Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on liberty and equality, the United States was locked in a great civil war testing 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 hallowed the ground beyond any further dedication by words alone. Their sacrifice called on the living to devote themselves to the unfinished work for which those soldiers had fought, to ensure that the dead had not 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.