With war raging in the far-off sands of Arabia, members of the Roslyn Landmark Society were treated to a lecture on another war, one much closer to home. On Wednesday, March 26, Harrison Hunt, vice president of the society, gave a talk on "Long Island and the Civil War," one that explored the adventures and sacrifices that Long Island citizens made during the bloodiest conflict in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

While few people living in Roslyn today can claim an ancestral link to the war, the village itself bears witness to the conflict. Roslyn's trademark structure, the Ellen E. Ward Clock Tower is named for the wife of a Civil War general. On a less pleasant side, Roslyn's largest Civil War monument, one that stands in the Roslyn Cemetery, remains decimated as a result of an act of thievery that took place in 1992. That piece of unfinished business was also part of the evening's discussions. The monument, in fact, is celebrating its centennial this year.

Opening his talk, Hunt noted that some of the war's most famous figures spent time on Long Island. General George Meade, who commanded Union forces at Gettysburg, once had a summer job surveying the Long Island Rail Road. The two most famous Confederate generals - Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson - both spent time at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn when they were still in the U.S. Army. Long Island's favorite poet, Walt Whitman, worked long hours as a volunteer nurse in Washington, D.C. Roslyn's William Cullen Bryant did not serve in the war, but he did introduce Abraham Lincoln when the latter gave his famous Cooper Union address in New York City in 1858.

But it is Long Island's ordinary people - farmers, farm laborers, sailors, baymen, and merchant seamen - whose story has yet to be told in full. At the time of the 1860 election, Long Island was a Democratic Party stronghold. The candidate Lincoln did not campaign on the island. In addition, the slavery issue, Hunt said, was not very important to Long Island voters. Most of them, he added, viewed it as a sectional issue.

So when Long Islanders fought, it was for the cause of Union. After Fort Sumter, rallies were held throughout the island, including at meeting houses in Roslyn. Long Island boys fought for other reasons than Union. Some wanted to go off to war with their buddies, others did not want to be branded as cowards, some had "nothing better to do," others were lured by advertisements inviting soldiers to "spend the winter in Savannah." And for some, the slavery issue was a determining factor. Long Island also had a few "copperheads," those northerners sympathetic to the southern cause.

Roslyn soldiers fought in a variety of companies. They included the 5th New York Volunteers, the 14th Brooklyn Militia, and the 119th New York Volunteers, a company commanded by Benjamin Willis, an Albertson resident, whose name would eventually adorn those of two local villages. As with numerous other Civil War historians, Hunt took note of the "wonderfully literate" letters that the soldiers wrote back home. Some were so good that they were published in local newspapers, even if they weren't written for that purpose.

One Roslynite, Jonathan Pollitz, fought not in a New York regiment, but in the 44th Massachusetts. During the war, he saved money for a bell for Roslyn's Trinity Episcopal Church. The young Pollitz died of exposure during the war, but his dream of having a bell at the church materialized. And today, the bell is still on display at the church on Northern Boulevard. Another Roslyn soldier, Alfred Copley, was the son of a well-known architect, a man who designed several spacious Roslyn homes, including Cedarmere. A Roslyn doctor, John Onderdonck, authored a manual used by Union physicians throughout the war.

Away from the battlefield, the Brooklyn Navy Yard served the cause at sea. The famed USS Monitor was launched at a field in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Training camps were set up throughout the island, including one in Mineola. Long Island women assisted, mainly by sewing clothes, socks, and flags for the troops in the field.

Although no battles between Union and Confederate forces took place anywhere near Long Island, the area was not immune to violence. The most famous incident was the notorious Draft Riot, which shook Manhattan Island for three bloody days in July 1863. A draft office in Jamaica was the scene of another, less violent one-day draft riot.

During the 1864 presidential election, General George McClellan, the Democrats' standard bearer, campaigned on Long Island. Although defeated by President Lincoln, McClellan did carry several Long Island towns. In the war's final months, Long Island troops served during the siege at Petersburg and were present at General Lee's surrender at the McLean house in Appomattox.

Even before the war ended, some Long Islanders were already collecting funds for monuments honoring the Union dead. In the decades that followed, towns and cities in both the North and South would see one of the most ambitious monument-building projects in modern times.

The Roslyn monument had its origins in 1891, when local veterans organized the Elijah Ward Post Number 654 of the Grand Army of the Republic. In 1902, the monument was erected and the next year, it was formally dedicated during the 1903 Decoration Day ceremonies.

Decoration Day eventually gave way to today's Memorial Day. Throughout the years, veterans gathered at the monument, and ceremonies were held even after the last Union veteran died in 1934.

Unfortunately, Roslyn's "steadfast bronze soldier" has suffered some indignities over the years. According to Harrison Hunt, the statue's head was once cut off; local tradition holds that it was restored by Roslyn resident William Terrell, Sr. Then in the spring of 1992, the entire statue was stolen from its column. "It is presumed that the figure was taken for a collector rather than as scrap metal, since the soldier was so carefully removed that the pins, which held it in place at the top of the column, were neither bent nor broken," Hunt has written to Landmark Society members.

A decade later, the case remains unsolved. But there is hope. "The recent restoration of a Civil War monument at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn may hold the key to the restoration of the Roslyn monument," Hunt has added. "The Greenwood monument includes a bronze infantryman similar to the one missing in Roslyn. The cemetery has offered to allow its foundry to cast additional figures from its patterns at cost for similar restoration projects. The Roslyn Landmark Society has been in touch with Greenwood regarding this, and has hopes of restoring our missing soldier to his rightful place again."