This is the second in a series of four articles concerning the most incompetent Civil War generals. In the June 2000 issue we discussed Confederate General Braxton Bragg. This month we'll shift over to the Union side and "bash" Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler, a corpulent Massachusetts lawyer and politician who never should have been commissioned in the first place, but who managed to retain his rank till nearly the end of the war -- in spite of one blunder after another.

Butler was originally a Democrat who spurned Steven Douglas and supported Secessionist John C. Breckenridge (James Buchanan's Vice President) at the 1860 Democratic Convention. Having secured a brigadier general's commission in the Massachusetts militia through his political connections, he sprang into action and led his regiment to Washington shortly after the attack on Ft. Sumter. Ordered to occupy secessionist-ridden Baltimore, he did so with surprising alacrity and even managed to secure the vital rail link to the north, without which the national capital would have been surrounded and isolated. That feat endeared him to President Lincoln, who would remain his patron and strong supporter throughout the war.

When the Union Navy began to implement General Winfield Scott's "Anaconda Plan" (which involved blockading and capturing vital southern ports), Butler was commissioned a Major General of Volunteers, returned home and raised a force large enough to be assigned the land portion of the campaign to capture New Orleans. Although his force got bogged down attempting to take the two forts guarding the mouth of the Mississippi River below New Orleans from the land side, Admiral Farragut's fleet of gunboats successfully fought their way past the forts and sailed upriver to the Crescent City, which surrendered without firing a shot (on May 1, 1862).

Butler was named Military Governor, a decision Lincoln soon came to regret because of the harsh treatment he administered to "Confederate sympathizers" there. One of his first (and most controversial) orders was to hang a fellow who'd impetuously hauled down the national flag from the US Mint in the city. The hanging was performed as a public spectacle, intended to make an example of "traitors", but instead served only to infuriate the locals, especially the women, who retaliated by "insulting" Union officers and men as they strolled the streets of the old French Quarter. One of the ladies' favorite tricks was to "inadvertently" empty their chamber pots and wash basins out their second-story windows onto the unsuspecting Yankees as they passed by on the sidewalk below.

Butler thought he knew how to handle such "uppidy wenches." He issued his now famous General Order No. 28, which stated that any woman caught committing "depredations" against Union soldiers would be arrested and treated as "a loose woman plying her trade." That order reverberated in Richmond -- where Jefferson Davis condemned Butler as a "poltroon" (about the worst thing one could be called by a Southern gentleman in those days), and Mary Chestnut wrote in her diary that "...this hideous cross-eyed beast orders men to treat the ladies of New Orleans as women of the town." It also had repercussions as far away as England and France as well. Lincoln was so embarrassed he had to order Butler to rescind the order.

More trouble arose in "the Big Easy" when (as Mary Chestnut puts it) "Mrs. Phillips, another beautiful and clever Jewess, [was] put in prison again by Beast Butler, for laughing as a Yankee funeral procession went by." An excellent pretext for removing 'the Beast' arose when he was accused of corruption, including stealing silverware from the tables of New Orlean's finest mansions (which earned him the sobriquet "Spoons"). The order to return to Washington for reassignment arrived in December of 1862.

Given nothing of importance to do for almost a year, in December of 1963 he was assigned command of what eventually evolved into "the Army of the James," headquartered at Fortress Monroe, in Virginia, on the Chesapeake Bay. At that time (with Major General Henry W. Halleck shuffling papers and serving at Chief-of-Staff) the Lincoln administration had no overall strategy for winning the war. But things changed when Ulysses S. Grant arrived and was named commander of all Union forces in the late winter of 1863-64. Grant's strategy was to launch a three-pronged attack in both the east and west in the spring of '64. In the east he and General George G. Meade would lead the Army of the Potomac south towards Richmond, while Butler's Army of the James would attack the Confederates' "soft underbelly" -- first by severing the vital rail-link between Richmond and Petersburg, then capturing Petersburg itself, where several of the railroads coming into Virginia from the west and south came together. Simultaneously, General William Tecumseh Sherman would cut a swath through the state of Georgia by following the railroad south to Atlanta.

It would have been an excellent plan had the Army of the James been led by a better commander. But in spite of his already amply demonstrated incompetence, Butler remained one of Lincoln's friends and favorites (largely because of his strong support among the radical wing of the Republican party). In his landmark biography, "Lincoln," Donald Herbert David tells us that, "[Lincoln] had scant respect for the general's ability, but he recognized that Butler could cause trouble, and he attended to his wishes and complaints with considerable deference and protected the notoriously inept general when Grant wanted to remove him from command at Fort Monroe."

In his "Personal Memoirs," Grant tells us that during the first week of May, 1964, Butler fulfilled his intended role satisfactorily by capturing City Point and Bermuda Hundred (well up the James River) "without loss and, no doubt, very much to the surprise of the enemy." But instead of threatening Richmond, he inexplicably "began intrenching," "made no great effort to establish himself on the [Richmond-Petersburg] railroad and neglected to attack Petersburg, WHICH WAS ALMOST DEFENSELESS [emphasis added]." This failure of will on Butler's part no doubt prolonged the war in the east by another year, yet still failed to result in his removal. Lincoln continued to stick by him, hoping his political clout could assist him in getting reelected that November.

Grant must have been beside himself with rage and frustration, yet his Memoirs reflect only mild disapproval of his faint-hearted subordinate. He writes that, "on the 16th [of May, Beauregard -- who'd been hurried up from Charleston to meet this emergency] attacked Butler with great vigor, and with such success as to limit very materially the further usefulness of the Army of the James as a distinct factor in the campaign". Grant was given to classic understatement, as the planned two-pronged attack had to be completely scrapped at that point, and the task of defeating Lee fully assumed by Meade's beleaguered Army of the Potomac.

Realizing that Butler's army (by then entrenched and self-bottled up across the Bermuda Hundred loop in the James River, between Richmond and Petersburg) would be of no further use to him, Grant ordered Butler to transfer one of his divisions to Meade, to partially make up for the fearful number of casualties already suffered in his disastrous "Overland Campaign." W. F. "Baldy" Smith's division arrived just in time to participate in the slaughter at Cold Harbor, a defeat which Grant severely downplayed but nevertheless admitted his regret to ever having made.

Grant writes that at that point, "Lee's position was now so near Richmond, and the intervening swamps of the Chickahominy [which had defeated McClellan two years earlier] so great an obstacle...that I determined to make my next left flank move to carry the Army of the Potomac south of the James River." Although that was virtually the identical plan vetoed by Lincoln during the summer of 1862 when McClellan had proposed it, this time he went along with it out of desperation, fearing that if the war didn't end before election day he'd be thrown out of office and his successor ("Little Mac") would negotiate a peace treaty with the Confederacy which would result in their independence. Thus what was happening to the war in the east had serious political implications which Lincoln, Grant and Butler were all well aware of, while Meade, for his part, was secretly fuming over the "using up" of his army and the loss of such fine officers as "Uncle John" Sedgwick -- who'd been killed by a sniper at Spottsylvania.

Sedgwick had commanded the Sixth Corps and (as senior corps commander) had been nominally Meade's second-in-command since Gettysburg. He'd have been a good choice to replace bumbling Ben Butler, but his promotion was politically unacceptable since he was known to be a Democrat and a "McClellan man" (whereas the opportunistic Butler had switched parties and declared himself "a Lincoln man").

Grant managed to steal a march on Lee and to get Hancock's corps across the James before Lee reacted. He feared, however, that, "Lee, if he did not choose to follow me, might, with his shorter distance to travel and his bridges over the Chickahominy and the James, move rapidly on Butler and crush him before the army with me could come to his relief." Such concern was quite justified, given Butler's timidity and incompetence, but Lee failed to take advantage of the opportunity. He instead hurried troops south on the railroad, to man the Petersburg defenses, which had been timidly and unsuccessfully assaulted by the combined forces of Baldy Smith and Hancock. The consequent stalemate would last until the following spring, by which time Lee's starved and frozen veterans would be forced out of their fortifications and driven towards their eventual surrender at Appomattox Court House.

Meanwhile, Butler had been removed from command of the Army of the James and given yet another unbelievable opportunity to fail; this time leading an amphibious expedition to Fort Fisher and the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. Word of this last debacle was the last straw as far as Grant was concerned. He telegraphed Lincoln: "The Wilmington expedition has proven a gross and culpable failure...Who is to blame will, I hope, be known".

Butler was sidetracked once and for all after that. But in a veiled but unmistakable parting shot at Grant, he told his troops that he'd been removed for "refusing to order [your] useless sacrifice" and that, "the wasted blood of my men does not stain my garments." Addressing the black regiments under his command he told them that, "you have been treated not as laborers but as soldiers. You have shown yourselves worthy of the uniform you wear" and that, "with the bayonet you have unlocked the iron-barred gates of prejudice, opening new fields of freedom, liberty, and equality of right to yourselves and your race forever."

In spite of his disastrous war record, old "Spoons" managed to get elected to Congress in 1866 by allying himself with the most radical (Thaddeus Stevens-led) wing of the Republican party, which tried (but failed by one vote) to convict President Andrew Johnson of high crimes and misdemeanors (i.e. being soft on the Southern states during the early Reconstruction period). In his biography, "Lincoln," David Herbert Donald writes that Butler, "demanded that leaders of the rebellion should be disfranchised and disqualified from holding any public office" and that, "the masses, including the negroes, should have the rights of citizenship."

Butler purchased the famous yacht America and was soon accused of having used public funds to refurbish it. Defeated for reelection to Congress in 1879, he bounced back up and was elected Governor of Massachusetts in 1883. The following year he ran for President on the National ("Greenback") Party label, but (not unexpectedly) garnered very few votes. He died in 1893 at the age of seventy-five.

Butler was an excellent example of why the "professional soldiers" (i.e. West Point grads) who fought the Civil War hated political generals. Arguably, his closest rival in incompetence (at least on the Union side) had been John C. Fremont (the so-called "Pathfinder," who'd been the Republican party's very first presidential candidate in 1856). But Lincoln cashiered Fremont way back in 1862, whereas Butler was propped up and kept on till the very end of the war. David Donald tells us that both Butler and Fremont's names had come up during the '64 campaign (as possible replacements for Lincoln), but that "few looked to Fremont, whose candidacy was already failing." Although he was also considered as a possible running mate for Lincoln, Butler had been unable to secure the nomination (when Lincoln insisted on remaining neutral during the selection process).

In "Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution," noted historian James McPherson writes that, "Henry W. Halleck...commented that 'it seems but little better than murder to give important commands to such men as Banks, Butler, McClernand and Lew Wallace, but it seems impossible to prevent it." Yet McPherson defends the practice, suggesting that, "From the viewpoint of military strategy this may have been inefficient; from the viewpoint of national strategy it was essential;" presumably because, "to mobilize [politicians'] support for this war, Lincoln had to give them political patronage" and that, "a general's commission was one of the highest patronage plums." Indeed, but at what a hideous cost in blood, lives and material, Professor!

About the Author:

BJT's founder & president, Ed Churchill, has had a life-long interest in the War Between the States. This interest was undoubtedly first generated by his mother's stories about her grandfather, Sgt. Henry Murray of the Army of the Potomac, who earned his stripes in many battles, was wounded, then imprisoned at Andersonville until nearly the end of the war.

Ed holds a BS degree in Civil Engineering and a Masters in Education. He has authored several books and articles on the C/W (including one published in the October '98 edition of CWTI), taught adult ed courses on the war at BCCC and spoken at C/W Roundtables as far south as Savannah, Georgia. He is a member of the Bucks County (PA) Civil War Roundtable and an honarary member of the Cumberland Guard, a group of re-enactors who portray the very same regiment his great-grandfather belonged to. He's also a member of The Friends of the Florence Stockade (where his great-grandfather was sent after Andersonville during Sherman's march to the sea), the SUV, the Winfield Scott Hancock Society, the Confederate Network and the Friends of the GAR Library & Museum in Philadelphia.

His knowledge of the war is extensive (particularly the eastern theater of operations) and his enthusiasm quite contagious -- as you'll learn for yourself if you accompany him on one of our tours. Visit Billy & Johnny Tours for more information.