The 22nd United States Colored Infantry was organized in January 1864 and, with 681 Jerseymen on its rolls, was the most Jersey of all United States Colored Troops regiments. After leaving Philadelphia for Virginia at the end of January, it served at Yorktown through April 1864 on garrison duty and several reconnaissance missions, then spent the spring and early summer constructing fortifications at Wilson’s Wharf, providing security along the James River, and skirmishing with and repulsing Confederate cavalry probes. On June 15, 1864, attached to the White XVIII, the regiment attacked Petersburg, overran a Confederate trench line under heavy fire, and at sunset captured a well-armed Confederate fort after splashing through a swamp. It then endured months of siege warfare before moving to New Market Heights on September 29, 1864, where under Major J.B. Cook it attacked Confederate defenses and swept Rebel forces before it. The men were then moved to the old Fair Oaks battlefield, where command confusion separated the regiment, but it still overran a Confederate artillery position before a Rebel counterattack pushed it back. In December 1864 the regiment joined the newly formed XXV Corp, the only all Black army corps in United States history, and remained in the trenches before Richmond until April 1865, facing bullets, shells, lice, rats, and Confederate troops. After General Lee’s surrender, it marched to Washington, took part in President Lincoln’s funeral procession, and then deployed on the Maryland side of the Potomac as the army hunted John Wilkes Booth. After Booth’s capture and death, the XXV Corps, including the 22nd, was sent to Texas to intimidate the French, who had installed Emperor Maximillian in Mexico in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, while also pacifying the former Confederate state. The regiment patrolled the Rio Grande border until it was recalled to Philadelphia in October 1865 and mustered out of service. This burial ground is the resting place of several African American Civil War soldiers and many early residents of Janvier whose markers have disappeared; most of those soldiers entered service at Camp William Penn near Philadelphia for three-year enlistments, served as privates, corporals, and sergeants in various companies, were mostly free-born, and though some could read and write, all were eager to fight for freedom and citizenship. Charles Love later enlisted in the Regular Army after the Civil War and served as a Buffalo soldier until 1894. Camp William Penn also trained other United States Colored Troops regiments, including the 3rd, the first regiment trained there in the summer of 1863, whose members were not allowed to parade through Philadelphia because of racial animosity, but later took part in the siege of Fort Wagner on Morris Island, South Carolina. Frederick Douglass, likely on July 24, 1863, addressed the 3rd and declared that the fortunes of the whole race for generations were bound up in its success or failure and that its service would answer whether the black man could be a soldier; his words resonated with many soldiers who, like him, were ex-slaves.