After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

  Before a decision was made, however, Pinchback was attacked on the street by John Keppard, his sister’s husband, who slashed at him with a knife. Caught by surprise, Pinchback said afterward that he had never learned the reason for the assault. He struck back, and Keppard collapsed with a minor wound.

  It was Pinchback, however, who was taken before a military court. Receiving bad advice, he pleaded guilty to assault with intent to kill. The provost judge sentenced him to two years in the city’s workhouse.

  “I nearly fainted in court,” Pinchback told friends. He claimed that lawyers and the court staff had been trying to extort money from him that he refused to pay.

  Prison records listed Pinckney Pinchback as educated but with “intemperate habits.” He eased his imprisonment by having the money to buy his own bed and better food.

  Money also may have bought the prompt pardon that he received from a military commander. As soon as the Lincoln administration decreed that “persons of African descent” could join the army or navy, Pinchback was accepted into a volunteer unit. Its commander was Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler, named for the sage of the American Revolution.

  • • •

  Butler, now forty-five, had been born in Deerfield, New Hampshire, but had a family tie to Louisiana since his father had fought there in 1815 with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. The elder Butler died when the boy was two, and his mother sent Ben to school at Exeter and then applied for him to enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

  But the family lacked the political sway for Ben to be selected, and he went instead to Colby College in Maine, which was then a Baptist institution called Waterville.

  After a hitch on a fishing ship and an apprenticeship in a Lowell, Massachusetts, law office, Ben Butler grew his thinning hair long, joined the state bar, and courted an actress named Sarah Hildreth. Butler won her heart but not her hand. It took four years before his prospects satisfied her parents and they allowed the marriage.

  Benjamin Butler

  Butler made his first foray into politics on the losing side, backing Martin Van Buren in his failed campaign for re-election in 1840. Butler was convinced that the U.S. Constitution gave each state the right to set its own policy on slavery, and he remained a Jacksonian Democrat.

  At the same time, however, Butler joined a campaign to shorten the working day at the textile mills in Lowell to ten hours. His stand provoked the wrath of the mill owners, and the Lowell Courier denounced him as a “notorious demagogue and political scoundrel.” Butler responded by accusing the editor of having picked up a venereal disease from a prostitute during the U.S. war with Mexico.

  Exploiting the divisions among both political parties, Butler formed a faction pledged to the shorter mill hours. One large plant, Hamilton Mills, retaliated by posting a notice: “Whoever employed by this corporation votes the Ben Butler ticket on Monday next will be discharged.”

  Over the years, Butler had been rising in the state militia, and his gift for command was on display when he addressed a throng at the Lowell City Hall:

  “As God lives and I live, by the living Jehovah! If one man is driven from his employment by these men because of his vote, I will lead you to make Lowell what it was twenty-five years ago—a sheep-pasture and a fishing place. And I will commence by applying the torch to my own house!”

  The Whig owners backed down, the Lowell Courier printed their pledge not to fire anyone, and every candidate on Butler’s slate won election. The ten-hour law fared less well. It took several legislative sessions to pass, and then the limit was set at eleven hours, fifteen minutes.

  • • •

  Running as a Democrat, Butler won election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives at age thirty-five. During the presidential nominating convention of 1860, Butler hoped to block the nomination of Stephen Douglas, whom he considered unelectable, and stuck with Jefferson Davis through fifty-seven unavailing ballots.

  But by the time war was declared, Butler had concluded that no state had the right to leave the Union, and he led his militia into battle for the North.

  When a Confederate mob in Baltimore killed twelve men, including four from Massachusetts, Butler’s war was officially launched in blood. He ignored pleas from Maryland’s governor, who hoped to remain neutral, and seized Annapolis. That action ensured control in the coming months over the gateway for supplying Union troops.

  Butler wrote to his wife, “I think no man has won more in ten days than I have.”

  Then Butler ignored orders from General Scott, his superior in Washington, and invaded Baltimore. Outraged, Scott summoned Butler to his headquarters and lectured him like a truant for the unacceptable risks he had taken. Scott concluded, “You can be trusted with nothing in this army again.”

  Butler answered with angry words of his own, but when he returned to his billet, he sank down on a couch and wept. Although he submitted his resignation, Lincoln’s secretary of war reminded him that Scott was in his midseventies and so doddering that he would soon be replaced.

  The affair ended when Lincoln met personally with Butler and offered him a commission as a major general in the U.S. Army. Accepting, Butler spelled out one condition: If he were ordered to do anything he could not support, he would return the commission.

  “That is frank, that is fair,” Lincoln agreed. “But I want to add one thing. When you see me doing anything that for the good of the country ought not to be done, come and tell me so, and why you think so, and then perhaps you will not have any chance to resign your commission.”

  Back in command, Butler became the first commander to flout the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and refuse to return to their owners the slaves who reached his army’s lines.

  By April 1862, Butler’s troops had captured New Orleans. With a population approaching 150,000, it was the largest city in the South; its citizens, mostly white, included many Northern merchants and bankers and also the South’s largest number of free black citizens. Light-skinned, often wealthy, more at ease speaking French than English, they had arrived from Haiti or were the mulatto children of French settlers and black women.

  In New Orleans, Butler was a whirlwind propelled by his New England values. He ordered a reeking canal cleansed of dead mules and rotting dogs and cats, and he closed down the outdoor food stalls in order to scrape filth from their stone floors. Butler tackled widespread unemployment by paying men fifty cents a day, plus a soldier’s rations; in return, he expected every house to be repainted or whitewashed. Littering was punishable by three months in jail.

  With strict surveillance, Butler broke up a burglary ring, and he censored or shut down the city’s newspapers. He prevented churches from offering a day of prayer for the Confederacy, but he ordered his troops to arrest clergymen who refused to pray for Abraham Lincoln.

  In that same spirit, he took on a morale problem among his troops. Rebel women were showing their contempt by getting off a streetcar if a Union soldier boarded or by holding a handkerchief to their nostrils when they passed a Yankee on the street.

  At first, Butler had laughed off the insults. When a group of city matrons ostentatiously turned their backs on him, Butler said loudly to his aides, “Well, these ladies certainly know which end of them looks best.”

  As the snubs got more aggressive, however, with women spitting or making retching noises, Butler issued what became known as the Woman Order. It concluded: “ . . . When any female shall, by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for 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.”

  The punishment for streetwalking was a night in jail and a five-dollar fine.

  The uproar that followed raised new questions about Butler’s fitness to command.

  Southerners next accused him of confiscating the silverware of those Confederate supporters he had driven out of New Orleans, and they took to calling him “Spoon
s.”

  But there had been nothing frivolous about Butler’s response when a New Orleans resident, William B. Mumford, faced execution for desecrating the Stars and Stripes.

  The incident had occurred during the five days while Union navy ships had waited at the port for Butler to take control of New Orleans. As a gesture in the meantime, their commander had sent an armed squad to fly the American flag over the building that housed the city’s mint.

  Mumford, a local gambler, hauled down the flag, ripped it to shreds, and sported a remnant in his buttonhole. When he was caught, tried, and convicted of treason, New Orleans rebels sent Butler anonymous letters warning that if Mumford was hanged, Butler would pay with his life.

  Butler admitted later that he had been frightened. He put in a sleepless night before the execution, then allowed Mumford’s wife and small children to visit him during his last hours.

  With that hanging, Butler became detested throughout the South. Jefferson Davis branded him “an outlaw.” If Butler was captured, Davis decreed that he should be executed “in expatiation of his crimes.” Throughout the Confederacy, he was reviled as “Beast Butler.”

  As New Orleans commander, Butler set no color bar for men volunteering for his army. He followed up his flouting of the Fugitive Slave Law by sheltering thousands of runaway slaves in New Orleans, and when Washington rejected his call for white reinforcements, Butler set out to raise three full Negro regiments on his own initiative.

  Pinckney Pinchback opened an office at the corner of Bienville and Villere streets and quickly rounded up an entire company for Butler’s new Corps d’Afrique. Along with the regiment’s other black officers, Pinchback became a temporary captain, pending a qualification examination.

  When those tests were completed, however, every other black candidate failed. They were discharged and replaced by white officers who did not hide their contempt for the one surviving black captain in their midst. Pinchback struck back with a symbolic protest. He refused to abide by the rules of the local streetcar company, which painted a large star on the only streetcars open to black passengers. When Pinchback boarded a whites-only car, however, employees closed its doors so that no whites would get aboard by mistake.

  The military authorities ignored Pinchback’s infraction, but when he was passed over a second time for what should have been an automatic promotion, he resigned his commission. The other officers were “inimical to me,” Pinchback wrote, which made “my position very disagreeable indeed.”

  No effort was made to dissuade him. He received $521.95 for his service.

  Two months later, Pinchback addressed a crowd at a “Meeting of Free Colored Citizens” at the New Orleans Economy Hall, called to seek the rights of free black men to vote. He appealed to a basic sense of fairness: If colored people were citizens, they had a right to cast ballots.

  His army experience had embittered him but had not quenched his desire to serve in the war. Spending his own money, he rented a headquarters and printed advertisements for a new company of black men, this time in the cavalry.

  He soon found that discrimination was not limited to the army’s lower echelons. His application was quashed by an adjutant general less willing than Butler to ignore the letter of the law, which held that awarding commissions to Negroes was illegal.

  Pinchback took up his protest with a vengeance. In speeches, he praised Benjamin Butler—although he noted that the general had “hesitated for a long time” before he had authorized the commission of black officers. Now, he added, after “it was proven beyond a doubt that colored men were as brave and trusty as any other man and would make just as good soldiers,” they were removed from their posts because “white men alone are fit to command.”

  • • •

  Troubling then to Pinchback—but no surprise—was President Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction late in 1863. With the North’s victory in sight, the president was turning his attention to postwar reconciliation. White backers of the Confederacy were offered the right to vote again after they took an oath to support the Constitution and the Union. When the number of those repentant rebels in any state reached 10 percent of the votes cast in the 1860 presidential election, the president would recognize their state government, and they could proceed to draft a new state constitution so long as it abolished slavery.

  Called the Ten Percent Plan, Lincoln’s proposal was designed to discourage Southerners from persisting in their rebellion. But to the dismay of Louisiana’s black population, Lincoln’s terms still prohibited them from voting or holding office.

  Lincoln’s leniency to the Confederates infuriated the Radical Republicans in Congress. To meet the administration’s challenge, Senator B. F. Wade of Ohio—named, like General Butler, for Benjamin Franklin—joined with Henry Winter Davis, his counterpart in the House.

  The Wade-Davis bill of July 1864 called for far more than the abolition of slavery. Confederate states would be required to repudiate their war debt. The bill required the appointing of military governors, who would then administer to all citizens an oath of loyalty to the United States. Only when a majority—not simply 10 percent—had sworn to the oath could they establish their government.

  Benjamin Wade also tried to strike the word “white” from the section that restored voting rights. Charles Sumner’s was one of the five votes to support him.

  When the legislation reached the White House in the closing moments of the congressional session, Lincoln turned to a tactic first employed by Andrew Jackson, the pocket veto. When he did not sign the bill, it died.

  Lincoln explained that since governments in Arkansas and Louisiana had already been installed under his plan, he would not reject them. He was “sincerely hoping and expecting that a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery throughout the nation may be adopted,” but meanwhile he was satisfied with his own approach.

  Although Wade was criticized for his inflexible party loyalty, he had made it clear for years that Lincoln, as a man, did not impress him. As long ago as 1861, Wade had written to a friend that Lincoln’s recent evasions on the issue of race “could only come of one, born of poor white trash and educated in a slave state.”

  Half amused, Lincoln had put up with Wade’s insolence and struck back with his own weapon of choice. Ben Wade may not have been the senator most devoid of humor—that distinction remained with Charles Sumner—but neither was he equipped for bantering with the president.

  Lincoln described to a friend one of their run-ins, which may have made Wade “my enemy for life.”

  In response to something Wade said, Lincoln had remarked, “Senator, that reminds me of a story.”

  Wade interrupted “in a petulant way: ‘It is with you, sir, all story, story! You are the father of every military blunder that has been made during the war. You are on your road to hell, sir, with this government, by your obstinacy, and you are not a mile off this minute.’ ”

  Lincoln replied—“good-naturedly,” he was sure—that the mile to hell that Wade had mentioned “is just about from here to the Capitol, is it not?”

  Wade “was very angry, grabbed up his hat and cane, and went away.”

  Lincoln was prepared, then, for the Wade-Davis Manifesto, which appeared in the New York Tribune on August 5, 1864. It began, “We have seen without surprise, but not without indignation, the proclamation of the President of the 8th of July.”

  Their statement went on to uphold the supremacy of Congress over the executive branch, an argument that would persist long after Lincoln was removed from the debate.

  The congressmen concluded that Lincoln’s action had been motivated by his desire for electoral votes in the coming presidential election. But he “must understand that our support is of a cause, not a man.”

  • • •

  At that disheartening moment for the Negroes of New Orleans, they seemed to be about to lose their staunch white advocate. For weeks, Ben Butler had been hearing rumors that Secretary o
f State Seward was calling for his recall from New Orleans. Butler’s offense was said to be the high-handed way he had treated those foreigners he considered sympathetic to the Confederacy. Protests from embassies in Washington had forced Seward to defuse their bitterness at the same time that he was working to undercut European support for the South.

  Butler’s enemies had also tainted his success in stabilizing the New Orleans banking system by accusing him and his brother of reaping large personal profits from his changes.

  In December 1863, General Nathaniel Banks arrived in New Orleans and handed Butler orders from the secretary of war that named Banks as the new military chief. Humiliated, Butler put up a brave front. He briefed Banks on the challenges he would face and then, ignoring the latest threats against his life, announced that he would be attending a performance at a local theater.

  That night, to Butler’s great surprise, the audience gave him a tumultuous standing ovation.

  • • •

  In Washington, Ben Butler pressed Lincoln successfully for a new posting, but he would be reporting to Ulysses Grant, who had taken command of all Union armies, and Grant considered Butler an amateur who held his rank only because he was supporting Lincoln’s re-election.

  Grant’s misgivings seemed confirmed when Butler’s troops were defeated outside Richmond, Virginia, in May 1864, by Confederate general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. Butler, however, could point to the fact that Grant had diverted seventeen thousand of Butler’s troops to reinforce his own men.

  Grant’s hesitation and the relentless bureaucratic infighting may indeed have contributed to the defeat. But blame for the humiliation fell to Butler.

  Butler himself brought on his own final disaster. He insisted on taking command for an attack on an unusually well-defended fort, although Grant wanted to put another officer in charge.