Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on liberty and the equality of all men, the country was locked in a great civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. On a battlefield, people gathered to dedicate part of the ground as a final resting place for those who had given their lives so the nation might live, yet the dead who had struggled there had already consecrated the ground beyond any power to add or detract. The living were called instead to devote themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought there, to draw increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that their deaths 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.
