Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on this continent, conceived 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 dedicated, could long endure. On a great battlefield of that war, a portion of the field was being dedicated as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so that the nation might live. Yet the ground had already been consecrated beyond any added human power by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there. The enduring duty of the living was to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work those soldiers had nobly advanced, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that their sacrifice would not be in vain, and to seek a new birth of freedom so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the earth.