President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he said that the nation, founded four score and seven years earlier in liberty and dedicated to human equality, was being tested by civil war. On that battlefield, he called the burial ground a fitting resting place for those who died so the nation might live, yet said the living could not truly dedicate or hallow the ground because the men who struggled there had already consecrated it by their actions. He urged the living instead to devote themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought there, to draw increased devotion from the honored dead, to ensure that they had not died in vain, that the nation would experience a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.
