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Lawside men answer the civil war call
- 1. Linda Shockley, LawnsideHistorical Society, Inc. Lincoln and the Constitution Celebration Camden County College, November 7, 2013
- 2. incorporated asa municipality by an act of the state legislature in 1926 bounded by Haddonfield, Tavistock, Barrington, Magnolia and Cherry Hill.
- 3. 26 Kings Court P.O.Box 608 Lawnside, NJ 08045-0608 856.546.8850 Open Saturdays Noon to 3 p.m. www.petermotthouse.org lhs@petermotthouse.org
- 4. By Charles C.Smiley Published in Camden, N.J., 1921
- 5. From “A TrueStory of Lawnside,” by Charles C. Smiley, Camden, N.J., 1921
- 6. SEC. 1.BE it enacted by the Council and General Assembly of this State, and it is hereby enacted by the authority of the same, That every child born of a slave within this state, after the fourth day of July next, shall be free; but shall remain the servant of the owner of his or her mother, and the executors, administrators or assigns of such owner, in the same manner as if such child had been bound to service by the trustees or overseers of the poor, and shall continue in such service, if a male, until the age of twenty five years; and if a female until the age of twenty one years.
- 7. Oakes writes: Whatsealed slavery’s fate was the now unstoppable public discussion of it.
- 8. Main Gate to MountPeace Cemetery Lawnside, Ne w Jersey Circa 1935
- 9. CIVIL WAR MEDALOF HONOR WINNER
- 10. Mount Peace CemeteryAssociation, c/o Yolanda Romero, 207 JFK Blvd., Lawnside NJ 08045 A 501 (c)(13) tax exempt non-profit organization seeking volunteers and conations.
- 11. Partial List of Lawnside CivilWar Veterans from “A True Story of Lawnside”
- 13. The Lawnside HistoricalSociety, Inc. P.O. Box 608 Lawnside NJ 08045-0608 856.546.8850 http://www.petermotthouse.org lhs@petermotthouse.org
Editor's Notes
- #2 A talk by Linda Shockley
- #3 This is the story of the response by men in a very small community of free Black people to the call to arms during the Civil War. I am president of the Lawnside Historical Society, organized in 1990 to promote the history of our community. We maintain and operate the Peter Mott House Underground Railroad Museum which is open for tours every Saturday from noon to 3 p.m. and by appointment. We know the UGRR was a secret network of those opposed to slavery who actively assisted or received freedomseekers.
- #4 First we need to establish some of the background of Lawnside. It is a historic African American municipality in Camden County bounded by Haddonfield, Tavistock, Barrington, Magnolia and Cherry Hill. It was incorporated as a municipality by an act of the state legislature in 1926 as other communities in Centre Township were incorporating. Our teachers in the kindergarten through eighth grade school system were African-American, many of whom attended historically black colleges and universities. Several were Lawnside natives and at least one was a descendant of siblings who escaped to New Jersey from Snow Hill, Maryland. The details of each of those stories -- the incorporation, descendants of the freedomseekers -- are for another day.
- #5 Growing up there, we were always told our community was founded by free Black people assisted by members of the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield. In fact, Charles Smiley in his 1921 book, “A True Story of Lawnside, N.J., began it describing the community motto, and it values. He said, “The geographical selection of our fathers was wonderful. We have a health place to live, plenty of water and very little marsh or low land; convenient to big cities, yet far enough away to be restful.”
- #6 “You may wish to know why so much secrecy about a place known as Free Haven. Well, it was a place of freedom to an oppressed people, so much so that they with thankful hearts called it Haven, and the secrecy was to conceal their habitation from the oppressors.” Mr. Smiley ended it this way, “My theory of the origin of the settlement called Snow Hill, Free Haven, and lastly, Lawnside is that it was formed by slaves that were liberated by “Friends.” The Friends owned Western New Jersey from March 1673. The Friends are known to be slave abolitionists in the U.S.A. history. The secrecy of origin and of the unnamed settlement was meant for safety.” When we consider that Mount Pisgah AME Church, established as Snow Hill Church, the oldest Methodist church in Camden County, was organized in 1792, the theory needs to be re-visited. So many of our settlers were free Black people, because clearly Friends in our region were staunch abolitionists voting to manumit the people they owned and to excommunicate or exclude any Friend from meeting who would not agree to do so. Consider also that New Jersey outlawed the trading in slaves in the 1790s. It’s important to note that does not mean holding slaves was illegal, only buying and selling.
- #7 New Jersey would follow up with gradual abolition which made anyone born of a slave mother after July 4, 1805 a “free born” person. This was a compromise between immediate abolition of slavery in the state and easing the financial impact on slaveowners. Alert, the law stipulated these children of an enslaved mother were “wards” of her master and therefore indentured to him for a term of 21 years for females and 25 years for males. So, in truth and fact, they were not free until released from indenture. Consider that a male child born of a slave mother in New Jersey in 1841 could have been indentured to his mother’s master through the Civil War. However as Graham Russell Hodges remarked in his book “Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North,” in 1846 the state legislature transformed the state’s remaining enslaved people into “lifetime apprentices.” Historian Giles Wright noted the statute did not free any of the state’s remaining 700 slaves but ensured their future children would be free. Yes, New Jerseyans held slaves in 1846. The 1860 census shows 18 slaves in the Middle Atlantic States all of them in New Jersey. The state was also slow to ratify the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and doing so Jan. 23, 1866, well after the end of the Civil War and lagging behind Georgia by more than a month! I’ll dispense with the question of slavery as irrelevant to the Civil War or that the slave economy was not a driving factor in America’s prosperity. If slavery were not lucrative to the owners and the northern manufacturers who profited from the raw materials it provided, then why institute it and cling to it? At any rate, the number tells that story.
- #8 I have no documentation but I’m told that New Jersey’s senate passed a law exacting a penalty to prevent Black men from attempting to raise a militia, the fine as much as $500. New Jersey 22nd Regiment U.S. Colored Troops, in fact, was not mustered until 1864, and the recruits were trained at Camp William Penn in the Cheltenham section of Philadelphia, Pa., where the 3rd and 6th regiments were also mustered. We were indebted to Mr. Smiley for recording the names of the 46 men from Lawnside who served in the military. The graves of several can be found at three local cemeteries. The others may lie elsewhere or their headstones have disappeared. The borough has two smaller church cemeteries, Mount Pisgah A.M.E. Church and Mount Zion United Methodist Church and the largest secular property, Mount Peace Cemetery.
- #9 Over the years since it began operations in 1902, Mount Peace Cemetery has received the remains of numerous African American area residents not only Lawnside residents, owing to segregation even at burial. . . These burials include veterans who rendered service to their country in military actions ranging from the Civil War up through the Vietnam War. The Civil War veterans buried at Mount Peace total at least 95 soldiers and sailors. The Camden County Office of Veteran Affairs records as many as 108 Civil War burials at Mount Peace. Based on headstone inscriptions compiled in 1999, Lawnside residents Lloyd A. Romero and Bryson C. Armstead, Sr. identified 71 individual soldiers and sailors from the Civil War at Mount Peace. These include 12 from the United States Navy and 59 from the United States Army. The sailors served on six naval vessels: U.S.S. Allegheny; U.S.S. Brandywine; U.S.S. Hartford, U.S.S. New Hampshire; U.S.S. North Carolina; U.S.S. Potomac; and the U.S.S. Princeton. The soldiers buried at Mount Peace include men from the following regiments: 1st; 3rd; 5th; 9th; 22nd; 23rd; 24th; 25th; 26th; 27th; 28th; 29th; 32nd; 35th; and 41st.
- #10 The lack of headstones for some veteran interments includes the only Medal of Honor winner buried at Mount Peace. The remains of U.S. Navy Landsman John Lawson, recipient of the Medal of Honor for heroic actions during the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864, lie in what is now an unmarked grave. His Medal of Honor Certificate reads, …awarded to him on the Thirty-First day of December 1864 for gallant and meritorious conduct in action, while serving on the U.S.S. Hartford in an engagement in Mobile Bay, August 6, 1864. He was one of the six men stationed at the shell-whip on the berth deck; a shell killed or wounded the whole number. Lawson was wounded in the leg and thrown with great violence against the side of the ship, but as soon as he recovered himself although begged to go below. He refused and went back to the shell whip, where he remained during the action. After recovering from his wounds, he returned to Philadelphia, the city of his birth, and his wife, Mary Ann Livingston Lawson, who he had married circa 1856. By 1880, the Lawson Family resided in the City of Camden, Eighth Ward, on Branch Street. John and Mary now had seven children: five daughters and two sons. John Henry Lawson died 3 May 1919 in Philadelphia, he was interred at Mount Peace Cemetery. At a symbolic ceremony in 2004 to lay a new headstone for Mr. Lawson, his granddaughter Blanche Pierce, then of Camden, recalled attending the funeral as a five-year-old and being told of her grandfather’s valor during the war. Messers. Romero and Armstead extended their research to the cemeteries at Mount Zion United Methodist Church on the White Horse Pike and Mount Pisgah African Methodist Episcopal Church on Warwick Road, where they found 17 and 14 Civil War veterans respectively.
- #11 Mr. Smiley characterized the sentiments of many free people, but Lawnsiders, in particular: “What does the United States Flag mean to us? Well, let us make it a little more sacred and cherish it more fervently, for in 1863 there was not so many men in this town as now, yet when the President, Abraham Lincoln, made a call for men to fight to preserve the Nation and to liberate the American people from slavery, the colored from the bondage of slavery, the white from the stigma and shame of holding slaves, forty-six men from here went to the war and did service. The women and men that were too old for service prayed, worked and kept cheerful until God returned all our loved ones.”
- #12 Lawnside Veterans – Mount PeaceCharles Still, Pvt. Co. H, U.S. Col’rd, Vol. Infantry, Died Nov. 6, 1912George Brown, Pvt. Co. B, 24th Regiment, John Emory, Pvt. Co. B, 24th Regiment Mount PisgahJoseph Brewster, Pvt. Co D, 22ndCol’d Regiment NJ Infantry, Died Nov. 19, 1925Joseph Gray, U.SS Princeton, Died Dec. 15, 1893Paul Hammond, Co. E, 24th Regiment, U.S. Col’d Troops Mount ZionCharles Chambers, Pvt. Co. C 25th RegimentBenjamin Faucett, Landsman, U.S.S. Wasp, Died Oct. 14, 1921William Jackson, Co. D, 22nd Regiment, Died Jan. 1, 1887Josiah Still, Pvt. Co. M, 3rd Regiment, Died Nov. 3, 1934Thomas White, Pvt. Co. H, 27th Regiment, Died June 7, 1897
- #13 Unfortunately, we don’t know much else about these men other than Mr. Lawson who is part of an exhibit at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. We need much more information about these brave men and life in our community during the Civil War. In “The Negro’s Civil War, How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union,” James McPherson reprinted an account from a (white) officer of the 22nd U.S. Colored Infantry to the Philadelphia Inquirer:“The problem is resolved. The negro is a man, a soldier, a hero. . . . I am now prepared to say that I never, since the beginning of this war, saw troops fight better, more bravely, and with more determination and enthusiasm.”They performed admirably at Petersburg, Va., they pursued the assassins of Abraham Lincoln, and they escorted the slain leader’s body. The 22nd mustered out in October 1865. THANK YOU
- #14 © Copyright November 7, 2013 Lawnside Historical Society, Inc.