its engagements around New Bern, had been ordered to join Jackson in the valley, but on its way was stopped at Hanover Court House, and kept on lookout duty there. General McClellan, expecting General McDowell to join him in a movement on Richmond, threw forward his right wing under Gen. Fitz John Porter to crush Branch’s force out of his path.
Porter had in his command Morell's division and Warren's brigade. Branch s force consisted of his own brigade—the Seventh North Carolina, Col. R. P. Campbells the Eighteenth, Col. R. H. Cowan; the Twenty-eighth, Col. J. H. Lane; the Thirty-seventh, Col. C. C. Lee; and the Thirty-third, Lieutenant-Colonel Hoke; and also two temporarily attached regiments, the Twelfth North Carolina, Col. B. O. Wade, and Forty-fifth Georgia—in all seven regiments—and Latham's North Carolina battery, that joined him the night before the battle. In view of the hard fight that Branch gave him, it is not surprising that General Porter, writing the day after the battle, should say that Branch's force "comprised about 8,000 Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia troops." But for General Webb, writing in 1881, and claiming to have "sifted" and "collated for careful investigation the new material gathered by the war department, and now for the first time made a basis of the history of that time,"[1] to say—for him to say in the face of such a claim as that—"that Branch’s command must have been about 10,000 strong" is, as the Federal General Palfrey sweetly says in commenting on some of McClellan’s figures, "one of those extraordinary, inconceivable, aggravating things that stirs up everything that is acrid in the nature of those who follow his career."[2]
What was the Confederate strength? Branch, in his congratulatory order to his brigade (July 24th), states that his total force was "about 4,000." This would make
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