‘Ah, Dan Sickles. I visited his leg,’ announced a colonel recently, as he spotted American Scoundrel on the floor of my office. He was referring to Sickles’s right leg, which was shattered by an unexploded cannonball on 2 July 1863, at Gettysburg. Sickles, as major general of the Third Corps of the Union army, had just led his men to what would prove an endlessly controversial victory, given that he had defied the orders of his commanding officer, George Gordon Meade, as to the positioning of his troops. As Thomas Keneally reports:

After chloroform was administered to Dan, Dr Thomas Sim, the corps’ medical director, using a new method of rounded amputation, cut off the leg at a third of the way up the thigh. He had just read that the Army Medical Museum in Washington was advertising for samples, and so, instead of throwing the limb into a heap, he had it wrapped in a wet blanket and placed in a small coffin for shipment to Washington. Dan’s shattered leg lived on as a museum exhibit and remains on display at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington.