Booty & the Beast

LINCOLN'S SCAPEGOAT GENERAL by Richard S. West Jr. 462 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $7.50.

He looked like Ben Turpin in uniform: a massive head, topping out at 5 ft. 4 in., rimmed with wild auburn hair and set with droop-lidded eyes that flashed balefully in opposite directions. He was called "the Beast," and "Old Cockeye"--though rarely to his face. For Benjamin Franklin Butler was one of the Civil War's toughest and most hated Northern generals.

Author West, professor of history at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and a Southerner himself, was not attracted to Butler by hero worship. "I wanted to take on the meanest damned rascal I could find," West explains. But in sorting through the myths, West discovered that beneath the Beast's rapacious exterior dwelt a man of wit, large ideas and generous humanitarianism.

Whipped in the Field. When the Civil War broke out, Ben Butler was New England's most famous criminal lawyer, a raspy-voiced Democrat who had long crusaded for shorter working hours and the secret ballot. Lincoln needed all the Democratic trimmings he could get in the war, and since Butler was incidentally a brigadier of the state militia, Lincoln dispatched him to Maryland, which was threatening to secede. Butler seized Annapolis and then, in a lightning move by night, occupied mutinous Baltimore.

In the flush of success, Butler sent poorly officered troops into combat at Big Bethel--the war's first battle--and got whipped. Though Big Bethel was soon forgotten in the greater Union calamity at Bull Run, it established Butler's reputation as an inept field commander. But when New Orleans was taken, Butler was sent to take over the occupation.

The Woman Order. New Orleans' haughty grandes dames scorned the occupying Union Forces, spat at the blue-coats passing in the streets. Rather than jail these indelicate flowers of Southern womanhood, Butler hit on a stratagem: any woman who insulted Union officers in the streets would be "treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation." To Southerners, this "Woman Order" sounded like an invitation to rape (though no incidents developed), and the Confederacy proclaimed Butler an "outlaw" to be hanged.

Butler was a tough administrator, and his "sins" multiplied in Southern eyes: he hanged a man named William Mumford who had torn the Union flag from atop the U.S. Mint (though Southern and Copperhead critics conveniently forgot that Butler also hanged Union soldiers caught looting in New Orleans); he confiscated property and gold that the rebels had hidden (but passed it all along to Washington).

Against Miss Nancyism. He was better at politics. After the war, he shifted allegiances from Democrat to radical Republican, was elected to Congress. In eleven years in the House, he espoused woman suffrage, currency reform and the eight-hour day. He stood firmly opposed to what he called "Miss Nancyism"--in this case a sympathetic approach to Reconstruction of the South. With his sharp lawyer's mind, he was a natural choice for prosecutor when the Congress tried to impeach President Andrew Johnson. Caustic and too clever by half in many people's opinion, Butler attacked Johnson as if he were a horse thief. The impeachment move failed by one vote.

Butler went on to crusade for Negro civil rights. In 1875, he introduced a "radical" but prophetic civil rights bill before the House: it demanded that Negroes be granted "full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances, theaters, places of public amusement; and also of common schools and public institutions of learning." Congress passed it (sans the education clause), but the act was declared unconstitutional in 1883 by the Supreme Court.

Beast Butler was too far ahead of his time, concludes West. Uncompromising in his "liberalism," he broke with the Republicans in 1884 to run for President as the candidate of a coalition known as the "People's Party." Though he campaigned with a verve and color reminiscent of Daniel Webster, his reputation--deserved or undeserved--had caught up with him. He polled only 175,000 votes of the 10 million cast in an election that went narrowly to Democrat Grover Cleveland. When Butler died in 1893, at the age of 74, Charles Dana of the New York Sun wrote his epitaph: "He was no pretender and no hypocrite."

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