THE ANTIHERO OF GETTYSBURG

At 6:30 p.m. on July 2, 1863, the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, a Confederate solid shot hurtled through the air and struck Union major general Daniel E. Sickles’s right knee, leaving the lower half of his leg hanging in shreds. Sickles and members of his staff had been riding behind Abraham Trostle’s barn to escape the rain of enemy metal. Sickles, by one account, calmly leaned forward and lifted his right leg out of the stirrup and over the saddle. Helped from his mount, the wounded commander was placed on a stretcher, and his men quickly turned their sweaty handkerchiefs into makeshift dressings and tightened an improvised tourniquet above his shattered knee.

Sickles’s encounter with the cannonball came just as Confederate attacks were beating back the units under his command. Now, with both his right leg and his vaunted III Corps smashed, Sickles, fortified by brandy and a fat cigar, was jolting to the rear in an army ambulance.

The Battle of Gettysburg marked the end of Sickles’s active military service. But he would spend the rest of