Four score and seven years after the nation’s founding on liberty and equality, amid a great civil war testing whether such a nation can endure, a portion of a battlefield 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 by the brave men who struggled there, living and dead, beyond any added human power. The living were called instead to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to draw increased devotion from the honored dead’s sacrifice, to resolve that they 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.
