Rehabilitating the Beast

Rehabilitating the Beast Douglas R. Egerton (bio) Elizabeth D. Leonard, Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xix + 365 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $36.00. General, congressman, and governor Benjamin Franklin Butler remains one of the more mercurial figures of the Civil War and Reconstruction years. As a young Democrat and attorney, Butler took the side of laboring women against the managers and owners of cotton mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, yet for most of the antebellum years, he was silent on the question of where that cotton came from. As a delegate to the 1860 Charleston and Baltimore Democratic conventions, Butler first endorsed Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas before transferring his loyalty to Mississippi's Jefferson Davis as the best hope of defeating a Republican presidential candidate, yet in his later years as a Republican congressman, many thought Butler the most likely progressive to take up the mantle of the ailing Thaddeus Stevens. Certainly, historians have rarely known what to make of his unpredictable career and flamboyant personality. Butler's inconsistencies soundly defeated biographer Hans Trefousse, who in Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast! (1957) flattened his life into a dull affair, and as late as 1997's When the Devil Came Down to Dixie, Chester Hearn demonized his tenure in New Orleans as a charming rogue who devoted his time to enriching himself at the expense of white southerners. At last, Butler has received the proper balance in Elizabeth Leonard's masterful and elegantly written biography. Leonard, the author of numerous books about these decades, and particularly the Lincoln-Prize-winning biography of Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, knows this terrain well, of course, but as a professor at Maine's Colby College, she is also associated with the institution once known as Waterville College, where Butler studied while briefly considering a life in the ministry. (Apart from the fact that Colby has a large cache of Butler's materials, the ever-helpful Butler attempted to assist his future biographers by writing Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences (1892), which filled 1037 pages and contained another 94 pages of documents and correspondence.)1 As one has come to expect from her earlier work, Leonard's study is deeply [End Page 138] grounded in archival materials, cites ninety-eight newspapers, and draws on a small library of books and articles. Her prose is lively and clear and wonderfully free of jargon, and this is an extraordinarily readable biography for a fairly hefty volume. Although Butler is today famous, or infamous, perhaps, for his later exploits as a soldier and politician, Leonard makes wise use of his early correspondence, and that of his wife, Sarah Jones Butler, in mapping out his years as a young Democratic operative and defense attorney. Justifiably, she here finds much to admire. His support for progressive reforms, such as a secret ballot and a ten-hour day in Lowell's mills, earned him a good deal of negative ink in the Whig press. After winning a seat in the Massachusetts state legislature in 1853, Butler drafted a bill to compensate the Charlestown Ursuline convent and school that had been torched two decades before. Given the virulent anti-Catholic nativism rampant in New England at the time, Butler could not have been surprised when his bill failed, but as he confided to one supporter, his "condition of mind" had always led him "to be with the underdog in the fight" when he thought somebody "had been wronged." At the same time, he opposed providing more seats in the statehouse to the Boston district, whose businessmen insisted they deserved more representation as they paid more in taxes. The state government, Butler declared, should not "give the rich man a right to cast more votes than a poor man" (pp. 35–37). If Butler's words echoed other northern Democrats, he was also typical of his party and region in wishing to ignore the fight over slavery in the western territories. Initially a supporter of Douglas and popular sovereignty, Butler came to doubt the Democratic front-runner could capture the electoral college in the upcoming presidential contest. Although he...