“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” 

Eighty-seven years before Lincoln’s speech, the founders of the United States had declared their independence from Great Britain and begun an experiment in representative government based on a free and equal citizenry. Lincoln presents this view of America at the outset, essentially declaring that these are the values at issue—the purpose for which the audience has gathered that day. Few among his listeners would disagree. With that as a consensus, Lincoln can make his points to a sympathetic audience.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

In 1863, two years into the US Civil War, the very ideals on which the nation was based were in peril. If the South had won and broken away from the Union, the compact between the states—to hold together and protect each other, their ideals of freedom and equality, and their national government—would have been broken, perhaps never to be restored. Lincoln highlights these existential stakes early in his speech while also laying the groundwork for his eventual call for a national rebirth; there is a play on the word “conceived,” which can refer either to devising an idea or to the literal event of conception.