Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on this continent, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, the United States was engaged in a great civil war testing whether such a nation could long endure. At a great battlefield of that war, a portion of the field was set aside as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so that the nation might live. Yet the ground had already been consecrated beyond any added human power by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there. The dead were to be honored not only in words but through renewed dedication by the living to the unfinished work they had advanced, so that they would not have died in vain, the nation would have a new birth of freedom, and government of the people, by the people, for the people, would not perish from the earth.