In response to the federal Peninsular Campaign in the spring 1862, it joined General William Mahone's Brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia, then participated in many conflicts from Seven Pines to Wilderness.

Cameron had been a staff officer under Gen. Mahone and won election as a member of the Readjuster Party.

In March 1862, before this regiment's combat service began, many men transferred from the Lafayette Guards into the new Petersburg Artillery (under Captain Branch), so that unit received many recruits from rural Patrick County in southwest Virginia.

[2] The regiment was unusual in the Confederate army as a whole, because most of its members were educated and from cities, only Companies F and I were from rural counties (both served by a railroad line from Petersburg).

The next morning I volunteered in the "B" Grays of Petersburg, and on the 20th of April, 1861, we boarded a train en route to Norfolk.

[5]Throughout the war, the regiment went through inconsistent reequipping, tending to leave the men with proper accoutrements and weapons, but without uniforms.

He attended school in Petersburg before entering the University of Virginia, where he received his bachelor of law degree on July 3, 1841.

The regiment reached Mexico early in 1847 and served on General Zachary Taylor's line until the end of the war.

He married Eliza Ann Eppes Allen and they had one daughter, born shortly before her mother's death in April 1851.

As the armies moved ever closer to the Richmond-Petersburg front, Archer again offered his military expertise to the Confederacy.

Composed of men between the ages of sixteen and eighteen and between forty-five and fifty-five from Petersburg and the counties of Dinwiddie and Prince George, the reserves were to be used for state defense and detail duty.

They participated in Archer's greatest military accomplishment, his defense of Petersburg on June 9, 1864, in what has come to be called the Battle of Old Men and Young Boys.

As more than 1,300 Union cavalry troops led by Brigadier General August Kautz attempted to ride into Petersburg from the south and Union infantry threatened the defenses east of the city, 125 members of Archer's unit and 5 men and one gun from an artillery unit answered a call for reserves and militia to assemble at Battery 29 on the Jerusalem Plank Road.

Later Archer recalled that details for special service and guard duty in Richmond had left him with barely a company of inadequately armed men in civilian clothes, combining those "with head silvered o'er with the frosts of advancing years" and others who "could scarcely boast of the down upon the cheek."

The arrival of Confederate cavalry and artillery put a check to further Union movement, but at the cost of 76 casualties to the reserves, more than half of those who had gone into action.

Promoted to lieutenant colonel, Archer led his unit in the defense of Petersburg during the subsequent Union attack of June 15–18 and throughout the nine-and-one-half-month siege of the city.

Wounded in the arm at Petersburg, he was hit again during the retreat to Appomattox, where his combined force of the 3rd and 44th Battalions of Virginia Reserves surrendered sixty-five men.

He sought the party's nomination for mayor in 1876 and 1878 but lost both times to William E. Cameron, who had remained with the 12th Virginia until war's end and later aligned himself with General Mahone and even later with the Readjuster movement.

In 1879 Archer and tobacconist Charles A. Jackson were the Conservative nominees for seats in the House of Delegates, but both lost as the Readjusters carried the city with 55 percent of the vote.

Archer received their nomination for mayor but lost to Thomas J. Jarratt, and the Readjusters won a narrow majority on the city council.

The Conservatives then tried to keep the Readjusters from taking their seats by alleging a violation of the city charter, and on July 1 Archer refused to vacate his office at the end of his term.

Archer died at his home on High Street on August 21, 1902, after having been in "feeble health by reason of his advanced age for some months."

Wounded at Crampton's Gap on September 14, 1862, captured and taken to the U.S. Army 6th Corps Hospital, in Burkittsville, Md.

Olivet Cemetery, Nashville Tennessee, on April 19, 1899, following a huge state funeral, one of the largest ever seen in the city.

Former Sergeant of Company E, William E. Hinton, became a local financier and political leader, first as a Conservative, then as a Re-Adjuster, including a term in the Virginia General Assembly.