Saturday, June 10, 2017

And on The Seven Days He Rested

"Fatigue makes cowards of us all."
     -Vincent Thomas Lombardi

The fierce, blue-lighted Presbyterian had just come off hard fought, hard won victory in the Shenandoah Valley when his gray Episcopalian elder needed the Chickahominy River made a stone wall in front of the capital against which the invader would batter himself until "destroyed."

As Stuart rode a ring around the enemy the two armies fought: at Oak Grove and Mechanicsville; at Gaines Mills and Glendale and at Malvern Hill. Tactical defeat was transmogrified into strategic advantage by the timidity and incompetence of Union generalship but the Army of the Potomac was not defeated much less destroyed.

Through it all the heretofore irrepressible Jackson was MIA. He dawdled as in a stupor, his movements when they came were slow and sluggish, he napped on the field. The fire temporarily had gone out of those blue eyes, a consequence of that which makes cowards of us all.

Thomas J. Jackson, lieutenant general, Army of Northern Virginia, June 25-July 1, 1862, The Seven Days' Battles.