During the Civil War, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln said that the nation, founded in liberty and dedicated to human equality, was being tested by war over whether such a nation could endure. He said the field had become a final resting place for those who died so the nation might live, but that the living could not truly consecrate the ground because the soldiers who struggled there had already done so by their sacrifice. He called on the living to devote themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to ensure that the 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.
