Four score and seven years after the nation was brought forth on this continent in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, the United States was engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure. At a great battlefield of that war, a portion of the field was set apart as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so the nation might live. Yet the ground had already been consecrated beyond any added power by the brave living and dead who struggled there. The enduring duty of the living was to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that they had not died in vain, that the nation under God 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.
