Daniel Sickles: An Unlikely Union General

By Christopher Ryan Oates | America's Civil War  | one comment  | Print This Post  | Email This Post

And still, Sickles was not yet confirmed a general despite spending the winter away from his troops. As spring and the campaigning season approached, Sickles decided the best way to win a star would be to demonstrate his prowess at the head of his brigade, using positive press coverage to force the Senate’s hand. He led reconnaissance across the Potomac and prepared his men for the upcoming spring campaign that would become General George McClellan’s Peninsula campaign. Sickles was ready to win glory no matter what the Senate did.

On board the ships that would take him and his men to the Virginia peninsula, Sickles received word that the Senate finally had voted on his generalcy. They had voted not to confirm him.

At that news, Sickles’ divisional general, Joseph Hooker, removed the Excelsior Brigade’s self-styled leader from command and ordered him off the ships, since he was no longer a part of the Army. Sickles, who had recruited the brigade, who had maneuvered to get them mustered into the Army, and who had faced personal ruin in his quest to redeem himself after his fall from grace, had failed.

But he was not finished yet. He had once bypassed an obstacle with the help of the president and believed he could do so again. So Sickles spent April 1862 in Washington, reminding Lincoln of the services rendered to the administration during the Wikoff and Mrs. Lincoln speech scandal. While the Excelsior Brigade learned of war firsthand outside Yorktown and lost a quarter of its number at the Battle of Williamsburg, Sickles waited to see if the president’s influence could win him a star.

On May 13, 1862, more than a year after Sickles began recruiting eight companies, the Senate voted on his confirmation to the rank of brigadier general. Nineteen senators voted for Sickles, 18 against. He was finally a general. Reassigned to command of the Excelsior Brigade, he immediately departed for his men. He would not command the brigade on the battlefield often—only at Fair Oaks and the Seven Days’ battles. He missed Second Bull Run while in New York drumming up replacement soldiers for the brigade and was promoted to corps command before its next big battle at Chancellorsville. Sickles fell near his brigade at Gettysburg when a cannonball smashed his leg. He visited the leg after the war at the Army Medical Museum.

But for his efforts to recruit the men, the hurdles he faced in mustering them into government service, and his wrangling to command them, the Excelsior Brigade would come to be known as “Sickles’ Own.” The creation of the brigade was one of the few episodes in Sickles’ life when his ambition and respectability coincided.

Christopher Oates is the author of Fighting for Home: The Story of Alfred K. Oates and the Fifth Regiment, Excelsior Brigade, Warren Publishing, October 2006. The book centers on a private, the author’s great-great-great-grandfather, who served for the duration of the Excelsior Brigade and whose letters led the author to his Civil War studies.

This article by Christopher Ryan Oates was originally published in the March 2008 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.For more great articles be sure to subscribe to America’s Civil War magazine today!

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