Okay, Dan Sickles. Wow. Is he in your library? src: https://www.reddit.com/r/CIVILWAR/comments/1qvurrn/who_had_the_most_plot_armor_during_the_civil_war/
Brought prostitutes to the New York assembly and to London while his wife was pregnant at home
Shot the grandson of the man who wrote the Star Spangled Banner in broad daylight across the street from the White House
Worked with Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's future Secretary of War to invent "Temporary Insanity" as a legal defense
Played the public so well that they forgot the murder, but were furious he forgave his wife for cheating with the man he murdered
Bonded with Joe Hooker over their shared love of, well
Reached division command at Fredericksburg, where his command suffered zero casualties
Lincoln recommends him for Corps command
At the Battle of Gettysburg, he stretches his corps across 2x its original front in a jagged mess of bent lines and salients a mile away from the rest of the army because uhhhhhhhhh the ground is a little better
His Corps is destroyed as an organization, with his 12,000 men doing nothing but bleed the 15,000 attackers of some momentum and organization as if they were 2,000 skirmishers
Meade has to use up most of his reserves (20,000 men) to restore the situation, the biggest single reason attacking Lee after Pickett's Charge would have been a bad idea
Becomes a celebrated hero after surviving the loss of his leg at Gettysburg
He lobbies so hard that he saved the day to the point he gets the Medal of Honor, and some people today actually believe this
Attacks George Meade continuously after the former's death and outlives him by decades, dying a largely beloved figure in 1913 at the age of 92
His leg remains on display in a museum he founded to this day
Of course! This is the type of story that the History Channel should be making documentaries about, by the way.
•The book is Sickles the Incredible by W.A. Swanberg, published in 1956.
There are a couple of others somewhere in my collection that are newer and also worth checking out:
•Star Spangled Scandal: Sex, Murder, and the Trial That Changed America (2019) by Chris DeRose [BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO]
•American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles (2002) by Thomas Keneally [BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO]
