Kelly: Confederate monument in New Jersey pays homage to fallen soldiers

PENNSVILLE — On the banks of the Delaware River, a monument to the Confederacy still stands tall.

But it’s not what you think.

There are no statues of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s president who led 11 southern states to war in the 1860s to preserve a system of torture known as slavery.

No, this is a grave marker to a tragedy.

The obelisk marks the final resting place for 2,436 Confederate soldiers, many captured at Gettysburg, all buried in a mass grave after they died of dysentery, typhoid, malaria, malnutrition and other afflictions in a nearby prisoner of war camp on a Delaware River island.

The Civil War will always be a disconcerting and divisive chapter in the American historical narrative. But, here in the quiet South Jersey hamlet of Pennsville, at the end of a gravel road so narrow that swamp reeds slap your car as you drive by, an 85-foot-tall granite obelisk offers a nuanced twist on the national debate over whether to tear down Confederate monuments.

What makes the monument in this spot distinctive — and worthy of a place in the current national debate — is the presence of another monument.

Several hundred feet from the Confederates’ final resting place a limestone dome the size of a backyard shed marks the graves of 136 Union soldiers who were assigned to the prison camp to guard the Confederates, and died of the same diseases.

The long-simmering debate — in particular, how their monuments' presence in some towns is seen as a tacit support to slavery — escalated last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, when an alleged neo-Nazi from Ohio who was part of a white nationalist group protesting the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, reportedly drove his car into a crowd and killed a woman.

The death of Heather Heyer, 32, a paralegal who supported the removal of the Lee statue in Charlottesville, drew attention to how white supremacist groups have used the controversy over Confederate monuments to promote their own violent agenda against minorities and progressives.

The issue intensified when President Donald Trump, in refusing to specifically condemn white supremacists, suggested that tearing down Confederate monuments could lead to removals of monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves.

On Monday, protesters in Durham, N.C., threw a rope around a statue of a Confederate soldier and pulled it down. On Tuesday evening, city workers in Baltimore began taking down four Confederate statues. On Wednesday, Episcopal officials in Brooklyn ordered workers to remove a plaque from the base of a tree at a church in the Fort Hamilton army base that commemorated Robert E. Lee’s service at the military base while he was a Union officer before the Civil War.

Dozens of other communities, meanwhile, are reviewing proposals to remove their Confederate memorials.   

The story in Pennsville of how soldiers from both sides came to be buried in such a remote spot — and how the nation tried with federal funds appropriated by Congress to memorialize them — is rarely discussed.

Certainly it has not emerged as even a footnote in the national debate over whether towns mostly across the South should remove any memorials to the Confederacy.

But Civil War buffs and historians say the existence of such an unusual set of war memorials in New Jersey should be part of the conversation.

“If you don’t know your history, what can you be proud of,” said Clark Van Buskirk, 75, a retired telephone installer from Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, who attends memorials at the Pennsville cemetery as part of a Confederate historical reenactor group. “Both sides did bad things in the civil war. None of that goes away.”

Joseph Bilby, a retired state labor investigator who has written several books on New Jersey’s role in the Civil War, said the Pennsville cemetery and its memorials to Confederate and Union soldiers offer a unique window into the national debate over how to pay homage to such a divisive conflict that still resonates as a touchstone in the nation’s race relations.

What bothers Bilby is how the voices of white supremacists seem to have taken center stage.

“The narrative of the Civil War has been oversimplified in many ways, especially by these neo-Nazi creeps,” Bilby said.

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The line between commemorating dead soldiers and trumpeting their cause — even 152 years after the Civil War — is still difficult to navigate.

Rich Walker, who grew up in Oakland and now lives in Stockholm, where he coordinates Civil War reenactments in schools and other groups as part of a living history program, refers to the Pennsville cemetery as “sacred ground.”

“We try and keep the memory alive of the people who fought and died in the war for whatever reason,” Walker said.

For Walker and others, however, the violent confrontations on the streets of Charlottesville — and Heather Heyer’s death, along with the deaths of two Virginia State troopers in a helicopter that crashed while flying to the scene — are a stark reminder of how the Civil War still stirs deep emotions across America.

“Is it really worthwhile that we’re killing people?” said Tom Burke, a retired Brooks Brothers executive from Matawan who has visited the Pennsville cemetery. “I’m a firm believer that if you don’t learn from history, you’re bound to repeat it.”

No one has suggested any changes to the Confederate or Union memorials in the tiny Pennsville cemetery. Visitors, however, are not allowed to leave Confederate flags at the obelisk. U.S. flags are permitted.

To many, the cemetery is seen as a neutral ground that touches far more than the Civil War — and its memories.

Just beyond the Confederate obelisk lie 13 white tombstones, each marking the grave of a World War II Nazi soldier who died while being held at a POW camp at Fort Dix. Like the Confederate memorial, almost no one visits the graves of such Germans as Gerhard Bauer, Alvis Fleischmann or Albert Bretschneider.

“It’s part of the American quilt. It’s not a bed of roses. There are some thorns too,” said David Hann, 58, a retired electrician from Hammonton.

Hann, who visits the Pennsville cemetery each year for a Civil War memorial service, said about 25 of his ancestors fought for the Union army during the Civil War and another 20 joined Confederate regiments. He is now a member of a historical commemorative club that is named after Meredith Pool, one of the last Confederate soldiers to die in the Delaware River POW camp.

"American history is like an ugly Christmas sweater,” said Hann. “There is some beauty and some ugliness. If you start pulling it apart, you’re left with a ball of yarn.”

Meredith Pool’s name appears on one of 12 bronze plaques with names of the dead Confederates that surround the base of the Confederate monument. The names include from M. Abbott from A Company in the 46 Georgia regiment and Isaac Hudson of Abell’s Florida Battery to William Foster of H Company of the 1st Texas regiment and A. Robinson of H Company of the 1st Arkansas Cavalry.

The plaques offer no other details besides the names — no ages or hometowns, nothing about when the men died. Most of the Confederates were believed captured at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. But the monument offers no other details.

The same is true of the memorial to the Union soldiers — just a listing of names and regiments from Ohio, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

The Pennsville cemetery, officially called the Finns Point National Cemetery, is not much of a tourist attraction these days.  A sign explains that the museum is closed "due to issues with the building."   Rust flakes from the steel gates to the cemetery.  No one answered the door — or phone — at the cemetery office.  

On Wednesday, the most noticeable sounds were the persistent buzzing of insects, the syncopated flapping of river reeds and cattails and the occasional rumble of a boat passing by on the Delaware. 

Just before noon, Christine Hosmer, 32, a waitress from Baltimore, showed up for a tour of the memorials and the artillery batteries at the former Fort Mott military installation before taking a 1-mile ferry trip on the Delaware River to the former Civil War POW camp on Pea Patch Island.  

Hosmer had no idea before she arrived that the Confederate soldiers were buried in the cemetery. Nor did she realize the cemetery had such a large monument. But she said she was gratified to know it was there, along with a memorial to Union soldiers.

“It’s all part of history,” she said. “Let them stay in peace.”

Email: Kellym@northjersey.com