Four score and seven years after the nation's founding in liberty and dedication to human equality, the United States was locked in a great civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. On a battlefield made a final resting place for those who had given their lives so the nation might live, the dead who struggled there had already consecrated the ground beyond any ceremony. Their sacrifice called on the living to devote themselves to the unfinished work they had advanced, to draw increased devotion from the honored dead, to ensure they had not died in vain, to secure a new birth of freedom, and to preserve government of the people, by the people, for the people on the earth.