There’s a face that many of us make when we learn that a previously unimaginable thing is not only a thing, it’s a thing that happened.
You may have occasion to use that face during the story of Daniel Sickles, who is most well known today for the leg he lost in the War Between the States.
Though, for him, “lost” was probably a relative term.
Sickles’ life veers from the bizarre to the sordid to the inexplicable.
He trained as a lawyer and quickly went into politics, first in the New York state legislature and then as a member of Congress.
Sickles was married, at least on paper; he was a notorious womanizer, and in Washington, his wife took a lover.
He took this as an insult to his manhood even though he was doing the same thing.
Nonetheless, in 1859, he ended the affair by shooting and killing the guy in Lafayette Park, right outside the White House.
That affair partner was Philip Barton Key, son of national anthem writer Francis Scott Key and the US Attorney for Washington DC.
A member of Congress admitted flat out that he had killed a federal prosecutor, saying “He had dishonored me, and we two could no longer live on the same planet.”
His lawyers, who included future Secretary of War Edwin Stanton used the first-ever defense of temporary insanity, and he was acquitted.
Sickles joined the military during the Civil War, rising to the rank of major general.
By some historians’ accounts, he screwed up big time during the Battle of Gettysburg, moving his Union troops into a spot that caused them to take heavy casualties.
Sickles was one of those casualties; a 12 pound cannonball went through his right leg, which had to be amputated.
He received the Congressional Medal of Honor for battlefield bravery, but arguably he ended up with something he valued even more.
As a politically connected military officer, he knew that the government was collecting specimens of what were called “morbid curiosity”: battlefield injuries, for what is now the National Museum of Health and Medicine.
He had his leg bones preserved and sent to those authorities, along with a card that read “With the compliments of Major General D.E.S.”
Sickles would bring guests with him to visit the leg on the anniversary of its, um, liberation.
One of them, Mark Twain, said that Sickles valued the leg he’d lost more than the one he still had.
Sickles eventually returned to politics; he served one more term in Congress and worked as minister to Spain, where he reportedly started an affair with a member of the Spanish royal family.
At least no one lost life or limb over that.
Daniel Sickles was a lot of things, but when it came to preserving a leg, he wasn’t one of a kind.
In July 2020, Justin Fernandes of Toronto lost his right leg after being hit by a motorcycle.
He asked that the bones preserved and mounted, and he got them back as a Christmas present.
As one of the people involved said, “Everyone heals in their own way.”
Swashbluckling Civil War General Made No Bones About Life Style (Pittsburgh Press via Google News Archive)
‘Everyone copes differently’: Man receives his own taxidermied leg just in time for Christmas (CTV News)
Photo by National Museum of Health and Medicine MIS 63-120-5, CC BY 2.0, via Wikicommons
