VP Beast Butler?

[Wild Bill]

Should we allow Yankees or whatever era decide to make of Ben Butler? Like Don they overlook so much, rationalizing everything as ok because they supposedly won the war.

Well, sort of. After all, took until 1965 before the North finally manned up and passed the civil rights measures in voting and public accommodations that their cause demanded, led by a Southern traitor (what do you expect from a Texan?) who wanted, by his own admission, to guarantee that blacks would vote Democrat for the next 200 years. Sounds a lot like what Stanton and Thad Stevens and others wanted back then.

I think that Butler would have made a great Vice President as he typified so much of what went wrong after four years of war. But wars are that way. They solve many questions but raise so many others.

Let's take Andrew Johnson of "Treason must be made odious" fame. His big change in Lincoln's supposed plan of Reconstruction was to disfranchise all Southerners of $20,000 worth of property unless they applied for pardon. So they came and good ole Andrew forgave them and vetoed Congress' plans of Reconstruction (much like the laws of 1964 and 1965) in 1866. And so he rose from fame to infamy.

So there was hope for Ben Butler. Wait a minute--didn't he spent the 1872 election sitting as a visitor holding hands through the bars of a jail cell, which housed that paragon of feminine virtue and presidential candidate for the Women's Rights Party, the notorious prostitute and con-artist, Victoria Claflin Woodhull?

The necessary "hard hand of war" that Don glorifies so much is indeed what happened in the end. Mark Grimsley is the author of the Northern side of that one, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). But there is another side, too, presented in Walter Brian Cisco, War Crimes Against Southern Civilians (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company, 2007). The latter sounds a lot more like Ben Butler.

An old Louisiana tale is about the mother and daughter walking down the main street in Baton Rouge, looking in the store windows. Suddenly, the girl pulls on her mother’s dress and points at the store window. “Look, Ma, ain’t that our silverware?” Sure enough, they didn’t call ole Ben “Spoons” for nuttin’!

So Butler, a House manager of the impeachment effort against Andrew Johnson, who cried rage over the missing pages of John Wilkes Booth’s diary (“Who spoilt those pages?), who supposedly “saved” US Grant as president from the blackmail attempts of a lecherous woman (Grant having an affair? Come on now!), and who saved Lincoln and the Union in 1861 as a War Democrat from one of the more populous states in the Union because he commanded in 1858 the largest army ever assembled in a summer militia camp, was one of the most adept of what Mark Twain once called America’s only native criminal class, politicians. He was no general.

But Lincoln kept him on as a lousy political general until he won the election of 1864 and allowed Grant to sack him for bungling the initial attack on Ft. Fisher. Butler lacked the one thing he needed to become vice president—character. But he sure makes for a great subject in history class lecture.