"Beast" Butler: the Incredible Career of Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler (review)

446CIVIL WAR HISTOR Y near or passed before a group of these animated beauties who was not literally . . . transformed into a demigod by the light of gloriously flashing eyes." A year later Judith McGuire wrote joyfully of Richmond greeting trainloads of soldiers passing through en route to battlefields. "Every table in Richmond seemed to have sent its dinner to Broad Street [Station], and our dear, dirty, hungry greycoats dined to dieir hearts' content, filled their haversacks, shouted 'Richmond forever' and went on their way rejoicing." By 1863 war weariness had engulfed even the socially elite. "A sort of court is still kept up here," Sara Pryor wrote of her social circle, "but the wives of our great generals are conspicuous for their absence. Mrs. [Robert E.] Lee is never seen at receptions. She and her daughters spend their time knitting and sewing for the soldiers." Christmas dinner, 1864, was a mournful affair for such Richmonders as Sallie Putnam. "VVe counted again the vacant chairs," she reminisced, "and glanced with eyes blinded by tears upon the sombre living of woe, that indicated whither had been borne our domestic idols." Nellie Grey captured the full impact of defeat in April, 1865, when she stated: "The song 'On to Richmond!' was ended—Richmond was in the hands of the Federals. We covered our faces and cried aloud. All dirough the house was the sound of sobbing. It was as die house of mourning , the house of deatii. Soon the streets were full of Federal troops, marching quiedy along. . . ." In this study Miss Jones has striven to pay tribute to Confederate women in general by letting a segment of one city's population tell dieir heroic story. She has succeeded admirably. James I. Robertson, Jr. U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission "Beast" Butler: the Incredible Career of Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler. By Robert Werlich. (Washington, D.C: Quaker Press, 1962. Pp. 166. $3.95.) "The beastliest, bloodiest poltroon and pickpocket the world ever saw." Thus spoke the Richmond Examiner of Benjamin F. Butler, Civil War political general from Massachusetts and Reconstruction Radical. "It seems . . . little better than murder," asserted General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, "to give important command to . . . Butler." Abraham Lincoln once declared that "Butler is as full of gas as a dead dog." "In war as in peace," wrote George Fort Milton, "he was a P. T. Barnum character. Gross in body, he was unscrupulously clever in mind and incorrigibly political in purpose." Yet die Bay State politician was never so unimportant that he could be safely snubbed or ignored . The salient events of Butier's fabulous career are well known: his birth in 1818 in Deerfield, N.H.; his astute investments and effective law practice; his membership in the Massachusetts legislature; his support of Davis and Breckinridge over Douglas; his occupation of Annapolis and Baltimore; his blundering at Big Bethel; his notorious administration of New Orleans; his inept Book Reviews447 operations at Bermuda Hundred and Fort Fisher, which led finally to his ouster; his role in the impeachment of Johnson, and as a Congressional Greenbacker and governor of Massachusetts; his defeat for the Presidency, the writing of his abusive memoirs, and his deadi in 1893. Until the mid-1950's, most previous biographies of Buder were but inaccurate apologies. Then in 1954 came a modem, well-written account by Robert S. Holzman, Stormy Ben Butler, and, in 1957, another documented study, Ben Butler: the South Called Him Beast!, by Hans L. Trefousse. Whde these two rather brief works leave something to be desired, they are at least respectable stepping-stones toward the exhaustive, objective study which must and will inevitably be written. The book under review—"Beast" Butler, by numismatist Robert Werlich—is unfortunately a step backward. Written evidently for the popular reading public , this is a brief, episodic, undocumented rehash of the more sensational events in the life of die "American Cyclops." It is a rather thin yarn, which makes for pleasant bedside reading, but is not to be taken seriously. While this reviewer personally believes Werlich is closer to reality in depicting Butler as primarily a demagogue rather than the more responsible figure that Holzman and Trefousse make...