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

EDUARDO CADAVA 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 This Act had repealed the Missouri Compromise and legislated that the question of slavery be determined by individual state constitutions rather than by a national policy of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 of America, 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 Arizona Quarter!} Volume 49 Number 3, Autumn 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-161 Eduardo Cadava is inseparable from the acts of representation that would soon render, and sometimes justify, the suffering and death brought on by the war. What interests him are the various rhetorical means whereby the wat or its ideological implications are legitimated. Throughout the war, his lectures, essays, poems, and journal entries persistently challenge the tendencies of contemporary representations of the war either to justify the effects of its violence or to have them disappeat in the name of the ideological discourses that helped both the North and the South negotiate the meaning of the war even before it had ended. We should not be surprised if, within this arena ofrepresentation, Emetson's attention focuses upon the recourse to a rhetoric of nature. Both Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians enlisted nature in the service of legitimating their respective causes as well as the war's violence. Moreover , the rhetoric of nature was central to the constitution of a nationalist ideology in the antebellum period. Insofar as this rhetoric attempts to dissimulate the violence that has been effected in its name, the histotical issues and questions that have led to the civil ctisis, or the death and violence of the war, Emerson positions himself against it. Nevertheless, amidst the brutality and terror of the Civil War, Emerson 's own appeal to the virtues of liberty and justice converges with an appeal to a rhetoric of nature. Aroused by the dangers of the war, by the danger that the ethical dimension of the war might be attenuated by the colossal carnage and suffering that define the struggle's most visible effects, he consistently mobilizes his efforts in the direction of stirring up enthusiasm for the war and its moral benefits. Nothing characterizes these efforts more than his use of natural imagery. Men and women need to be moved to act, he argues. They need to be persuaded to make sacrifices in the name of justice and freedom. And nothing moves or persuades people better than the evocation of nature. The idiom of nature is in fact everywhere in Emerson. If he seems to use the same rhetoric used by others to justify the war, though, he uses it in order to trace its operations within the many efforts to define the meaning of the war: he uses this rhetoric in order to mobilize it in another direction. Only in this way, he says...