Cotton Thread Is the Union

Emerson had, in 1844, much warrant for his sour observation that ‘Cotton thread holds the union together. Patriotism is for holidays & summer evenings with music and rockets,’ he says, ‘but cotton thread is the union’ (Journals 356). This is, of course, an observation about slavery. The black slave was the instrument white men used to make the cotton thread that bound the union to their interests. Love of money, not of country, lay at the bottom of it. Music, rockets, holidays, and summer evenings: there is patriotism, and there is the power to which patriotism gives cover. Frederick Douglass had that power in mind when, in Rochester, New York, he took the stage one bunting-bedecked July evening in 1852, eight years after Emerson set down his remark about cotton: ‘What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?’ he asked an audience of white abolitionists. ‘A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.’