Salute to the Hero

JUST how vile a man General Daniel E. Sickles, a ‘hero’ of the Civil War, may have been, this reviewer does not know. He was notorious before the war for having shot and killed his wife’s lover, Philip Barton Key, and for being triumphantly pronounced, after due process of law, guiltless of anything except the noblest principles regarding the sanctity of the home. His chief military exploit was his useless and arbitrary handling of the left flank at Gettysburg, in which he lost a leg and the better part of his corps, and almost lost the battle. Better generals have been court-martialed for less. Thereafter he engaged in bitter and unworthy attacks on General Meade concerning the battle, and somehow contrived to emerge from the controversy esteemed as a far better man and soldier than he was in reality. He lived on that reputation to the dwindling days of his last illness.

Mrs. Robertson calls General Sickles ‘Richard Bute’ in her novel. It is fair to presume that she studied the lesser known elements in Sickles’s story and has presented them as faithfully as she has those which are well known to the casual reader of Civil War history. If this is true, so much the worse for the memory of General Sickles, for Richard Bute is conscienceless, false, selfish, and cruel. Nevertheless he contrives to hold many friends and to enjoy strong political support. He betrays everyone, yet many swear by him; he has a theatrical talent; he is entirely dishonest and essentially vile.

The author has written an interesting novel with an adequately studied background, but many will object to the general scheme and philosophy of her work. Richard Bute is so palpably Daniel Sickles in all major incidents that one is forced to assume that Daniel Sickles in private life was the kind of man Mrs. Robertson presents as the dreadful Bute. Thus a dead man is libeled by indirection. General Sickles may have deserved such treatment, but the method is neither ingenuous nor ingenious, and one hopes that it will not be followed by other novelists.

R. E. D.