Daniel Sickles: Lafayette Square Killing, Peach Orchard and a Boxed Leg

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Daniel Sickles, born in New York City in 1819, rose through the printer's trade and the law into New York politics. In 1852 he married Teresa Bagioli, then 15 or 16, and as secretary of the U.S. legation in London he presented Fanny White to Queen Victoria under the surname of a political rival. As a congressman in 1859 he shot and killed U.S. Attorney Philip Barton Key II, son of Francis Scott Key, in Lafayette Square across from the White House. Defended by Edwin Stanton, he was acquitted using temporary insanity for the first time in American law, then drew more outrage by forgiving Teresa than for the killing.

As the only Union corps commander without a West Point education, he moved his Third Corps a mile forward to the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, without orders, and James Longstreet's attack wrecked it. A cannonball took his right leg, and he puffed a cigar on the stretcher. Back in Washington ahead of George Meade, he blamed Meade in the press. Later came Reconstruction command, a stormy post as minister to Spain during the Virginius affair, a Medal of Honor 34 years after Gettysburg, and his ouster from the New York Monuments Commission over missing funds.

He kept his pistol in jail and received congressmen, senators and a note from the president.
He leaked Teresa's written confession to the newspapers after the judge excluded it.
In the occupied South he banned discrimination on public transport and gave laborers first lien on crops.
He donated his leg bones to the Army Medical Museum and reportedly visited them on the anniversary.
He fenced Gettysburg National Military Park with iron fencing taken from Lafayette Square.

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