Historical sketch of the Fifteenth Regiment, New Jersey Volunteers First Brigade, First Division, Sixth Corps — A Reader’s Guide

From Mustering to Fortifications

The regiment was mustered into service on August 25, 1862, and moved to the front just two days later, at the height of the Second Bull Run campaign. Campbell records that their first duty was not combat but construction: building fortifications at Tenallytown, Maryland, laboring day and night for about a month. This early assignment sets a pattern of hard, unglamorous work that recurs throughout the narrative. The author’s attention to the regiment’s origins and initial tasks establishes a baseline of discipline and physical endurance that he will later contrast with the horrors of sustained battle.

The Cost of the Wilderness

Campbell includes a lengthy casualty list from the Wilderness Campaign (May 4–15, 1864), reproduced from a letter to the Sussex Register. The letter, signed by Marshall B. Stull, provides a raw, immediate account: officers killed in a charge, men shot through the lungs, a captured battle-flag taken from breastworks. Stull apologizes for his “confused statement,” a telling admission of the chaos of sustained combat. The list that follows names dozens of killed, wounded, and missing by company, from privates to captains. Campbell lets this document speak for itself, embedding a primary source that conveys the scale of loss more powerfully than any summary could.

A Roll Answered in Blood

In a later passage, Campbell reflects on the regiment’s total casualties: 361 dead, the highest loss of any New Jersey regiment, from an original strength of 947. He writes that such a record “must be traced in blood,” and calls for the names to be “written in gold.” The language is deliberately solemn, but it is grounded in a precise statistic—the regiment’s disproportionate sacrifice relative to its size. Campbell also acknowledges the unknown number of men crippled by wounds or wasted by disease, broadening the definition of loss beyond the killed. This section functions as a moral reckoning, tying the earlier demographic portrait to its grim outcome.

Structure and Voice in a Regimental History

Campbell’s narrative moves between official summary and embedded firsthand testimony. The opening sociological analysis gives way to a chronological campaign account, then to the raw letter, and finally to a reflective coda. This structural shift mirrors the arc from organization to experience to memory. The author’s own voice is present throughout—he notes that he “saw much of Union soldiers” and hopes to speak without “invidious comparison”—but he cedes authority to the casualty roll and the correspondent’s letter. Readers should attend to these shifts in register, as they reveal Campbell’s dual purpose: to document and to commemorate.

Campbell’s sketch is best read as a hybrid: part statistical record, part memorial. The casualty lists and the embedded letter from the Wilderness offer the most direct access to the regiment’s experience, while the opening pages provide a framework for understanding who these soldiers were. Because the excerpts are incomplete, the full arc of the regiment’s service from Fredericksburg to Appomattox is only hinted at. Readers may wish to compare the tone of the opening with the closing passages to see how Campbell’s perspective evolves across the narrative.

The rain slid down the window, and Campbell’s rolls of the Fifteenth felt like names whispered in a dark room. Their hard miles, their thinning lines—it left a quiet ache. Reaching for something else, I found History of Morgan's Cavalry — Story, Setting & Ideas, and it offered a strange counterpoint: movement and fire, not endurance, but its own ragged humanity. Two different wars, same haunting weight.