Benjamin Butler

[Bruce Vail]

Butler ran for president in 1884 on the Greenback Party ticket. The party platform included the eight-hour work day, progressive income tax and suffrage for women.

 

[Hunter]

Well, not exactly. "The End" meant being arrested and shipped to a hotbox on an island full of mosquitoes for at least one lady - conditions which would straight up bring Amnesty International on your head today and essentially amounted to attempted murder. It wasn't a matter of "sit down and eat your dinner, young lady."

He had some justification for his behavior; that doesn't make his behavior justified.

Yes, and Lincoln's disdain for him had nothing to do with his actions in New Orleans.

 

[Bruce Vail]

Gen. Butler and his officers (undated)

 

[Bruce Vail]

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By 1891 the Greenback Party had disintegrated and many of its followers, including Butler, were drifting to The Peoples Party (Populists). This cartoon showed an elderly Butler (he would die in 1893) at the launch of the new party.

 

[Sid J.]

"General Benjamin F. Butler had taken a more politic course in Virginia, at his command post at Fortress Monroe. Because it formed a direct precedent for the Federal formula as it actually emerged, the general's action is entitled to examination. Hardly a month after Sumter, three slaves who had been used to build a Confederate battery arrived within Butler's lines. Benjamin Butler had been a politician before he became a general, and he was quick to read the signs of the times. A few weeks earlier, his offer to use his troops to put down a possible slave uprising in Maryland had brought him the severest censure from the abolitionist wing of the Republican party in Massachusetts, Butler's home state. Therefore, when a Confederate officer arrived under a flag of truce to claim the runaway Negroes, the general was in a quandary. HAving ascertained that the Negroes in question were about to be sent to South Carolina to help on the fortifications there, Butler borrowed a chapter from international law, declaring that the slaves were now "contraband of war" and refused to return then. In the subtle way of slave "intelligence" the news spread, and within three days, Butler had $60,000 worth of human contraband on his hands."

--Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, pgs 13-14.

 

[Bruce Vail]

This is a much better reproduction of the same image.

 

[18thVirginia]

Actually, no. There are threads on this issue that show the cyclical nature of Yellow Fever and other diseases. Butler didn't really have much to do with reducing death from disease. It's a nice Narrative, but not really true.

Here's a quotation from @andy Hall's Dead Confederates blog which contradicts your information. The quote is from Andrew McIlwaine Bell's book, Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever and the Course of the American Civil War.

I believe that in addition to Yellow Fever, malaria is a mosquito born illness which was a scourge of the community of New Orleans and cannot but think that Butler's efforts to drain water must have diminished malarial deaths. And now, I have to go and pour out all the water in my yard from last night's rain, to try and inhibit the growth of the mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus.

After consulting with his medical staff and a few local doctors (some of whom were openly hostile), Butler decided that yellow fever was an imported malady that required local unsanitary conditions to survive. As a result, he chose to implement simultaneously the two strategies best known at the time for preventing the spread of the disease-a strict quarantine and fastidious sanitation measures. A quarantine station was set up seventy miles below the city and its officers given firm orders to detain any potentially infected vessels for forty days. In addition, a local physician was appointed to inspect incoming ships at the station and was threatened with execution if any vessels known to be carrying yellow fever were allowed to proceed upriver. These new rules caused a minor diplomatic row with the Spanish; who believed that their ships arriving from Cuba (where yellow fever was endemic) were being unfairly targeted for lengthy detentions. Butler assured Senor Juan Callejon, Her Catholic Majesty's consul in New Orleans, that he was not imposing "any different quarantine upon Spanish vessels sailing from Havana." To the relief of the State Department, Spain eventually dropped the matter but not before firing off a few strongly worded communiques.

In town Butler put an army of laborers to work round the clock flushing gutters, sweeping debris, and inspecting sites thought to be unclean such as stables, "butcheries;' and New Orleans's many "haunts of vice and debauchery." Steam-powered pumps siphoned stagnant water from basins and canals into nearby bayous. The northern press picked up the story and ran articles praising Butler's methods. "He will probably demonstrate before the year is out that yellow fever, which has been the scourge of New Orleans, has been merely the fruit of native dirt, and that a little Northern cleanliness is an effectual guarantee against it," predicted the editors at Harper's Weekly. The magazine published a cartoon five months later which featured the general holding a soap bucket and scrub brushes in front of an approving Abraham Lincoln. https://deadconfederates.com/tag/yellow-fever/

 

[Bee]

Butler was a huge humanitarian. Nobody please yell at me, he was

Beeing that I am the one who asked the question and forced the introduction of controversy, I would suggest that any yelling bee directed towards me for upsetting the tranquil environment, not Miss Huson.

 

[18thVirginia]

Butler did some things which made him very unpopular with the slave-owning aristocrats of New Orleans, but some don't like to talk about that, so they focus on things like the order about the women of New Orleans. Many of the elites believed that whipping slaves and then brining them was simply a necessity of life, but they often didn't want to do that deed themselves, so they placed their slaves in the slave jail and had the constables whip them.

Butler shut down the slave jail. He ended the practice of selling babies of incarcerated slaves for the profit of the state. He tore down the whipping post.

He ordered an old man who was whipping his 14 year old slave in the yard and she was screaming as her naked back was lashed, to stop. When word came to him the next day that the old man was again in the yard lashing the slave, Butler ordered him jailed.

He also employed the Irish and German laborers who'd been bullied, beaten, and disenfranchised by the elite classes in New Orleans. And provided food for their wives and children. Butler also had tickets made to give out food and had them given to the women.

 

[Bruce Vail]

"General Benjamin F. Butler had taken a more politic course in Virginia, at his command post at Fortress Monroe. Because it formed a direct precedent for the Federal formula as it actually emerged, the general's action is entitled to examination. Hardly a month after Sumter, three slaves who had been used to build a Confederate battery arrived within Butler's lines. Benjamin Butler had been a politician before he became a general, and he was quick to read the signs of the times. A few weeks earlier, his offer to use his troops to put down a possible slave uprising in Maryland had brought him the severest censure from the abolitionist wing of the Republican party in Massachusetts, Butler's home state. Therefore, when a Confederate officer arrived under a flag of truce to claim the runaway Negroes, the general was in a quandary. HAving ascertained that the Negroes in question were about to be sent to South Carolina to help on the fortifications there, Butler borrowed a chapter from international law, declaring that the slaves were now "contraband of war" and refused to return then. In the subtle way of slave "intelligence" the news spread, and within three days, Butler had $60,000 worth of human contraband on his hands."

--Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, pgs 13-14.

I'm going to have to read Rehearsal for Reconstruction one of these days.

Fort Monroe, by the way, is an interesting place for history lovers to visit. The section of the fort where Jefferson Davis was imprisoned after the war is restored and open to visitors. You can actually stand in his cell.

 

[Bruce Vail]

I'm unable to identify which periodical published this cartoon celebrating Butler's 'contraband of war' policy. Anybody out there have any ideas?

 

[Drew]

Beeing that I am the one who asked the question and forced the introduction of controversy, I would suggest that any yelling bee directed towards me for upsetting the tranquil environment, not Miss Huson.

No one yells at Miss Huson around here, Miss Bee. That's not happening.

Now, Beast Butler is another matter altogether.

 

[Drew]

LOL! Good ol' Spoons Butler. Never liked by anyone North or South it seems!

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General Butler's likeness in fact showed up in all sorts of, well, pots, in New Orleans.

Jefferson Davis in fact issued what amounted to a death warrant in response to Butler's proclamation with respect to the women of New Orleans.

The entire officer corps of the Confederate Armies were instructed that Union General Benjamin Butler, if captured, should be hanged immediately and without trial.

It was showmanship on Davis' part, mostly, as there was little chance that Butler would get captured. But if he had, whoa.....

 

[Bruce Vail]

Sarah Jones Hildreth, or Mrs. B.F. Butler

"Sarah Hildreth married Benjamin Butler on May 16, 1844, in Saint Anne's Episcopal Church in Lowell. Sarah was a stage actress and daughter of Dr. Israel Hildreth of Lowell, but she gave up her stage career after marrying Benjamin Franklin Butler, and the couple had four children, three of whom survived to adulthood: Blanche, Paul, and Benjamin (aka Ben-Israel). Their daughter, Blanche, married Adelbert Ames, a Mississippi senator who served in the Union Army during the Civil War."

Beauty and the Beast?

 

[Drew]

Sarah Jones Hildreth, or Mrs. B.F. Butler

"Sarah Hildreth married Benjamin Butler on May 16, 1844, in Saint Anne's Episcopal Church in Lowell. Sarah was a stage actress and daughter of Dr. Israel Hildreth of Lowell, but she gave up her stage career after marrying Benjamin Franklin Butler, and the couple had four children, three of whom survived to adulthood: Blanche, Paul, and Benjamin (aka Ben-Israel). Their daughter, Blanche, married Adelbert Ames, a Mississippi senator who served in the Union Army during the Civil War."

Beauty and the Beast?

Mrs. Butler is indeed lovely. I've not seen her picture before. Thanks for posting it.

One may hope the children, for their own sake, looked like her.

 

[MRB1863]

LOL! Good ol' Spoons Butler. Never liked by anyone North or South it seems!

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Is that a chamber pot??? What a political statement. Whether deserved or not, quite the message.

 

[hanna260]

Just wanted to drop in to say that I find this discussion very interesting and am really enjoying the different viewpoints.

 

[Aussie Billy Sherman]

Yes it certainly would've been interesting had Butler been captured. Would rebel officers really follow through and hang him? Depending who he was captured by, I don't think they would have.

 

[peteanddelmar]

Butler was actually a pretty good guy if you were black and living in the 19th century. He did a number of good deeds on behalf of contraband during the war and freedpeople after, and his outrageous conduct seems to have been at least partially provoked by sincere rage at the way Southerners treated their slaves. He was also apparently a good family man.

He had the misfortune of being extremely funny looking, and he pulled a couple of idiot moves that were hard to forget - order no. 40 was just one of them.

"Unfortunate looking" is a term I learned on this forum.

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

Well, not exactly. "The End" meant being arrested and shipped to a hotbox on an island full of mosquitoes for at least one lady - conditions which would straight up bring Amnesty International on your head today and essentially amounted to attempted murder. It wasn't a matter of "sit down and eat your dinner, young lady."

He had some justification for his behavior; that doesn't make his behavior justified.

Well, if they got to her case at all in 1863. She would be case number 4 million and one, little low on the list after every, single enslaved person- a white female low on the list. What the women were doing was the same as assaulting Federal officers in time of war. If they had been men they'd have been shot. Butler went easy on them, really. Women had in fact been arrested and imprisoned elsewhere in the war for acts less intrusive.