Battle of Hanover Court House: Turning Point of the Peninsula Campaign, May 27, 1862 [Hardcover]

Michael C. Hardy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 16, 2006

After a year of fighting, armies on both sides of the American Civil War had abandoned their early optimism regarding a swift conclusion. Beset by military and political pressures, General George B. McClellan committed his Army of the Potomac to the Peninsula Campaign, with the ultimate goal of capturing Richmond and destroying the surrounding Confederates. Hampered by Lincoln’s demand for troops to protect Washington, a limited Union Army engaged Confederate forces in a series of engagements in and around the community of Hanover Court House, Virginia, eventually forcing a Confederate retreat but missing the critical opportunity to press on and capture Richmond. It was an opportunity that would never come again, leading to three more years of protracted conflict, the rise of Robert E. Lee as Confederate commander, and a missed chance that haunted McClellan for the rest of his life.

Researched from official reports as well as contemporary accounts, this is the first detailed look at the battle most widely known as Hanover Court House and Slash Church. The opening chapters set the stage for this crucial battle and outline the events that led up to May 27, 1862, and the high tide of the Peninsula Campaign. The book’s main focus is the series of battles that took place between the forces of Union V Corps commander Fitz John Porter and Confederate general Lawrence O’Bryan Branch. Photographs of the battle's central participants are included, along with appendices featuring the official reports of commanders and lists of casualties from both sides.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Civil War historian Michael C. Hardy is the author of The Thirty-seventh North Carolina Troops (2003). His articles have appeared in nationally syndicated magazines, and he frequently presents lectures and interpretive programs on Appalachia’s role in the Civil War. He lives in western North Carolina.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 213 pages
• Publisher: McFarland & Company (May 16, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786424648
• ISBN-13: 978-0786424641
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,634,560 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mention North Carolina's role during the Civil War, and at some point, the conversation will include the name of award-winning author and historian Michael C. Hardy. Michael's large body of work on the Old North State and the War Between the States includes numerous books, articles, and blog posts on topics ranging from specific battles, regiments, and personalities, to the experiences of North Carolinians before, during and after the war.

History has been a life-long passion for Michael. He participated in his first Civil War re-enactment at the age of ten in 1982. Since then, he has participated in hundreds of events in locations ranging from south Florida to Pennsylvania. Some of the highlights include the 125th Gettysburg; the 130th Murfreesboro; the 135th Antietam; the 135th Gettysburg, which was the largest re-enactment ever held; the 135th Nashville; the 135th Chickamauga; and the 140th Manassas. Michael has served in nearly every position imaginable, from medical steward, to color sergeant, to colonel of an infantry battalion. He has also volunteered as an interpreter at local museums and state and national parks, and has presented hundreds of programs for schools, libraries, scout troops, and churches. Michael has spent a vast amount of time researching the day-to-day lives of mid-nineteenth-century Americans in an effort to effectively communicate the experiences of the past to people today.

Michael's efforts to preserve, document, and teach history have grown far beyond re-enacting and living history. He is a serious reader and book collector. His personal library contains hundreds of books on nineteenth-century American history. Two specific sections of the collection are nearly exhaustive, featuring virtually every text on Robert E. Lee and just about every book on North Carolina and the Civil War.

In the mid-1990s, Michael began his professional writing career; his first published piece was a biography on Brig. Gen. Collett Leventhorpe in North and South Magazine. Since then, Michael has continued to research and write about battles, people, and places. He has a particular passion for regimentals. So far, his regimentals have focused on two groups with very different histories and wartime experiences: the Thirty-seventh North Carolina Troops was a Tar Heel regiment that fought in some of the most storied battles of the war's Eastern Theater and lost more men to death than any other Tar heel regiment, while the Fifty-eighth north Carolina Troops, the largest infantry regiment from North Carolina, fought in the Western Theater and was plagued by record numbers of desertions. Michael has also devoted his energies to crafting much-needed histories of battles, such as Hanover Court House (1862) and the Brooksville-Bayport Raid (1864). The subject of remembrance is one dear to Michael's heart, and has been showcased in Remembering North Carolina's Confederates, as well as in his 2011 books North Carolina Remembers Gettysburg and North Carolina in the Civil War. In addition to his books, he has continued to contribute focused and meticulously researched articles to national publications such as America's Civil War and Gettysburg Magazine.

Since 1995, Michael has lived in the mountains of western North Carolina, an ideal location for his work, as it places him about five hours from either Atlanta, the heart of the Western Theater of the War, or Richmond, Virginia, the heart of the Eastern Theater of the War. Plus, western North Carolina, where some of Michael's ancestors first settled in the 1770s, has plenty of its own stories, some of which Michael has been privileged to tell in books and articles. Thanks to the magic of technology, Michael attended the University of Alabama, majoring in Community Studies with a focus on Civil War history.

Michael is a six-time winner of the Willie Parker Peace History Book Award from the North Carolina Society of Historians. In 2009 he was presented the Jefferson Davis Historical Gold Medal by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Superior Achievement Award from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, both for his work in preserving Confederate history. In October 2010, Michael was honored as the North Carolina Historian of the Year by the North Carolina Society of Historians.

Michael consults with a number other authors and organizations in their work, answering a legion of emails from researchers ranging from amateur genealogists to scholars at major museums, libraries, and educational institutions. He has assisted several museums with displays about the Civil War, and at times even loans articles from his own collection for display. Michael has also worked as a historical consultant for several well-known fiction writers, including New York Times best-seller Sharyn McCrumb, answering questions about the Civil War or western North Carolina. Through his very popular North Carolina and the Civil War blog, Michael shares his research and insights and invites conversation from readers.

Michael regularly volunteers with a number of local historical societies and associations. He is a member of numerous national organizations, like the Civil War Trust, The Society of Civil War Historians, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He lives with his wife Elizabeth, an English professor at Mayland Community College and acclaimed literary scholar, their wonderful son Nathaniel (born in April 2001), and their beautiful daughter Isabella (born in December 2006) high up on the side of a mountain.
To learn more about Michael, visit www.michaelchardy.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid (But Expensive) Coverage of a Neglected Battle, July 14, 2006

By 

Brett R. Schulte "Civil War Buff" (Southwestern IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Battle of Hanover Court House: Turning Point of the Peninsula Campaign, May 27, 1862 (Hardcover)

The Battle of Hanover Court House finally gets its own book in this McFarland offering of author Michael Hardy. As is usually the case, I would recommend this one because of that fact unless it happened to be a really bad book. I can say without reservation that Hardy provides a very solid look at this small battle overshadowed by Seven Pines and the Seven Days. This is your typical McFarland offering in a solidly constructed hardback of less than 400 pages (only half of that in this case) with an oversized price tag. The author seems to contradict himself somewhat between the subtitle and the text, however. In the subtitle, Hardy calls the battle the "turning point of the Peninsula Campaign." However, in the last paragraph of the book, Hardy says that "while [the soldiers who fought at Hanover Court House's] legacy is a modest one, it should still not be forgotten." This seems to be a far cry from the turning point of a campaign that could have led to the end of the war.

By late May 1862, General McClellan's Peninsula Campaign had moved forward with barely a hitch. He had managed to move within five miles of Richmond with very little bloodshed, and he was determined to keep it that way. To ensure the success of his upcoming siege, McClellan wanted Lincoln and Stanton to forward as many troops forward as possible. One such group was the 40,000 men of McDowell's I corps, Army of the Potomac (now called the Department of the Rappahannock), then positioned at Fredericksburg in order to guard Washington, D.C. from any sudden Rebel movement in that direction. McClellan wanted to extend his right wing in McDowell's direction to clear the way for a smooth march for that general's troops. To do this, McClellan detailed his favorite Corps commander, Fitz-John Porter to take a large portion of his newly formed V Corps and move north to the vicinity of Hanover Court House. Porter was opposed by several Confederate brigades in the area, including the North Carolina brigade of Lawrence O'Bryan Branch. In the end, only Branch's troops took part in the actual fighting, while a large portion of Porter's two divisions arrived by the time the Confederates quit the field. The Federal battle line was mainly directed by John H. Martindale, who seems to have been the only Federal commander who knew what was happening for most of the fight. Martindale took one regiment of his brigade, the 2nd Maine, added another regiment and a battery, and held on against branch while his superiors Morell and Porter initially refused to believe Branch was attacking. The sounds of the firing eventually convinced them otherwise, and the large number of arriving reinforcements caused Branch to quit the field. The battle turned out to be rather unimportant in my view, since the scare Jackson's Valley Campaign put into Lincoln and his cabinet meant that McDowell's troops would not be forwarded anyway.

I enjoyed this one tremendously. It is a rather short, compact read at a little over 200 pages, but I thought Hardy did a good job covering events before, during, and after the battle. The book seems to be written in a new military history mold, with varying chapters concentrating on the wounded, the reporting of the battle in various newspapers, and the way the battle has been remembered over time. I enjoyed the ratio of tactical descriptions to everything else. It seemed to strike a nice balance as far as that goes. The maps were numerous and went down to the regimental level, though I do have several gripes. First, the maps are not to scale, which is a large omission in my opinion. Second, the maps seem to go from a large map of central Virginia to extremely zoomed in maps depicting the fighting. I would have liked to have seen an intermediate map depicting troop positions on both sides as well as the route Porter took to Hanover Court House. Hardy's appendices include the usual (orders of battle) as well as the unique (the Official Reports of Porter and Branch as well as a list of every casualty by name suffered as a result of the fighting). In addition to the ubiquitous Official Records, Hardy relies on quite a few excellent books in his notes, including Russell Beatie's Army of the Potomac series, Steven Newton's controversial look at Joe Johnston and the defense of Richmond, and Joe Harsh's book detailing Confederate strategy in the first two years of the war. For the chapter focusing on the battle, Hardy relies mainly on the Official Records and the OR supplement. His later chapters typically draw from a wealth of letters and newspaper accounts. Anyone interested in the Peninsula Campaign will absolutely want to have this one. For others, the price of $45 for a 200 page hardback may be a bit steep considering the narrow focus.