Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on liberty and human equality, the United States was in a great civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. At a battlefield where soldiers had given their lives so the nation might live, the living gathered to dedicate part of the field as their final resting place. Yet the ground had already been hallowed by the struggle and sacrifice of the brave men who fought there, beyond anything words could add. The dead were to be honored not only by burial and remembrance but by renewed dedication to the unfinished work for which they had fought, so that they would not have died in vain, 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.