Remembering Morristown’s July Fourth memorial to the Civil War

By Joey Viola

America is re-examining its history, and how it has been represented. A major area of discussion has been Civil War monuments — specifically, the removal of dozens of Southern “Lost Cause” memorials.

The story behind each monument is important to look at: Why it’s there, who put it there, who is it for, who does it represent, and what is its relationship to its community.

Arguably, the Civil War is the most memorialized war in United States history. Thousands of monuments dot the country. There’s a fairly good chance that some statue, plaque or historical marker may be found in every town involved in that conflict.

Morristown is a case in point. At the southeastern corner of the historic Morristown Green is the nearly 50-foot-tall Morris County Civil War Monument, which went up in 1871, only six years after the war’s end.

Also on the Green is the Patriots’ Farewell Fountain, dedicated to the New Jersey Militia of the Revolutionary War. It was erected in 2001, a mere 218 years after the conclusion of that conflict. Finally, in 2007, came The Alliance, life-sized statues of Washington, Hamilton and Lafayette.

How could a town that proclaims itself the “Military Capital of the American Revolution” be so slow in commemorating its Revolutionary past, yet so quick to acknowledge its Civil War connections?

The easiest answer is the influence of veterans in post-Civil War America.

On Aug. 20, 1866, some 16 months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, President Andrew Johnson officially ended the Civil War by announcing that the “insurrection is at an end and … peace, order, tranquillity [sic], and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America.”

While that statement stretched the truth by a mile and a half, it was true that the United States was relatively peaceful. After years of fearsome combat, the Confederate States of America was dead. The daily carnage was over. The institution of slavery finally ended.

The war’s end also meant the end of hundreds of thousands of military careers. The disbandment of the Union Army created a flood of veterans in the North who wanted to memorialize their sacrifices.

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After prior wars, statues of leaders such as George Washington or Andrew Jackson were featured prominently in town squares. But following the bloody Civil War, and the horrific wounds some men had to carry for the rest of their lives, veterans and citizens of the North understood that the common enlisted man deserved as much reverence as Abraham Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant.

And so began the postwar push to memorialize Union soldiers.

Morristown’s Post 18 — the Ira J. Lindsley Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans organization–asked the Morris County Freeholders (now called Commissioners) in 1869 to put up a monument commemorating the more than 6,000 men from Morris County who served in the Civil War.

In May of that year a committee started scouting for a location, design and sculptor for a soldiers monument. Costs were not to exceed $15,000.

Henry H. Davis won, with a popular period design: A solitary soldier, in a pose that evoked what Frederick Law Olmsted, New York City’s Central Park landscape architect, described as “a watchful sentinel in front of a picket line.”

If you look at the 7th New York Regiment Monument in Central Park and the monument on the Morristown Green, you immediately will notice similarities.

Davis, a local craftsman, worked in his shop on 20 Morris St., creating a 40-foot column, topped by an eight-foot Civil War common solider made of Quincy granite weighing 100 tons.

Next obstacle: Selecting a location for the imposing monument.

As the county seat, Morristown was an obvious choice. But where exactly to put the monument was a topic of dispute. The Green was a logical location: In 1860, the public celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s election there.

It’s also where more than a hundred soldiers of Company K of the 7th New Jersey Regiment received sendoffs before heading to war under the command of Morristown’s own Col. Joseph Warren Revere.

The fall of Vicksburg, passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, and the capture of Richmond all were celebrated on The Green with 30 gun salutes and church bells ringing.

Yet all this meant little to The Jerseyman, the area’s leading paper at the time. The publication decried the “utter absurdity” of placing the monument on the Green.

Today, monuments and markers all over the Green help bring out its charm and historical significance. But back in 1869, there was nothing.

Aside from the Liberty Pole, a water pump and a Revolutionary War-era cannon that went missing from time to time, the Green had no objects of note. The Trustees of the Green, stewards of the park since its sale by the Presbyterian Church in 1816, had a strict anti-memorial policy. The goal was to keep the Green an open space, instead of a crowded monument garden.

This led to a push to place the Morris County Civil War Monument in the oval at the entrance to Evergreen Cemetery, a plan that excited trustees of the cemetery.

A third location, in front of the Morristown Courthouse, also was discussed. While viable, these venues weren’t ever seriously considered.

Expressing popular sentiment, the Democratic Banner stated “the monument is of a public character, and ought therefore have a public place, where it will not only be an ornament, but where its honorable position will insure patriotic feelings.”

As in Civil War battles, casualties mounted during the excavation of the monument. A worker died from heart failure. More tragedy occurred when a local teenage boy, playing around the construction site, caused the derrick to fall, crushing him to death.

On July 4, 1871, the Morris County Civil War Monument was unveiled. Sitting atop a mound, it was ringed by an iron fence surrounding four cannons.

A column bore names of 12 battles, Antietam, Vicksburg, Appomattox, Roanoke, Winchester, Gettysburg, Shiloh, Wilderness, Malvern Hill, Atlanta, Donelson and Cold Harbor.

Union casualties from these battles alone amount to more than 98,000, in a war that claimed more than 828,000. The backside of the monument reads: “In honor of our heroic dead, who fell martyrs for Union and Liberty.”

Some of those martyrs are buried right across the street, behind the Presbyterian Church on the Green. They include Andrew C. Halsey of Company K, 7th New Jersey, who died in 1864, and Capt. Dorastus B. Logan of the 11th New Jersey, killed at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.

Down South Street, at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, sits the tombstone of Capt. Charles W. Canfield, who died from wounds suffered while fighting with the 2nd United States Cavalry during the Battle of Brandy Station.

In Evergreen Cemetery, hundreds more — including veterans of the United States Colored Troops –are at rest.

A DAY TO REMEMBER

More than 300 people packed a reviewing stand, and more than a thousand others spread across the Green for an event described as “one of the most imposing ever witnessed in this section of the State.”

Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson gave the keynote address. New Jersey Governor Theodore Randolph and Morristown resident Major Gen. FitzJohn Porter were joined by hundreds of veterans from the Grand Army of the Republic.

President Ulysses S. Grant and Major Gen. George B. McClellan, a future governor of New Jersey, didn’t attend. But both sent letters to be read to the public. A reading of the Declaration of Independence closed out the day.

The Trustees of the Green made sure to keep the floodgates closed tight when it came to other proposals for monuments, even those with connections to the Civil War.

In 1903, they shot down a suggestion to place a bust of famed cartoonist and Morristown resident Thomas Nast.

The freeholders turned down $5,000 from the will of Augustus Revere for a granite flagstaff base, meant to serve as a memorial marker for his father, General Joseph Warren Revere.

This trend continued with rejections of monuments for the Spanish-American War and World War II. It wouldn’t be until 2001, with the privately funded Patriot’s Farewell Fountain, that a monument to rival the Morris County Civil War Monument would appear on the Green.

The Alliance, depicting Gen. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette, came in 2007.

Now more than ever, it’s worth emphasizing that the Morris County Civil War Monument is not dedicated to one individual, or even one cause. It’s there to “perpetuate the memory” and honor those who gave their lives fighting for their country.

Some fought to end slavery. Some fought to save the Union. Some fought because they were bored. Some fought because they were drafted.

But they all fought. They saw unimaginable horrors, and made the ultimate sacrifice. They must not be forgotten.

Joey Viola, a lifelong Morristown resident, graduated from Morristown High in 2011. He also attended the County College of Morris and New York Film Academy. His love for Civil War history and local history was given to him at a young age by his parents.