ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the symbolic temporal transcendence assigned to death in the Gettysburg Address against the allegorical justification of national suffering in the Second Inaugural. It highlights the contrast between the impersonal monumental ideal that gives modern nationality its distinct temporal form and the sacralization of personal feeling in sentimental nationality. The chapter examines the complex timing of national feeling in the eulogies that followed Lincoln's assassination in April 1865. It also examines the temporal relation of the nation to its dead, framed in the renowned short speech Lincoln delivered on that site during the November 19, 1863 dedicatory ceremonies. Against the sentimental vision of representative mournfulness, African-American eulogies for Lincoln assigned a different significance to the temporality of black grief for the President. Echoing the general sense that black mourning for Lincoln was particularly intense, African-American eulogists depicted this intensity as the effect of the historical novelty of Lincoln's regard for the rights of African Americans.
