Four score and seven years after the nation’s founding on a continent in liberty and dedication to human equality, the United States was engaged in a great civil war testing whether such a nation could long endure. At a battlefield of that war, part of the ground was being dedicated as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so the nation might live. Yet the living could not truly dedicate, consecrate, or hallow the ground, because the brave men who struggled there, living and dead, had already done so beyond any added power. 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’s sacrifice, to ensure that they had not died 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.