Introduction: Getting to Know the Inter-Imperial “Lineages” of Domestic Commodities in US Fiction, 1865–1930

Summary

In her 1841 poem “To a Fragment of Cotton,” Lydia Sigourney apostrophizes the commodity whose volatile economic and political history would come to define much of the nineteenth century. With a curiosity and ambivalence about the circumnavigatory history of the scrap of cotton that sneaks its way into her home, the speaker of Sigourney's poem raises questions about the cotton cloth's origin that would be echoed by US writers for decades to follow about many goods beyond cotton. She implores, “If thou hast aught to say, / I’ll be a listener. Tell me of thy birth, / And all thy strange mutations, since the dow / Of infancy was on thee, to thine hour / Of finish’d beauty ‘neath the shuttle's skill” (9–13). Though the cotton does not literally speak to answer the question of its “birth” and “strange mutations,” its physical presence in her home causes the speaker to imagine how the cotton's progeny has “sown themselves in every sunny zone / Of both the hemispheres” (21–2), how “Commerce loves thee well” (26), how “thou dost make / Much clamour in the world” (26–7), and how difficult it is to count the cotton's “many transmigrations” (36).

The speaker travels with the cotton across the globe, from “the vessel's hold” (38) where it sleeps “in ponderous bales” (39), to its transformation into “many-colour’d chints” worn by “the countrydame in Sunday-gown” (45–6), or its “slow emerg[ence] from the Indian loom” (47). Sigourney's fanciful engagement with this humble scrap of household cloth expands into a vision of the multidirectional nineteenth-century system of global trade, in which raw cotton was cultivated in the US and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to supply material for England's cotton-spinning industry, with India also supplying inexpensive colorfully printed chintz cotton textiles to England and beyond. Awareness of this vexed international history fills Sigourney's speaker, like many of her fictional successors, with consternation about her responsibility given this knowledge, as she exclaims, “Mysterious Guest! / I seem to fear thee. Would that I had known / Thy lineage better, and been less remiss / In the good grace of hospitality” (58–61). Given cotton's “lineage” as a commodity harvested by the labor of enslaved people working under tortuous conditions, a commodity that would also later lead to the US Civil War and greater colonial and imperial expansion, Sigourney's speaker is perhaps prescient to fear this “Mysterious Guest.”