Paging Sickles and Kearny

[Gil R.]

I've been doing some reading, and it strikes me that two Union guys we ought to have are Kearny (among the Union's more underrated generals) and Sickles. Any volunteers?

Regarding Sickles, I took some notes while reading about the Battle of Williamsburg, in which he didn't participate, but his brigade did. Here they are, ready to be adopted:

He was a lawyer who was elected to the N.Y. General Assembly, then State Senate, and ultimately the U.S. Senate, rising despite a bad reputation and the contempt of many of his peers. Supported by many powerful representatives and senators he was angling for the presidency, but in 1859 in a fit of jealous rage he shot his wife’s lover – Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key and a prominent member of the Washington social scene – in a public park. He was acquitted after his lawyer, Sen. Edwin Stanton of Ohio (Lincoln’s Secretary of War), argued temporary insanity. This hurt his political future, but in 1861 the governor of N.Y. asked him to raise a regiment, which was the beginning of the Excelsior Brigade. The brigade spent the summer of 1861 training and that winter guarding the Potomac, and that March when it was sent to the Peninsula Sickles found out that his enemies had blocked his appointment to brig. gen., so he returned to Washington to fight for his rank to be restored, while division commander Hooker replaced him as commander of the brigade.

(I mainly took these notes to make sure that the bit about shooting Francis Scott Key's son would make it in.)