Dan Sickles Returns to Gettysburg for the Last Time

ECW welcomes guest author John L. Hopkins.

In the summer of 1913, 45,000 Union veterans and 8,000 former Confederates converged on Gettysburg for the largest Blue-Gray reunion ever held. Among those in attendance was the last surviving corps commander who had participated in the battle: 92-year-old Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, a man whose continued presence among the living was a rebuke to anyone who believed longevity was the gods’ reward for a man of probity, honor, and sobriety.

As a congressman in pre-war Washington, Sickles had gunned down his wife’s lover, Philip Barton Key, in broad daylight in Lafayette Square. To call the ensuing murder trial sensational would be an understatement. Sickles’s legal team, which included future Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, presented a defense based upon the then-novel claim of temporary insanity and secured an acquittal. Three months later, Sickles reconciled with his wife, an action that may have outraged public opinion even more than his murder of Key.

At Gettysburg, Sickles’s III Corps had narrowly escaped annihilation on the battle’s second day after he moved it without authorization some 1,500 yards forward of the rest of the Union line, a decision that Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck called “an error which nearly proved fatal in the battle.”^[1] In the desperate fighting that ensued, a shell fragment shattered Sickles’s right leg, which had to be amputated. He never received another command.

After the war, Sickles returned to New York, built a successful and lucrative law practice, and was appointed minister to Spain, where he was rumored to have had an affair with Queen Isabella II. Back in Congress in 1892, he helped pass the legislation that created the Gettysburg National Military Park.

By 1913 he had spent a half-century working to reshape the historical record and recast his own role at Gettysburg from that of blundering political general who “came so near being the cause of irreparable disaster”^[2] to that of an indispensable man who, through bold, aggressive action, had saved the day. And as the fiftieth anniversary of the battle approached, he helped plan the grand reunion of Union and Confederate veterans that he hoped would be “a national love feast.”^[3] It was Sickles who first proposed that “a permanent Peace Monument of some kind should, if possible, be dedicated on the field at the time of the Jubilee celebration,” an idea that did not come to fruition until the 75th anniversary in 1938.^[4]

A few months before the reunion was set to take place, an audit of the New York Monuments Commission, which Sickles had chaired for 26 years, found more than $28,000 unaccounted for. Suspicions turned to its chairman, who was known to be experiencing financial difficulties and had no explanation for the discrepancy, and around whom rumors of financial improprieties had swirled before. A warrant was issued for his arrest in January 1913, but he remained free on bond while his friends worked frantically to keep him out of jail. Harry K. Thaw, the obsessive, mentally unstable millionaire who had murdered architect Stanford White in 1906, even sent a check for $1,000 from his cell in New York’s Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to help pay off the old general’s debts.^[5] Finally, in early May, weary of the negative press the case was generating, the state attorney general dropped the prosecution.

So, it must have been with no small sense of relief that Sickles set out for Gettysburg and the reunion. “The old warrior certainly has sympathy in his misfortunes,” the Boston Globe editorialized, “and the knowledge that he has the regard of the Boys in Blue may serve to remove some of the bitterness from his cup.”^[6] He arrived on Sunday, June 29, along with several thousand other New York veterans to find a cheering crowd surrounding the Western Maryland railroad station. He was helped into a waiting automobile and, accompanied by an escort of 24 troopers from the 15th U.S. Cavalry, driven out to the Rogers house on the Emmitsburg Road, where he was to be the honored guest of the veterans of Carr’s brigade.

Sickles had agreed to write a series of articles from the reunion, which were syndicated in newspapers around the country. He began his July 2 dispatch with characteristic modesty: “The thronging hordes who have motored and walked and trolleyed to my camp today have swept there [sic] hats off and hailed it as ‘Sickles Day.’ And so I have always regarded July 2nd. It was on this day a half-century ago that God gave me strength to serve my country and my Maker, better than I had ever been able to serve them before. It was upon this day in ’63 that I lost my leg and did my little part by the mercy of God to preserve the Union. … Let me call attention right here to the fact that if I had not taken the initiative our left would have been lost. Longstreet said I won the battle by my advance move.”^[7]

Longstreet himself was nine years in his grave, but his widowed second wife, Helen Dortch Longstreet, a former newspaper reporter and fierce defender of her late husband’s legacy, was very much alive; she, too, filed newspaper stories from the reunion that backed up Sickles’s view. “The tragic figure of this great reunion,” she wrote of Sickles, “is the grim warrior whose life blood on these wind-swept fields, on the fateful July day 50 years ago, cemented forever the indissoluble union of the states. It was his victory. It is his field.”^[8]

Mrs. Longstreet went to the Rogers house to pay her respects to her husband’s old adversary, and at her approach Sickles “arose and bowed deeply. He took the greatest pleasure in the dramatic situation and the utmost satisfaction in being permitted on this anniversary and at that spot of spots to tell Longstreet’s widow what a splendid and noble enemy her husband was.”^[9]

Dan Sickles’s life had never lacked for drama or plot twists that would make a scriptwriter blush, and the 1913 reunion was no exception. Among those in attendance was an 82-year-old resident of the Confederate Soldiers’ Home in Pikesville, Maryland. A veteran of Breathed’s Battery of horse artillery in J.E.B. Stuart’s command, he had been wounded twice, captured at Madison Court House, and spent more than a year as a prisoner of war. His name was John Francis Key—grandson of Francis Scott Key and nephew of Philip Barton Key, the man Sickles had murdered five and a half decades earlier.^[10]

John L. Hopkins is a retired communication and public relations professional with more than three decades of experience in higher education, nonprofit, and agency settings. He was born and raised in New York City and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Williams College. He is the author of The World Will Never See the Like: The Gettysburg Reunion of 1913, which the Wall Street Journal called “a compelling, poignant and sometimes heartbreaking account of the biggest gathering of the Blue and Gray since the Civil War.”

Endnotes:

^[1] The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1, 16.

^[2] Frank A. Haskell, The Battle of Gettysburg (Sandwich, MA, 1993), 117.

^[3] Letter, Daniel E. Sickles to Louis Wagner, Nov. 23, 1910, Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg Commission: Correspondence, Record Group 25.24, Box 2, Pennsylvania State Archives.

^[4] Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg Commission Minutes, 13, Record Group 25.27, Box 1, Pennsylvania State Archives.

^[5] “Harry Thaw Goes to General Sickles’ Aid,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 1913.

^[6] “Editorial Points,” Boston Globe, June 29, 1913

^[7] “Sickles Tells of His Bitter Fight on July 2nd, 1863,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 1913.

^[8] “As Mrs. Longstreet Sees It,” Baltimore Sun, July 2, 1913.

^[9] “55,000 Veterans Defy Great Heat,” New-York Tribune, July 2, 1913

^[10] “Maryland 500 Strong,” Baltimore Sun, July 1, 1913