Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on liberty and the equality of all men, the United States was in a great civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. On a battlefield of that war, a portion of the ground was set apart as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so the nation might live. Yet the ground had already been consecrated beyond any power to add or detract by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there. The living were called instead to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work so nobly advanced by those who fought, to take increased devotion from the honored 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.