“Yes,” Dan replied. “But I can hold him until reinforcements arrive. I will contract my line, or modify it, if you prefer. My men are easily maneuvered under fire.”
General Meade said it was too late, but that he would support him on the left, where Birney’s men held the line, and on his right and center, held by Humphreys, with men from neighboring corps. Then Meade galloped away, and Dan heard nothing more of him that day. Meade had left dangling the question of whether Dan had done a good or bad thing. Had Dan also played, in a different and less deliberate sense than Longstreet did, with his men’s lives by advancing so far? Or would they have been destroyed had they stayed where Meade wanted them to be? One observer would say that on this would be spilled “a Caspian Sea of ink.”
On the banks of the Hudson at Bloomingdale, the same endless, humid afternoon that prevailed at Gettysburg pended over the city and outer parts of Manhattan. It was a promising day for Teresa and Laura to be on Bloomingdale business—visits to animals and to ill neighbors, and preparations for the visits by her parents and others on July Fourth. The child had inherited the salutary interest in domestic animals that was so strong in her mother—a happy circumstance, since Teresa had not recently had the same energy she once did.26
The newspapers Teresa had seen that morning were full of late June news, some days out of date, of threatening Confederate movements in Pennsylvania. She had found them hard to read. She was these days possessed of an increasing melancholy and languor. The recently departed Dan was still on her mind and on Laura’s. Even though, of all the family, only Susan Sickles seemed to have extreme fears of Dan’s death, the possibility of harm coming both to the polity and society of the North and to Dan hung over the day, adding weight to the humid air.
Teresa’s feelings—or, more exactly, symptoms—that day were indications that she, like her husband, lay under danger of a great flanking—in her case from one of the pervasive diseases of the era. Tuberculosis, also called consumption or phthisis (a Greek term meaning “wasting away”), was famous, at least in the theater and literature, for attacking the young, the fair, the exuberant, the talented. In fact, it was a predominant disease among Irish immigrants and blacks, arising from the poverty in which they lived, the foulness of the surroundings, the scarcity of warmth and food. Teresa was far from the usual venues of this disease, from the Fourth Ward, where toilets spilled into streets and courtyards, where bacteria from human excrement and urine and from the animal offal of slaughterhouses, all contributing to high mortality. Tuberculosis was, above all, a disease of the lower East Side, the middle East Side known as the Gas House district, and the middle West Side, Hell’s Kitchen. Archbishop Hughes, the Catholic archbishop of New York, said, with perhaps too much resignation, that tuberculosis was “the Irish death.” Nearly twice as many immigrants as native-born contributed to the city’s yearly death toll from the disease of three thousand souls. The working class, having contracted the disease, had no clear mountains, no sun-drenched sanatoria to resort to for a cure. In fact, the use of sanatoria had yet not come into vogue as a means of treating the disease. It was a mercy that laudanum and opiates were freely available across the counter of drugstores to patients who had no other succor. A brown tincture of macerated opium in diluted spirits was imbibed by people of all classes who suffered tubercular symptoms. It was the only effective medicine available, and though it did something for pain and for suppressing the cough, one of its chief influences was to make the patient less fearful and more resigned.
In sylvan Bloomingdale, Teresa would in one sense have been considered by the doctors of the day to be relatively secure from the infection, for the leading experts furiously denied until 1882, when the bacterium was isolated, that tuberculosis was a contagious disease. One important contributor to the disease was, the experts of Teresa’s time proclaimed, a hereditary disposition, and though Teresa’s parents and grandparents were or had been healthy and long-lived and had never been troubled by tuberculosis, her uncle Lorenzo Da Ponte had died of a form of it. Despite talk of heredity, the unrealized fact was that organisms of the disease were everywhere in the city. If a tubercular person sneezed or coughed, minute droplets containing hundreds of tubercule bacilli would float in the air for hours and even attach themselves to food. For the affluent, it was often the servant who brought the disease out of the squalor of Lower Manhattan into the uptown residences. The early stages of the disease were difficult to detect. One conclusive sign was the fearful cough and the spitting up of blood from ulcerations in the lungs. This expectoration of blood was not uncommonly seen on the streets, and in eating houses and theaters. Once the bacillus found a bridgehead within the body, it entered an alliance with any discontent or ambiguity of soul and, more obviously, with unsuitable domestic arrangements. The chief unsuitable elements in the house at Bloomingdale were its demanding size and draftiness.
Again, however, the baffled experts put less stress on cold drafts in the case of a tubercular gentlewoman, which Teresa was on her way to becoming, than they did on flaws of character in the sufferer. Religiosity and sexual hysteria—“an incontinent search for pleasure”—were other causes they uncomprehendingly invoked. For, apart from religious excess and celibacy, said a leading British specialist, other primary causes were an early addiction to horse riding continuing into young womanhood, inducing habitual masturbation and “paving the way for phthisis.” Hence, as Teresa’s incipient symptoms developed, the doctors would be predisposed to shake their heads sadly. A horse-riding, sexually notorious soul whose husband had abandoned her to whatever solitary solace she could achieve.
It had been only recently, in 1854, that Hermann Brehmer, a German sufferer from the disease, had cured himself by spending time in high, dry air in the Himalayas, and had been moved to build the first sanatorium and to recommend altitude, clean air, and good food. But Teresa, in whom the symptoms were not yet fully visible, was in any case already surrounded by relatively wholesome air and ate wholesome food.27
In Washington that same day, as Teresa by the Hudson felt the onset of the unusual languor that was an early symptom of her disease, and as Dan waited with a warrior exaltation for bloody chaos to begin by the Emmitsburg Road, Mary Todd Lincoln was thrown from her carriage in Washington. It was not known whether the bolts of her carriage seat had been intentionally loosened by a saboteur with Mr. Lincoln in mind or whether it was an accident, but it would lead to serious illness. Lincoln himself was saved from injury because he spent that day in the telegraph office of the War Department, waiting for news from Gettysburg. There, on the field itself, at midafternoon, the pattern of the afternoon’s havoc was established. General Hood’s rebels struck Sickles’s men, or, specifically, David Birney’s men, with a sudden ferocity. De Trobriand, commanding one of Sickles’s brigades, thought the enemy came rushing up like demons from hell, but many of Birney’s men were Pennsylvanians, fighting resolutely for home ground.28
Still, the fury of fire from the Confederate lines, the determination of their advance toward the wheatfield (later to be known as the Wheatfield), and their pressure on Sickles’s men at the hinge of their line among the trees of the peach orchard (hereafter, Peach Orchard) were such that Dan had continually to transfer men from Humphreys’s end of the line to reinforce Birney. Dan’s friend Charles Graham, formerly of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was a brigade commander under Birney in the Wheatfield, a triangular parcel of land about four hundred yards on each of its three sides. He rolled back a number of attacks. But a third of all Birney’s men had within an hour been struck and variously shattered by shells or minié balls. Graham, the Tammany engineer, already wounded once, was pitched to the ground in the Peach Orchard when his horse was shot. Stunned and blood-soaked, he could barely see or move as men from Mississippi swarmed over his position and captured him.
Three brigadier generals ordered to help Dan’s men were shot dead in short order that afternoon. As some of the newcomers wavered, de Trobriand in t
he Wheatfield was depicted almost in caricature as yelling, “Third Michigan, change front to right! . . . Change quick, or you will be gobbled up. Don’t you see you are flanked? Ze whole Rebel army is in your rear!” Ultimately the position would be tenuously held, and de Trobriand’s brigade, like other men of Sickles’s corps, were ordered to march to the rear for resupplying. They moved across fields in which their reinforcements from the Fifth Corps lay down on the stubbly and stony ground in lines to enable the surviving Black Diamonds to pass among them.
Many of Dan’s units managed an orderly withdrawal back across the creek named Plum Run Creek. Others, he saw, were stampeded. But it cannot be denied that by nightfall the federal line would lie more or less where Meade had that morning envisaged it should lie, with the difference that the Roundtops were firmly held by the Union.29
Before Dan’s troops withdrew (or were driven back, according to which view was accepted), Dan was still astride his horse in the Trostle farmyard, an unlit cigar in his mouth, maintaining without apparent effort a deliberate but tautly aware frame of mind. He later depicted what happened next in the plainest language, leached of all trauma. “I am wounded. I turn over my command to Birney and am carried to the rear, knowing that victory is ours.” Indeed it was, for the Confederates had not managed to turn the Union flank, and it was the Third Corps and its reinforcements that had denied Longstreet’s men the victory. What had happened to Dan, however, was that a twelve-pound cannonball that had failed to explode came visibly lolloping, far too fast to be avoided by Dan and his mounted staff, across the farmyard from the direction of the Confederate artillery on Seminary Ridge and shattered and tore to pulp Dan’s right leg in its blue fabric. Curiously, by one of those anomalies veterans were used to, it left his horse unmarked. Dan was conscious of the damage, yet was not overwhelmed with pain and did not lose consciousness. Already in a heightened, feverish state from the battle he was fighting, perhaps he found it all the easier to marshal the chemicals appropriate to trauma. A captain of the 70th New York, standing nearby, nonetheless feared that the men still fighting on the Third Corps line might be affected if too many of them heard the rumor that their general had been—as it seemed—mortally wounded. The captain formed a detail of a sergeant and six soldiers, who covered Dan with a blanket and carried him to the shade of the Trostle farmhouse. This was, above all, in the hour of his wound, a moment of which the right sort of general could make a myth of his easy gallantry, and Dan managed it, his cigar still stuck between his lips by grimace or by stubbornness. When he arrived by the wall of the house, he appeared merely moderately upset and told one of the men to buckle a saddle strap tightly over the upper thigh as a tourniquet. Major Harry Tremain then turned up with a message and was filled with horror to see what had befallen Sickles. Dan ordered Tremain, “Tell General Birney he must take command.”30
A stretcher arrived, Dan had an NCO light his cigar, and that was how he was carried away, cap over his eyes, cigar in mouth, hands folded on chest. A little to the rear, bleeding heavily despite the strap around his upper thigh, but still not showing acute pain, he was placed in an ambulance with a medical aide, who began pouring brandy down his throat to counteract the shock. Tremain also got into the ambulance, since he thought Dan would expire on its bloody boards, and he did not want him to die without a face he knew. “Solemn words,” said Tremain, “not to be written in my story, were softly spoken to me amid the din of cannon.” Dan was pleased to see Father O’Hagen, chaplain of the 74th New York, ride up to offer spiritual comforts. There seemed to be a consensus that the general would die, but Dan did not appear oppressed by it.
Certainly he was now about to experience the mercy of a field hospital, of exactly the kind of place outside which Walt Whitman, hospital orderly, sighted a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, and hands—the mark of a site of horrors. The Third Corps field hospital consisted of a string of tents near the Taneytown Road, a little way behind the Round-tops. Light was fading, and the doctors inspected Dan by the illumination of candles stuck on bayonets. Tremain caught the odor of chloroform, which the more advanced Union surgeons were merciful enough to use. After chloroform was administered to Dan, Dr. Thomas Sim, the corps’ medical director, using a new method of rounded amputation, cut off the leg at a third of the way up the thigh. He had just read that the Army Medical Museum in Washington was advertising for samples, and so, instead of throwing the limb into a heap, he had it wrapped in a wet blanket and placed in a small coffin for shipment to Washington. Dan’s shattered leg lived on as a museum exhibit and remains on display at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington.
Overnight, as the anesthetic wore off, the pain of Dan’s amputation became intolerable. He now felt at one with the thousands of agonized men of Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, and other nightmares, and he was filled with vague but deep anxieties. After he was given two opium pills for the pain, Sim believed it essential to get him away from the infections of the field hospital. In the morning he was placed on a stretcher and began the journey to the nearest Union-controlled railroad depot at Littlestown, twelve miles away. He had been moved to the hospital, following his wound, fairly deftly and without pain, but this time he could be transported only at a creeping pace. As well as Dr. Sim, who had left his deputy in charge of the Third Corps hospital, Tremain and two other aides, handsome Alexander Moore and plump Tom Fry, accompanied Dan, and ten shifts of four men each were used to transport him, with enormous care, over the difficult ground. Whenever cavalry came rattling past, Dr. Sim would cry out to them and to the stretcher bearers themselves to go steadily. “A stumble might kill the patient.” There were frequent rests, of an extent not afforded the wounded of other ranks, in secluded and shady places. They traveled only four miles that first day, as, at Gettysburg, the final Confederate assault on the center began, ending in the defeat of Lee’s army. At the Wheatfield, Mathew Brady would take a famous photograph of the already bloating young dead of Dan’s corps.
The next morning Dan at first felt well and insisted on shaving himself, and that day the railroad and its strings of rail coaches full of wounded was reached. Dan and his accompanying surgeon and aides traveled to Washington on what Tremain called “an ordinary passenger car.” The jolting of the train pained Dan, and he was fed morphine. Two days after the battle, the party reached Washington. Dan could sense, that Sunday morning, even through his opium haze, the exhilaration of the capital, the excitement apparent on the faces of people at the train station. There were frantic cheers from those waiting for or arriving on trains as he was carried forth. Had he known, he would have been ecstatic to learn that the New York Times was already laying print for the next day that said, “New York State and City owe a debt of peculiar gratitude to General Sickles. He it is that, in the most signal manner, has proved what militia are capable of when led by a brave man.” There was hope, “amounting almost to confidence, that his life and services will be spared to the country.” The Times could not express more than “hope” because of the problems surgeons often had with amputations. Since such injuries were covered with lint scraped from materials not always sterile, the chance of gangrene and of an agonizing and fevered death was always present for the recent amputee.31
Rooms in a lodging house on Eighth Street had been organized for Dan. He continued to lie on the stretcher on top of a mattress placed on the floor, and a medical orderly kept the stump wet—what Surgeon Sim called “irrigating the wound.” There was discussion about lifting him off the floor and into a bed, but since Sim felt he might not be up to it, he was tended quietly where he was. He seemed to be alert and happy in a feverish way.
Late that Sunday afternoon, an aide came into the room with the news that the President and his son Tad were downstairs. If many professional soldiers were blaming Dan for taking his corps forward, the President, an advocate of “forward,” did not fret much about the matter. Lincoln, aware that Dan, right or wrong, had given spirited aid to the survival of the United
States, was willing to leave his sick wife at the White House to spend time with Dan. He had been following Meade’s dispatches and, concerned, as so often before, by the man’s excessive caution, was planning to urge him to pursue Lee. “You have given the enemy a stunning blow at Gettysburg. Follow it up, and give him another before he can reach the Potomac.”
No visitor could have been more welcome to Dan in his semidelirious state, alternating between euphoria and fretfulness, than the President. Lincoln walked in, bent over, shook hands with Sickles, asked him about his wound, and then sat in a chair at the side of the mattress while Tad stood by, no doubt amazed at the pallid transformation of this man he had seen around the White House. Sickles had a cigar lit up for the occasion, and was eager to answer the President’s questions about the battle. That very afternoon, with his hold on life tenuous, Dan began his campaign to discredit the dilatory Meade before Meade discredited the rash Sickles. Meade himself would not lose much time arguing his point. In his official dispatch he would state, “General Sickles, misinterpreting his orders, instead of placing the Third Corps on the prolongation of the Second, had moved it nearly three-quarters of a mile in advance, an error which nearly proved fatal in the battle.” But Meade, Dan implied or said outright to the President that afternoon, had had no plan of battle for Gettysburg. Sickles explained now to the nation’s father how he had seen it as a matter of necessity to advance to the high ground. According to one of his aides, he spoke of the general impact of the battle itself, and its probable political consequences, “with a lucidity and ability remarkable in his condition. . .. Occasionally he would wince with pain and call sharply to his orderly to wet his stump with water. But he never dropped his cigar nor lost the thread of his narrative. . .. He certainly got his side of the story of Gettysburg well into the President’s mind.” Lincoln gravely thanked Dan, asked if there was anything he needed, was thanked in return, and departed.32
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