Eighty-seven years after the founding of a new nation on this continent in liberty and equality, the country was in a great civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. At a battlefield where many had given their lives so that the nation might live, part of the ground was set aside as their final resting place. Yet the living and the dead who had struggled there had already consecrated the ground beyond any further human power. The deeper duty of the living was to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought there, to draw increased devotion from the honored dead's sacrifice, to ensure they had not died in vain, and to seek a new birth of freedom so that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.
