At a battlefield during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln spoke of a nation founded four score and seven years earlier in liberty and dedicated to human equality, said the war was testing whether such a nation could endure, and declared that while people had come to dedicate part of the field as a resting place for the dead, those who fought there had already consecrated the ground by their sacrifice; he urged the living to continue the unfinished work, draw renewed devotion from the honored dead, seek a new birth of freedom, and ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.