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The Nature of War in Emerson's "Boston Hymn"

Less than five years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Emerson announces a crisis in the structures of political and linguistic representation. "Language has lost its meaning in the universal cant," he writes, "Representative Government is misrepresentative; Union is a conspiracy against the Northern States which the Northern States are to have the privilege of paying for; the adding of Cuba and Central America to the slave marts is enforging the area of Freedom. Manifest Destiny, Democracy, Freedom, fine names for a ugly thing."1 He makes this statement within the context of the controversy over the KansasNebraska Act. This Act had repealed the Missouri Compromise and legislated that the question of slavery be determined by individual state constitutions rather than by a national policy of exclusion. For Emerson, that slavery is to be preserved and extended signals a contradiction in the meaning ofAmerica, a contradiction that is dissimulated within a rhetoric of representation, democracy, and freedom. Declaring the rhetorical and historical basis of the virtues upon which America was to be founded, Emerson here predicts the crisis of representation that would define the issues ovet which the coming war would be fought.2 These issues included debates over who could claim the right to representation and over the relations of power existing between state and federal governments within the system of representation. The crisis to which Emerson refers is therefore a crisis written into the histoty of America, insofar as America was itself conceived in various efforts to rethink and define the nature and concept of representation. As Emetson suggests, however, this crisis in political representation