic interest in silk largely came to an end.⁵ However, as Senechal notes, "The sericulture dream did not burst with the bubble."⁶ Similar to other forms of consumer activism within the antebellum era (such as the northern free produce movement and the southern non-intercourse movement), the idealism of silk that captivated its producers effected a broader reconsideration of the ethics of market participation.⁷ Silk's effect on the northern market was hardly economic. Rather, I argue that the cultural work of the silk movement promoted economic and ethical independence from cotton, imagining a market-based means for supporting abolitionism.

The dual influence of ethics and economics on northern interest in silk can be seen in the Massachusetts State House of Representatives in 1844, when a Mr. Wright, representing Concord, described how silk presented an opportunity to relinquish the state's reliance on slave-grown cotton: "Our cotton manufacturer are dependant [sic] on the south for their raw materials; silk would be our own, and states like individuals, cannot be too careful to secure within themselves, means for their prosperity and greatness."⁸ Tying the growth of silk to the pursuit of "prosperity and greatness," Wright views silk as economically liberating. Many northern advocates of the trade held a similar view toward sick: that it held the possibilty of transforming northern sentiments into a fully realized—and profitable—state. Indeed, discussions on the benefits of sericulture almost always rely on a sense of futurity to make their case, a vision that often could be described as utopian.

As sericulture began to be associated with a variety of reform groups (taken up in abolitionist periodicals like The Liberator, by the utopian-reform community the Northampton Association, and in the African American periodical The Colored American), it came to be viewed by many northerners as having the potential to provide an economic solution to a moral problem. In that regard, the rhetoric employed in periodical debates over the merits of sericulture reveals the silk debate functioning as a microcosm of larger sectional debates over slavery, capitalism, and ethics. At the intersection of northern agrarianism and idealism, the northern silk movement sought to counteract the South's attempt at economic independence post-1837 by positing a more ethical, antislavery economy.⁹

In this article, I discuss how advocates for the silk industry during the 1830s and 1840s, as well as northern reform...