Four score and seven years after the nation’s founding in liberty and equality, Abraham Lincoln said the Civil War was testing whether such a nation could endure. At Gettysburg, he spoke at a battlefield cemetery dedication, honoring those who had died so that the nation might live, while insisting that the ground had already been hallowed by the soldiers who fought there. He urged the living to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work for which the dead had given the last full measure of devotion, so that the nation would experience a new birth of freedom and government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.