Word: pinchon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...SICKLES - Edgcumb Pinchon -Doubleday, Doran...
...Washington Tragedy," as it came to be called, kept the name of Sickles green for a generation; the tragedy and its actors have been long forgotten. Edgcumb Pinchon revives them again, in the first biography of one of the 19th Century's most eccentric and notorious U.S. characters. Like many recent biogra-phies, Dan Sickles is partly straight fact, partly imaginary reconstruction of likely facts (especially in the bedroom scenes). It suffers from writing so thick with emotion that Hero Sickles often emerges from obscurity only to be buried in gush. But it leaves clear the fact that Daniel...
Admiring Author Pinchon believes that but for Sickles, Chancellorsville would have been not a defeat, but a rout. He quotes Stines's History of the Army of the Potomac: "If Sickles had not brought up his command in time to strike Jackson's right and rear, there is no telling where [the] disaster might have ended. . . . His subsequent night attack against Jackson was one of the most brilliant actions in military history." But General Sickles' major achievement was his stand against Longstreet at Gettysburg. It also cost Sickles his right leg from the thigh down. His military...
Sickles was now in his 80s. To William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, says author Pinchon, he was a valued counselor; to veterans an adored hero. ("It is my guess," observed Sickles' friend Mark Twain, "that if the General had to lose a leg, he'd rather lose the one he has than the one he hasn't.") And, incredibly enough, he was still the terror of matrons with unmarried daughters. The great bureau in his bedroom was stuffed with silk stockings, lingerie and perfume; to a lady who said she would prefer to be rewarded with...