US soldier and US representative, born in New York City, New York, USA. A lawyer and active Democrat, he twice served New York City in the US House of Representatives (185761, 18935) but his colourful and controversial career lay elsewhere. During his first term in Washington, he killed Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, in a duel (1859), but was acquitted in a trial in which he was the first American defendant to plead temporary insanity. (Young Key had been having an affair with Mrs Sickles, whom her husband took back after being acquitted.) When the Civil War broke out, he raised a brigade, and was assigned the rank of brigadier-general, leading it through several campaigns and battles, culminating at Gettysburg (2 Jul 1863), where he put his corps in an advanced and vulnerable position. He paid for it with the loss of a leg, and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was appointed military governor of the Carolinas after the war, and stayed in the army until 1869, then served as ambassador to Spain (186973). Back practising law in New York City, he was chairman of the New York State Monuments Commission (18861912). He was relieved of this post for mishandling funds, but he is credited with preserving Gettysburg battlefield as a national park.
Daniel Edgar Sickles (October 20, 1819 – May 3, 1914) was a colorful and controversial American politician, Union general in the American Civil War, and diplomat.
Early life and politics
Sickles was born in New York City to Susan Marsh Sickles and George Garrett Sickles, a patent lawyer and politician. (His year of birth is sometimes given as 1825, and, in fact, Sickles himself was known to have claimed as such. Historians speculate that Sickles deliberately chose to appear younger when he married a woman half of his age.) He learned the printer's trade and studied in the University of the City of New York (now New York University).
In 1852, he married Teresa Bagioli against the wishes of both families—he was 33, she only 15, although she was sophisticated for her age, speaking five languages. In 1853 he became corporation counsel of New York City, but resigned soon afterward to become secretary of the U.S. legation in London, under James Buchanan, by appointment of President Franklin Pierce. He returned to America in 1855, was a member of the senate of New York state from 1856 to 1857, and, from 1857 to 1861, was a Democratic representative in the United States Congress (the 35th and 36th Congresses).
Sickles's career was replete with personal scandals. He was censured by the New York State Assembly for escorting a known prostitute, Fanny White, into its chambers. He also reportedly took her to England with him, leaving his pregnant wife at home, and presented White to Queen Victoria, using as her alias the surname of a New York political opponent. In 1859, in Lafayette Park, next to the White House, Sickles shot and killed Philip Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, whom Sickles had discovered was having a blatantly public affair with his young wife, Teresa. Stanton, later to become Secretary of War.) Sickles withdrew briefly from public life due to the notoriety of the trial. Oddly, the public seemed more outraged by Sickles's reconciliation with his wife after the trial than by the murder and his unorthodox acquittal.
Civil War
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Sickles desired to repair his public image and was active in raising United States volunteers in New York. In March 1862, he was forced to relinquish his command when the U.S. Congress refused to confirm his commission, but he worked diligently to lobby among his Washington political contacts and reclaimed both his rank and his command on May 24, 1862, in time to rejoin the Army in the Peninsula Campaign. He was absent for the Second Battle of Bull Run, having used his political influences to obtain leave to go to New York City to recruit new troops.
Sickles was a close ally of Major General Joseph Hooker, who was his original division commander and eventually commanded the Army of the Potomac.
Sickles was promoted to major general on November 29, 1862, just before the Battle of Fredericksburg, in which his division was in reserve. Joe Hooker, now commanding the Army of the Potomac, gave Sickles command of the III Corps in February 1863, a controversial move in the army because he became the only corps commander without a West Point commission.
Gettysburg
The Battle of Gettysburg marked the most famous incident, and the effective end, of his military career. Meade ordered Sickles's corps to take up defensive positions on the southern end of Cemetery Ridge, anchored in the north to the II Corps and to the south, the hill known as Little Round Top. Sickles was unhappy to see a slightly higher terrain feature to his front, the Peach Orchard. Meade rode out and confronted Sickles about his insubordination, but it was too late. Sickles fell victim to a cannonball that mangled his right leg. His leg was amputated that afternoon and he insisted on being transported back to Washington, D.C., which he reached on July 4, 1863, bringing some of the first news of the great Union victory, and starting a public relations campaign to ensure his version of the battle prevailed.
Sickles had recent knowledge of a new directive from the Army Surgeon General to collect and forward "specimens of morbid anatomy...
Sickles was not court-martialed for insubordination after Gettysburg because he had been wounded, and it was assumed he would stay out of trouble. Sickles ran a vicious campaign against General Meade's character after the Civil War. Sickles felt that Meade had wronged him at Gettysburg and that credit for winning the battle belonged to him. In anonymous newspaper articles and in testimony before a congressional committee, Sickles maintained that Meade had secretly planned to retreat from Gettysburg on the first day. (There is a germ of truth in that point of view and historians have argued about it ever since.)
Sickles also managed to get himself awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions, although it took him 34 years to do so. The official citation that accompanied his medal recorded that Sickles "displayed most conspicuous gallantry on the field, vigorously contesting the advance of the enemy and continuing to encourage his troops after being himself severely wounded."
Postbellum career
Despite his one-legged disability, Sickles remained in the army until the end of the war and was disgusted that Ulysses S. In 1867, received the brevets of brigadier general and major general in the Regular Army for his services at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg respectively.
Sickles served as U.S. Minister to Spain from 1869 to 1873, and took part in the negotiations growing out of the Virginius Affair.
Sickles was president of the New York State Board of Civil Service Commissioners from 1888 to 1889, was sheriff of New York in 1890, and was again a representative in the 53rd Congress from 1893 to 1895. For most of his postwar life, he was the chairman of the New York State Monuments Commission, but he was forced out by a financial scandal. Sickles is a conspicuous exception. But when asked why there was no memorial to him, Sickles supposedly said, "The entire battlefield is a memorial to Dan Sickles." However, there was, in fact, a memorial commissioned to include a bust of Sickles, the monument to the New York Excelsior Brigade. It was rumored that the money appropriated for the bust was stolen by Sickles himself; the monument is displayed in the Peach Orchard with a figure of an eagle replacing Sickles's likeness.
Sickles lived out the remainder of his life in New York City, dying in 1914.
In popular media
Sickles appears prominently in the books Gettysburg and Grant Comes East, the first two books of the alternate history Civil War trilogy by Newt Gingrich and William R.
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