Four score and seven years after the nation’s founding on principles of liberty and human equality, the United States faced a great civil war that tested whether such a nation could endure. On a battlefield where many had given their lives so that the nation might live, the dead had already sanctified the ground beyond any further human act of dedication. The living were called instead to devote themselves to the unfinished work for which those soldiers had fought, to draw renewed commitment from their sacrifice, and to resolve that the dead would not have died in vain, that the nation would experience a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.