Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life by Elizabeth D. Leonard

Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life by Elizabeth D. Leonard

Published by University of North Carolina Press (2022)

One of the Civil War social media discussions I find most disturbing is the regular and unthinking denunciation of non-West Pointer generals. If there were enough mature, experienced, West Pointers in 1861 to fill all of the top posts in the Union army, I am guessing Lincoln would have appointed them. An officer corps that was designed to run a 15,000-man army could not be suddenly expanded to run an army that saw two million rookies join in just four years.

Most denounced, of course, are the “Political Generals.” Folks seem to dump anyone they don’t like into this category. Immigrants with extensive military experience and training in Europe are routinely, and inaccurately, described as “Political Generals,” even if they achieved more than native-born West Pointers.

Of course there were some genuine “Political Generals” whose primary pre-war careers were holding elected office. While this may seem way off base to modern American readers, part of the problem in these discussions is the ignorance of many Americans of revolutions, civil wars, secessions, and other internal conflicts in countries other than the United States. Looking at the Chinese or Russian revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, the Vietnamese armed decolonization struggle against France, or the various 19th Century Latin American independence movements, we see that many non-professional soldiers wound up in command of large numbers of troops. Even a quick look at the American Revolution tells us that the revolutionary movement had to promote non-professionals to command. America’s Civil War was no exception to this rule.

While “Political Generals” often went through a long and painful process of learning to command thousands, or tens of thousands of men, they also brought skills, experiences, contacts, and talents to their wartime jobs that helped them mold what were essentially tests of mass popular mobilizations.  In looking at similar conflicts in other countries, it is routinely accepted that some military leadership would come from political leaders, labor organizers, leaders of minority ethnic groups, political publicists, etc. Certainly this was the case during our own American Revolution. For some reason, the Civil War in the United States is too often analyzed as if the U.S. were an exception to this rule.

One of the “Political Generals” who is the most misjudged is Benjamin Franklin Butler. This Massachusetts man was a genuine politician before he rose through the volunteer officer corps. A Democrat with only moderate capabilities as a battlefield commander, Butler was an innovator who developed strategies and tactics that successfully advanced the Union cause as a cause of popular action. His development of the contraband category of freedom and his administration of New Orleans in 1862 were among the most important actions taken by any generals below the very highest levels of the Union army.

Elizabeth D. Leonard’s Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life does a good job of looking at Butler as a figure in a broad and socially transformative civil conflict. While he had some militia experience in the Lowell City Guard of that growing, immigrant-rich, industrial city in northern Massachusetts, his name was made in politics as Democratic advocate for the white working- and middle classes. She does a good job of framing his Jacksonian politics and how it boosted his predominance in urban New England. Butler was a harbinger of late 19th Century New England, moved beyond its “Yankee” Yeoman farmer Revolutionary stereotype and into a revolutionized economy of conflict between a Boston capitalist elite and an exploited, largely immigrant, industrial working class.

At the same time that he was rising in politics, Butler was rising from the struggling classes in wealth. He did not inherit a fortune, he made it through his skill as a lawyer and his business enterprises. In spite of his own growing affluence, Butler allied himself with the organized workers of the factories, fighting for the ten hour day at a time when sixty hour work weeks were common. He also fought for the secret ballot so that factory owners could not fire their workers who voted for better working conditions.

For all of his concern for white workers, before the Civil War he demonstrated little or no sympathy with enslaved Blacks. An ally of Democrats from the South who later went on to lead the Confederacy, Butler would take on unpopular positions in defense of immigrants and Catholics contra the Know Nothings, but not in favor of Blacks.

In 1860, Butler hoped to avoid disunion and civil war through appeasement of the leaders of the white governments of the South, but after Lincoln’s election and a parade of slave states declared their secession, Butler worked to improve Massachusetts’s capacity to mobilize a military force to defend the Union. When the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Butler’s militia was among the first units to head south to defend Washington, D.C. from Confederate seizure. By April 21, 1861 Butler’s men had occupied Anapolis in a Maryland very divided in its loyalties. While he was quick to try to save the Union, he told the Maryland governor that his men would not interfere with slavery in the Border State.

In May, the second month of the war, Butler was sent to Fortress Monroe in Virginia to preserve it as a Union base in Confederate territory. On May 24, 1861 three enslaved Black men  were presented to Butler after they had escaped to his lines. Butler’s law training was put to work to define the men as “contraband of war.” Since the three men were defined as property and not people under Virginia law, and since they were the property of a man waging war against the United States, they could be confiscated as could any other form of “property” in the service of the enemy. After he provided protections to the very first contrabands, Butler wrote, “the negroes came pouring in day by day.” Butler became convinced that his tactic could deprive the Confederacy of its labor force. By July 30, 900 escapees had come into Butler’s lines and Fortress Monroe was said to be called “Freedom Fort” by Black Virginians.

Frederick Douglass, who had been disgusted by Butler’s pre-war alliances with politicians like Jeff Davis, now recognized the Lowell political strategist as providing a path forward towards Black freedom. Butler’s act had facilitated Black self-emancipation for those who could reach Union positions. Lincoln tacitly endorsed Butlers tactic because it allowed for individual emancipation without “prematurely” announcing abolition.

It was Butler’s policies towards Blacks at Fortress Monroe that made him “the most hated man in the South,” and also one of the most beloved there, depending on the Southerner’s skin color.

The following Spring, Butler and Admiral Farragut captured the Confederacy’s largest city, its commercial capital New Orleans.  While most of the military credit rightly belongs to the navy man, Butler’s administration of the occupation was at times brilliant. He quickly realized that far from being a unified Confederate city, New Orleans had oppressed groups within it who could be worked with to the United States’s advantage. Free and enslaved Blacks were the obvious potential allies, but so too were the city’s large immigrant communities. In the late 1850s, the city’s government had come under strong Know Nothing influence and the Irish and German immigrants there had been subjected to communal violence from the nativists. These same Know Nothing politicians reigned over the city during its year in the Confederacy. Butler had a long history of political outreach to these same immigrant groups in Massachusetts and he put what he had learned to work in the Crescent City. Blacks and immigrants saw their conditions improve during his tenure running the city. Health conditions also improved as Butler employed these marginalized peoples to get rid of standing water where malaria, yellow fever, and cholera bred.

While white Confederates would claim that Butler stole a rich persons spoons, Blacks and immigrants remembered him as a man who brought them out from the shadows and improved their health conditions. In spite of the tendency of early-20th Century  historians to listen only to white native-born voices, people so gross that they put Butler’s picture at the bottom of their chamber pots so his image  could look at them while they did their business, in fact, he turned New Orleans, with a population several times that of his small army, into a relatively secure base for Union operations in the Gulf and along the Mississippi for the entire rest of the war. Elizabeth Leonard does a good job describing how Butler wrote the book on occupation of the contracting Confederacy in the first months of 1862.

Edwin Stanton wrote to Butler in June of 1862:

No event during the war has exercised an influence upon the public mind so powerful as the capture and occupation of New Orleans, and to you, and to the gallant officers and soldiers under your command, the Department tenders cordial thanks. Your vigorous and able administration of the government of that city also receives warm commendation.

Soon after, Butler proposed that he be authorized to recruit white Southerners into Louisiana regiments. These quickly filled with men unhappy with Confederate domination. By August the first Louisiana regiment was full. He next proposed experimenting with the creation of Black military units. In August of 1862 he wrote that he believed that the Louisiana Native Guard, an all-Black unit, could be incorporated into the Union forces in the city. By November, he had created three regiments of Native Guards.

Butler later said of the three Black regiments, “Better soldiers never shouldered a musket…they learned to handle arms and to march more readily than most…white men.” Butler asked his trusted friend, German immigrant general Godfrey Weitzel, to command his Black brigade. Weitzel would later command a Black army corps, but he turned down Butler’s request because he was not sure Blacks would fight. Butler told Weitzel bluntly “You have failed to show, by the conduct of these free men so far, anything to sustain that opinion.”

The new Black soldiers not only provided reinforcements to the army, they also convinced the enslaved that the Union army was on their side and the forces took on the character of an army of liberation. Butler himself finally endorsed abolition of slavery as a necessary outcome of the Civil War. He set up a program to provide free labor employment to former slaves who came into Union territory.

Butler’s brother Jackson’s arrival in New Orleans left a cloud over Butler’s occupation. Butler’s friends warned him that Jackson was involved in shady trading. Even butler’s wife heard of his activities and told Butler that Jackson had “done, and is doing you vast injury.” It was even believed that Jackson was carrying on trade with the enemy. Leonard  believes that Jackson may have profited as much as $2 million ($50 million in today’s money). Suspicions arose that Butler knew of his brother’s illegal trading or perhaps he even profited from it.

In December of 1862, Butler was put in charge of the Union’s prisoner exchange policies. With new Black regiments in the army, Butler insisted that captured Black soldiers be treated the same as whites. By January, the Confederates broke off talks with the Union about prisoner exchanges. This was the beginning of more than two years of suffering for prisoners of war on both sides. With large numbers of Confederates now stewing in Union prisons, Butler began recruiting the incarcerated Confederates into the United States Army for use on the frontier.

When Butler next led a military offensive, this time outside of Petersburg in 1864, his command was lackluster. Grant would say in his memoirs that it was “as if Butler was in a bottle,” and “the enemy had corked the bottle and with a small force could hold the cork in its place.” Butler, who had been popular with Abolitionists, War Democrats, Radical Republicans, immigrants, and Blacks began to suffer from a declining military reputation. When Butler finally left the Army of the James after being pushed out, he spoke to the entire army in praise of its Black soldiers saying:

“You brave black soldiers of the Army of the James,” have “shown yourselves worthy of the uniform you wear,” “won the admiration even of those who would be your masters,” “illustrated the best qualities of manhood,” and “unlocked the iron-barred gates of prejudice, opening new fields of freedom, liberty, and equality of right to yourselves and your race forever.”

After the passage of the 13th Amendment by Congress, Butler began to advocate for land redistribution in the South to allow Blacks to own some of the land they had once worked as slaves. Butler thought that redistribution would recompence Blacks for the wealth stolen from them by slavery and also destroy the overweening power of “the landholding and slaveholding aristocracy of the South, which has brought so much of evil upon us,” he wrote.

After Lincoln’s assassination, Butler opposed the new president, Andrew Johnson’s reconciliation with white Southern leaders. He began to call for Blacks to be given the right to vote and appeared on stage with Frederick Douglass to speak out for civil rights. Unlike many biographies of Civil War generals, Elizabeth Leonard does not neglect the post-war life of her subject. Butler’s post-war was fascinating.

In 1866, Butler, now a Republican, was elected to the United States House of Representatives. A week after he was sworn in, Butler made his first speech, which called for an investigation into President Johnson’s actions that might lead to his impeachment. Soon after that, he took up the cause of admitting Black cadets to West Point, and promoting Black elected officials. Butler was embraced as a leading Radical Republican. His legal skills led to his selection as a leader of the prosecution of Andrew Johnson in the Senate following his impeachment by the House. While the trial failed by one vote, it promoted Butler’s prominence nationally. When Johnson’s term ended in 1869, you might think that Butler’s problems with the presidency ended, but he and President Grant had a difficult history dating back to Butler’s failures in Virginia during the last year of the Civil War.

In 1870, Butler’s daughter Blanche married Union General Adelbert Ames.  Ames had been the military governor of Mississippi after the war and he was elected to the United States Senate. A leading reformer, he provided Butler with an ally in his own family

In the 1870s, Butler worked to give the right to vote to women, eradicate the Ku Klux Klan, and promote racial integration. Unfortunately, in opposing Chinese “contract labor,” he also deployed racist language in describing Chinese immigrant labor gangs.

In the 1874 elections, many Northern voters had tired of the cost of Reconstruction. They  were also angry that a financial recession in 1873 had not been dealt with by the Grant administration. Butler and many other Republicans were turned out of office. He would go back to Congress following the 1876 election and he would later be elected governor of Massachusetts. His 1882 election as governor came on the Democratic and Greenback parties tickets! Butler had become a strong advocate of paper money during Reconstruction, arguing that the Gold Standard tied the economy to the mining of a mineral, that it was irrational and needed to be abandoned.

Leonard’s book is a good accounting of a “noisy” life. Much of what Butler fought for that made him seem so odd in the 19th Century; Black equality, paper money, women’s suffrage, immigrant rights, among others, are now embraced by many Americans and Leonard does a good job of showing Butler’s role in popularizing them. Her treatment of Butler’s four year military career will disappoint those who only want to read about the Civil War military aspects of his life, but for other readers, they will find a good overview of his time as a general in what was, at its heart, a political conflict carried on on many fronts over race and national identity with deep economic and social implications.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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