President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, an early national cemetery for Civil War dead. Beginning in 1909, coinciding with the centennial of Lincoln's birth, tablets bearing these words were first cast for installation in national cemeteries across the country so visitors would remember the honored dead and why they gave their lives. In the address, Lincoln recalled that four score and seven years earlier the nation's fathers had brought forth a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He said the Civil War was testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure, and that those gathered had come to dedicate part of the battlefield as a final resting place for those who had given their lives so that the nation might live. He declared that, in a larger sense, they could not dedicate, consecrate, or hallow the ground, because the brave men who struggled there had already consecrated it beyond any added power of the living. He urged the living instead to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought there, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, and to resolve that those dead should not have died in vain, that the nation should have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the earth.
