A question about sewing a collar in Tom Sawyer

Question

In the opening chapter of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, we find Aunt Polly trying to dupe Tom into revealing that he skipped school to go for a swim. To preempt a potential line of questioning, Tom volunteers that his head is damp since he pumped some water on it earlier, presumably to cool down. Then his aunt says:

“Tom, you didn’t have to undo your shirt collar where I sewed it, to pump on your head, did you? Unbutton your jacket!”

Now it's been a few years since the 1800s, so what does this actually mean? I was trying to look online for some understanding of what type of collar and what sort of sewing is being suggested here, but I couldn't turn up anything.

Then, Tom's web of lies unravels when Sid detects that his collar is now sewed using black thread instead of the white that Aunt Polly originally sewed it with. Tom grumbles that:

She’d never noticed if it hadn’t been for Sid. Confound it! sometimes she sews it with white, and sometimes she sews it with black. I wish to gee-miny she’d stick to one or t’other—I can’t keep the run of ’em.

How would it be possible for Tom not to know what color thread the collar was originally sewed with? Assuming he rips off the collar, wouldn't the broken pieces of thread be more than enough to tell? I guess this goes back to the question of how this sewing of the collar is done in the first place.

Answer 1

Despite rigorous searches of the internet for details of rural boy's clothing from mid 1800s Missouri, I've found no suggestion of daily sewing of collars to be a standard approach to the garmenting of children.

Looking instead to the text of he book, we can see that this event occurs very close to the beginning where Twain is introducing us to the characters. This is part of our introduction to Aunt Polly:

His aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then broke into a gentle laugh.

“Hang the boy, can’t I never learn anything? Ain’t he played me tricks enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old fools is the biggest fools there is. Can’t learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days, and how is a body to know what’s coming? He ’pears to know just how long he can torment me before I get my dander up, and he knows if he can make out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it’s all down again and I can’t hit him a lick. I ain’t doing my duty by that boy, and that’s the Lord’s truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says. I’m a laying up sin and suffering for us both, I know. He’s full of the Old Scratch, but laws-a-me! he’s my own dead sister’s boy, poor thing, and I ain’t got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart most breaks.

It seems that she very much wants, for his own benefit, for Tom to be well behaved yet does not enjoy punishing him.

When we get to the particular incident of the collar, the text is clear that she suspects him of going swimming after school. Given her aversion to punishing Tom, my reading is that we are to understand that she has taken to sewing his collars closed as a preventative measure to prevent him going swimming.

Shirts in that era and social strata were not made to open all down the front, but to be pulled on over the head with a relatively short opening. My interpretation is that because Tom is so untrustworthy, Aunt Polly has taken to sewing up this opening so that Tom can't slip out of his shirt.