Excerpt from The Defence of Petersburg: Address of Capt. W. Gordon McCabe Before the Virginia Division of the Army of Northern Virginia, at Their Annual Meeting, Held in the Capitol at Richmond, November 1st, 1876
I am here in Obedience to your orders and give you a soldier’s greeting.
It has fallen to me, at your behest, to attempt the story of a defence more masterly in happy reaches Of generalship than that of Sebastopol, and not less memorable than that of Zaragoza in a constancy which rose superior to accumulating disaster, and a stern valor ever reckoned highest by the enemy.
It is a great task, nor do I take shame to myself that I am not equal to it, for, Speaking soberly, it is a story so fraught with true though mournful glory - a story so high and noble in its persistent lesson of how great things may be wrested by human skill and valor from the malice of Fortune - that even a Thucydides or a Napier might suffer his nervous pencil to droop, lost, perchance, in wonder at the surprising issues which genius, with matchless Spring, extorted time and again from cruel odds, or stirred too deeply for utterance by that which ever kindles the hearts of brave men - the spectacle of human endurance meeting with unshaken front the very stroke of Fate.
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