As tensions between the North and South increased throughout the 1850s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, like many Americans, was becoming more resigned to the prospect of civil war. He was convinced that the “insanity” of the South’s attachment to slavery would soon tear the nation apart.

A longtime member of the Whig Party, Emerson’s political allegiance switched to the nascent Republican Party in the mid-1850s. Emerson was a supporter of Willam Seward, who lost the presidential nomination to Abraham Lincoln, so Emerson cast his vote for Lincoln in the election of 1860. Like many New Englanders, he wasn’t much impressed with the rough-hewn lawyer, unsure if Lincoln could save the quickly dissolving Union. Emerson later remembered that, at the time, Lincoln was just a simple Kentuckian with “no frivolous accomplishments.” His opinion would change over the next five years. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson c. 1856

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By 1860, Emerson was one of the most famous writers in America. Part philosopher, part poet, Emerson’s wise and powerful words about nature, literature, spirituality, and self-reliance had friends and admirers from near and far calling him The Sage of Concord. His essays and poems were widely read, and his lectures were well attended as he traveled across the North and Midwest. In January 1862, Emerson’s fame brought him to Washington, D.C.   

Emerson was in the capital city to present a lecture titled “American Civilization” at the Smithsonian Institution. Delivered on January 31, 1862, Emerson openly addressed the “existing administration” with “the utmost candor,” insisting that “the end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation…Morality is the object of government.” This morality would naturally lead to the abolition of slavery. “The South calls slavery an institution...I call it destitution...Emancipation is the demand of civilization.”

Three days later, Emerson met with his friend, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, who took Emerson to the White House to meet President Lincoln. Also at the meeting were Secretary of War Edward Stanton, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, and Secretary of State William Seward. Emerson would record the meeting in his journal:

“The President impressed me more favorably than I had hoped. A frank, sincere, well-meaning man, with a lawyer’s habit of mind, good, clear statement of his fact, correct enough, not vulgar, as described; but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness, or that kind of sincerity and jolly good meaning that our class meetings on Commencement Days show, in telling our old stories over. When he has made his remark, he looks up at you with great satisfaction, and shows all his white teeth, and laughs...” 

Abraham Lincoln and His Second Son Thomas (Tad), 1865

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Back in January 1853, Emerson had given a series of lectures in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, and now, much to Emerson’s surprise, the president knew who the Sage was: “When I was introduced to him, he said, ‘Oh, Mr. Emerson, I once heard you say in a lecture, that a Kentuckian seems to say by his air and manners, ‘Here am I; if you don’t like me, the worse for you.’” It is not known if Lincoln heard Emerson speak in 1853. There are even stories that Lincoln’s wife, Mary, served Emerson tea and cake at a church supper after one of the lectures, but this seems apocryphal: neither Lincoln nor Emerson ever mention such a meeting, and the line Lincoln quoted was not in any of the lectures Emerson delivered in Springfield. 

Emerson and Secretary Seward would again visit the president the next day. While on their way to the White House, Seward mentioned that Lincoln had warned him not to tell Emerson any “smutty” stories. Seward apparently ignored the president’s instructions and proceeded to deliver an anecdote involving a rather dirty punch line, a story that Emerson described in his journal as an “extraordinary exordium.” He would continue in his journal about life in the Lincoln White House:

“We found in the President’s Chamber his two little sons, — boys of seven and eight years perhaps, — whom the barber was dressing and ‘whiskeying their hair,’ as he said, not much to the apparent contentment of the boys, when the cologne got into their eyes. The eldest boy immediately told Mr. Seward, ‘he could not guess what they had got.’ Mr. Seward ‘bet a quarter of a dollar that he could. — Was it a rabbit? was it a bird? was it a pig?’ He guessed always wrong, and paid his quarter to the youngest, before the eldest declared it was a rabbit. But he sent away the [barber] to find the President, and the boys disappeared.”

Emerson was referring to Tad and Willie Lincoln, who were actually older than Emerson thought; Tad was nine and Willie was eleven. Tragically, Willie would die from typhoid fever only eighteen days later. This would be the only time that Emerson and Lincoln would meet. Emerson would return to Concord the next day. 

On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The direct result of the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam, it announced that if the Confederate States did not end the fighting and rejoin the Union by January 1, 1863, all enslaved peoples in the rebel states would be declared free. Like many in the North, Emerson welcomed Lincoln’s edict; he saw it as a powerful moral victory for the Union cause. Later that month he would deliver a lecture in Boston entitled “The President’s Proclamation,” noting that the Civil War’s true purpose, the end of slavery, was finally decided: “Great is the virtue of this Proclamation.” 

On January 1, 1863, a “Jubilee Concert” was held at the Boston Music Hall to raise money for the relief of formerly enslaved black refugees who crossed over into Union lines for safety. The event was organized by a committee that included Emerson’s friends Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. The event was particularly festive because of the announcement that Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation at midnight, and the crowd gave “three cheers for Lincoln.” 

Order of services for the meeting of the people of Concord, at the hour of the funeral of President Lincoln, April 19, 1865

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The hall was packed with 3,000 people, including literary figures and abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The music of Beethoven and Schiller was played, but one of the highlights was a surprise appearance by Emerson, who insisted that his name not be printed in the program. He read his recently completed “Boston Hymn” to the crowd, having been asked in December by John Sullivan Dwight to specially write the poem for the celebration. He reluctantly fit it into his other commitments, but the majority of the piece was not finished until the day before its debut. While the poem does not specifically mention Lincoln by name, it celebrates the president’s proclamation: 

I break your bond and masterships

And I unchain the slave;

Free be his heart and hand henceforth

As wind and wandering wave. 

Emerson read his poem again later that day for a private gathering at the home of George Luther Stearns in Medford, Massachusetts. Other guests at the soirée included Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Bronson Alcott and his daughter, Louisa, as well as Julia Ward Howe, who read her “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Emerson’s “Boston Hymn” would be published in Dwight’s Journal of Music at the end of January and in the Atlantic in February 1863. 

A little over two years later President Lincoln would be shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, and would die the next morning. A country that was celebrating the end of the Civil War just a week earlier was now thrown into mourning for their martyred president. Special memorials were held all across the North and a public service was held in Concord at the First Parish. A picture of the murdered president, draped in black, hung on the pulpit. The communion table was also dressed in black, with a basket of white flowers and a wreath of English violets placed on top. Emerson gave the eulogy in which he would honor the man he had grown to respect and admire.

“A plain man of the people, an extraordinary fortune attended him. He offered no shining qualities at the first encounter; he did not offend by superiority. He had a face and manner which disarmed suspicion, which inspired confidence, which confirmed good will. He was a man without vices. He had a strong sense of duty, which it was very easy for him to obey…He was the most active and hopeful of men; and his work had not perished: but acclamations of praise for the task he had accomplished burst out into a song of triumph, which even tears for his death cannot keep down.”