James A. Hessler
Page 51
On the other side, Federal artilleryman John Bigelow was not a Third Corps officer, but he still argued for Sickles in his 1910 account The Peach Orchard. In referring to Meade’s intended position, he wrote, “It is very doubtful whether the small 3rd Corps could have held Gen. Meade’s line even until reinforcements arrived, as the ground close in its front was broken by large boulders and a wood, thus offering shelter for attacking infantry; while the Peach Orchard knoll, in its front gave a commanding position for artillery.” Bigelow argued that Sickles’ “small 3rd Corps could not possibly … have occupied the Big and Little Round Tops.” Although Bigelow saw artillery value in the Peach Orchard, he had been misled by decades of misinformation into thinking Sickles was required to hold both Round Tops, thus justifying the advance. Bigelow recalled a postwar visit to the Peach Orchard with Henry Hunt, during which Bigelow asked whether Confederate artillery in the orchard would have “swept clean” Meade’s intended position. Hunt declined to answer, but did admit, “I will say, that when this advanced position was lost, the opportunity passed away for acting on the offensive after the repulse of Pickett’s charge, on July 3rd.”16
Bigelow also wrote that Sickles’ salient position specifically disrupted Lee’s offensive strategy. “The advanced position at the Peach Orchard, with the line running back to the Round Tops, seems to have misled Gen. Lee and caused him to insist, against Longstreet’s advice to flank the Round Tops, that a direct attack on the supposed exposed flank of Meade’s army should be made.” The resulting delays in the Confederate attack were understandable and greatly advantageous to Meade—as it allowed time for the Union 5th Corps to “go and hold the Round Tops.” The resulting battle was “in front [emphasis in original] of this line and thoroughly exhausted both sides. At its conclusion the Confederates had gained nothing of value.”17
Little Round Top, and not the Peach Orchard, increasingly became the focal point in debates over the merit of Sickles’ move. Robert Carter, who fought in Tilton’s 22nd Massachusetts, wrote in 1913: “I am more and more firmly convinced, after seven visits to the field, that Sickles’ position on July 2 was not only faulty, and should not have been taken, but his losses would not have been so great had he prolonged the line of the Second Corps to the left over Little Round Top.” Carter argued that if Vincent’s “small” brigade had successfully held the hill from portions of Law and Robertson’s brigades, then “it would have been much easier, especially had they [De Trobriand and Ward] been posted early, for these two brigades to have held our extreme left.” Sickles could then have been “heavily reinforced by the Fifth and Sixth Corps, and the extreme left well guarded by one or more brigades of the latter in reserve to Ward and de Trobriand.” Instead, it became “impossible for the fractions” of the Second and Fifth Corps to “patch up or reinforce a line that was already broken and rushing or breaking to the rear.” Admittedly the line proposed by Meade “would seem to be more exposed to an artillery fire, but as the Confederate artillery was used along this line of the Emmitsburg Road, from which the Third Corps had been driven … with less loss (statistics show this) to the troops occupying it than actually occurred to the Third Corps at the Peach Orchard—then it is a logical conclusion that the Corps should have prolonged the Second Corps line.” Carter somewhat mitigated his criticism against Sickles by calling Meade’s orders “not explicit nor sufficiently positive.…”18
When the last of the battle veterans had passed away, the old Gettysburg debates were taken up by men who had not fought in the great battle. With no friendly partisans alive to protect his memory, Sickles’ image began to increasingly suffer, particularly among military professionals. Major E. C. Bertram, the U.S. Army officer in charge of R.O.T.C. at Gettysburg College in the 1930s, thought Sickles committed “a serious error when he took up the position at the Peach Orchard. It is true that the position assigned him by General Meade was not the best terrain for defense, but it was necessary to hold it as a part of a complete defensive position. When a commander plans a defensive, he selects the best terrain available. He cannot take isolated pieces of terrain because of their individual defensive value but must select terrain that will permit a coordinated defense. As a result some poor terrain must often be included in the position. In order to have a coordinated position, General Meade was forced to use the comparatively weak terrain to the right of Little Round Top.” Bertram recognized the obvious defects of Sickles’ choice and it was only through “Meade’s prompt and skillful maneuvers and Confederate blundering that saved the Union position. The only thing to be said in favor of Sickles is that his intentions were good.”19
Sickles’ reputation received a boost in the 1940s and 1950s with two favorable biographies. Edgcumb Pinchon’s gushing 1945 work, Dan Sickles: Hero of Gettysburg and ‘Yankee King of Spain,’ referred to Sickles as a “seasoned commander” created by “two years of rigorous campaigning and increasing responsibility.” Pinchon attributed Sickles’ “confusion” over Meade’s orders to the fact that “Geary had left no line… and had withdrawn long before the Third Corps began to arrive on the ground. Sickles thus was left in considerable doubt as to the exact location and extent of his sector.” After failing to convince Meade that the Confederate attack would land on his left, Sickles’ “uncanny prescience” convinced him “that Lee was outsmarting Meade” and that the attack would come “against his own decrepit left.” Although Pinchon’s published work suggested that he was a vigorous apologist for the general, and time has brought some of his conclusions into question, Pinchon’s research benefited from the assistance of a few remaining individuals who had actually known Sickles in life. Stanton’s son, and Dan’s grandson, Captain Daniel S. Sickles, contributed substantially and financially to the project. (Sickles’ image was not always favorably passed down within his own family. Great-grandnephew John Shaud told this author in 2008 that his first memory of hearing of his famous ancestor was from his grandmother, Dan’s niece, who rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, he was a scoundrel and a tyrant.”) Pinchon’s team even entertained hopes that the book would be made into a film. Whatever his published faults, Pinchon recognized what made Sickles a unique American character: “Ninety-four years of America’s turgid adolescence! And some fifty of them spent in the thick of national affairs.”20
More substantial was W. A. Swanberg’s Sickles the Incredible (1956), which offered a somewhat more balanced evaluation of Sickles. Swanberg could not deny that Sickles was “a truly adventurous spirit,” but regarding July 2, 1863, he wrote:
Without question, General Sickles thought he was [emphasis in original] acting for the best, though he was going against Meade’s orders. He felt rightly that he knew the ground better than Meade and was apprised of enemy operations that the commander seemed to ignore. He was resentful that Meade was so infernally preoccupied with guarding against an attack on his right that he dismissed the left as of minor consequence. The Third Corps leader- and his trusted General Birney- were both seriously concerned about an enemy maneuver Meade underestimated. Sickles had been guilty of many a foolish impulse in his day, but the change of position was not impulse. It was the fruit of careful deliberation. He had pondered this move for hours.…21
Despite his best intentions, “Its wisdom was another matter entirely.” Swanberg acknowledged the line’s many defects: too far in advance from the rest of the army, unsupported flanks, and a longer distance in which Sickles’ “lack of depth was greatly magnified.” To Swanberg, “Worst of all, Little Round Top, soon to be recognized as the key to the whole Union position, was left without a single fighting man on its rocky height.”22
No major full-length Sickles biography appeared for decades following Swanberg, leaving Sickles’ actions to be covered as part of broader studies of the Gettysburg campaign. Evaluations of the general were mixed. Edward Stackpole’s They Met at Gettysburg (1956) thought Sickles a “rugged individualist” who “believed strongly in taking the law into his own hands on occasion
.” Stackpole (who also gave Meade mixed marks) called Meade’s orders “oral and not nearly as explicit as they should have been,” while Sickles (since he didn’t like his assignment) was “purposely slow in assigning troops to the [Meade’s] position.” Sickles left Little Round Top, Stackpole’s “key position” unoccupied, but in evaluating the pros and cons of “The Sickles Controversy,” Stackpole wrote that it can “be argued, with considerable plausibility, that Sickles’ action strongly influenced the course and possibly the final outcome of the battle.” Although Sickles took major casualties and seriously jeopardized Meade’s plans, Longstreet ultimately failed to roll up Cemetery Ridge, and with their own heavy casualties Hood and McLaws were “relegated to a minor role for the remainder of the battle.…”23
Glenn Tucker’s High Tide at Gettysburg (1958) argued that there was “divided sentiment about the prudence of his move.” Although Tucker discredited the accusation that Meade planned a 3:00 p.m. retreat, Meade’s orders to Sickles “contained some of the ambiguities that at times ruin battles or empires.” Tucker even thought Meade’s intent to occupy Little Round Top was ambiguous. Sickles “implored” Meade to review the ground but was treated “cavalierly, at the very least.” Tucker ultimately admitted that Sickles’ advance was “unsound, though none can be certain how he would have fared in his old position,” and that Longstreet’s attack delays were fortuitous for the Confederates, because Sickles moved into the only position that would allow Longstreet to attack up the Emmitsburg Road and turn the Federal left. Conversely, had Sickles defended Little Round Top, Longstreet would have had to change front and attack an “impregnable” position. In the end, Sickles “won handily because he outlived his detractors and went down swinging at the age of ninety-five. He got fifty years of argument, political appointment, and glory out of one afternoon of fighting, but never a monument—like the other corps commanders—on the battlefield.”24
In The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command (1968), Edwin Coddington recognized that Sickles’ forward move had nearly negated Meade’s advantages of position. But the strength of Meade’s interior lines had combined with the faulty Confederate tactics to allow Meade to throw reinforcements into holes created by Sickles. Coddington thought “Longstreet could not have hit the Union left flank at a more inopportune moment for Meade. The timing of Sickles’ move to a new position compounded the inherent defects in the line Sickles had chosen for his Third Corps. Before his men could dig in and Meade could shift the Fifth Corps from right to left, Longstreet opened his attack.” Rather than the capture of ground that ultimately held no value, Coddington considered “temporarily knocking out thirteen of Meade’s brigades” to be Longstreet’s greatest accomplishment. While true, the losses in both armies were nearly proportional as a percentage of available strength, and Lee could not afford to suffer large casualties as could his Union counterparts. Hood and McLaws had also been badly mauled and their unavailability on July 3 contributed to the Pickett’s Charge debacle. Coddington rejected the argument that Sickles acted as a buffer or “breakwater,” arguing instead that Sickles was more like “an empty harbor”—with nothing to protect behind him. Coddington accurately noted that the Union Third and Fifth corps could have defended Cemetery Ridge much easier had Sickles been in line. But Coddington also supported the debatable assumption that if Sickles had remained on Cemetery Ridge, Longstreet’s Confederate divisions would have blindly attacked northward up the Emmitsburg Road in a vain attempt to locate Meade’s left, and that Sickles would have simply raked Longstreet’s exposed right flank and rear.25
No work has had a greater influence on public perceptions of Gettysburg than Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels (1974) and Ronald Maxwell’s motion picture Gettysburg (1993), which was based upon Shaara’s novel. Shaara’s readers and Maxwell’s viewers will forever consider July 2, 1863, as the story of Joshua Chamberlain’s defense of Little Round Top. In the novel, an “amazed” Strong Vincent told Chamberlain, “That damn fool Sickles, you know him?… The Bully Boy. You know the one. The politician from New York. Fella shot his wife’s lover. The Barton Key affair… Well, the damn fool was supposed to fall in on the left of Hancock.… But he didn’t like the ground.” In the film, Sickles and any such references are omitted entirely, leaving viewers without an accurate understanding of why the 20th Maine was raced into position in the first place. Meade hardly fares better. When he does make cameo appearances, he is cantankerous and (in the novel) his “damn fool orders” are scoffed at by the virtuous Chamberlain. In fact, it is easy to walk away from the novel and/or film with the inescapable conclusion that Winfield Hancock ran the Army of the Potomac. Until something more popular comes along, Shaara and Maxwell have cemented the notion that Little Round Top was the key to the second day, and although Sickles is mostly absent, the implication is clear: only a “damn fool” would leave the hill unoccupied.26
Harry Pfanz, in his Gettysburg: The Second Day (1987), considered Sickles “not quite the peer of either John F. Reynolds or Hancock…but he was competent, and his aggressive spirit, like theirs, was sadly lacking among the corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac in the closing half of the campaign.”27 Still, Pfanz could not escape the conclusion:
General Sickles increased the odds of Confederate success when he advanced his Third Corps from its important and relatively secure position on Cemetery Ridge. In doing so he abandoned vital terrain, isolated his corps, and put the entire army at special risk. It was a grievous error mitigated only by the hard and costly fighting of his corps and the assistance given it by the corps of Hancock and Sykes.28
James M. McPherson, in his best-selling Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), thought that “Sickles’ unwise move may have unwittingly foiled Lee’s hopes.” McPherson believed that upon finding the Union left in an unexpected position, Longstreet did not, and “probably should” have, notified Lee. Scouts reported the Round Tops “unoccupied, opening the way for a flanking move around to the rear,” but Longstreet, having already failed to dissuade Lee from attacking, refused to change his plans as he “did not want to risk another rebuff. Lee had repeatedly ordered him to attack here, and here he meant to attack.” Little Round Top remained in Union hands, thanks largely in McPherson’s narrative to Joshua Chamberlain, and the left was secure. July 2, 1863, was a Union victory because “Confederate assaults were uncoordinated and disjointed” while Union “officers from Meade down to regimental colonels acted with initiative and coolness.”29
In a 1993 essay, “The Peach Orchard Revisited: Daniel E. Sickles and the Third Corps on July 2, 1863,” William Glenn Robertson pointed out that both Sickles and Meade “carried mental baggage to Gettysburg that hampered their smooth cooperation in the crisis.” Robertson posited: “From the perspective of the Third Corps, Sickles’ advance to the Peach Orchard ridge made sense.” A move that was coordinated with Meade might have worked well, but given his unilateral execution without Meade, “Sickles’ movement was decidedly improper” and placed the army in jeopardy. Robertson believed Sickles lacked the manpower to occupy Little Round Top in force, and that his actions might have fortuitously caused Meade to reinforce his left flank at a crucial moment. While admitting to the hypothetical nature, Robertson thought that if Longstreet had gained his ground uncontested, it was “quite possible” that Meade “might have lost the Round Tops and the southern end of Cemetery Ridge.” While Robertson criticized Sickles for acting without orders, “Dan Sickles was not perfect on July 2, 1863, but neither was he the military buffoon so often portrayed.”30
The popular explosion of Civil War and Gettysburg studies in the 1990s was reflected in the creation of Internet message boards and publications such as Gettysburg Magazine. Whatever the media format, Sickles has been regularly pummeled by Gettysburg enthusiasts. Among notable examples, in “Deception and the Citizen-General,” K. Paul Raver focused thorough detail on Sickles’ “unequaled ability to spin particulars into seemingly plau
sible, yet deceiving, pretenses.” In “George Gordon Meade and the Defense of Cemetery Ridge,” Richard Rollins wrote: “Dan Sickles and his friends indulged in lies, deceit, and innuendo and political machinations to publicly assassinate Meade’s character.” Jared Peatman, writing in “General Sickles, President Lincoln, and the Aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg,” blamed Sickles as a “large factor” in Lincoln’s dissatisfaction with Meade. Without Sickles, Lincoln would have supported Meade differently and “By extension, Meade would have been a different commander” following the battle had Lincoln not “sapped his confidence.”31
To many students, particularly those with military backgrounds, Sickles represents the ultimate amateur in a war filled with them. That Sickles’ lack of training achieved prominence on Gettysburg’s large stage ensures that his military abilities will be debated long after many of his “amateur” contemporaries have been forgotten. “Throughout the history of the U.S. Army,” wrote retired Colonel Kavin Coughenour, “regular officers have always accepted the precept that professionals are predictable, but the world is full of amateurs.” In referring to both Sickles and Butterfield, he observed, “Meade had to endure dealing with some very difficult subordinate amateur generals.” Referring specifically to the high Third Corps casualties, Coughenour thought that “Generals who are aggressive, show initiative, and use good judgment on a battlefield are showing the qualities of great captains. While Sickles was aggressive and showed initiative, he was clearly guilty of stupendously poor judgment at Gettysburg.”32