Four score and seven years after the nation’s founding in liberty and dedication to human equality, the United States was enduring a great civil war that tested whether such a nation could survive. On a battlefield made a final resting place for those who died so the nation might live, the dead who struggled there were held to have already consecrated the ground beyond any words. The living were called instead to devote themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to draw increased devotion from the honored dead, and to resolve that their sacrifice would not be 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.
