Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on liberty and the proposition that all men are created equal, the United States faced a civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. At a battlefield turned in part into a final resting place for the dead, Abraham Lincoln declared it fitting to honor those who gave their lives so the nation might live, yet said the living could not truly dedicate or hallow the ground because the soldiers who struggled there had already consecrated it by their sacrifice. He urged the living instead to devote themselves to the unfinished work and the great task remaining, so that the dead would not have died in vain, the nation would experience a new birth of freedom, and government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the earth.