Wasn't He a Bully Boy!

SICKLES THE INCREDIBLE (433 pp.)--W. A. Swanberg--Scribner ($6).

Major General Dan Sickles may or may not have won the Battle of Gettysburg (he thought he did), but he was an American who lived as if he never cared where his next square melee was coming from. On one leg (he lost his right leg to one of Longstreet's cannonballs on the second day of the battle), he lived more than most men could a) on two legs and b) in two lifetimes.

Perhaps because he was the General Sickles who led the III Corps into an indefensible salient in the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg, he has never had more than a corporal's guard of biographers, unlike the platoons, companies and regiments bristling about the tombs of other Civil War heroes.* In 1945, Edgcumb Pinchon wrote Sickles' first biography (TIME, June 18, 1945), but he was too preoccupied with Sickles as a sexy swashbuckler to catch the personality captured by sober-sided Civil War Buff Swanberg. Here the snaggle-toothed old warhorse gets free title to his redoubt on the flank of American history.

Respect & Contempt. Sickles' life sprawled, bounced and hopped over the incredible period between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. He was born four years after Waterloo and died in the year World War I began. He was a high-spirited boy (or what would now be called a delinquent) who matriculated at one of New York's most cultivated households, that of Mozart Librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, where he learned a respect for languages and a contempt for bourgeois morality. He was to need both.

With fist, boot, pistol and general finagling, he made his way through New York's Tammany Hall, took on a doxy named Fanny White, whom he found in a brothel, earned the enmity of Editor James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald. Bennett called him "Aunfit" for a diplomatic post, so Sickles devised a subtle revenge: when he got to London, he presented his favorite tart of the moment to Queen Victoria as "Miss Bennett."

He went to Washington as a Congressman and there, right across from the White House, shot down and killed his young wife's lover, Philip Barton Key, son of the man who had written The Star-Spangled Banner. Biographer Swanberg suggests that Sickles' virtue was offended less than his pride. The outcome of Sickles' trial for the murder of Key was that the public applauded him for the shooting, then execrated him when he "forgave" his wife by living with her in the same house.

The Civil War came to the rescue. Sickles raised a brigade in New York, called it the "Excelsior," and poured his own money into it. Just as the brigade approached bankruptcy, the Union defeat at Bull Run made President Lincoln happy to put Sickles' volunteer army on the Federal payroll. Sickles hired chefs from Delmonico's to keep the mess happy, but good cooking did not save him from losing a third of his men in the advanced position he had taken up against Meade's orders at Gettysburg. While the rights of the matter were still being debated (they still can be), the one-legged hero clumped about the White House trying to get Lincoln to let him back into the fight. He was not to be satisfied until 40 years later when Versifier Horatio King put his military record in the proper light:

The fight was bloody, fierce and long. And Sickles' name shall stay Forever in the Hall of Fame As he who saved the day.

Earning the Title. After Appomattox, all should have been an anticlimax. But Dan Sickles went on to be Minister to Spain by appointment of President Grant. In Madrid he tried to cozen the Spanish out of Cuba without a war and earned the derisive title, "Yankee King of Spain'' by his trips to Paris to make love to the deposed Spanish Queen Isabella.

Civilian life, Sickles reasoned, was best conducted on the lines of a running skirmish. He got leave from his ministerial job to come home and tangle with Robber Baron Jay Gould over control of the Erie Railroad. Supported by immense fees from the Erie's British stockholders, Sickles marshaled his forces, led a cavalcade of carriages full of lawyers and stockholders and, flanked by squads of police, raided the Erie's plush headquarters and forced Gould to resign. In 1887 Sickles' father died, leaving him a fortune, and the general marked the event with a dinner for 150 guests. He collected girls galore, got himself elected again to Congress and, with a troupe known as "the wrecks of the Civil War." did some bellicose barnstorming against William Jennings Bryan. "Isn't he a bully boy!" exclaimed Philosopher William James.

It was not until Sickles was 93 that his troubles began to hem him in. He had lost $4,000,000 on Wall Street, and the sad fact was that he was $28,000 short in his accounts with the New York State Monuments Commission, which he headed. When eviction threatened, he hung three American flags out of his Fifth Avenue window and awaited the sheriff. He died broke at 95, with little but his medals and a fame that already belonged to another age. He may not have been the ideal leader of a boys' club or the neighborhood Cub troop, but he was a mean man in the clinches and never dull.

*Though he promoted the Act of Congress that established the Battlefield of Gettysburg as a national monument, Sickles lacks a statue there.

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