General Daniel E. Sickles loses a leg at the Battle of Gettysburg

Colorful, enigmatic, and controversial Union General Daniel E. Sickles suffered the misfortune of being struck by a cannonball at the Battle of Gettysburg. As a result of this injury, his right leg was amputated, thus ending his combat career. In typical Sickles fashion, he faced his handicap with extraordinary bravery and calm. Whitelaw Ried describes this calm in his Cincinnati Gazette column of July 4. Reid writes:

On a stretcher, borne by a couple of stout privates lay General Sickles -- but yesterday leading his corps with all the enthusiasm and dash for which he has been distinguished -- to-day [sic] with his right leg amputated, More...and lying there, grim and stoical, with his cap pulled over his eyes, his hands calmly folded across his breast, and a cigar in his mouth! For a man who had just lost a leg, and whose life was yet in imminent jeopardy, it was cool indeed. He was being taken to the nearest railroad line<, to be carried to some city where he could get most careful attendance...

Newspaper coverage of the Civial War: journalists report on the Battle of Gettysburgh

During the American Civil War, Whitelaw Reid was a war correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette. In his coverage of the Battle of Gettysburg, he relates the following story wherein he encounters fellow journalist L.L. Crounse while enroute to Taneytown, Maryland to meet the newly installed commander of the Army of the Potomac, General George Meade. Reid writes:

In a plain little wall-tent, just like the rest, pen in hand, seated on a camp-stool and bending over a map, is the new " General Commanding" for the army of the Potomac. More... Tall, slender, not ungainly, but certainly not handsome or graceful, thin-faced, with grizzled beard and moustache, a broad and high but retreating forehead, from each corner of which the slightly- ciirling hair recedes, as if giving premonition of baldness — apparently between forty-five and fifty years of age — altogether a man who impresses you rather as a thoughtful student than as a dashing soldier — so General Meade looks in his tent.

"I tell you, I think a great deal of that fine fellow Meade," I chanced to hear the President say, a few days after Chancellorsville. Here was the result of that good opinion. There is every reason to hope that the events of the next few days will justify it.

A horseman gallops up and hastily dismounts. It is a familiar face — L. L. Crounse, the well- known chief correspondent of the New York Times, with the army of the Potomac. As we exchange hurried salutations, he tells us that he has just returned from a little post-village in Southern Pennsylvania, ten or fifteen miles away ; that a fight, of what magnitude he cannot say, is now going on near Gettysburg, between the First corps and some unknown force of the enemy ; that Major-General Reynolds is already killed, and that there are rumors of more bad news.