I Remain Indifferent To Your Opinion Of Me, Sir.
Notable Scumbags Of The Civil War – The Second In A Series
General Benjamin “Beast” Butler, USA 1818-1893
To provide the appearance of balance in this series, I’ll alternate with Blue following Gray. Our first example of a Yankee scumbag is a doozy, Benjamin Butler. Cunning lawyer; political general; military incompetent; iron fisted tyrant; arrogant, puffed up popinjay; and in all likelihood a corrupt profiteer, Butler was also one of the homeliest, butt ugly men to walk the face of the United States in the mid-19th century, an age of general homespun crudity. On the plus side, he was a competent civil administrator, an early civil rights advocate, and a staunch supporter of the Union and emancipation.
As noted, Butler was an attorney and politician, serving in the Massachusetts legislature prior to the war. An ardent defender of the Union, he secured a commission in the Army and rose through a combination of beginner’s luck and political pull to the rank of major general. He was placed in command of Fort Monroe, a strategic point near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Here he demonstrated his military incompetence, getting his pee-pee badly spanked at the Battle of Big Bethel. More notably, Butler devised a novel legal theory to deal with the runaway slaves who fled to the fort. Rather than return them as their masters demanded, Butler, using clever legal reasoning, pointed out that since the slaves were considered the masters’ chattel property, they should be treated like other seized property or “contraband” confiscated from rebels by their lawful government. This legal basis was subsequently relied upon by the Federal government as part of a general policy to not return runaway slaves and provided momentum and support for the Emancipation Proclamation. Contrabands became the general term for runaway slaves such as those that followed Sherman on his March to the Sea.
Butler was tasked with the conquest of New Orleans in coordination with the U.S. Navy. A large military force was built up on Ship Island. The city was basically handed to him thanks to the intrepid daring of men like Farragut and Porter and other naval stalwarts. Butler took command and proceeded to run New Orleans with an iron hand, an entirely appropriate step in my opinion. The city teemed with Rebel sympathizers, furious at the city’s easy fall. Conquest and occupation did nothing to dim their fervor, male and female alike. They made their hatred evident toward Yankee soldiers and officers, cursed them in the streets as they passed and heaped execration on the Union and the Old Flag in public. The women were worse than the men, supposedly respectable housewives who spat on officers on the street or, even worse, emptied chamberpots over their heads, no better behaved than fishwives or trollops. They even had the nerve to do it to David Dixon Porter, hero of the U.S. Navy.
Butler took action of the sternest sort. The men were put into line by means of an object lesson, the public hanging of a sure thing gambler who helped destroy an Old Flag in a riot shortly after Farragut landed and then was stupid enough to brag about it afterward, even brandished a torn fragment as proof. Butler had the tinhorn’s neck stretched in front of the Mint with the angry crowd kept well behaved under the open barrels of cannons loaded and aimed straight at them. He remembered Napoleon’s adage about a whiff of grapeshot when it came to keeping a mob in line. There was no talk of dissension after that.
He turned his attention to the city’s recalcitrant daughters and quickly had them by the ringlets as well. Butler issued a public order that for open, contemptuous rudeness had no peer in either this war or any other. I refer of course to the infamous General Order No. 28 in which Butler threatened to treat any woman who gave offense to a Union soldier or officer as no better than a prostitute, subject to arrest, fines, and confinement in exactly the same manner. This is why Butler is called “Beast” to this day down in Dixie. Despite the calumny and fury against Butler that the order aroused both in the South and in Europe, the measure had the desired effect. The women of New Orleans were reduced to sticking portraits of Butler into their chamberpots by way of silent protest.
There were other rumors about Butler, stories about more than his penchant for drastic action, tales of an acquisitive nature, a blind eye where profit was concerned. New Orleans gave Butler the nickname “Beast,” but he also gained the sobriquet of “Spoons” there, allegedly due to his penchant for stealing silverware from wealthy families. He had a brother named Andrew with a suite of rooms at the St. Charles Hotel who insisted everyone call him “Colonel” even though he was a civilian. Andrew Butler was as homely as his younger brother, but spared a completely bald dome by a few carefully combed over locks. His eyes were cunning, experienced, those of a man who trimmed suckers, not the other way around. He worked closely with Jonas French, the city provost marshal (19th century term for military police).
Herbert Asbury, in his book The French Quarter, states that Butler issued two orders, one public, the other private. The public, official military order closed every gambling house in the city. The private order, available only to those in the know, allowed a gambling house to reopen with the payment of a hefty “license” fee to French and taking Andrew on as a silent partner. Pardon me for being lawyerly and pedantic about this, but, if true, this use of high rank to extort money constitutes malfeasance of office of the worst sort.
Even worse allegations are made by George Devol, sure thing gambler and author of 40 Years A Gambler On The Mississippi, a most entertaining read. Devol claims in his autobiography that Butler sentenced him to prison for a year for showing some Yankee officers how to play three-card monte and also confiscated the string of horses he ran at the Oakland racetrack, a prime destination for gamblers, touts, and prostitutes before the war. He further alleges that Andrew had the race horses shipped across Lake Pontchartrain where they were sold to the Confederate army. If this charge is true, Andrew would have been guilty of treason. It’s difficult to see how Butler wouldn’t have known about it so he would have been guilty as well, an unforgivable fault in a U.S. Army officer, especially one of flag rank.
As noted previously, Devol was a sure thing gambler, in other words a thief and a cheat, a professional liar. He was also a Southern sympathizer and prone to aggrandize himself. Some grains of salt therefore can be applied to these allegations. Other, more serious charges are made against Butler, however, in a biography of Nathaniel P. Banks (by Raymond H. Banks), the Union general sent to replace Butler after the rumors of corruption and abuse of office grew so serious that Lincoln could no longer ignore them despite Butler’s political clout. These allegations involve Jonas French, Andrew, and Butler himself and relate to the illegal confiscation of money and property for their own gain, trading in Confederate supplies and munitions, and railroading an honest Federal policeman into prison to silence him. Lincoln forwarded these allegations to Secretary of War Stanton with a request for action. The result was Butler’s replacement by Banks.
He was too important politically to be denied further command so Lincoln gave him the military department of Virginia and North Carolina. Butler went on to garner further military disgrace at Bermuda Hundred, where he was outfoxed and whipped by Beauregard with vastly inferior forces. The last straw came with the attack upon Fort Fisher, an amphibious assault that failed miserably. With Lincoln reelected in ’64, Butler no longer had the political clout he once commanded and U.S. Grant finally relieved him of command.
Butler went on to a notable political career after the war. He was elected to the House of Representatives as a Massachusetts delegate and played a key role in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, lamentably only the first use of the constitutional tool for purely partisan, political ends. On the credit side, Butler supported civil rights for emancipated slaves, women’s suffrage, and an eight hour day for workers. He also drafted the first civil rights acts in this country, only to fail to be enacted or found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. He was subsequently elected governor of Massachusetts in which office he appointed an Irishman, African-American, and a woman to high ranking official positions. Characteristically, he died in court at the age of seventy-three.
If Butler had never been a general, I doubt he would have had the opportunities to indulge the negative facets of his character to the degree that he did. Of course I wouldn’t be writing about him then. The almost unlimited scope afforded to a general in command in the field obviously went to Butler’s head as amply illustrated by his draconian tactics and, more reprehensibly, his abuse of his position to extort money and property in New Orleans. If his military record could be excised, Butler could almost be described as admirable by modern standards, a champion for equal rights. Yet the record still remains and the repeated, continual instances of military hesitancy and incompetence coupled with his grasping, greedy peculation cannot be ignored or excused. Benjamin Butler was a scumbag, pure and simple, a money hungry bastard. I give about zero credit to Neo-Confederate nonsense or any Lost Cause swill, but I’ll acknowledge that folks down South have a point when they revile Beast Butler to this day.