General Dan Sickles Proves to Be an Independent Thinker
July 2, 1863: The Second Day at Gettysburg
Doug Niles
The morning of July 2 dawned hot and sticky over southern Pennsylvania. The previous day’s fighting had resulted in some real triumphs for the Confederacy, and two Union Army corps—the I and the XI—had suffered serious casualties. The I Corps had fought well before being forced to retreat, while the ill-starred XI Corps had been poorly placed by its commanders and had routed in panic and confusion under an attacking avalanche of Rebel divisions. Both corps had retreated to the high ground of Cemetery Ridge, where they joined some later arriving troops of the II and III Corps.
In the meantime, the rest of the Union Army had been marching to the sounds of the guns. General Meade arrived during the middle of the night after the first day of battle. Now Meade had almost all of his army on the battlefield, though Sedgwick’s VI Corps was in the middle of a thirty-five mile forced march and would not arrive until midafternoon. Still, despite the first day’s losses, the Yankee position was strong. The line was deployed on a shape vaguely resembling a fishhook, with the right anchored on the heavily fortified crest of Culp’s Hill, situated against attack from the east and north. From Culp’s Hill, the line traversed a short distance westward to the eminence of Cemetery Hill, overlooking the town of Gettysburg itself.
South of Cemetery Hill stretched Cemetery Ridge, the long shaft of the fishhook, and this is where the bulk of Meade’s men had been ordered to make their stand. The line extended for nearly two miles, following the gradually descending crest of the ridge into a low swale. From there the land rose abruptly again, first to a steep, wooded hill named Little Round Top—with a top that included some clearings providing a good view of the field—and then to a loftier elevation known as Big Round Top. Though it was the highest hill in the area, Big Round Top was heavily forested and slightly removed from the rest of the front. For all intents and purposes, Little Round Top would be the solid left flank of the long, curving Union line.
Most of Meade’s corps commanders were pleased with the position, recognizing that they possessed interior lines that would allow them to move reserves easily from one part of the front to another. Also, this time the Yankees had the high ground, with plenty of vantages for artillery positions and clear fields of view to the east, north, and west. The Confederates, conversely, were spread out beyond the Federal arc and had much more distance to traverse if they tried to redeploy troops from one sector of the line to another. More than one officer suggested that a Rebel attack against this line would give the army a chance to fight a “Fredericksburg in reverse.”
The one dissenter to this point of view was the III Corps commander, Major General Daniel Sickles. Sickles was a unique character in many ways. He was the only non–West Pointer in all of the high command, and as an ambitious and suspicious fellow he suspected that the clique of military professionals did not show him the respect he deserved. He, in turn, viewed Meade, Hancock, Howard, and his fellow corps commanders as overly cautious and careful, more concerned with not making a mistake than in taking bold action to achieve decisive results.
And Dan Sickles was no stranger to bold action. The most notorious example of his character occurred in 1859. Having served as a local and state politician in New York, rising through the tangled byways of Tammany Hall, he had served as a diplomat on a mission to Europe under James Buchanan and had found a comfortable place in the United States House of Representatives. At thirty-three years of age he had married a pretty fifteen-year-old, Teresa Bagioli, though since then he had been known to be unfaithful to her on several instances during the 1850s. He was also a good friend of Philip Barton Key II, son of Francis Scott Key, who is best known for composing the national anthem.
When it came to his attention that Teresa and Francis Key were engaged in a very public adultery, Sickles acted. He encountered Key on the sidewalk at Lafayette Square, right across the street from the White House, and there he shot him dead. His trial was a media circus, perhaps most notable for the fact that he was the first defendant ever to plead innocent based on a period of “temporary insanity.” His lawyer, Edwin Stanton (soon to become Lincoln’s secretary of war), argued the case successfully to an understanding public and jury, and Sickles was acquitted and, in fact, welcomed back into the bosom of Washington high society. After all, it was reasoned, any self-respecting husband might be expected to do the same thing.
In the view of that society, however, a real outrage happened after the trial, when Sickles forgave his wife and welcomed her back into his home. While killing the man who cuckolded you was deemed acceptable behavior, reconciling with a known harlot was clearly not! For the next year and a half Sickles was ostracized throughout the city and even in the halls of Congress, until the Civil War gave the ambitious politician a chance to get his career moving again.
He wasted no time in organizing several companies of New York volunteers, eventually drawing so many that he was commissioned a brigadier general in charge of a full brigade. He took good care of his men, even paying for many of their expenses out of his own pocket as official commissary and payroll matters were resolved. (Reportedly he once rented an entire bathhouse and paid a dime apiece for each of his 1,400 men to get a shave, bath, and haircut.)
Despite the fact that he was clearly a political general, Sickles performed adequately in the field, and indeed had the presence of mind to seize the good position of Hazel Grove in the Battle of Chancellorsville, giving it up only reluctantly under direct orders from Hooker. After III Corps withdrew, of course, the Rebels made good use of the grove as an artillery park.
Now, at Gettysburg, Sickles feared that the same thing was going to happen all over again. His corps was assigned to anchor its right against Hancock’s II Corps and follow the rapidly vanishing crest of the ridge to Little Round Top. From his line, however, Sickles could see a rise of higher ground about a mile in his front, with a peach orchard marking the apex of what looked like a natural position along the Emmitsburg Road. That road began in Gettysburg, very near to Cemetery Ridge, but as the ridge extended southward the road followed a southwesterly path, so that in front of Sickles’s part of the line the road was more than a mile in front of where Meade had ordered III Corps to take up station.
During the morning of July 2, Sickles made several attempts to get Meade to come over and consult with him about the position, but the new army commander was (understandably) busy with a whole host of details and couldn’t afford to take the time. After yet another personal visit from Sickles, Meade sent his artillery commander, General Henry Hunt, over to inspect the lay of the land for himself.
When the two men returned to the III Corps position, Sickles was further dismayed to discover that the Union cavalry of General Buford, which had been his flank support, had been sent away on some irrelevant mission by the overall cavalry commander, General Pleasanton. (Pleasanton’s order was never satisfactorily explained, and had the result of removing one of the army’s most effective and hard-fighting units from the rest of the battle.) Hunt suggested to the increasingly anxious Sickles that he might want to send a reconnaissance force out toward the Emmitsburg Road, and perhaps beyond, to see what the enemy was up to.
That was better than nothing, so Sickles dispatched three companies of sharpshooters, with an infantry regiment in support, to see what they could see. This small force moved up to and over the Emmitsburg Road without encountering any trouble, but when they advanced onto the southern part of Seminary Ridge they met a line of Rebel skirmishers. Scattering them, the patrol continued to advance but was soon met by massed volleys of musketry, discovering a whole formation of Rebel infantry marching to the south. After about twenty minutes of a firefight, the Yankees withdrew, their colonel reporting to Sickles that a large column of Johnny Rebs was trying to sneak around to the left.
Sickles had an idea of what had to be done, and he did it: he ordered his entire corps forward, marching them almost a mile to the position he coveted along the road. The center of his line was that peach orchard, and he posted infantry and guns throughout the widely spaced trees in a solid wedge. There was a wheat field nearby and he also garrisoned that with men and artillery. To his extreme left was a rocky nest of hillocks and gullies known to the locals as Devil’s Den, and he even managed to post a couple of cannons in this rough terrain at the far left of his line.
There were but two problems with this deployment, though those proved to be glaring problems indeed. First, Sickles didn’t have enough men to cover the front of his position, which, because it bowed out into a considerable salient, was much longer than the front assigned to him by Meade. Thus Little Round Top was unoccupied by infantry or guns—it was only manned by a few men and officers of the signal corps, who had set up an observation post and flag station on top of the steep, dominating hill. Also, Sickles’s advance broke contact entirely with Hancock’s II Corps directly to his right, so that both of the III Corps flanks were essentially hanging in the air. (As one of Hancock’s veteran division commanders, John Gibbon, watched Sickles move forward, he wondered if an order for a general advance had been issued and Gibbon had somehow not heard the news.)
The second problem with Sickles’s deployment was that he didn’t tell anybody from army headquarters that he was doing it. Right about the time his men were taking their new positions, General Meade decided to have a conference with his corps commanders. General Sedgwick and VI Corps had finally arrived, and the Army of the Potomac now had its full strength on the battlefield. Before the conference began, however, Meade got wind of Sickles’s advance and rode over to III Corps to find out for himself what was going on.
The army commander, to put it mildly, was displeased with his subordinate. He rebuked him with some heat—in Bruce Catton’s nicely worded description, when Meade “looked out at the new line he became wrathy.” Perhaps slightly chagrined, Sickles asked if he should return his troops to their assigned position. Just as Meade was answering in the affirmative, a crash of guns roared across the battlefield, and plumes of smoke clearly indicated that III Corps was under attack. It was too late to do anything but stand and fight.
This opening salvo, coming in midafternoon, was the result of a long, reluctant march on the part of Longstreet’s corps. That veteran general had spent much of the day trying to convince Lee not to attack here. When the Confederate commander insisted upon the offensive, Longstreet had grudgingly moved his men onto position to strike the Union left. Insisting upon a screened line of march, he had taken hours longer than Lee had expected, moving his two powerful divisions, Hood’s and McLaws’s, into position for a powerful attack from concealment. Now the full fury of the Rebel I Corps was about to explode against Sickles’s dangerously exposed line.
But it turned out that Sickles’s creative deployment was not just a surprise to his own commander. Perhaps because of his lack of enthusiasm for the attack, Longstreet had not conducted a thorough reconnaissance of his target. He trusted all of his battlefield intelligence to a cursory inspection conducted by one of Lee’s staff officers much earlier in the day. Lee, for his part, maintained his hands-off approach to the operation: once he had ordered Longstreet to make the attack, he did nothing to influence the course of events.
As a result, Longstreet’s advancing divisions were startled when they immediately encountered Yankee defenders—far forward of where they had expected them. In effect, Sickles would end up sacrificing his corps to form a trip line for the day’s battle, and though the great strength of the offensive would do horrific damage to his exposed divisions, the battle would be fought in the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, and Devil’s Den, instead of on the low eminence of Cemetery Ridge.
To his credit, Meade wasted no time in recriminations or regrets. He ordered Sickles to fight where he was, and told him he would send him as much support as he could. Galloping back to his headquarters, he immediately sent Sykes’s V Corps, a unit he’d intended to hold in reserve, to bolster the far left of the line. Hancock, meanwhile, advanced one brigade after another to try to fill the gap between the two corps—even as another cannonade opened up against the Union right, signaling that Culp’s Hill was also under attack.
Longstreet’s attack didn’t commence until late afternoon, but between then and the blessed relief of darkness occurred some of the most savage fighting of the whole war. The scenes of these clashes were soaked in blood and fire, and their names became the stuff of history and legend. For every fresh brigade marched into the carnage, another emerged, pathetically thinned, survivors shocked and bruised and bleeding. McLaws and Hood were bold, experienced commanders, and their men were some of the best the Confederacy had to offer. To meet them, Meade kept marching more and more of his brigades into the hellish inferno, stripping his right flank dangerously to try to cover the gaps on Sickles’s flanks—and, before long, the gaping hole in the center as the bulk of III Corps was torn to pieces.
One of the most dramatic actions of the war occurred on Little Round Top, which was not even garrisoned with infantry at the start of the attack. Fortunately, it was occupied by Meade’s chief engineering officer, Brigadier General Gouverneur Warren. Instantly perceiving the danger, he pulled Strong Vincent’s brigade, of Sykes V Corps, out of the left wing and ordered it to deploy on the key hilltop. With its flank bolstered by the heroic stand of the 20th Maine Regiment on the left and Warren’s perfectly timed reinforcement of the right, the brigade fought until half of its men had fallen and its ammunition was expended. When all else failed, the 20th Maine executed a bayonet charge with the men rushing downhill bearing their empty muskets, and Little Round Top—and quite possibly the Union itself—was saved.
The battle on July 2 was, in Wellington’s words about Waterloo, “a very near-run thing.” If Lee and Longstreet had planned, coordinated, and scouted more effectively . . . if Lee had taken a more direct role in command or been more flexible to Longstreet (and Hood’s) ideas for a wider flanking move . . . or if Longstreet had followed his orders with more alacrity, the Rebels could very conceivably have broken through Sickles’s malformed line, rolled up the Union line, and won the Battle of Gettysburg. But on this day, there were plenty of mistakes to go around, and many of them were made by commanders on each side.
At last, Hood’s charge was broken. Nightfall brought an end to some of the most furious fighting that the world had ever seen. Sickles’s military career was over, a cannonball having taken off his leg—though even then he didn’t lose his sense of style, as he puffed a cigar and urged his men to valor while the stretcher-bearers carried him to the rear.
The second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, at last, was over.