Daniel Sickles

Daniel Edgar Sickles was an American politician, diplomat and Union Army major general. Before the Civil War he served in Congress; during the war he commanded III Corps of the Army of the Potomac. At Gettysburg on 2 July 1863 he advanced his corps from its assigned position to the Peach Orchard salient, where it suffered heavy losses and Sickles was severely wounded.

After the war Sickles returned to public life, served as United States minister to Spain and became an energetic advocate for preserving the Gettysburg battlefield. His controversial Gettysburg decisions made him one of the best-known and most debated Union commanders of the campaign.

William R. Forstchen and Newt Gingrich’s Gettysburg places Daniel Sickles among the real Union commanders in a counterfactual battle whose altered outcome leaves Washington exposed. Grant Comes East carries the consequences of that imagined Confederate victory into the defence of the capital, with the shattered Army of the Potomac and its surviving political and command rivalries still shaping the crisis Sickles helped create at Gettysburg. Never Call Retreat completes the alternate campaign as Grant and Lee manoeuvre in Maryland, extending the trilogy’s use of historical officers such as Sickles inside a war whose strategic course has deliberately diverged from the real one.