Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation in liberty and equality, the United States faced a great civil war that tested whether such a nation could endure. On a battlefield made sacred by the sacrifice of the dead and the struggle of the living, the living were called not merely to dedicate the ground as a resting place, but to devote themselves to the unfinished work for which those soldiers gave their lives, so that the nation might have a new birth of freedom and government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.