Civil War Eccentrics: General Dan Sickles

 

Many  Civil War generals were deeply eccentric, had wild personal lives, or engaged in bizarre behaviors that would seem unthinkable for modern military leaders.

Union Major General Daniel Sickles stands out as perhaps the most outrageous. Before the war, as a Congressman, he murdered his wife's lover (Philip Barton Key, son of the Star-Spangled Banner writer) in broad daylight in 1859. He was acquitted using the first successful "temporary insanity" defense in U.S. history.

At Gettysburg (1863), he famously disobeyed orders by advancing his corps to the Peach Orchard, which some blame for nearly collapsing the Union line — yet he lost his right leg in the fighting and later received the Medal of Honor. He had the amputated leg bones preserved in a small coffin-shaped box and donated them to the Army Medical Museum (now National Museum of Health and Medicine). He reportedly visited "his leg" on the anniversary of the amputation for years.

Sickles was a notorious womanizer who once brought a brothel madam as his date to meet Queen Victoria.

Alexandria, 1861-1865

The Great Northern Rebellion of 1860