INTRODUCTION
Public loss is related to, but different from, private loss. Some deaths – of civic leaders and other cultural figures – prompt grief on a wider scale. In the same way that private grief and mourning affirm the shape and meaning of an individual person’s life as the mourners come to terms with loss and absence, public mourning rituals affirm the shape and meaning of the grieving community. For this reason, displays of public mourning can represent the best of a society and its vision for itself as the community digs past the superficial and ephemeral to locate and speak to a shared nobility of purpose and belonging that the cultural figure was able to reflect and contribute to in their life.
In November 1863, less than five months after the Battle of Gettysburg, the deadliest days of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address at the ceremony dedicating a national cemetery for the battle’s fallen Union soldiers. The loss of so many young lives was not just a series of private griefs, but also a massive communal loss that called for public mourning. Lincoln linked the soldiers’ sacrifice to the nobility of their cause — the “unfinished work” of building a durable democracy. He committed post-Civil War America to “a new birth of freedom” that led to the abolishment of slavery and assurances of citizenship and voting rights.
FULL TEXT
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.