Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on liberty and equality, the United States was engaged in a civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. At Gettysburg, a portion of the battlefield was dedicated as a final resting place for those who had given their lives so the nation might live, yet the ground had already been consecrated by the struggle and sacrifice of the brave men who fought there. The living were called to devote themselves to the unfinished work advanced by the dead, to resolve that those dead had not died in vain, 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.