Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, from a copy in his own handwriting. In it, he said that four score and seven years earlier the nation's fathers had brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He said the country was engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, could long endure. At a great battlefield of that war, people had come to dedicate a portion as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so that the nation might live, but he said they could not truly dedicate, consecrate, or hallow the ground because the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there had already consecrated it beyond any added honor. He said the world might little note or long remember what was said there, but could never forget what those men did there. He called on the living to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work nobly carried on by the dead, to take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, to resolve that the dead should not have died in vain, that the nation should have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.