Type: Exhibition caption

Detail: The first major battle of the Peninsula Campaign was at Williamsburg on May 5, 1862. The Union army, including the New Jersey Second Brigade under Joseph Hooker, suffered over two thousand casualties. In this detailed letter to his wife Mary Squier, surgeon Henry F. Van Derveer of the Fifth New Jersey Volunteers describes the Confederate artillery barrage. "Last Saturday afternoon I rode with an officer of engineers to the advance works before Yorktown. Roads had been built – earthworks thrown up – guns mounted and in short the whole face of the country changed by the labor day and night of Porter and Heintzelman’s army corps of 30,000 men. Dismounting we crept to the advance shielding ourselves by the works – in the trenches we sat and peeked through embrasures and loopholes at the enemy’s front end works. A pretty active bombardment was going on – between our battery No. 1 down by York River – throwing 100 pound shells and one over 200, and the enemy who unable to reach battery no. 1 opened from their different works firing all sorts of missiles everywhere they supposed us to be. The shrieking of a shell is a strange unpleasant sound, (as loud if the shell is a large one and something like, but shriller) than the noise of an express train at high speed. To see them burst high up against the blue sky is beautiful."

Type: Exhibition case

Name: The Early Years

Detail: None of the New Jersey units saw much action in the first year of the war. In August, 1861, they became part of the Army of the Potomac, the new designation for units stationed around Washington under the command of General George B. McClellan. The New Jersey troops began fighting in earnest in the winter and spring of 1862, when McClellan pursued the strategy of trying to capture Richmond by an invasion of the Peninsula of Virginia. By early summer, it became clear that the plan was not a success. Robert E. Lee’s Confederates pushed McClellan’s forces back with heavy casualties, including the loss of New Jersey’s most renowned war hero, Major General Philip Kearny. The campaign ended with the Union’s near rout at the Second Battle of Bull Run in August 1862.