Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on liberty and equality, the United States faced a great civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. At a battlefield where many had given their lives so that the nation might live, a portion of the ground was set aside as a final resting place for the dead. Yet the living could not truly dedicate, consecrate, or hallow that ground beyond what the brave men who struggled there had already done by their sacrifice. The dead's actions, not the words spoken there, gave the place its meaning, and the living were called instead to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work, to renewed devotion to the cause for which the fallen gave their full measure, and to the resolve 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.
