Boston Hymn

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.

[1] 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.

[2] 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.

[4][5] Emerson read the poem again that day at a private gathering at the home of George Luther Stearns in Medford, Massachusetts.

The poem "became famous immediately"[6] and was adopted as an anthem by the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, an all-black regiment of the Union Army.

[4] The poem recalls the conception of Boston as a "city upon a hill" that originated with Massachusetts Colony's Puritan founders, also called Pilgrims.

[8] According to a modern critic, the poem connects this history to the contemporary moment by "imagining wartime Boston as the legitimate inheritor of Puritan militance, severity, iconoclasm, and singleness of purpose, if not necessarily its literal theology.

[7] In one stanza, the poem calls for reparations to be paid to freed slaves for their labor: Pay ransom to the owner, And fill the bag to the brim.