Lincoln’s greatest concern in the Gettysburg Address was whether the United States—“a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”—could long endure amid the Civil War.

In other words, the emergency he pointed to was the very survival of democratic self-government: he saw the Civil War as a test of whether such a nation could continue to exist or would collapse and allow “government of the people, by the people, for the people” to perish from the earth.

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