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Then, after the concert, tune in to the Super Bowl 60 pregame show on NBC. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people coming to you from the city where the West begins. Fort Worth, Texas. One of the great characters of the Civil War, General Daniel Sickles, left a trail of unpaid bills, broken romances, and political scandals everywhere he went. Here to tell the story.
is Ashley Lubinsky. Ashley is the former co-host of Discovery Channel's Master of Arms, and she's the co-founder of the University of Wyoming College of Law's Firearms Research Center. Here's Ashley. The expression, sometimes fact is stranger than fiction, might well have been written specifically for Civil War General Daniel Sickles. I'm not sure that there is a more peculiar or colorful character in American history.
It's hard to know where to begin with Sickles, as he has no shortfall of stories that could be told about him. He was born in New York City and throughout his life would serve as a soldier, politician, and diplomat. He attended law school and became active in the Democratic Party and began his political career in 1847. Probably his least controversial accomplishment is that he acquired the land for Central Park in 1853. In 1855, he won consecutive terms in the New York State Senate and was a member of the U.S.
House of Representatives from 1857 to 1861. That tenure, though, was not without scandal, which might be a massive understatement. On February 27, 1859, Sickles shot and killed Philip Barton Key, who was the son of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the national anthem. He shot Key in broad daylight across from the White House. And interestingly, Sickles then walked straight to the Attorney General's house and surrendered himself.
And he was so popular and so influential in Washington that he was allowed to receive visitors from the jail, and he was also allowed to keep his personal weapons on him when he was in prison. And he had so many visitors that came through to see him that he actually got to use the head jailer's apartment for those visits. And the people visiting him were politicians and heads of Washington. President Buchanan even sent him a personal note. And one visitor that was of particular interest to Harper's magazine was the frequent visits of his wife.
And the reason why this is interesting is that the reason he was in jail was because he shot the man that she was having an affair with. Hmm. And it was that justification that got him acquitted on temporary insanity. And this was actually the first time that this defense had successfully been used. And after he was acquitted, he very publicly forgave his wife and they stayed together.
And the newspapers, and this shows you just how kind of crazy, no pun intended, how crazy the culture was because he kills his wife's lover. Gets off on temporary insanity, and then the newspapers paint him as a hero, claiming that he, quote, was saving all the ladies of Washington from this rogue guy named Keith. Temporary insanity, though, you might think would have squashed the rest of his career, but it did not stop him from becoming a major general in the Civil War. At the Battle of Gettysburg, he makes several controversial moves. One of the biggest ones that he's known for is the fact that he disobeys a direct order and relocates his corps to a different position at the battle that he thought would be more adequate.
Now, there's some debate as to whether or not there were any positives to that, but unfortunately, that decision did leave his men exposed to the Confederacy and they were overrun. While his men were overrun, though, Sickles rode his horse up to get a better view of the fighting. And while he was mounted on his horse, that's when he was hit with a 12-pound cannonball. His horse was completely unharmed, so he was able to dismount his horse and he had a tourniquet wrapped around his wound, which, you know, these types of wounds happened a lot on the battlefield. And there were procedures done on the battlefield, but if they could move you off-site, they would.
And that's what they did with Sickles. And you get this larger-than-life image surrounding him being taken off the battlefield with a tourniquet around his wound on a stretcher, smoking a cigar. Once he gets off the battlefield, they take a look at his leg. His lower leg is too bad to save.
So they make the decision to amputate it.
Now, they initially were going to amputate it below the knee, but then they learned the damage was too bad, and so they ended up amputating it above the knee. And the limb was not discarded. A lot of times when you hear about amputations on the battlefield in the 19th century, even in the 18th century, you get this image of just limbs being discarded or thrown out windows because it was so common. But for some reason, somebody kept General Sickles' leg. And around this same time, the Army Medical Museum, which is now the National Museum of Health and Medicine, was founded and they were looking for artifacts like this.
They were acquiring what they termed, quote, specimens of morbid anatomy, end quote.
So Sickles, of course, thought it would be a great idea to have his leg sent to the museum in a coffin-shaped box. The museum was incredibly stoked about this donation. They stabilized the broken bones and they used it as a teaching tool of battlefield trauma, and it's still in the museum today. And it is thought that Sickles would visit his leg on the anniversary of losing it every year. Sickles went on to be the military governor of North and South Carolina from 1865 to 1867, although he was relieved of that position, not super popular, and he retired from the army in 1869.
After that, he served as a minister to Spain from 1869 to 1874, and he got involved in a really odd warmongering scheme over there where he was passing bad information to Washington.
So he was ultimately relieved of that duty as well. But while he was there, he developed a reputation as a ladiesman in the Spanish court, and he was rumored to have had an affair with Queen Isabella II. After all of that, he ended up being able to do another term in the House between 1893 and 1895, where he would help to pass a bill to preserve the Gettysburg battlefield. His Civil War reputation was checkered because of a lot of criticisms and falsehoods. There were a lot of stories making him sound really good, usually coming from him, and then there were a lot of people who criticized things that he did.
But he was incredibly instrumental in the preservation of Gettysburg as a national historic site and also the establishments of the New York Monuments at the National Park. But of course, he couldn't help himself, forgot all of his life. And so he, in 1912, was pushed out of the New York Monuments Commission for embezzling $27,000. I don't think there's a moment in General Sickles' life where he wasn't causing some level of drama. It went from having a philandering wife to being a philanderer himself, from murdering someone to getting off for insanity.
So it seems only fitting that. He is preserved forever as a curiosa item in a National Museum in Washington, D.C. The story of one heck of a character, a heck of a 19th century character, General Daniel Sickles, here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell stories of history, faith, business, love, loss, and your stories.
Send us your story, small or large, to our email, oas at ouramericanstories.com. That's oas at ouramericanstories.com. We'd love to hear them and put them on the air. At CVS, it matters that we're not just in your community, but that we're part of it. It matters that we're here for you when you need us, day or night.
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Seven free. Your front row experience will be on iHeartRadio stations across the country. And the free iHeartRadio app is Sunday at 3:30 Eastern, 12:30 Pacific. Then, after the concert, tune in to the Super Bowl 60 pregame show on NBC. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore.
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