Brave men of St. Albans fought in the Civil War, a struggle Abraham Lincoln called a test of whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long endure. At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863, he spoke of dedicating a portion of the battlefield as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so that the nation might live, while insisting that the living must instead dedicate themselves to the unfinished work, to increased devotion to the cause for which the honored dead gave the last full measure of devotion, and to a new birth of freedom so that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.