VP Beast Butler?

[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.