New Jersey History - It's Our Story

Part of what I was trying to say in yesterday's post is that New Jersey's history is our history - our story and we can't expect anyone else to tell it for us. To take yesterday's example of the Irvington base ball club a step further - New Jersey had two prominent base ball teams in the pioneer period, the Eureka of Newark and the Irvington clubs. During that time frame they took on the best teams in base ball and more than held their own.

That was no small part in the story of the early days of base ball, but the only way that New Jersey will have its rightful place in the full story is if our state's part of the story is told from a New Jersey perspective. It still has to be subject to the full rigor of academic research and analysis, but looked at from the perspective of what part did New Jersey play in this important phase of the game's history. Heroes have to earn their place in the story, but once they do it is important to honor that place.

The same thing is true in a broader sense when we come to the Civil War. Unless we take the time to tell New Jersey's part in that story both civilian and military, we are at the mercy of the generalists (no pun intended) as to whether New Jersey even has a place in the story. New Jersey had 40 regiments in the Civil War, much has been done about telling their stories, but there is a lot more yet to be done.

Lying underneath the group stories of those regiments are the stories of the indivuals who served in them as well as that of their families who were left behind. Having tried to tell the regimental story of the 33rd New Jersey, I am now trying to tell the personal story of William LLoyd through his letters. Tom Fox did much the same thing with the story of William Magee, the famous or infamous drummer boy of the 33rd. When Tom researched that story he found much of the evidence in the archives of the New Jersey Historical Society, specifically in the papers of Marcus Ward.

Ward was a wealth Newark business man who was known as the "soldier's friend" because of all he tried to do to help the common soldier. His papers are held by NJHS, but it is not enough to just hold those papers. Far too many of the manuscripts in NJHS' collections are unprocessed simply because there has never been enough money to hire the staff to do that important work. Who knows how many other important New Jersey stories go untold because of the lack of funds to catalog or the lack of historians to research and write those stories.

When will this change?

Only when we as a state are willing to make our history, the priority it deserves to be.