Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on liberty and the equality of all men, the United States faced a great civil war testing whether such a nation could endure. At a battlefield of that war, a portion of the ground was set aside as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so the nation might live. Yet the ground had already been consecrated beyond human power by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there. The lasting duty of the living was to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to draw increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that their sacrifice 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.