One Leg and Temporarily Insane: The Tawdry Twisted Tale of Civil War General Daniel Sickles

 

General Daniel Sickles, former Democratic congressman from New York, eccentric aristocrat and Corps Commander has a mixed reputation among his fellow officers in the Union Army.

His erratic behavior throughout his life, and during the war, has earned him the unflattering nickname of “Devil Dan” Sickles.

Most call him a political General and many believe that it is only his connections with the Tammany Hall Democratic political machine of New York City that have earned him his officer’s commission.  

In 1863, on the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, he was the only Corps Commander in the entire Union Army without a West Point education.

In early 1862, as rumors about his sanity swirled around Washington, Sickles was forced to give up his position in the army when Congress refused to endorse his commission because many of his peers considered him mentally unfit for command.

General Daniel Sickles was a murderer--albeit an acquitted one.

General Sickles with his Staff 1864

But murderer, or not, after a year’s worth of political wrangling Sickles was able to once again regain his commission as a General in the Union Army through the influence of his close personal friend, and at that time overall commander of the Army of the Potomac, General Joseph Hooker.

In May of 1863, at the head of the Excelsior Brigades, a division of the Union Army comprised of volunteers that Sickles himself helped recruit from New York City and its environs, Sickles and his Excelsior Brigades were cited for bravery in combat at the Battle of Chancellorsville.

Two months later, on July 2, 1863 during the height of the Civil War’s most climactic battle at Gettysburg, Sickles was placed in command of the Union Army’s 3rd Corps.

At the start of the second day of the battle General George Meade called a meeting of all his corps commanders to confer on the displacement of the opposing Confederate forces at Gettysburg.  Sickles, holding Meade in utter disdain based solely on the fact that it was Meade who had replaced his friend Joseph Hooker as overall commander of the Army of the Potomac, didn’t bother to show up until the meeting was over.

Meade, ordered Sickles and his corps to take up a defensive position on a small hill at the end of the Union line called Little Round Top, but wishing to be on the offensive and believing himself to be a better military tactician than the ungentlemanly Meade, Sickles directly disobeyed his commanding officer Meade’s orders and positioned his troops in a peach orchard ahead of the center of the Union line.

Stationed in this forward position, cut off from help, Sickles 3rd corps ran headlong into a massive attack by Confederate troops under the command of Lieutenant General James Longstreet.  The fighting in the peach orchard was ferocious.

Sickles corps, sticking out into no man’s land, was nearly wiped out by the unrelenting Confederate assault, but Sickles held firm and continued to rally his men while sitting high atop his horse with a cigar clenched between his teeth as the fighting swirled all around him.

Around 2 pm during a frenzied Confederate assault a cannonball smashed into Sickles right leg and threw him from his horse.  Sickles was carried by his soldiers to a nearby farmhouse where a leather saddle strap was used as a tourniquet to keep the General from bleeding to death.  With the bleeding staunched, General Sickles was placed on a stretcher and carried about a mile to the 3rd Corps field hospital.

With his mangled leg hanging off the side of the stretcher, Sickles continued to smoke cigar after cigar, and smiled the whole time, exhorting his troops to, “Keep up the attack boys!  Keep up the attack boys!”

His men cheered wildly and shouted, “We’ll give ‘em Hell Devil Dan!” as their bleeding and wounded commander passed by.  That afternoon Dan Sickles’ leg was amputated inside a small tent along Tarrytown Road just outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

General George Gordon Meade, in overall command of the Union Army at the Battle of Gettysburg was furious.  Upon witnessing the fight at the peach orchard and hearing of how Sickles disobeyed his orders, Meade is reported to have thrown his hat to the ground and exclaimed, “That lunatic has put the entire army at risk!”

Because of Sickles rash actions, Meade was forced to rush a raw and untrained regiment of soldiers from Maine to hastily protect the Union flank at Little Round Top from an impending Confederate attack.

For his bravery at the Battle of Gettysburg General Dan Sickles would be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.  His Congressional citation read, “General Daniel Sickles displayed most conspicuous gallantry on the field, vigorously contesting the advance of the enemy and continuing to encourage the advance of his troops after being himself severely wounded.”

General George Gordon Meade

Today, many historians believe that Sickles’ disobedience and desire for glory may have blunted the entire Confederate attack at Gettysburg.  Pulitzer Prize winning Civil War historian James M. Mcpherson has said of him that, “Sickles’ unwise move may have unwittingly foiled (Confederate General) Lee’s hopes for victory.”

Though revisionist history today might exonerate Daniel Sickles for his insubordination as a General and military tactician at the Battle of Gettysburg, all of those who know anything about the life of Daniel Sickles, would probably readily agree with General George Meade’s assessment and label Daniel Sickles as, “that lunatic”.

After all, Dan Sickles, was the first defendant in the history of American jurisprudence to use temporary insanity as a criminal defense in a murder trial.

In September of 1852, while working as an attorney, and prior to serving his first term in the New York State Senate, the then 33 year old Daniel Sickles had fallen in love with and married a precocious and beautiful 15 or 16 year old debutante named Teresa Bagioli.  The couple married against the wishes of both families, and in the light of their elopement and the public (not to mention legal) scrutiny  over the age difference between the two lovers, it was at this time that Sickles first claimed he was born in either 1825 or 1826 in an effort to legitimize his marriage despite the fact that New York City birth records clearly attest that Daniel Sickles was born on October 20, 1819 and not five or six years later as he claimed.

Teresa Bagioli

Seven years later, in 1859 while Sickles was working for the administration of then President James Buchanan, he and Teresa were staying at a house on Lafayette Square less than a block from the White House.

While staying with his wife in Washington D.C. Sickles received an anonymous letter on February 24, 1859 stating that his wife had been having an affair with the U.S. Attorney Philip Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key, author of The Star Spangled Banner.

Key is young, good looking, and known as a rising star in legal as well as political circles in the nation’s capital.  The anonymous letter goes on to recount, in lurid detail, how Sickles’ wife Teresa and Philip Barton Key used prearranged signals to communicate and how, on more than one occasion, they have engaged in sexual intercourse right in Sickles’ own home while he’s been out.

Sickles confronted his wife.  He got the young Teresa to break down in tears and he extracted a written confession from her.  All that the anonymous letter had said was true.  With her confession in hand, and both he and his adulterous wife near to hysteria, Sickles had his closest political and legal friends in Washington come by his home to confer on what his next course of action should be.

Alarmed that he had not heard from his lover in several days, Philip Barton Key, then rented a room across the street from Sickles’ home on Lafayette Square and started spying on the married couple through a pair of binoculars from a second story window.  

One Sunday morning, while pacing the floor after a sleepless night, Sickles stopped by a front window in his home and exclaimed to a friend, Samuel F. Butterworh who had been staying with him for support, “I see him!  That villain is out there spying on me!”

The two men, Sickles and Butterworth look out the window, and catch what they believe to be the reflection of lenses glinting in the moonlight.  Butterworth agreed that the next day, he would go across the square with Sickles, and see if Key, in fact, was renting a room at one of the buildings across the square.

However, according to Butterworth, before he could even stop him, Sickles stormed out the front door in a rage and walked out onto Lafayette Square.

Once outside Sickles caught sight of Philip Barton Key taking a stroll in Lafayette Park.  He charged up to Key, grabbed him by the throat and shouted, “Key you scoundrel!  You have dishonored my house!  You must die!”

Sickles attempted to shoot Key in the gut at point blank range with a small pistol he had concealed in his coat pocket but the two men grappled and he couldn’t get off a shot at first.  In an effort to get away from Sickles’ stranglehold, Key struck Sickles across the face with the same binoculars that he always carried and used to spy on Sickles’ wife Teresa.

Sickles staggered away from Key and fired the revolver again.  He wounded Key, who then attempted to hide behind a tree in the park and begged for mercy, but Sickles walked up to Key and fired into his head again and again shouting, “You must die!  You must die!”

Passersby were finally able to subdue Sickles once all the bullets had been expended.  Oddly enough Sickles was allowed to go, but realizing there had been so many witnesses to the murder in Lafayette Park, he immediately took a carriage to the home of United States Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black and surrendered to authorities.

With tawdry sex, scandal, high power attorney’s and wealthy celebrities the Daniel Sickles Murder Trial had it all and the nation was instantly entranced.  Washington D.C. had to literally double its police force just to contain the flood of reporters and curiosity seekers who came into the city simply to be around the trial.

Eight of the nation’s leading defense attorney’s were on the payroll of Daniel Sickles. Among them the renowned New York City lawyer James T. Brady who was famous for his ability, and willingness, to manipulate witnesses and jurors through any means necessary, including but not limited to, threats, bribery and extortion.  In addition to Brady, Sickles also employed the services of Edwin M. Stanton, who in 1859 was considered the nation’s foremost expert on constitutional law, and who in 1861 would become Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War and would be responsible for legal proceedings against secessionist during the Civil War.

Even at the time, many believed that the prosecution, most of whom had to pay all their own trial expenses out of pocket, simply didn’t stand a chance against such heavyweights of legal expertise.

Sickles, who refused bail and professed that he was justified in murdering Key, spent the weeks leading up trial languishing in a vermin infested jail in Washington while living on a near starvation diet.  A rumor started to circulate in the press that Teresa was pregnant with Key’s child and even before the trial commenced, public opinion began to sway in favor of Dan Sickles.

Right from the get go, Sickles’ attorney’s were able to paint him as the victim, and cast their client as someone who deserved the all male jury’s sympathy rather than their approbation.

“The injured husband and father rushes upon the confirmed adulterer,” argued Sickles attorneys in their opening statement, “and executes upon him a judgement which was as just as it was summary.”

Sickles defense team realized that some jurors might not readily agree to the supposed justice of a murder committed in broad daylight in a public park in front of dozens of witnesses, so this is where Brady and Stanton came up with the defense of “Temporary Insanity” for Daniel Sickles.  They argued that their client at the time of the the murder was, “in such a state of white heat,” that it was, “a state of too great a passion for a man to be in and at the same time be held wholly responsible for his actions”.

        

The Murder Trial of Daniel Sickles

The defense called dozens of witnesses who testified to the mental anguish and distress that Sickles had been in at the time of the murder thereby backing up the argument that Daniel Sickles had been driven temporarily insane as a result of the adulterous actions of his young wife. And when the prosecution tried to introduce the confession of Teresa Sickles as evidence in the trial it was thrown out by the Judge who deemed her confession, “a private marital communication between husband and wife,” and therefore not admissible in court.

Handwritten Confession of Teresa Sickles

In less than an hour, after a week long trial, the jury returned with a verdict of “Not Guilty” by reason of temporary insanity.  The next night Daniel Sickles threw a victory party for his acquittal which was attended by over 1,500 people.

Oddly enough, Daniel and Teresa Sickles would stay married until her death by tuberculosis in 1867.  Though both would publicly state that they had forgiven their spouse for the affair and subsequent murder, Daniel and Teresa Sickles despite several attempts at reconciliation would remain largely estranged from each other over the course of the next eight years.

Daniel Sickles, who would lose his leg at the Battle of Gettysburg, win the Congressional Medal of Honor and serve as the United States Ambassador to Spain during the presidential administration of Ulysses S. Grant would go on to remarry and father three children.  He would live to the age of ninety four before passing quietly in his sleep in May of 1914.  Sickles funeral was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and attended by thousands.

Though he probably would have liked best to be remembered as the Union General who won the Battle of Gettysburg, today Daniel Sickles is best remembered as the man who first used the defense of temporary insanity.