Abraham Lincoln declared that eighty-seven years earlier the nation had been founded in liberty and dedicated to human equality, and that the Civil War was testing whether such a nation could endure. At Gettysburg, he said, those who fought and died had already consecrated the battlefield beyond any ceremony, and he urged the living to continue their unfinished work with renewed devotion so that the dead would not have died in vain, the nation would experience a new birth of freedom, and government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.