Fourscore and seven years after the founding of a new nation on this continent, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, the Civil War tested whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, could long endure. On a great 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, though the ground had already been consecrated beyond any further human power by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there. The living were called to dedicate themselves instead to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought there, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that their deaths would not be in vain, and to ensure a new birth of freedom so that government of the people, by the people, for the people, would not perish from the earth.