James A. Hessler
Page 29
Although fighting would continue on the Union right on Culp’s Hill and East Cemetery Hill well into the evening, the second day’s battle for Meade’s left flank was officially over. Sickles’ advanced line had disintegrated, and Longstreet retained the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, and the western side of the Wheatfield. Most importantly, Longstreet failed to drive in Meade’s left and Cemetery Ridge was firmly under Union control. “The general line of battle on the left was shortened, strengthened, firm,” reported General Sykes, whose Fifth Corps now anchored the Round Tops. “Now Sickles’ blunder is repaired,” exclaimed Lieutenant Frank Haskell.21
Sickles had departed the battlefield rather ingloriously in an ambulance while Alexander’s artillery shells rained down around it. To Tremain, “it seemed to me a long time before a halt was made.” According to the New York Timeson July 18, “He suffered much pain during the ride.” When the ambulance finally arrived at a makeshift field hospital, the Third Corps medical staff took charge of the patient. At some point, Chaplain Joe Twichell met and accompanied the ambulance. Twichell remembered a scene that would “never fade from my memory as long as I live. From an ambulance, driven slowly across a green meadow toward the Baltimore Pike, was lifted [Sickles’] “mangled, blood-drenched form.” Twichell later described the general as “pale and swooning…and he struggled against his deathly faintness to ask intelligence of the battle.”22
The shattered right leg was examined by the Medical Director of the Third Corps, Surgeon Thomas Sim, who took charge of the case. Sim informed the general that the leg would have to be amputated above the knee. Sickles replied grimly, “Do with me as you please.” Sickles later managed to create some confusion over which doctor actually amputated the leg. He told a newspaper in 1882 that Assistant Surgeon J. T. Calhoun “cut off the useless limb.” But Tremain, Randolph, Twichell, and Dr. Calhoun himself agreed it was Dr. Sim who performed the operation. Calhoun recorded that “the medical director of the corps, Surgeon Thomas Sim, U.S.V., with my assistance amputated the injured limb.” Monument sculptor James Kelly was later fond of repeating a secondhand canard that Sickles’ wound was only “slight” but that he ordered a “drunken volunteer surgeon” to amputate the leg and “save him from the mess he got in.” This was of course preposterous, but may have been a muddled version of the more common rumor that Sickles’ amputation ultimately saved him from a court-martial.23
According to Henry Tremain, the amputation was “immediately performed (just at dusk).” The modesty of the era prevented observers from describing the procedure in any detail. “It was fast growing dark, and the scene and actors need not be recalled,” Tremain related to his memoir readers. “An improvised operating table, candles in bayonets, lanterns, sponges, the odor of medicines, of chloroform, a few idlers who belonged elsewhere—all are vaguely assembled in uncertain memory.” The rattle of musketry could still be heard in the distance when Chaplain Twichell administered the chloroform. “I may not expose too freely,” Twichell recalled during an 1888 speech, “even here, the sacred privacy of that scene; and I will not; but we heard him say, over and over…again, ‘God bless the Third Corps! God bless the Third Corps!’—and saw the smile on his pallid lips with which he said it.” His “bearing and words were of the noblest character,” muttering comments such as, “If I die, let me die on the field.…God bless our noble cause.…In a war like this, one man isn’t much.…My trust is in God.” Dr. Sim told the newspapers that before the chloroform rendered him insensible, Sickles “had the whole battlefield before his mind, and gave repeated orders, as if he were hotly engaged with the enemy.” However, Sickles eventually faded under the effect of the chloroform, and his right leg was amputated at the lower thigh just above the knee. The fledgling Army Medical Museum in Washington had requested medical officers to forward “all specimens of morbid anatomy…which may be regarded as valuable,” so someone (perhaps Dr. Sim) saved the severed leg. It was later donated to the museum in a small coffin-like box and accompanied by a visiting card signed, “With the compliments of Major General D.E.S.”24
The operation was successful, although Tremain recalled that the chloroform “had a very exciting and nervous effect.” On waking from the stupor, Sickles complained of feeling weak, and a cup of tea was provided to help his recovery. E. L. Townsend wrote in 1903 that Sickles told the doctor, “if you call this a victory, take the other off.” Dr. Sim likewise claimed that the moment his patient awoke, “he inquired anxiously how the fight was going on, and added with great earnestness that he would give the other leg, and his life to boot, to win the battle!” The noise, chaos, and sanitary conditions of a field hospital must have been considered unsuitable, and it was thought best to have the general carried to the rear where he might rest quietly. Sickles requested that Dr. Sim accompany him, leaving the medical care of the corps with Dr. Calhoun. “I immediately selected a new site for the hospital of the corps,” wrote Calhoun, since the present location had “been rendered untenable by the fire of the enemy, and had our wounded, over three thousand in number” removed to the new site.25
The hospital location where Dan’s leg was amputated is another of Gettysburg’s uncertainties. This is surprising given Sickles’ rank and notoriety, but it is merely an indication of the chaos that transpired within the Union lines, as well as a reflection of the frustratingly imprecise accounts that were later provided. According to Joe Twichell, “the rear was one vast hospital. The wounded were everywhere.” W. H. Bullard wrote that the general was taken to an “old Penna. Barn or stone barn and Dr. Ash [sic] I think and others amputated his leg.” The New York Monuments Commission history (under Sickles’ supervision) recorded only that “His leg was amputated in the field hospital of the Third Corps.” Tom Cook, correspondent for the New York Herald, reported on July 6 that it happened in a “wheatfield to the rear.” Dr. Sim spoke to newspaper reporters on July 7, but didn’t say where the operation occurred. Surgeon George Otis, curator of the Army Medical Museum, said Sickles was removed to “a sheltered ravine a short distance to the rear, where the limb was amputated.…The patient was then sent farther to the rear.” E. L. Townsend, a former Third Corps officer, recalled in 1903 that the leg was removed about one-quarter of a mile to the rear. Private Stephen Chase of the 86th New York claimed, “While passing to the [Third Corps] hospital with [a wounded] soldier, we passed the table where General Sickles was having his leg amputated.”26
Some believe the amputation occurred on a Baltimore Pike farm, but there is good evidence to suggest that it took place in one of the makeshift Third Corps hospitals closer to the Taneytown Road. The chief surgeon of Birney’s division, Jonas W. Lyman, initially had difficulty selecting a suitable site along the Taneytown Road to establish his hospital during the early afternoon of July 2 because the Second and Eleventh corps hospitals had already occupied many of the houses. Lyman finally selected an “old barn by the roadside” and moved between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. to “a large stone barn.” An assistant’s account also noted that the initial corps hospital (s) were on the Taneytown Road behind the Round Tops. The Third Corps official U.S. government hospital marker likewise confirmed: “The Division Field Hospitals of the Third Corps were located July 2 in houses and barns along the Taneytown Road from the [Granite] Schoolhouse Road to Mill Road [Blacksmith Shop Road]. During the night they were removed to the south side of White Run three hundred yards from its junction with Rock Creek.” Given that the Third Corps hospitals were almost certainly located on the Taneytown Road, it seems likely that the corps surgeon would have also been stationed there, rather than the more distant Baltimore Pike.27
On the other hand, Sickles said in 1882 that the operation occurred “on the Baltimore Pike that night.” Given the shock of the wounding, the blood loss, and the artificial stimulation, Sickles also admittedly remembered little after being taken off the field. Chaplain Twichell wrote that enemy artillery fire had caused the corps doctors to move farther to the rear at least tw
ice, and recalled that he ultimately met the ambulance (before the amputation) as it approached the Baltimore Pike. This Baltimore Pike amputation site is usually credited as the Daniel Sheaffer farm, located on the western side of the pike a few hundred yards south of White Run. The brick Sheaffer farmhouse dated to about 1780, and the family operated a large sixty-nine acre farm. Given their size and location (on the pike and near White Run), it was an advantageous location for a field hospital, and Sickles spent the night of July 2 in the house. The question remains as to whether the amputation was performed there.28
In her postwar damage claim, Mrs. Sheaffer wrote that the farm was used by both the Third and Twelfth corps, and that a number of wounded men were brought to the house. Mrs. Sheaffer stated that “on the second day of July 1863 Maj. Gen. Sickles was carried to the house in consequence of a wound which resulted in the amputation of a leg—he remained over night.” Local civilian J. Howard Wert lived on his father’s farm approximately three hundred yards from the Sheaffers. Wert wrote in 1886 that he saw “the noble chieftain borne with shattered leg to the somber brick house on the Baltimore pike.” The Gettysburg Star and Sentinelreported in 1905 that the amputation happened in the Sheaffer house itself, but a sufficient number of post-battle accounts cast doubt on this.29
Several contemporary accounts suggest that Sickles was moved to the Sheaffer farm after the amputation was performed. As noted previously, Dr. Calhoun wrote that Sickles, accompanied by Dr. Sim, was moved to a new location for post-operative rest. Dr. Calhoun was also forced to select a new hospital site because the location where the leg was amputated had been “rendered untenable by the fire of the enemy.” This would again suggest an original location for the surgery closer to the Taneytown Road than to the Baltimore Pike.30
Correspondent Tom Cook wrote in the New York Herald on July 6 that soon after Sickles’ amputation in “a wheatfield,” he awoke and addressed Cook: “In this war a man is but a cipher. God rules and directs all for the best.” Soon after, the patient was “borne away to a house on the Baltimore turnpike, where he passed the night very comfortably.”31 The New York Times of July 18 informed its readers that after the amputation:
It was then thought best to have him carried to the rear to some house, that he might rest quietly. A detail of forty men from the First Excelsior regiment of his old brigade, were sent for to bear the litter. As soon as the brave veterans saw their General lying wounded, they could not control their emotion.…Gen. Sickles looked at them, and smilingly said, “Now, boys, take up your poor old General, and be careful not to let him fall, for that would be the last of him.”32
A modern view of the Daniel Sheaffer farm looking west from the Baltimore Pike. Sickles was taken here after being wounded and might have had his leg amputated at this location. Author
Sickles instructed his bearers on how to give the stretcher as little motion as possible, and:
After being carried a distance of four miles, the General complaining of great exhaustion and fatigue, he was taken to the house of Mr. Shaffer [sic], on the Baltimore road. The family was much alarmed by the fighting in their vicinity, and when a room was asked for the General’s accommodation they were in a quandary whether to admit him or refuse him entrance. He was, however, admitted and some tea was given him. He slept little during the night, and said in the morning he felt much better. He appeared in cheerful spirits; talked and laughed with his Staff and remarked he should soon be in the field with a new leg. He got shaved, made his toilette and smoked a cigar. His eyes were as animated as ever, his face was but slightly tinged with paleness. Beyond this there was nothing to indicate that he had passed through any suffering. He was perfectly unconcerned, easy and composed.33
According to one of Sickles’ own accounts, which must always be taken with a grain of salt, he requested champagne to help fuel his recovery. When a bottle could not be located, wine was used as a substitute. Dan drank a mouthful at a time, finished the bottle during the course of the night, and “thus started on the way to recovery.” In truth, the general was still not out of the woods and that first night “was passed in successive watches” by a nervous Tremain, and Captains Alexander Moore and Thomas Fry.34
Henry Tremain recalled that “the musketry lingered long beyond the shades of evening” on Gettysburg’s second day of battle (the only day Sickles actively participated). By sundown, Sickles’ proud Third Corps was shattered. Of the roughly 10,675 troops who followed him off Cemetery Ridge, 4,211 (39.4%) were killed (593), wounded, captured, or missing. Birney’s 5,095 men suffered 2,011 casualties (39.5%), and Humphreys’ 4,924 soldiers lost 2,092 for a 42.5% rate. Randolph’s 596 artillerymen contributed another 106 (a high 17.8% for an artillery brigade). Losses were substantial at every level. The Excelsiors’ 73rd New York tied for the fifth highest Federal regiment in number killed (51) and the Excelsior Brigade took 778 casualties overall— 42.4% of its 1,837 effectives. These numbers didn’t include the troops from the other infantry corps and artillery batteries who helped save the Union left. Sickles never imagined that he would finish the day as a one-legged amputee. As he ended the day in a painful chloroform-induced stupor, he also surely did not realize that he was not finished at Gettysburg. The battle would play a major role in his life for the rest of his days.35
While their commander lingered through the night, the day’s survivors tried to reassemble the shattered corps and come to grips with what had happened. Lieutenant Colonel Baldwin of the 1st Massachusetts considered the Third Corps “victor of a bloody day. A report was in circulation that General Sickles had been carried from the field severely if not mortally wounded which spread an additional gloom over all, and proved to be nearly true.” Officers rounded up stragglers and attempted to bring their regiments back together.36 “The Third Corps hospital to which nearly all our wounded were taken,” a veteran in Ward’s brigade later remembered,
had been established in a grove about half a mile to the left and rear of where we were then lying.…The scene at the hospital was one of the most horrid imaginable. During the afternoon and evening nearly 3,000 wounded men had been brought there.…The ground of the entire grove…several acres in extant [was]…literally covered with them; and such noises filled the air as I never heard before and trust may never reach my ears again…away down through the trees flickering lights could be seen, the reflections of which fill with ghastly effect upon the corps of surgeons who, with coats off and sleeves rolled up, were gathered at, or moving rapidly to and fro about the amputating tables.37
General Birney’s division assembled in the fields near the Taneytown Road. Ammunition wagons were brought up, and refilling the cartridge boxes became first priority. Fires were lit so that the men could get something to eat. “We were still ignorant of the day’s results,” wrote Regis de Trobriand, “but we well knew what it had cost us. There remained only to find out how many of the missing would rejoin us during the night.” Birney, “in a moment of despondency…said to me, in a low voice, that he wished he had shared the fate of his horse” that had been killed. “He believed the day lost; he counted up his friends, dead and wounded; he saw his command half destroyed, and, thinking of the Republic, he trembled for it, if the army were beaten. These dark thoughts were dispersed when Birney’s young brother, Fitz-Hugh Birney, who was serving on his staff, arrived with news of the last success of Hancock and Crawford.”38
After the passage of many years, de Trobriand reached the conclusion that the day was strategically indecisive:
All the efforts of the day were concentrated on one object: on one side, to carry the advanced position where Sickles had placed the Third Corps; on the other to hold it. To lose it and retake it twice was well enough while the battle lasted. But to remain there, in order to renew the trial the dangers of which had been demonstrated, would have been a grave fault. Meade did not commit that fault. He brought the army back to the position where he had intended to await the attack of the Confederates, and the morning
of the 3d of July found us disposed in regular line on the Cemetery Heights.39
As a wounded prisoner behind enemy lines, Captain Frank Moran of the 73rd New York heard a “dozen times” that “Gen’l. Sickles was badly wounded and a prisoner; which was never generally believed among the rebels during the night of the 2nd, but which I was gratified to learn in the morning was contradicted.…The fact that our troops still held possession of Round Top and Cemetery Hill, had a marked and depressing influence on the Confederates, who evidently felt that the slight advancement of their line was a beggarly consolation for the serious and almost fatal crippling of Longstreet’s fine corps.” False rumors were also rampant that Longstreet, too, had been wounded and captured.40
That evening, Meade summoned his corps commanders to headquarters at the Leister farmhouse. The meeting was later dubbed a “Council of War.” As a corps commander, Meade had complained during the Chancellorsville campaign that Joe Hooker kept his subordinates in the dark about important matters. Meade wished to avoid that mistake, but however laudable his intentions, the post-battle criticism that was heaped upon him must have made him second-guess his decision. David Birney represented the Third Corps; Butterfield and Warren were also there from Meade’s staff. There were twelve exhausted attendees in total, all squeezed into a single tiny room.41
The conversation began informally. John Gibbon, representing the Second Corps with Hancock, and an old friend of Meade’s, later recalled, “It soon became evident that everybody was in favor of remaining where we were and giving battle there. General Meade himself said very little, except now and then to make some comment, but I cannot recall that he expressed any decided opinion upon any point, preferring apparently to listen to the conversation.” After some discussion, Butterfield (in his typical administrator mode) proposed that they officially formulate the questions to be asked.42 Meade agreed, and Butterfield wrote several questions on some notepaper, and then “formally proposed to the council”: