Appropriating Eternity
How the rhetoric of permanence naturalized the Union's immortality
Author’s Note
This essay extends The Co-Arising of State and Nation in U.S. Federalism (Part 1), The Humanist Paradox (Part 2), and The Paradox of Citizenship (Part 3).
Where those essays examined how American political forms co-create one another, this one turns to the semiotic foundations of that process—the borrowed language that made a new nation sound ancient.
It argues that the United States inherited the sound of perpetuity from the very names it kept and adopted, and that this linguistic inheritance prepared the ground for Lincoln’s later claim that the Union was “perpetual.”
In short: the rhetoric of eternity preceded the theology of eternity.
Preface
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
— Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare’s famous line may be true of things that exist purely at the level of denotation—a rose, a stone, a star.
But political forms do not exist that way. They live through connotation: through the shared fictions, memories, and meanings that their names invoke.
To rename a government or a nation is to change what it is, not just what it’s called.
And to refuse renaming—to preserve a word across rupture—is to disguise transformation as continuity.
The United States was built on that disguise, even before it was a country.
Its revolutions were linguistic as much as political; each new order intentionally kept the old names and inherited their aura.
The result was a republic that sounded “perpetual” before it ever asserted it was.
1. The Language of Continuity
The Revolution proclaimed rupture but sounded like continuity.
Twelve of the thirteen colonies kept their colonial names, most of which were already derived from British royal titles or Native words.
A new political order could thus continue to masquerade, linguistically, as a venerable one.
The revolutionaries abolished monarchy yet preserved its vocabulary, creating the illusion of unbroken inheritance.
From Britain they kept the royal names—Virginia, Georgia, Carolina, Maryland, New York—to inherit the aura of dynastic legitimacy.
From Indigenous nations they kept the Native words—Massachusetts and Connecticut—to continue appropriating the mystique of primordial belonging.
They kept the eternal names to claim the ‘eternal’ land.
They wore both types of names like a garland of skulls—elevating vanquished foes to mythic status to display their own power, to assuage their guilt, and to pretend continuity with what they had subsumed.
They borrowed the illusion of permanence from both directions—the royal above and the Native below—turning revolution and conquest into the sound of inheritance.
2. Nominal Perpetuity as Political Habit
Thus the American Revolution, unlike most revolutions, hid its novelty behind a continuity fetish—privileging the illusion of credibility over newness, legitimacy over transformation.
The refusal to (re)name the colonies when they became Nations in the Declaration of 1776 set a template that would govern every subsequent transformation: keep the name, claim the continuity.
This same strategy continued when the Nations became States under the Articles of 1778 and kept the same names, turning naming itself into an instrument of continuity.
Whether by reflex or design, the pattern persisted because it worked.
Similarly, when later States entered the Union, roughly twenty-two followed the blueprint and adopted Native names already resonant with antiquity—Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Iowa, Dakota.
Having cast off British rule, they could no longer borrow royal legitimacy, but they could still appropriate the sound of the land’s ancient names.
What began as a mixture of habit and strategy hardened into instinct—the grammar of legitimacy itself.
3. The Union That Should Have Been Renamed
Even the naming of the new nation repeated the same act of appropriation the colonists had already performed on Britain and the Native nations.
“The United States of America” under the Constitution of 1788 was not the same polity proclaimed in 1776 in the Declaration or bound under the Articles of 1778, yet it kept the same name as if nothing had changed.
The act was semantically similar in form to the colonies’ earlier refusals to rename, but now scaled upward and turned inward—no longer against a foreign ruler or a conquered people, but against its own prior self: a new political order masquerading under an old title, pretending ‘improvement’ where replacement had occurred.
Meanwhile, a separate, entirely new phrase—“the Union”—entered the national vocabulary with the Articles, promising for the first time “a perpetual Union.”
“The Union,” too, should have been renamed. But the Constitution of 1788 kept the phrase while transforming its meaning, calling it a “more perfect” Union.
What had once been a compact among separate nations became a federated, co-arisen, single organism, yet it carried the same name as though its substance were unaltered.
Thus, both names endured but for different reasons: “The United States of America” as the illusion of legal continuity, “the Union” as the illusion of metaphysical continuity.
Together they fused juridical permanence with theological permanence, disguising rupture in both law and ideology.
When Lincoln later swore to preserve the “perpetual” “Union,” he was reenacting the founders’ strategy—borrowing the conceptual authority of what had already been replaced, and calling it the original.
4. Lincoln and the Scaling of Permanence
In the Articles, “perpetual” was meant politically, not metaphysically—a promise of indefinite cooperation, not an assertion of immortality.
But the word carried more than law; it carried theological resonance. To call a human compact perpetual was already to borrow the language of eternity.
Lincoln’s genius—and his error—was to fuse the two: to make the Union’s legal perpetuity sound like ontological eternality.
Fortunately for him, by the time Lincoln rose to defend the Union, the map already spoke the language of eternity.
By 1860, thirty-one of the thirty-three States sounded indestructible—bearing either Indigenous or European names that carried centuries of borrowed time.
Even the name “The United States of America” still masked its own replacement, unchanged since 1776 despite two political reincarnations, while “the Union” carried forward the first mention of ‘perpetuity’ promised in 1778.
So, in 1861, when Lincoln declared the “Union” “perpetual,” he was appropriating and extending the claim made in the Articles of 1778—expanding its definition from a legal promise of continued duration forward in time into a metaphysical assertion of timelessness, both forward and backward in time, using a similar rhetorical move the Founders had performed over and over again.
He transformed linguistic continuity and political perpetuity into metaphysical permanence, bringing the cycle of historical appropriation to a close.
The Union was no longer a contract among peers but a ‘natural,’ self-evident entity whose existence appeared to antedate and transcend its members.
Lincoln, a lawyer and skilled orator, inherited the grammar of appropriation and applied it to political ontology.
Where colonists and revolutionaries had borrowed the aura of the land and the Crown, and the Founders had appropriated their own political names to mask discontinuity, Lincoln borrowed the aura of time itself.
He simply scaled up the illusion of permanence that the names on the map had already made believable.
5. Eternity as Appropriated Property
For Lincoln to assert that the Union was eternal was not merely political; it was religious.
What had begun as linguistic and political continuity became metaphysical conviction.
The sacredness once reserved for divine or dynastic permanence reappeared, secularized, in the concept of the Union itself.
Having already borrowed time through its names, the United States at last borrowed timelessness, completing the sequence of appropriations:
The colonists and revolutionaries took the names of the conquered, both from above and below.
Lincoln took the language of permanence from the Founders—and the church—and applied it to the Nation itself.
Through these successive borrowings, the United States converted change into continuity and continuity into creed.
Its language became proof of its immortality.
6. The Ontological Cost
The price of this illusion was the foreclosure of honest transformation.
Once a nation imagines itself eternal, it can no longer admit change without anxiety or violence.
The refusal to rename in 1776 and again in 1778 made it easier for Lincoln to deny secession in 1861, and easier still to treat any future alteration as heresy.
Perpetuity, the Union’s founding and sustaining myth, became its Achilles’ heel.
Its creators had escaped monarchy only to inadvertently enthrone the idea of the Nation itself as the new immortal sovereign.
The colonists had stolen the sound of eternity; Lincoln made the theft sacred.
What had once united the colonies against England later divided the Union against itself.
By naturalizing continuity, they made rupture unthinkable—and therefore inevitable.
The language that once legitimized revolution abroad became the logic that forbade it at home.
The same borrowed names that gave the Founders confidence to go to war with the Natives and violently break from empire made their successors incapable of imagining internal change without more bloodshed.
The semantic strategy worked—until it didn’t.
What had once secured legitimacy against empire turned inward and calcified, binding the Union to the very myths that had once ennobled it, rendering it inert instead of what Whitman called a “living union.”
The nation erased the Natives before it began, erased England in 1776, replaced itself in 1778 while simultaneously calling itself “perpetual,” replaced itself in 1788 without renaming, and was deemed eternal in 1861.
Same on the surface—always a “rose”—different underneath.