James A. Hessler
Page 47
In the fall of 1902, James Longstreet was invited to attend the dedication of Henry Slocum’s Gettysburg monument.5 The aging ex-Confederate declined due to his poor health. Longstreet sent Sickles a letter of regret, in which he formally documented his defense of Sickles’ Gettysburg record:
On that field you made your mark that will place you prominently before the world as one of the leading figures of the most important battle of the Civil War. As a Northern veteran once remarked to me, ‘General Sickles can well afford to leave a leg on that field.’
I believe it is now conceded that the advanced position at the Peach-Orchard, taken by your corps and under your orders, saved that battle-field to the Union cause. It was the sorest and saddest reflection of my life for many years; but, to-day, I can say, with sincerest emotion, that it was and is the best that could have come to us all, North and South; and I hope that the nation, reunited, may always enjoy the honor and glory brought to it by the grand work.6
In early January 1904, Longstreet died in Gainesville, Georgia, just shy of his eighty-third birthday. The nearly forty-one years since Gettysburg had been difficult for Longstreet. Attacks on his war record had overshadowed his active travels and involvement in Republican politics. Controversial in the South, Longstreet had been a popular celebrity in Northern circles. Both Longstreet and Sickles shared the distinction of having to defend their Gettysburg records, but Sickles had been better at it than Longstreet, whose pen often alienated more than he won over. In 1897, Longstreet had married thirty-four year old Helen Dortch. Helen became a celebrity in her own right, and outlived him by fifty-eight years, dying in 1962. She spent much of her remaining life trying to rebuild Longstreet’s reputation. In 1904 she published her own defense of Longstreet’s war record in Lee and Longstreet at High Tide,and asked Sickles to contribute a lengthy introduction.7
Sickles began by noting the apparent irony that he might be writing a preface for “a conspicuous adversary.” But, he reminded readers, “the Civil War is only a memory, its asperities are forgotten, both armies were American.” Sickles thought that Longstreet’s war record needed no apology, and clearly believed where the blame for Gettysburg belonged. The failure of the Confederate assaults “must be attributed to the lack of strength in the columns of attack on both days, for which the commanding general alone was responsible.”8 In revisiting the one event that truly brought the two men together, Sickles wrote:
Longstreet was unjustly blamed for not attacking earlier in the day [July 2] at Gettysburg. I can answer that criticism, as I know more about the matter than the critics. If he had attacked in the morning, as it is said he should have done, he would have encountered Buford’s division of cavalry, five thousand sabers, on his flank, and my corps would have been in his front, as it was in the afternoon. In a word, all the troops that opposed Longstreet in the afternoon, including the Fifth Army Corps and Caldwell’s division of the Second Corps, would have been available on the left flank of the Union army in the morning. Every regiment and every battery that fired a shot in the afternoon was on the field in the morning, and would have resisted an assault in the morning as stubbornly as in the afternoon. Moreover, if the assault had been made in the morning, Law’s strong brigade of Alabamians could not have assisted in the attack, as they did not arrive on the field until noon. On the other hand, if Lee had waited an hour later I would have been on Cemetery Ridge, in compliance with General Meade’s orders, and Longstreet could have marched, unresisted, from Seminary Ridge to the foot of Round Top, and might, perhaps, have unlimbered his guns on the summit.9
Once again, Sickles’ interpretation of the historical record was not completely accurate. “Every regiment and every battery” was not simultaneously on the field that morning, and he again made the questionable assumption that had he been in Meade’s intended position, Longstreet would have “unlimbered his guns” on Little Round Top. This was also another opportunity to tell an audience that he had prevented Meade from retreating. “Longstreet’s attack held the Union army at Gettysburg” and the aborted 3:00 p.m. war council was “broken up by the sound of Longstreet’s artillery…If Longstreet had waited until a later hour, the Union army might have been moving towards Pipe Creek, the position chosen by General Meade on June 30.” By Sickles’ reasoning, the nation owed Longstreet a debt of gratitude by timing his attack when he did. Had Longstreet attacked any later, the Federal army would have been gone and no Union victory would come about. Sickles saved an opportunity to give himself credit for disrupting Lee’s plan, which “was a repetition of Jackson’s attack on the right flank at Chancellorsville.”10
Sickles was at least satisfied that Longstreet “lived long enough to rejoice with all of us in a reunited nation, and to know that his name was honored wherever the old flag was unfurled. His fame as a soldier belongs to all Americans.” Realizing that he was rapidly facing his own mortality, Sickles closed with, “Farewell, Longstreet! I shall follow you very soon. May we meet in the happy realm where strife is unknown and friendship is eternal!” The two men who shared some of Gettysburg’s greatest battlefield influence had joined forces for one last time to address their numerous critics and perpetuate their own history of the battle.11
Sickles’ notoriety and increasing elder-statesman status allowed him to socialize with presidents and other celebrities. Sickles and Oliver Howard escorted President Theodore Roosevelt to Gettysburg for 1904’s Memorial Day celebrations. Despite drenching rain, Roosevelt spoke to an estimated 10,000 people from the cemetery’s rostrum. The party also spent more than three hours touring the battlefield. Sickles and Howard played guides, with “the entire party listening attentively to the graphic word pictures the two distinguished veterans drew” of the battle. As the newspapers reported, “At the President’s request Gen. Sickles pointed out where he received the wound which cost him his right leg. In that connection he said that he did not know precisely when he received the wound, as he did not know that he had been hit until he returned to his headquarters about 6:30 p.m., only discovering the fact then by finding his right hand which had been resting on his leg, covered with blood.” A “prolonged stop” was made on Little Round Top, and after hearing a “cross-fire of graphic descriptions” from both Union and Confederate participants, Roosevelt remarked, “This country is all right so long as we can have this kind of talk on Little Round Top.”12
Former Excelsior chaplain Joe Twichell had become pastor of a fashionable church in Hartford, and had in the process struck up a lifelong friendship with humorist Mark Twain. Twichell always paid a call on both Sickles and Twain when he visited New York. As it turned out, the pair lived across the street from one another, although they never socialized. “He is too old to make visits,” Twain wrote, “and I am too lazy.” Finally, on a rainy night in January 1906, Twichell managed to get Twain across the street and into Sickles’ house.13 Twain devoted a significant passage in his memoirs to his meeting with Sickles, a testimonial to how famous Sickles had become in his own right. “Sickles,” remembered Twain,
is a genial old fellow; a handsome and stately military figure; talks smoothly, in well-constructed English—I may say perfectly constructed English. His talk is full of interest and bristling with points, but as there are no emphases scattered through it anywhere, and as there is no animation in it, it soon becomes oppressive by its monotony and it makes the listener drowsy. Twichell had to step on my foot once or twice.…His talk is much better than it is.…His talk does not sound [emphasis in original] entertaining, but it is [emphasis in original] distinctly entertaining.”14
Despite the potentially entertaining subject matter, Twain still found it to be a monotonous evening:
Now when we sat there in the general’s presence, listening to his monotonous talk—it was about himself, and is always about himself, and always seems modest and unexasperating, inoffensive—it seemed to me that he was just the kind of man who would risk his salvation in order to do some ‘last words’ in an
attractive way. He murmured and warbled, and warbled, and it was all just as simple and pretty as it could be. And I will also say this: that he never made an ungenerous remark about anybody. He spoke severely of this and that and the other person—officers in the war—but he spoke with dignity and courtesy. There was no malignity in what he said. He merely pronounced what he evidently regarded as just criticisms upon them.15
Struggling to stay awake, Twain made a significant observation. “I noticed then…that the general valued his lost leg away above the one that is left. I am perfectly sure that if he had to part with either of them he would part with the one that he has got.” Twain also observed that Sickles’ home was “a curious place” where the floors, walls, and ceilings were literally covered with animal skins, photos, trophy swords, and flags “stuck here and there and yonder.”16 He continued with his description:
You couldn’t walk across that floor anywhere without stumbling over the hard heads of lions and things. You couldn’t put out a hand anywhere without laying it upon a velvety, exquisite tiger-skin or leopard skin.…Then there was a most decided and rather unpleasant odor, which proceeded from disinfectants and preservatives…so it was not altogether a pleasant place, on that account. It was kind of a museum, and yet it was not the sort of museum which seemed dignified enough to be the museum of a great soldier—and so famous a soldier. It was the sort of museum which should delight and entertain little boys and girls. I suppose that that museum reveals a part of the general’s character and make. He is sweet and winningly childlike.17
There was an effort by friends in 1910 to have Sickles promoted to lieutenant general. Partisans such as Washington’s The National Tribune thought that Gettysburg “showed, and the testimony of the leading Confederates since fully supports the belief that Gen. Sickles correctly fathomed Gen. Lee’s designs, and took the most effective way of frustrating them.”18 The paper continued:
Gen. Sickles and his friends may well accept Gettysburg as the crown of his military career and a lasting monument to his fame. He rendered services there, as he had before, which under the great Napoleon would have made him a Field Marshal and a Duke of the Empire, and brought him enormous wealth from the National Treasury. In the great battle which was the turning point of the war it was Gen. Sickles who divined the supreme situation involved, who took prompt advantage of it in a most military way, and whose action was approved beyond all question by the battle being fought out there to the ruin of the Confederate army and the success of that of the Union. It will only be a just recognition of this to allow the splendid veteran to end his days as a Lieutenant General of the United States Army. Certainly he deserves this.… 19
There was enough opposition, however, to prevent him from making lieutenant general. Still, he was popular enough with the common men to continue attending reunions and monument dedications. In September 1910, the largest and most expensive of all Gettysburg monuments was dedicated. The Pennsylvania State Memorial, 69 feet tall and costing nearly $200, 000, was erected along the southern extension of Cemetery Ridge. The monument’s location is near Hancock’s July 2 left flank, slightly north of the low ground that Sickles had so strenuously objected to occupying. Organizers wanted the occasion to be “distinctly a Pennsylvania event. There will be no speakers of national prominence. President Taft will not be here.” Although the President’s attendance was not desired, the non-Pennsylvanian invitees did include Joshua Chamberlain and Dan Sickles. Far from being an outcast, Dan’s presence at Gettysburg was considered more desirable than Taft’s.20
The monument’s main design is a large dome topped by a 7,500 pound statue of the “Goddess of Victory and Peace,” below which are statues of prominent Pennsylvania generals, President Lincoln, and Governor Andrew Curtin. In addition to Sickles’ nemesis George Meade, David Birney was also honored with his own statue, a permanent memorial status that Sickles would never achieve on the field. The base contains ninety bronze tablets intended to honor the approximately 34,000 Pennsylvanians who fought in the battle. The last of these bronze tablets was put in place only hours before the ceremony. In addition to the last-minute efforts to complete the memorial, the Gettysburg Compiler complained bitterly about the “bungled” dedication ceremony. “General Daniel E. Sickles, the only surviving corps commander of the Union Army at Gettysburg was one of the invited guests of the Commission, and he was left waiting at the Eagle Hotel for what his hosts were going to do with him.” Finally making the discovery that he “had been forgotten, an auto was hired and he took a drive over the battlefield. General Sickles, and General Chamberlain, an ex-Governor of Maine, were scheduled for short speeches but nobody saw to it that they were made and there were many veterans who wanted to see and hear from them.”21
Increasingly, the veterans were reuniting at funerals instead of monument dedications. Monument sculptor and artist James Kelly spotted Sickles at Alexander Webb’s 1911 funeral:
I looked for Dan Sickles, but strange to say he did not strut down the middle aisle [as was his usual custom]. But as I reached the door on the left of it, there sat Sickles in a chair braced conspicuously against the door jam…He was receiving and shaking hands with the mourners as they passed out. It caused a diversion as the poor dead hero’s body was in the vestibule on the opposite side and Dan so distracted me that it was only by accident that I saw it. It was the most outrageous piece of impudence I ever saw—I would ever see him do.22
When Oliver Howard died in 1909, Sickles achieved venerated status as Gettysburg’s last surviving corps commander in either army. Not only had he outlasted his contemporaries, but after General Ward’s 1903 death, all of Gettysburg’s old Third Corps division and brigade commanders were also gone. Sickles even outlasted Henry Tremain, who despite being twenty-one years younger, died at the age of seventy in 1910. Had the next few years transpired differently, Sickles might truly have closed out his final days doing little more than giving dinner speeches to cheering veterans. (Although “Time is money” was a favorite Sickles-ism, and he reminded favor seekers that he expected to be paid for his talks.) In April of 1911, Sickles was guest of honor at a reunion of veterans of the old 12th New York. So many men turned out that the party filled five banquet rooms. The New York Timesreported on the festivities: “It was nearly midnight before the dinner was finished. By the time the speaking began Gen. Sickles alone, as he presently announced, had signed no less than 1, 861 autographs on as many menu cards handed to him…Gen. Sickles started off the symposium of war-time recollections, and when he asked how long he might talk, the regiment roared ‘All night! All night!’”23
In order to garner as much attention as possible at such functions, Sickles’ repertoire now included some standard tricks to ensure that the spotlight would shine brightly on him. While attending a lecture by Fred Grant in 1911, James Kelly watched in disgust as:
Just before the lecture, there was a commotion at the door; and Gen. Dan Sickles came in, doing the spectacular—as usual. He puttered laboriously along, a woman supporting him. In his shaky voice he piped up, ‘Oh, anywhere,’ at the same time heading up the middle aisle for the platform. By this time the whole place was upset.
He stumbled up to the platform, and was boosted into the seat of honor. As he soused down there was a sigh of relief from the people, who were not acquainted with his old-time trick of arriving late and strutting down the middle aisle of the theater or opera, and going out after each act; but his latest pose as “the last survivor” was most effective.24
After Grant finished speaking, Sickles was called on to make a few remarks. “Having made allusions to his lost leg at Gettysburg, and told how President Lincoln had often sent for him and profited by his advice, Sickles branched off without any apparent reason to describe with a chuckle the pleasure he took in hugging a pretty girl.” Although he was still a chronic attention-getter, Sickles was physically but a shadow of his former self and a far cry from the lady-killer who prowled Washington in the 1850s a
nd Joe Hooker’s headquarters in the early 1860s.25 “Sitting there, with his bald head, around which grew a circle of hair like a tonsure,” observed Kelly,
a friend remarked that even this did not make him look saintly. His bulgy, baggy eyes, his big, straggling mustache, over which hung his bold, aggressive nose, and under which hung his projecting, limp, fleshy, sensual chin, to me—who knew him—was a depressing sight.26
Several partisan publications during this period also elevated Sickles’ public image. Prior to his death, the devoted Henry Tremain had published his memoirs Two Days of Warin 1905. Not surprisingly, his recollections were extremely favorable to the Sickles agenda. In 1910, the Third Corps Union published James Rusling’s account of the post-battle meetings and friendship between Sickles and Lincoln. Filled with unverifiable anecdotes, it emphasized Lincoln’s greatness, and by extension that of the New York Democrat who was worthy of his friendship.27