Zachariah Chandler: A Political Biography (review)

182civil war history Gen. Benjamin F. Butler During the Civil War, compiled and edited by Butler's grand-daughter, Jesse Ames Marshall. It has always seemed to me that anyone who wanted to brighten Butler 's image—and, indeed, to draw a more accurate picture of this very complex man who three times changed political parties—would do well to look into his correspondence with his daughter Blanche. These letters reveal him to be a man of warmth and humor, a loving father, and a person of considerable literary cultivation. A figure, in short, very difficult to match with the man who coldly separated Mrs. Philip Phillips from her children and sentenced her to desolate Ship Island. Unfortunately, Mr. Nash barely mentions Blanche Butler and makes no attempt to sort out Butler's complexities. Convinced that Butler has been maligned, he settles for an attack on James Ford Rhodes, the nineteenth -century historian who was, in Mr. Nash's view, solely responsible for the sorryview of Butler thathas been so longheld. There's little question that in some circles today the name of Benjamin F. Butler is still a dirty word; but the members of these circles probably haven't read Rhodes—nor, as is the case with the author himself, H. L. Tréfousse's first-rate The South Called Him Beast. Anyone who has certainly could list at least one fair, well-balanced, carefully documented life of Butler. All this being so, does Mr. Nash's book add anything to that previously done? Unfortunately, it does not, for—in addition to the previously mentioned omission of manuscript sources or references that indicate an awareness of either the Tréfousse book or of this journal—the author seems to have relied almost entirely on secondary sources published fifty or more years ago. (Of 325 items in the bibliography, only 29 were published after World War II—and such excellent periodical articles as Howard P. Johnson's "New Orleans Under General Butler" [Louisiana Historical Quarterly, April, 1941] or Richard Harmond's "The Beast in Boston" [Journal of American History, September, 1968]—are omitted entirely.) There is a pervading air of the late nineteenth century throughout the book, induced as much by the author's heavy reliance on writings of that period as by his chapter "refuting" Rhodes or by such occasional obiter dicta as the sentence on page 188, "Needless to say, Butler made a friend that day." All in all, Stormy Petrel is a pedestrian biography that adds little or nothingto the existingknowledge of Benjamin F. Butler. Elizabeth Joan Doyle St. John's University, New York Zachariah Chandler: A Political Biography. By Sister Mary Karl George, R.S.M.'(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1969. Pp. x, 301. $8.50.) Sister George, president of Mercy College in Detroit, has limited her BOOK REVIEWS183 study to a straight political chronology covering Chandler's role as a leader of the Republican party in Michigan, his long senatorial career (1857-1875), his two year term as Grant's Secretary of the Interior, and as Hayes' campaign manager in the disputed election of 1876. In her preface , the author admits she has discovered very few records relating to Chandler's political career and that the seven volumes of Chandler papers in the Library of Congress seem to have been carefully pruned. Unfortunately, these are major handicaps which Sister George fails to overcome. For example, in chapter one Chandler's life from his birth in 1813 to his unsuccessful bid for governor of Michigan in 1852 is summarized in three pages (without footnotes). The reader can only guess how Chandler became wealthy during this period, what he did as mayor of Detroit, and what influence his early Whig affiliations had in molding his political viewpoints. This lack of information on, or interpretation of, Chandler's early life makes it almost impossible to interpret his subsequentpolitical career in any meaningful way. The treatment of Chandler's Civil War career is equally superficial. We are not told why Chandler aligned himself with the Radicals, what type of Radical he was, or what motivated his responses to wartime events. The lack of answers to these questions...