The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North

2. The Beast Unleashed: Benjamin Butler, Corruption, and Masculinity

2 The Beast Unleashed Benjamin Butler, Corruption, and Masculinity _ That . . . beast, With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power So to seduce! —Hamlet Union General Benjamin F. Butler remains one of the most controversial and widely reviled figures of the U.S. Civil War. The flamboyant Massachusetts lawyer’s political connections and shameless selfpromotion had helped him attain a senior position in the state militia during the 1850s, and upon the outbreak of war in 1861 he was assigned field command of the first brigade sent into federal service from the Bay State. His troops seized Baltimore on May 13 and thereby helped ensure Union control of the nation’s capitol. In recognition of this service, President Lincoln sent Butler’s name to Congress among the first batch of major generals nominated for the new U.S. volunteer army, and he was duly confirmed. His subsequent actions while serving as a military administrator in occupied Maryland, Louisiana, Virginia, and North Carolina excited what the New York diarist George Templeton Strong referred to as widespread “denunciation of his corruption and abuse of power.” A typicalcriticchargedthatButlerwasutterlylackingin“moralcharacter,” and “one of the most corrupt scoundrels brought into prominence by the misfortunes of civil strife.” This chapter will focus on the various ways in which Butler stirred up popular, republicanism-influenced fears of the corrupt misuse of power, and the means by which the wily general took Power-Hungry Generals 40 advantage of the wartime context and his astute manipulation of popular nineteenth-century conceptions of idealized manhood to further his remarkable career. Popular concern over corruption in the Civil War North provides a basic context for understanding Butler’s wartime career—in essence, it represented the muddy, befouled waters that he navigated like a champion swimmer.1 Southerners, and some Northern critics, referred to Butler as “the Beast,” a nickname with apocalyptic overtones that he had earned, most specifically, because of his famous “Woman Order” of May 15, 1862. This order held that if “the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans . . . by word, gesture, or movement, insult . . . any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” In response to Butler’s order, which greatly offended the sensibilities of many Victorian Americans and Europeans, Confederate President Jefferson Davis put a price on the Union commander’s head (an action that George Templeton Strong took as evidence of Davis’s “barbarism” and “weakness”).2 Butler also acquired the nickname “Spoons” because of his alleged theft of silver from an occupied New Orleans mansion, and evidently he did make a vast amount of money during the war from financial dealings of debatablelegality,primarilyinthetradingofcotton.CriticismofButler today mostly concerns his alleged financial corruption, but during the war these charges were actually secondary to accusations that he was morally corrupt in a broader sense, and a potential or actual tyrant. He also gained fame, or infamy, for executing a New Orleans gambler for having insulted the U.S. flag, and for confiscating the property of white Southerners (in the form of their African American slaves) in advance of legislation specifically authorizing this action. He famously and somewhat cynically regarded runaway slaves as “contraband of war,” and by thus defining African Americans as property with military value hit on a temporary but effective solution to a complicated issue. In short, to many Americans of the Civil War era, Butler represented everything that was wrong with Northern society and the Union war effort: the tyrannical abuse of power, the selfish pursuit of individual gain, and general immorality and dishonesty. A Democrat in the war’s final months was surely right in averring that “the newspapers of both sections ought to be grateful to Gen. Butler. There is no man before the public who furnishes so many topics for public discussion as the General.”3 Most of his critics, however, never The Beast Unleashed 41 achieved this level of detached gratitude; rather, they characterized him as an “embodied disgrace to American manhood.” As the historian Mark Summers put it, Butler became the “symbol” of a corrupt society and a corrupt age, “his reputation then and since the epitome of depravity.” His long involvement in Republican and third-party politics during the period of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age enabled him to...