President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he said that the nation, brought forth in liberty and dedicated to the equality of all men, was being tested by civil war. He called the battlefield a resting place for those who died so the nation might live, said the struggle of the brave men who fought there had already consecrated the ground beyond any ceremony, and urged the living to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work, to increased devotion to the cause for which the dead gave their last full measure of devotion, and to the resolve 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.