Day 2 - July 2, 1863

Shell hole in Mr. Trostle's Barn.  Another round shot mangled Dan Sickles's leg on Day 2

"DANIEL EDGAR SICKLES’ contentious tale at Gettysburg centers on a feature on which countless military engagements have turned – the battlefield’s terrain.  As one heads down Cemetery Ridge towards Big and Little Round Tops, one soon arrives at the position in the Army of the Potomac’s line assigned to his Third Corps.  The Tammany politician and womanizer turned soldier was tasked with tying his unit in with Hancock’s Second Corps placed neatly along prominent Cemetery Ridge to his right.  As for Sickles’ left flank, General Meade was less clear.   Obscurely, the army commander told him to hinge his corps with “. . . Round Top, [and] if it was practicable to occupy it.” 

Apparently, Dan Sickles didn’t find such a move in the least bit practicable. Further, he ignored his orders to link with General Hancock’s men.  Instead, after riding over where he needed to go, looking around and thinking about it for a short time, he pushed his corps far forward onto higher ground near the Emmitsburg Road ahead of him.  Here the controversy begins.  To this day, it remains subservient only to the fuss created by Robert Lee’s decision to attack the Union army’s center on the third day. 

A number of pseudo-strategists have trudged around the salient formed by Sickles’ brazen move of the Third Corps on the second day at Gettysburg.  They are judge, jury and executioners all.  I am one too, but I lean a bit towards exonerating the accused.  I cannot help but be captured and enmeshed in the debate.  It intrigues me to find more out about it. 

When he and his men reached the Emmitsburg Road, the corps was thrown out in a line roughly paralleling it and angling back on both sides in a feeble attempt to connect back to the rest of the army’s lines.  He was a boil on the Union army’s skin waiting to be popped by a Confederate lance.  His troops occupied ground in and around the Trostle Farm, the Peach Orchard and the Wheat Field; all places now firmly cemented in Gettysburg lore.  Sickles also positioned men near the rocks of Devil’s Den and the swales and hollows in the western shadow of the Round Tops.  In doing so, his flanks, as they say in military parlance, were quite exposed and waving like laundry in the wind.

Sickles, for all his personal faults and inexperience as a military professional, was certainly not ignorant of the obvious.  His assigned ground, the patch of land on the southern fringe of Cemetery Ridge, drops noticeably before the ridge rises a bit and merges with the northern upslope of Little Round Top.  Standing there, it’s as if one is in a hole.  Even a novice cannot help but empathize with Sickles’ decision to move his corps to the west to a better vantage point.  In essence, he could not see a darn thing in front of him except the slow rise up to the intermediate ridgeline carrying the Emmitsburg Road on an oblique angle to his front.  Staying where he was would blind him to the disposition of the enemy.  He would only discover their true intentions when they were arrayed directly to his front with weapons charged and bayonets flashing.  His was an unenviable position in which to be."  - Route 15 to Gettysburg -