Eighty-seven years after the nation’s founding on this continent in liberty and equality, the United States was locked in a great civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. On a battlefield where many had given their lives so the nation might live, the living gathered to dedicate part of the field as a final resting place, yet the men who struggled there, living and dead, had already consecrated the ground beyond any further human power. Their sacrifice called the living to continue the unfinished work, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, to ensure they had not died in vain, to seek a new birth of freedom, and to preserve government of the people, by the people, for the people.