page_title: Boston Hymn
section_title: Political context
hierarchical_section_title: Boston Hymn / Political context
caption_attribution_description: English: Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States.
context_page_description: "Boston Hymn" is a poem by the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson composed the poem in late 1862 and read it publicly in Boston Music Hall on January 1, 1863. It commemorates the Emancipation Proclamation issued earlier that day by President Abraham Lincoln, tying it and the broader campaign for the abolition of slavery to the Puritan notion of sacred destiny for America.
context_section_description: In 1861 the American Civil War began, with a number of Southern states rebelling against the United States government (known as the Union) led by President Abraham Lincoln. The primary issue was slavery, which was endemic in the South but which Lincoln's Republican Party sought to abolish. In September 1862, Lincoln warned that he would declare free all slaves held in any state still in rebellion at the start of the next year. He accomplished this on January 1, 1863, with the Emancipation Proclamation.
  In the years leading up to the war's outbreak, Emerson's home city of Boston was a "hotbed" of abolitionism in the United States. In one incident in 1854, an angry mob protested federal troops as they marched Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave, out of Boston to be returned to bondage in Virginia. Emerson came to identify publicly with the cause of abolitionism following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. By 1851 he was numbered among the prominent "Free Soiler" poets.
caption: Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the year he issued the Emancipation Proclamation
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