VP Beast Butler?

[Wild Bill]

I noticed the LSU connection, too, Gene

[HerbS]

I am a Yankee and what I said about Butler stands firm! We always learn more from the side that loses than the side that wins!

[BettyO]

Quote:Neet photo BettyO. I've seen cereal bowls with pictures on the bottom like that, but not chamber pots. So much for that antique cereal bowl I've been eating my Frosted Flakes from. You can bet that I'll be eating them from a different bowl from now on.

I've seen coffee cups like that, too! I'll have to keep an eye on those antique and
"Novelty" coffee mugs from now on.....

[Don1946]

Let me raise the question again: What exactly does Butler stand guilty of in the eyes of those criticizing him here? What is the actual evidence that condemns Butler?
If all this boils down to opinion or prejudice originating in where we are born, educated, or live, what is the sense in studying history? No one has glorified the "hard hand of war," but that is the historical context Butler (and his enemies) were operating in during 1862 when the war turned toward a life and death struggle over slavery. The hackneyed stereotypes of spoon-stealing and woman abuse seem to me just echoes of the slurs passed back and forth on both sides 150 years ago. We learn nothing from them.

[L Verge]

I'm a Southern Maryland girl (so that makes me stuck on the fence between sides), but my favorite professor in college was a "darn Yankee." Despite that, he did not have much good to say about Beast Butler. I've only read a little bit about the General over the past forty years because I avoid military history like the plague. I should know more about him because, from what I remember, his military career was lackluster and he had no formal training in it. His "training" was as an officer in a peacetime local militia in Massachusetts. I will also admit that historians may have revised their thoughts on Gen. Butler over the years since I exited college.

The few slurs that I remember from that college professor and further readings over the years, however, focused chiefly on Butler's handling of New Orleans. First, his decree against disrespectful women only seemed to please the Union soldiers who were being spat upon and baptized with chamber pot refuse. I thought that order enraged Northerners also as well as England and France? Didn't Butler also get himself in trouble over the way that he treated foreign delegations?

Also, didn't he engage in some highly irregular financial shenanigans while in control of New Orleans? Making money off of dealing with Confederates and also cotton dealing (of course, I think Lincoln engaged in some of that also)? Butler was supposedly worth millions of dollars at the time of his death and someone said they weren't sure how he got it, but that most of it came from New Orleans.

I was also led to believe that Butler was not the champion to runaway slaves that some people suggest. Weren't the first ones ordered returned to their masters because he didn't know what to do with them? When that blew up in his face, he found jobs for them as nurses, cooks, laborers, etc. until there were just too many. They put such a strain on his regime there that he ordered all unemployed people - black and white - out of his lines. Contraband no longer became his concern.

Again, these tactics that I remember are probably examples of poor administrative work, not lack of military skill. As for learning nothing from "slurs" made 150 years ago, I tend to disagree. Slurs are often reflective of the way our ancestors thought and formed opinions from their experiences. I don't think they should be cast aside so easily.

[Don1946]

Yes, I fully agree that we can learn from slurs and accusations in the past, false or proven. I was urging that we do just that by examining them against the historical evidence.

Butler was very controversial, primarily because he was ahead of others in the Union in realizing, first, that slavery was the South's most vulnerable point and, second, that the Union army had to take the gloves off. His order in May 1861 that slaves of rebels were to be considered "contraband of war" was a pivotal turning point early in the war. It led to the first Confiscation Act, and eventually to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Adam Goodheart did a fine brief piece on Butler's decision that May. As he makes clear, Butler was no abolitionist, but he made a pragmatic, and rather ingenious, decision to treat runaway slaves as "contraband," which permitted confiscation and allowed him to refuse returning the slaves to their masters.
Goodheart on Butler: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazi...War-t.html

The Woman Order, a year later, set off a storm of controversy North, South, and abroad. Women were supposed to be kept out of war, and the order was not only an insult to women of New Orleans. It was an invitation to ravage and abuse southern womanhood, so critics would have it anyway. New Orleans was a vital prize and Butler imposed martial law, which allowed Union forces to subjugate a rebellious population by taking matters outside the normal process of justice. Men caught abusing Union soldiers were treated to pretty rough justice, as one would imagine under martial law. But women felt they were protected by the traditions of chivalry toward women and they apparently took advantage of that propriety--at least until Butler's woman order. The point I was trying to make was that the order was not enforced, that is there was no widespread abuse of women in New Orleans. Most were probably intimidated by the order. Butler's order was provocative not because it led to actual physical abuse of women, but because it was an insult and threat to the white women of New Orleans.

Shocking things happen in wars! I think the more interesting point, which Stephanie McCurry makes in her book, Confederate Reckoning, is that women, instead of being kept out of war, were exposed to it, and more precisely they were inserting themselves into it by bold and risky acts of protest. OK chamber pots and spit rather than guns and knives, but aggressive acts by any measure.

"Beast Butler" was a godsend to the CSA, the perfect villain, luring slaves to rebel and defiling southern womanhood, all in the stroke of his pen. Jefferson Davis probably thought it was wise to play to public indignation against Butler in calling for his summary execution at the end of 1862, but he coupled this with virtually the same threat against black Union soldiers and their white officers, and that backfired insofar as it reminded people that Butler's gravest offense to the South was not what he threatened to do to the ladies of New Orleans, but what he actually did for runaway slaves.

[HerbS]

Don 1946-I am basing my opinion on the diary of my own great-grandfather,who fought for Butler and survived being a POW in Texas!"Butler was inept as a military leader and often shot himself in the foot".Herb Swingle

[Don1946]

Herb, What were Butler's major failings as a military commander? I know he led the capture of New Orleans, which was a major blow to the Confederacy. I hold no brief for Butler as a general, but most of us would need more evidence before judging him as inept.

A massive citizen's army pulled a lot of prominent civilians into military roles they had no business in. There were a lot of politics involved in these appointments, and it resulted in any number of inept military leaders shooting themselves, and others, in the foot, to be sure. Enlisted men, themselves civilians pulled into unfamiliar roles as soldiers, spent a good deal of time grumbling about their officers; that just goes with the job.

I was trying to interrogate the evidence that has led some, then and now, to such a harsh judgment of "Beast" Butler. I was suggesting that it traces back to Butler's policies on slaves as contraband and on civilian woman as potential enemy agents. The woman order probably qualifies as a big blast in the foot, but Butler's role in turning the war against slavery earns my respect. After the war, he played a major role in enacting the Civil Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act. He was also elected to four terms in the House of Representatives. I suspect his negative reputation in the South probably helped him in Massachusetts.

[HerbS]

Banks was terrible also,and I think that sodiers felt that Butler's tactics were not well planned.Sometimes,I think that Butler was dumb like fox!

[L Verge]

"Shocking things happen in wars! I think the more interesting point, which Stephanie McCurry makes in her book, Confederate Reckoning, is that women, instead of being kept out of war, were exposed to it, and more precisely they were inserting themselves into it by bold and risky acts of protest. OK chamber pots and spit rather than guns and knives, but aggressive acts by any measure."

I used to give talks on Into the Fray: How the Civil War Changed the Role of Women. A book that I loved on the subject was written in the 1960s, can't remember the author, but the title was Bonnet Brigades.

One more question about the Beast: There was some controversy over his role at Fort Fisher, but I don't remember it...

[Rick Smith]

(12-03-2014 10:12 AM)HerbS Wrote:  Banks was terrible also,and I think that sodiers felt that Butler's tactics were not well planned.Sometimes,I think that Butler was dumb like fox!

Herb,

I believe you may be right as to Banks being a poor general, but I also believe that he looked so very poor since he went up against The Mighty Stonewall and was driven from the Valley.

Rick

---

Butler's biggest failings were at Petersburg and at Fort Fisher, where he ignored his orders and withdrew from the attack. I believe that Wild Bill can give a much more detailed explanation than I on these matters. Where are you Bill?

[Wild Bill]

One of the problems in these discussions is that we rely more on opinion that fact. So here are the footnotes to Cisco, which I mentioned in post 14 above and no one has looked up.

1. Chester G. Hearn, When the Devil Came Down to Dixie: Ben Butler in New Orleans (Baton Rouge, LSU, 1997), 69; James Parton, General Ben Butler in New Orleans (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 346.
2. John D. Winters, The Civil War in Louisiana Baton Rouge: LSU, 1963), 125-26; ***** Nolan, Benjamin Franklin Butler,: The Damnest Yankee (Novato: Presidio Press, 1991), 2, 11; Hern, Devil Came Down, 2.
3. Hearn, Devil Came Down, 180.
4. Ibid., 2-3.
5. W. C. Corsan Two Months in the Confederate States: An Englishman's Travels through the South (Baton Rouge: LSU, 1996), 17.
6. Parton, General Butler, 326-26.
7. Ibid., 327.
8. Winters, Louisiana, 132.
9. OR, ser. 1, vol. 10, pt. 2, 531.
10. OR, ser 1, vol. 15, 743.
11. Hearn, Devil Came Down, 105.
12. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven: Yale, 1981), 343.
13. Hearn, Devil Came Down, 134, 136-37.
14. Parton, General Butler, 352.
15. Hearn, Devil Came Down, 86; Winters, Louisiana 131-32, 134-36, 140.

Now some of this may seem dated, most of it too Southern, but Hearn was published by LSU Press, one of the best on Southern History in the USA. I suggest that anyone who wants more footnotes than get down to the primary sources go read it. I am not going to do it for you. Also the Official Records is the federal government's authorized publication of primary sources on the Civil War. Check vols 10 and 15. I daresay that newspapers north and south have stories on Butler, both pro and con.

Stop acting like the stuff that Butler pulled never happened. Why do you think Lincoln replaced him with Banks? Essentially what Banks did was spread Butler's larceny into the countryside and steal the slaves off the plantations and conscript the black males into the Federal Army.

We need to remember that both Butler and Banks were political generals. The stink on the battlefield but unstained the realities of the up coming Reconstruction era.

[HerbS]

Thanks for your clarification Wild Bill.I agree with your educated opinion! I am just going on what I have read from my great-grandfather's diary and opinions from other historians! I could be all wet.

[Don1946]

(12-03-2014 11:41 AM)Wild Bill Wrote:  Essentially what Banks did was spread Butler's larceny into the countryside and steal the slaves off the plantations and conscript the black males into the Federal Army.

We need to remember that both Butler and Banks were political generals. The stink on the battlefield but unstained the realities of the up coming Reconstruction era.

I rest my case!

[Wild Bill]

You have no case, never did