Four score and seven years after the nation’s founding in liberty and dedication to human equality, the United States faced a great civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. At a battlefield where men had given their lives so the nation might live, the living gathered to set apart part of the field as a final resting place for the dead. Yet the ground had already been consecrated by the brave men who struggled there, beyond any power of words to add or detract. The dead’s sacrifice called on the living to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work they had advanced, to take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, and to resolve that the dead would not have died in vain, that the nation would have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.