Four score and seven years after the nation's founding in liberty and dedication to human equality, the United States was engaged in a great civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. On a battlefield where men had given their lives so the nation might live, a portion of the ground was set apart as a final resting place, yet the soldiers who struggled there had already consecrated it beyond any further human power to add or detract. The living therefore bore the greater duty: to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to draw increased devotion from the honored dead's sacrifice, and to resolve that they should not have died in vain, that the nation should experience a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.