Sickles summoned his friend Samuel Butterworth for counsel on how to deal with the situation without harming his chances of becoming president. During this Sunday-morning conference, as Sickles paced the floor, he looked out the window only to spy Key standing in a park across the street shaking a white handkerchief in another brazen signal to Teresa. Butterworth ran out to engage Key in conversation while Sickles went to his gun chest.
Sickles soon caught up with Key. “You villain, you have defiled my bed and must die!” Key took cover but was defenseless as Sickles, a marksman, plugged several bullets into him. Sickles was arrested and charged with murder. After a wrenching and sensational trial in which he pleaded temporary insanity (the first use of such a defense), he was acquitted, enabling him to sustain his career in politics, for he had recently been elected to another term in Congress.
Teresa was banished in ignominy to the seclusion of her parents’ home in New York. After all this, Sickles began to feel remorseful about his own sexual transgressions. Realizing he was still in love with his wife, he attempted to reunite with her, but in a supremely ironic twist of public capriciousness, his constituents were so offended by his desire to reconcile with a disgraced woman that his political career was destroyed. His former wife was left to herself in shame.
Major General Daniel Edgar Sickles and his leg bone, which he sent in a makeshift coffin to the Army Medical Museum with his compliments and frequently visited.
No longer a congressman, Sickles returned to his law practice in the spring of 1861. By this time the conflict between the North and South had grown explosive, and a man like Sickles was not content to vegetate in an office while history was being made. He recruited a volunteer brigade in New York and was made a brigadier general. After successfully commanding his brigade in its maiden engagement, he was provisionally promoted to a major general and given responsibility for the Union army’s Third Corps. He led this group through a campaign at Chancellorsville, Virginia, and on to Gettysburg.
On the morning of July 2, 1863, the second day of a fierce three-day battle at the site, General George Meade ordered Sickles to position his men near troops already posted at the Round Tops, two hills in the south of the Gettysburg battlefield that made for a strategic position for the Union army. Later in the day Sickles, without permission, advanced his men beyond this position, a costly move. The Confederates, led by Lieutenant General James Longstreet, wiped out about half the division. Early in the evening, as Sickles sat on his horse observing the action, a twelve-pound cannonball ripped his right leg open. His horse panicked, but Sickles was able to calm it and dismount alone. Some soldiers rushed him off in an ambulance wagon to a nearby ravine, where Dr. Thomas Sim, a surgeon and medical director of the Third Army Corps, severed the leg low in the thigh. Dosed with opium and clutching his amputated shinbone, which Dr. Sim returned to Sickles because a general’s leg was deemed a special war memento, he was carried by stretcher for miles to a train and taken to Washington. While he was recuperating, President Lincoln paid him regular visits. At one point a nurse showed the wounded man a flyer urging doctors to “collect and forward to the office of the Surgeon General all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded as valuable.” So, deeming his shinbone a worthy contribution to medical science, Sickles forwarded it to the Army Medical Museum, where it was put on display.
Having only one leg didn’t lessen Sickles’s passion for life. He was only forty-three and had many more accomplishments ahead of him. Within two months his stump was healed, and he was up and about, even riding a horse again. He became military governor of the Carolinas, minister to Spain, a New York City sheriff, and again a U.S. congressman. As a representative, he spearheaded a drive to make the site of battle at Gettysburg a national military park. He even became intimate friends with James Longstreet, the former Confederate general who had commanded the bloody attack that took off his leg. Longstreet graciously absolved Sickles of blame for taking his advanced position at Gettysburg by composing a document avowing that Sickles’s initiative “saved the battlefield to the Union” and expressing the hope that “the nation, reunited, may always enjoy the honor and glory brought to it by that grand work.”
Daniel E. Sickles wearing the regulation dress uniform of a U.S. army general around the turn of the century. Sickles was the last major general of the two armies that fought at Gettysburg to attend the fiftieth anniversary Gettysburg reunion, held from June 30 to July 4, 1913, and attended by 54,000 veterans of the north and south. The following year, 1914, Sickles died at the age of ninety-four.
LOCATION: National Museum of Health and Medicine,* Washington, D.C.
Footnote
*Known as the Army Medical Museum during the Civil War.
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS
DATE: 1863
WHAT IT IS: The handwritten manuscript of the speech read by President Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The following is a description of what is called the Nicolay copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: It is on two pages. Page 1 is 9⅞ inches long and 7⅞ inches wide, is written in brown ink, and has “Executive Mansion” printed at the top in bold letters, and “Washington, …., 186.” below it. It is lined horizontally in blue ink and has a tannish color (perhaps from the effects of time). Page 2 measures 12⅝ inches by 7¹¹/₁₆ inches, is written in pencil, is also ruled in blue ink, has an irregular tear on the lower right corner (the missing portion of the sheet is about 1⅛ inches by 4¼ inches), and is lighter in tone than page 1 (it may have been off-white in 1863). Page 2 has sometimes been referred to as a sheet of foolscap, but the term does not quite apply. It is too small and would not qualify as drawing paper. Both pages have fold marks—two on page one and three on page two.
One of the great mysteries of American historical documents concerns Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Lincoln wrote the address in his hand at least five times—that is to say, five copies of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s hand exist today. But the reading copy, the one that the beleaguered president held on that autumn day of November 1863 as he looked out at more than ten thousand spectators gathered on the ravaged Pennsylvania battlefield, would be a priceless manuscript, a supreme national treasure. Does the reading copy survive, and if it does, which one of the five known copies is it?
The five copies are each known by their former owners. Accordingly, they are the Nicolay copy, named after John George Nicolay, Lincoln’s principal personal secretary; the Hay copy, named after John Hay, an assistant to Nicolay; the Everett copy, for Edward Everett, the famed orator; the Bancroft copy, for George Bancroft, a diplomat and historian; and the Bliss copy, for Alexander Bliss, a colonel in the U.S. Quartermaster’s Department. The Everett, Bancroft, and Bliss copies can be ruled out immediately as the reading copy. It is well documented that they were written by Lincoln after his Gettysburg Address at the request of others so that copies of his speech could be sold at “sanitary fairs”—fund-raising events sponsored by local organizations of the U.S. Sanitary Commission for the benefit of injured soldiers.
That leaves the Nicolay and Hay copies as the contenders for the reading copy. Or perhaps Lincoln wrote another copy, the real Gettysburg Address, and it has been lost or destroyed.
To understand the provenance of the speech, one must have a sense of the historical context. Here are the circumstances of the Gettysburg battlefield commemoration and of Lincoln’s invitation to speak.
From the first to the third of July 1863, Union and Confederate soldiers fought one another in one of the most vicious battles of the Civil War. Seventy-five hundred soldiers lay dead in the fields; more than twenty-six thousand were wounded, many requiring the amputation of one or more limbs; and more than ten thousand were missing or captured. The magnitude of the Union victory and the need to honor the fallen soldiers at Gettysburg brought together the political leaders of the North in com
memorating the enormous casualties of their army. Less than five months after the last cannons resounded, statesmen, soldiers, and citizens gathered to consecrate the battleground.
The idea to set aside a portion of the twenty-two-thousand-acre Gettysburg battle site to bury its dead came from David Wills, an attorney in the small Pennsylvania town. Charged with overseeing the medical attention given to those ravaged by the battle, Wills was so overwhelmed by the spectacle of temporary graves and exposed remains on the fields that he recommended to Pennsylvania’s Governor Andrew Curtin that the dead be reinterred with proper burial rites in an area that would be designated a cemetery. Curtin approved the idea, and eighteen states of the North that had lost men in the battle participated in the venture. Wills became the superintendent of the Gettysburg Cemetery Commission.
From the start of this enterprise the commissioners wanted to have America’s most acclaimed living orator as the principal speaker for the dedication ceremony. They succeeded in procuring the orator: Edward Everett, a former president of Harvard, congressman, governor, minister to Britain, U.S. senator, and U.S. secretary of state, accepted an invitation sent to him in September. So the commission went ahead with its plans, postponing the ceremonies from October 23 to November 19 to accommodate Everett, who requested more time to craft his speech for so solemn an occasion. On the second of November, Wills extended an invitation to President Lincoln to deliver “a few appropriate remarks.”
Lincoln accepted the invitation, which surprised those around him. Usually, his hectic schedule forced him to decline public appearances, even at important functions. In this instance the enormity of the battle and the opportunity to define the war as one against human injustice certainly influenced Lincoln’s decision to attend.
Unfortunately, the circumstances attending Lincoln’s actual writing of his address are vague. Did he write it in Washington before his departure for Gettysburg? On the train to Gettysburg? At Gettysburg, after his arrival and before the ceremonies commenced? Or a combination of these?
These questions were investigated by two of the foremost Lincoln scholars, David C. Mearns and Lloyd A. Dunlap, in their 1963 book Long Remembered. The authors gathered recollections and testimonies of eyewitnesses, evaluated their credibility and the evidence at hand, and arrived at a conclusion.
According to Mearns and Dunlap, the evidence strongly indicates that Lincoln began writing the speech while at the White House—exactly when is open to question. Noah Brooks, a reporter who knew Lincoln well, declared in 1878 that he had been with the president on November 15, four days before the ceremonies, and that the president had mentioned receiving a copy of Everett’s speech. Lincoln quipped that Everett sent the speech out of fear that he might say something similar, but that Everett need not worry; Lincoln’s remarks would be brief. In response to Brooks’s question as to whether he had written his own speech, Brooks quoted Lincoln as saying, “Well, I have written it over two or three times, and I shall have to give it another lick before I am satisfied. But it is short, short, short.” A year later, former U.S. attorney general James Speed noted that Lincoln had once spoken to him about the preparation of his speech and claimed to have written “about half a speech” the day before he left for Gettysburg.
Around noon, on Wednesday, the eighteenth of November, Lincoln boarded a special train of four cars. Lincoln’s family didn’t travel with him. The younger Lincoln boy, Tad, was seriously ill, and his wife, Mary Todd, was distressed; their third son, Willie, had died just a year earlier, and their second son, Eddie, several years previously. But during the trip Lincoln was composed, and at times he even displayed his keen sense of humor.
It was on this train, legend has it, that Lincoln wrote his speech. But did he really? Many historians believe Lincoln did no writing during the journey, but there are conflicting accounts, some from people who claimed to have been eyewitnesses and to have actually seen him scribbling on a piece of paper or an envelope braced on his knee.
Lincoln’s train arrived in Gettysburg at 5:00 P.M. The president was led to David Wills’s house (which still stands on the southeast quadrant of the square in the center of town), where he was to spend the night in a second-floor bedroom. Dinner was served for Lincoln and other guests. Late in the evening, Lincoln begged to be excused to work on his speech and retired to his room. Here again, the accounts of his work on the speech differ.
Historians agree that the president had already written at least part of the speech and had brought it with him to Gettysburg. Lincoln finished the speech at Wills’s house sometime between when he arrived that evening and before the ceremonies the next morning, but except for the governor, Andrew Curtin, no one witnessed firsthand the president writing that evening.
As Mearns and Dunlap report, Curtin said in 1885 that he had observed the president writing his address “on a long yellow envelope.” Such envelopes were of the kind officially used in the Lincoln White House. Curtin recalled the president leaving the social gathering that evening to show what he had written to his secretary of state, William Seward, who was a guest in the next house, then returning and copying his address “on a foolscap sheet.” Some claimed that this foolscap was the same from which he read the address at the ceremony. James Rebert, a sergeant in a Pennsylvania cavalry, assigned to Lincoln on the morning of the Gettysburg procession, later said that he met Lincoln in his room and was asked to wait a few minutes until the president finished writing. Rebert noted that Lincoln had several pieces of pencil-inscribed notes before him, which, after completing his writing, he folded and put in his pocket.
That Lincoln finished his draft in pencil has been disputed by some historians. They contend that on the night before the ceremony, Lincoln did not like the way his speech ended and destroyed his second sheet; the next morning he copied in ink his first draft onto two new pages and used them when he delivered the address.
However, most evidence suggests that a two-page ink draft was not written before the speech. Both Nicolay and his assistant, John Hay, report that Lincoln finished his address in pencil on the page he read from at the ceremony. This pencil-written page would be the companion to an ink page with the words “Executive Mansion” written at the top, which Wills asserted he saw in the copy Lincoln read from during the speech. (No ink copy later made by Lincoln has these words printed on any of the sheets.)
A rare photograph of President Abraham Lincoln (pointed out by arrow) on the speaker's platform before he delivered his speech at the dedication ceremonies of the Gettysburg National Cemetery. Lincoln's speech was so brief that camera crews were still setting up when the president finished.
The Gettysburg ceremonies began with a procession to the battlefield, at about eleven o’clock on the morning of November 19, 1863. It was a cool, clear autumn day, and a large crowd was present—probably ten thousand to thirteen thousand, although estimates range from as few as five thousand to as many as twenty thousand. Lincoln rode in the procession on a horse and presumably reached the speaker’s platform at eleven-fifteen. The military salute and introductions probably occupied another twenty-five minutes, with a military band performing just before Edward Everett began a two-hour speech on the battle.
At about 2:00 P.M., Lincoln arose from his seat and took the podium. From his pocket he withdrew two folded pages, which he held in his hands and referred to while speaking. As he looked out at the audience, his heart was torn. His only desire was for the country to reunite. He felt no bitterness toward the South, but rather he agonized for it; he felt the loss of the Confederate states. He spoke the words that would soon be immortalized: “Four score and seven years ago . . .” The speech was short, only two minutes, yet applause interrupted Lincoln’s address a few times and sustained clapping followed at the conclusion. The reception in the press, however, was by no means wildly enthusiastic, and many of the newspaper accounts were unfavorable. “Ludicrous,” said the London Times; “Silly, flat,” lamented the Chicago Times, “an offensi
ve exhibition of boorishness and vulgarity.” But there were also many positive descriptions, and the next day Everett sent a note to the president in which he declared, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”
On November 23 Wills wrote the president asking for the original manuscript of his speech for archival purposes. Nicolay later wrote that Lincoln made a copy but changed some of the words to match the newspaper versions of his speech, which differed from his manuscript. Relying on his memory of exactly what he said at Gettysburg, his original draft, and the newspaper accounts, the president wrote out a new draft. It is possible that Wills never received an original or copy of the speech. John Page Nicholson, a soldier and later chairman of the Gettysburg National Park Commission, noted that four days after the Gettysburg procession Lincoln wrote out a copy of his speech and presented it to John Hay. Interestingly, few people knew about this copy of the address until its existence was made public in 1901. Further support for the Hay copy not being the reading copy arises from the fact that the copy does not contain any folds.
Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain Page 24