Four score and seven years after the nation was brought forth on this continent, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, the United States faced a great civil war testing whether such a nation could long endure. On a battlefield of that war, a portion of the field was dedicated as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so 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 living were called to devote themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to draw increased devotion from the honored dead, and to resolve that their sacrifice would not be 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.