On November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, President Abraham Lincoln declared that the nation, brought forth four score and seven years earlier in liberty and dedicated to human equality, was being tested by civil war over whether such a nation could endure. He said the battlefield was a fitting place to dedicate a resting place for those who had died there, yet insisted that the living could not truly dedicate or consecrate the ground because the men who struggled there had already done so by their sacrifice. He urged the living instead to devote themselves to the unfinished work advanced by the dead, to take increased devotion from their example, and to resolve that those dead would not have died in vain, that the nation would experience a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.
