“True Jersey Blues” The Civil War Letters of Lucien A. Voorhees and William Mackenzie Thompson, 15th Regiment, New Jersey Volunteers by Dominick Mazzagetti (review)

Books about the Civil War are legion. But there is always room for another if it adds to our understanding of the most devastating event in American history. True Jersey Blues provides an insightful view of the lives of two soldiers from Flemington, New Jersey (Lucien A. Voorhees and William M. Thompson) from 1862 to 1865 as they related their experiences in a series of letters to their hometown newspapers. Author Dominick Mazzagetti includes more than a hundred letters, but he does more than just edit the letters; he provides substantial historical essays into which are woven the words of the “war correspondents.”

The work is organized topically, which means some of the material becomes redundant when the same letter is used in more than one context. The author begins each chapter with a verse from a poem written by Voorhees, reminiscent of Joseph Plumb Martin’s Revolutionary War memoirs.

As Mazzagetti informs us, soldiers’ lives were engaged in three main activities: marching, camp life, and fighting, with the last taking the least of their time. Most of the soldiers’ time was spent in camp, and about this the subjects of this story exposed the reality of boredom, work, training, and just plain living under often extreme conditions. Winter camp was usually organized in a somewhat permanent fashion; some even erected chimneys in their makeshift accommodations. Camp life also included sickness, disease, death, personal relationships, and the rumors that abound in armies everywhere. The reader is sad to find that in the end only one of the letter writers survived the war (Thompson).

Weather often defined their days, but so did the needs of the military when camp must be closed and the marching began. This army moved by foot—ten miles a day, twenty, twenty-two, thirty! It’s no surprise, then, that these volunteers repeated what soldiers have complained of since Roman times: Their feet hurt.

The correspondents didn’t spend much time on the action they saw, although they arrived at Gettysburg at the end of the second day of fighting in time to bury the dead before hurrying on to pursue Lee. Thompson gave a detailed description of the heated skirmishing at Salem, where they fought “in close and bloody conflict until their ammunition ran out” (56–57). They served in the 15th New Jersey Volunteers, which earned the soubriquet “the Fighting 15th” after the Battle of Fredericksburg when they “hold the line” against Lee “in pine woods clotted with blood” (57). Many of their assignments were on picket duty, often dangerous, sometimes boring.

When added to the previous stories of individual soldiers from New Jersey like Bernard Olsen’s, Upon the Tented field and A Billy Yank Governor, this work helps us round out the personal expense war demands of men. And it offers the reader the opportunity to remember and appreciate the sacrifices of our unsung hometown heroes.