Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Identity

2. Thought and Action

2 A Thought and Action My thoughts are murder to the State. —henry david thoreau Translating the Nation On September 10, 1856, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke in Cambridge, Massachusetts , at a meeting to raise funds to provide relief for antislavery settlers in “Bleeding Kansas,” as it came to be known. With the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, and its effective authorization of the expansion of slavery under the principle of popular sovereignty into territories north of the line 36°30´, Kansas had become an increasingly violent settlement, effectively governed by two opposing administrations, one antislavery and the other proslavery , with the federal government, led by President Franklin Pierce, firmly siding with the latter.1 Emerson’s speech, reprinted in the Miscellanies volume of the Centenary Edition of his works, is a powerful indictment of the political machine, at both national and state levels, and evinces a deep suspicion of language as the tool of public discourse. Lamenting a polity “so choked and stultified by forms” (CWE 11: 258) that it can no longer recognize “the known foundation of all law, that every immoral statute is void” (CWE 11: 261), Emerson asserts that “language has lost its meaning in the universal cant.” The foundational vocabulary of American identity has become no more than a series of empty shibboleths that misrepresents the actual state of the nation’s contested affairs: 56 / thinking america Representative Government is really 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 enlarging the area of Freedom. Manifest Destiny, Democracy, Freedom, fine names for an ugly thing. They call it otto of rose and lavender,—I call it bilge-water. (CWE 11: 259) As Jenine Abboushi Dallal has noted, this passage identifies the “ugly thing” not as the project of U.S. geographical expansion, but rather as the specific extension of slave territory. The contours of “Manifest Destiny,” a term which for Emerson, Dallal suggests, offers a “vision of the self expanding into free space . . . as if it were acquired ahistorically and aphysically,” are distorted by the all too physically tangible and historically scarring structures of slavery.2 Language struggles to signify beyond or above the level of Realpolitik: “Our poor people,” he declares, are “led by the nose by these fine words” (CWE 11: 260). Emerson’s response to this impasse is to revert, characteristically, to smaller units of authenticity, where federal government is replaced by “the primary assembly” and society is ignored in favor of “the private man.” In a polemically antinomian vein, governments are only effective at the instant of their formation, “in the moment when they are established,” thereafter lapsing into habits of accreted corruption; likewise only the “private man” “is qualified to be a citizen” because he remains untarnished by forms of collective immorality (CWE 11: 258). The history lesson that follows is fiction, to be sure, but it serves to underscore Emerson’s attachment to a politics of liberal individualism that remains suspicious of—and at times explicitly hostile to—communal structures of governance: “Massachusetts, in its heroic day, had no government—was an anarchy. Every man stood on his own feet, was his own governor; and there was no breach of peace from Cape Cod to Mount Hoosac” (CWE 11: 261–62). Likewise California, another experiment in self-reliant pioneering “a few years ago,” possessed “the best government that ever existed. Pans of gold lay drying outside of every man’s tent, in perfect security. The land was measured into little strips of a few feet wide, all side by side . . . Every man throughout the country was armed with knife and revolver, and it was known that instant justice would be administered to each offence, and perfect peace reigned” (CWE 11: 262). Exhibiting in this passage the kind of decontextualized affirmation of American expansionism of which Dallal writes, Emerson’s celebration of a purified self signally fails to acknowledge either location as a geography already populated by indigenous peoples and as contested, often dangerous environments. Instead we read a vision of utopian anarchism, one that presents a scenario, as Dallal notes, in which “U.S. expansion organizes the encounter of the United States Thought and Action / 57 with itself—its own destiny; the ideology admits no dialectic and no Other.”3 It...