GENERAL BENJAMIN BUTLER
Adam Goodhart’s 1861: The Civil War Awakening
BOOK NOTES by Bill Norris
Butler had grown up in Lowell, Massachusetts the famous textile mill town. His mother was a poor widow who ran a boarding house for female textile mill working women. Growing up in this hard scrabble life he chose law for his profession. Not getting clients from the prominent white shoe attorneys, he had to do it his own way. He mastered the law to the point that he could pull a thread out of any case and make it fall to pieces.
He was making a princely income of $18K and had developed a political career as a state legislator, a leader in the Democratic Party and a candidate for governor in 1860. Having led a volunteer militia was his only qualification for an appointment as Major General by Lincoln. Butler had voted for Jefferson Davis as the party’s nominee and opposed Negroes being enrolled in the militia. His peers said he was less a major general than a politician. He was assigned to Fortress Monroe on the Chesapeake at the James River, a Federal installation deep in the Confederacy’s territory.
Within a day of his arrival at the Fortress three runaway slaves arrived at the facility seeking asylum. Shortly after, their owners came to retrieve them. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act required their return to their owners. But, Butler reasoned, confiscating the property of Confederates, whether a rifle or a slave, was a necessary part of the conflict. He refused to release them. Within days the issue reached Lincoln. Newspapers deplored the idea of returning the slaves to the South.
Within a week the issue came to Lincoln’s desk. He issued no order to Butler. Meanwhile, “contraband” as they were called, by the hundreds arrived at the fort for freedom. Soon there were a thousand under his command. Butler took them in. He declared that when they reached the fort they became free. It would be fourteen months before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, resolving the issue upon which Butler, with his keen legal mind, had taken a stand.
For the capture of New Orleans, Butler was sent out with Captain Farragut to take the city. He became the senior military official in charge of the surrendered city. Thousands of blacks streamed into city from the surrounding plantations. He was one of the first Union commanders to enlist Negro troops, which he did without authorization from the Lincoln Administration. They served in the bayou country and most honorably in the Union battle for the Mississippi River Confederate position at Port Gibson. He fought to secure equal treatment, including equal pay for black soldiers (at which he was unsuccessful) as well as to protect them from being re-enslaved. Butler’s legal background served him well in the issue of fugitive slaves.
After the war Butler reentered politics as a radical Republican. He was instrumental in passing the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875, which mandated equal treatment for blacks in the public accommodations, including restaurants, hotels and trains. The law was never enforced in the South, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1883. Not until the 1960 were those right reinstated. 7/25/11
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