Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, delivered in 1863 and presented here with the dates 1809 and 1865, declares that the nation, founded in liberty and dedicated to human equality, was being tested by civil war over whether such a nation could endure. Speaking at a battlefield cemetery dedication, Lincoln says the dead who struggled there had already consecrated the ground beyond any power of words, and he calls on the living to continue the unfinished work for which they gave their lives, so that the nation might experience a new birth of freedom and government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.