On November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery, President Lincoln said that four score and seven years earlier the fathers had brought forth on the continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He said the Civil War was testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, could long endure, and that those gathered had come to dedicate a portion of the battlefield as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so the nation might live. He said it was fitting to do so, but that in a larger sense the ground could not be dedicated, consecrated, or hallowed by words, because the brave men who struggled there had already consecrated it beyond any power to add or detract. He said the world would little note or long remember what was said there, but could never forget what they did there, and that the living should instead be dedicated to the unfinished work and the great task remaining: to take increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that these dead should not have died in vain, that the nation under God should have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.