Seven Bloody Days

[Draggingtree]

Seven Bloody Days

Forgotten battlefields; monuments to vanity

Jul 2, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 40 • By GEOFFREY NORMAN

 

General George McClellan

 

Richmond, Va.

It doesn’t take long to walk the Malvern Hill battlefield. Less than an hour. And there is not much to see. There are a few cannons at the top of the hill, where they were on July 1, 1862, firing remorselessly into the lines of assaulting Confederate infantry that never came close to reaching them and took appalling casualties in the effort. Alongside a trail that meanders through the mature hardwood trees at the base of the hill, there are some shallow depressions in the ground that a plaque describes as hasty graves where some of the Confederate dead had been buried. There is one structure at the top of the hill that looks, more or less, the way it did on the day of the battle. Some split rail fences for verisimilitude. And that is about it.

Measured against, say, the 4,000 acres of Shiloh or Gettysburg with its 1,300 monuments, Malvern Hill is decidedly minor league as Civil War battlefields go. And sparsely visited in comparison to the other, better known and better tended sites. When I walked Malvern Hill on a hot morning three weeks before the 150th anniversary of the battle, I had the place entirely to myself.

But the battle was no minor affair. Neither in terms of what was called, in those days, “the butcher’s bill,” nor in military and historical consequences. Malvern Hill was the last of what came to be known as the “Seven Days

Battles,” a running series of fights that resulted in casualties to both sides of 36,059 killed, wounded, and missing. More than had been lost a couple of months earlier at Shiloh, a battle whose casualties matched those of the entire Revolutionary War and put both sides in the Civil War on notice.

In spite of the slaughter,

Seven Days was, snip Read More http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/seven-bloody-days_647775.html

[Pepper]

@Draggingtree

 

From article

 

"McClellan was quite the other thing. He was a master of military organization and an exceedingly adroit player in the political contests that result in promotion. But he did not much like war, and he made a point of avoiding both battle and the battlefield. The carnage was repellent to him."

 

 

One cannot help but compare emperor Obama to McClellan. So let me fix that.

 

"Obama was quite the other thing. He was a master of military community organization and an exceedingly adroit player in the political contests that result in promotion blaming, pandering and double talk. But he did not much like war working people, and he made a point of avoiding both battle them and the economic battlefield. The carnage capitalism and self reliance was were repellent to him."

[Draggingtree]

@Draggingtree

 

From article

 

"McClellan was quite the other thing. He was a master of military organization and an exceedingly adroit player in the political contests that result in promotion. But he did not much like war, and he made a point of avoiding both battle and the battlefield. The carnage was repellent to him."

 

 

One cannot help but compare emperor Obama to McClellan. So let me fix that.

 

"Obama was quite the other thing. He was a master of military community organization and an exceedingly adroit player in the political contests that result in promotion blaming, pandering and double talk. But he did not much like war working people, and he made a point of avoiding both battle them and the economic battlefield. The carnage capitalism and self reliance was were repellent to him."

That was well done Pepper