Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life by Elizabeth D. Leonard

Abstract

Reviewed by: Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life by Elizabeth D. Leonard Brooks D. Simpson (bio) Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life. By Elizabeth D. Leonard. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xxiii, 365. $36.00 cloth; $27.99 ebook) Coming away from his first encounter with Benjamin F. Butler on April 1, 1864, Cyrus B. Comstock, an officer on Ulysses S. Grant's staff, concluded that Butler was "sharp, shrewd, able, without conscience or modesty—overbearing," adding, "A bad man to have against you in a criminal case." Many other people agreed with Comstock and many still do. For most students of the American Civil War, Butler remains caricatured more than understood. Credited with developing the initial U.S. military reaction to handling enslaved people who fled Confederate lines to seek protection and freedom, Butler was both praised and denigrated for his performance governing occupied New Orleans before his unremarkable role as commander of the Army of the James where he was relieved by Grant in January 1865. As a Republican congressman during Reconstruction, Butler proved determined and, some suspected, underhanded—as interested in building his base in Massachusetts politics as he was in supporting vigorous measures to protect the freedpeople in the South. Surely there was more to the man, although few people seemed interested in discovering what that might be. Biographies by Robert S. Holzman, Hans Trefousse, Richard S. West, and Dick Nolan fought to resurrect Butler's reputation, not always in persuasive fashion. At best they modified but did not radically alter his historical reputation, which tended to focus on his military service during the Civil War. Elizabeth Leonard takes a different tact, focusing on Butler's entire career, grounded in politics, while bringing his private life into clearer focus. The resulting portrait calls into question the cartoon-like renderings of Butler, demonstrating that he held fast to a determination to help the downtrodden and the underdog as he battled for women's rights and eventually for the [End Page 80] end of slavery and equality for African Americans. The later crusade came as something of a surprise for a prewar Democrat who once endorsed Jefferson Davis for president of the United States, but the experience of war and secession helped transform his views as he became known as an earnest Radical Republican. Later in life, Butler made his way back to the Democratic party, serving a term as governor of Massachusetts, continuing a career in which he was loved and hated, mocked and feared. The strength of Leonard's admittedly admiring account is in the attention paid to Butler's personal life and in her willingness to highlight his political principles, which pointed in an egalitarian direction. Although she illuminates the first two years of Butler's military service because of the ramifications in how he handled southerners, she is somewhat less interested in his tenure as an army commander in 1864–1865. Butler's correspondence, including incoming letters, often dominates the narrative. Butler's critics are given short shrift, even as Leonard recognizes that Butler was a divisive and controversial figure. To be sure, Butler's critics frequently derided him because of what he believed, but nevertheless there remained a cunning and calculating individual whose behavior merited Comstock's measured assessment. Some people, like Grant, were willing to deal with Butler out of political necessity but at times found the result distasteful. This avowedly sympathetic treatment of Butler gives readers reason to admire its subject, even as one wonders whether at least some of his critics were also onto something about him. Leonard's skill as a biographer and a historian serves both herself and Butler well as she escapes the extremes to which some revisionist treatments are subject. This fresh reappraisal more than answers the demand for one. [End Page 81] Brooks D. Simpson BROOKS D. SIMPSON is an ASU Foundation professor of history at Arizona State University and the author of several books on the Civil War and Reconstruction. (2013). Copyright © 2022 Kentucky Historical Society