Dan Sickles Did A Bad Job At The Battle Of Gettysburg

Day 2 of the Battle of Gettysburg is all about how much Dan Sickles sucks. 

First of all, he was a child molester, marrying a 15-year-old child when he himself was 32 years old.

Then a few years later, he murdered that wife's affair partner, Philip Barton Key II, who also happened to be the adult son of Francis Scott Key (Key was also several years older than Teresa, the wife, who was still only 21 or 22 years old by this time). And mind you, this is after Sickles himself got so involved with a sex worker that he took the sex worker with him on vacation to England, where he also TOOK HER TO MEET QUEEN VICTORIA. 

What. An. Asshole.

Anyway, after the affairs on both sides, after the murder, after the trial during which he becomes the first person in the United States to use the temporary insanity defense, the Civil War starts, and Sickles, who'd low-key been a militiaman since the 1850s, became more active--having one's boots on the ground was a good way to repair one's dodgy political reputation! He always seemed to have some reason out of his control to keep him out of many of the actual battles (ahem), but he did do a cool thing in that whenever freedom seekers found his camp, he'd assist them, get them jobs and military training and stuff. So that was good, but overall, he was still an asshole.

Okay, so on the morning of July 2, Major General Meade--you know, the guy who was in charge of the ENTIRE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC?!?--told Sickles to anchor the very leftmost flank of the army in a very specific spot. Remember how the Union had ended the night before on top of Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill? On this day, Meade wanted to line up against the Confederates in a sort of upside down fishhook shape south of the town, everyone facing outward. Culp's Hill was the right flank, with forces extending a little bit south along that hill. From Culp's Hill forces were stationed west to a little past Cemetery Hill, then south along a ridgeline, Cemetery Ridge, to just north of Little Roundtop. Meade told Sickles to hold that that specific spot just north of Little Round Top.

In the below screenshot you can see Cemetery Ridge topographically, although I think the forces were actually mostly stationed just to its west. Sickles was basically supposed to hold the line south from about the "Chubby's" to the "Monument" straight north, with other guys to help him out north of that and Little Round Top to block the way through south of that. Sickles held that spot for a little bit, but then he decided that he personally liked the Peach Orchard better, so he gave the order and marched his entire corps away from where they were supposed to be, moving them forward nearly a mile and causing a huge, obvious gap in the line.

Meanwhile, this guy, Brigadier General Warren--

--was doing exactly what his statue depicts: standing on top of Little Round Top with binoculars, checking out the battlefield. Facing the northwest, he didn't see Sickles' corps at the base of Little Round Top, where they were supposed to be, but waaaaaay out there in that green field you can see a little sliver of behind the trees:

Mr. Craft Knife and Gouverneur Warren do not understand why Sickles' corps is so far away from their post!

Even worse, though, was that when he looked to the southwest, he saw glints of light and realized that they came from the bayonets of Confederate soldiers, who he realized could easily just march northeast, straight past Sickles' corps, and over Little Round Top to get right through the Union line. This view to the southwest shows their super easy path. Devil's Den, which will be important in a minute, is to the right:

Warren is trying to point out the danger to me, but I'm looking in the wrong direction entirely!

Warren basically ran immediately to go tell Meade, who then immediately went to check on the situation, but by then it was too late to get Sickles' troops back into their proper spot, because the Confederates started attacking. 

A messenger was sent to ask for reinforcements from one specific division, but before the messenger reached that division he ran into a completely different brigade commander, and when that commander heard the message, he took it upon himself to run his own four regiments up to Little Round Top, and it's those four regiments who saved the situation.

Some of the Confederate forces tried to fight their way up the west side of Little Round Top--

--but it's super rocky and exposed, AND uphill, and some of these soldiers had already been marching 20 miles that day. Earlier, they'd stopped for a rest and because they were out of water, a few guys gathered up everyone's canteens and made a quick run to the nearby creek to fill them. But while the guys were gone, they got orders to move out, and the canteen carriers still hadn't caught up with them. So they mostly got shot down like dogs, dehydrated and exhausted, on the western slope of Little Round Top.

Some other Confederate forces instead tried to go up and over Round Top so they could sneak up Little Round Top from the south, but they were met by the 20th Maine, commanded by Chamberlain, who had been told to hold this left flank of the Union army at all costs with his 385 soldiers.

This monument marks the left flank of the entire Union army.

There were so few soldiers to hold the entire southern edge of Little Round Top that they stretched out side by side in a single file instead of in their tidy Napoleonic rows, then, when they started to run out of ammunition, they fixed their bayonets and charged down Little Round Top in a counterattack of hand-to-hand fighting, as depicted in this Ghost of Paul Revere song:

Meanwhile, Sickles' guys were now the leading edge of this entire attack since they were so far in front of everyone else, so they ended up getting super spread out trying to keep Confederates from getting around them. Their line, which had just been meant to cover between the northern edge of Little Round Top to the southern edge of the Second Corp, now straggled from the Peach Orchard southeast to the Wheatfield, then due south to Devil's Den. All three spots had some of the bloodiest fighting of the battle, thanks to Sickles.

We skipped the Wheatfield and Peach Orchard, but we were curious about Devil's Den--so rocky!--so we stopped there to have a little snoopy around:

Full disclosure: somehow during this specific hike, Mr. Craft Knife must have walked through a nest of ticks or something, because he got about 1,000 ticks on him! Even the next morning, we checked out of the hotel and hopped into the car, ready to grab breakfast and the little kid and then book it back to Ohio for the big kid's graduation, and as I slid into the passenger seat I saw yet another tick clinging to the ceiling over the driver's seat, ready to drop onto his head.

So, if you go to Devil's Den, wear lots of permethrin and be careful not to brush against the greenery!

This is the view from the top of Devil's Den towards the eastern side of Little Round Top. You can't really see it in this photo, but if you zoom in about a thousand percent on my original photo, you can see a really cool monument to the 40th New York Infantry, with a soldier holding a rifle hiding behind the stone plaque and peeking over at you where you stand on top of Devil's Den. The 40th New York Infantry commander's official report is here, and when he gets to 4:00 he starts describing this attack.

This is the view a little to the south of the previous photo. The wooded area is Round Top, and the Confederates who met Chamberlain's force came through those woods, down into the little valley between Round Top and Little Round Top, and up into the woods you can see on the south side of Little Round Top. And then Chamberlain's soldiers ran them down with bayonets.

And here's me in the middle of Devil's Den itself, somehow not crouching in a nest of ticks!

The foreground of this photo looks alarmingly brushy, however, so now I'm wondering if Mr. Craft Knife did in fact sacrifice his health to get this perfect shot of me...

Devil's Den kind of feels like both a terrible and a wonderful place to fight. I have a couple of friends who are into Airsoft, and I bet if someone ever made an Airsoft arena that recreates this space, they would be booked solid at any admission price. You probably couldn't recreate via Airsoft the Union cannons on the west side of this hill, aimed to repel the first Confederate wave, or the Confederate sharpshooters on the east side, stationed after they'd taken the hill to snipe Union officers on Little Round Top.

Looking down at the Slaughter Pen area, probably already with his 1,000 ticks along for the ride.

By the end of July 2, the Union held Little Round Top and the Confederates held Devil's Den. The Union used cannons set up on Little Round Top to fire at Confederate forces to the north during the next day's battle, and Confederate snipers continued to pick off Union soldiers as they could find them from their nests on Devil's Den. 

But Sickles wouldn't be there to see that, because earlier on this day, a cannonball damaged his leg so badly that it had to be amputated. But that limb, at least, wouldn't be tossed outside through a broken window to land in a big pile of amputated limbs in some poor farmer's yard; Sickles, like the absolute psychopath that he was, kept his amputated leg, had the flesh removed, and then donated it to a museum--where it is still on exhibit!

While that was happening, though, further north along Cemetery Ridge was also seeing major fighting. Sickles' forces who had spread out along the Peach Orchard were falling back towards Cemetery Ridge, which means that the Confederates chasing them were now causing Cemetery Ridge to be attacked not just from the west, but also from the southwest. Soldiers, especially ones using tactics last relevant during the Napoleonic Wars, don't do as well when they're attacked on two fronts.

I wanted to take a photo towards the west, where the Confederate line would have been, but I'm not quite oriented correctly. If you want to know where the enemy was, you should always look where the cannons are pointed!

But this was also basically the center of the Union line (the next day's Pickett's Charge, also meant to break the center of the Union line, is just to the north of this spot), so breaking through here would give a huge boost to the Confederate forces. Individual Union artillery and infantry units suffered shocking casualty rates--out of the 262 soldiers of the 1st Minnesota infantry, 47 survived their charge toward the Confederate line here that was solely intended to buy time for more Union reinforcements to arrive--but the Union forces managed to hold Cemetery Ridge, which put everything in motion for a new Confederate push against the center of the Union line on the next, final day of the battle.

Caught my guy reading from our Bible, A Field Guide to Gettysburg, in exactly one photo, even though this book was in someone's hand constantly. It orients you to exactly where to face at each spot--at Little Round Top, it described actual specific rocks, and they were right where the book said they would be!--and then tells you exactly what happened there, what you could see at the time and what it looks like now, how it contributed to the battle and the war as a whole, etc. I swear that this trip would have been nearly meaningless without it.

Sickles spent the rest of his life trying to sully Meade's reputation and insisting that he'd been right and Meade had been wrong about the best spot for his troops to be that day--never mind that he'd defied a direct order and fucked up the whole battle plan. Meade was definitely right, though. If Sickles had held the line and not stretched his forces out at an angle in front of everyone else, the Confederate forces would have come up against a better established line with more manpower and gunpower. Although it's definitely possible that if it had been Sickles, and not Chamberlain, on the southern face of Little Round Top, he'd have done a bad job and the Confederates would have ended up taking it, and then there would have been no Union artillery to attack the right flank of the big Confederate charge the next day.

Which is where we're going next!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!