The Power of Cotton is a pamphlet published by Chatterton & Brother of New York in 1856.  The work claims to be a paper read in New York in November 1856.  The only known copy of the paper had been in the possession of Theodore Parker, the most prominent Unitarian and Transcendentalist minister in the northeast in 1856.  The work was bequeathed to the public library of the city of Boston from the Parker estate on 30 October 1864, four years after Parker’s passing.  On both the cover and title page, the precise location of the reading and the author’s name were both removed ...