1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [180]
This, indeed, was the reason behind his dizzying military apotheosis. Lincoln, fearful of having his contest with the South branded a “Republican war,” had elevated a number of reliably Unionist Democrats to high rank. Benjamin Butler’s long service as a leader of the volunteer militia was the least of his dubious qualifications; much more important, he was the last man anyone could accuse of being an abolitionist zealot. Race-baiting was red meat to many of his working-class Lowell constituents, and he had always been glad to toss healthy morsels of it in their direction. He had publicly endorsed the Dred Scott decision, and a central plank of his gubernatorial campaign was his fiercely sarcastic opposition to enlisting blacks in the state militia. (He also reminded his fellow citizens that “we buy and sell the products of slave labor”—no doubt with his hometown textile mills in mind.) In fact, when representing his district at the 1860 Democratic National Convention, Butler had cast his vote for Jefferson Davis as the party’s nominee—not once but on fifty-seven successive ballots, an extravagant blunder that would dog his political career for decades to come.15
A fellow officer once said that Butler was “less like a major general than like a politician who is coaxing for votes.” And after barely twenty-four hours at Fortress Monroe, the new commander had already sized up his new constituency. The garrison was made up predominantly of fresh but eager volunteers from New England, men who had flocked to the recruiting stations while the smoke of battle still hung over Fort Sumter. These were no Lowell mill hands, either. The Third Massachusetts hailed mainly from the starchy old Puritan settlements around Boston; there were many college men in its ranks—one entire company had formed at Cambridge. The soldiers of the First Vermont had marched off to war with evergreen sprigs pinned to their lapels, under the leadership of Colonel John W. Phelps, a West Pointer and Mexican War veteran and, as it happened, an abolitionist of the deepest dye. (The London Times’ ubiquitous William H. Russell, visiting the fort in July, would call him “an excellent type of the chief of a Puritan regiment”—and, on a later occasion, “one who places John Brown on a level with the great martyrs of the Christian world.”) The sentry who had brought Baker, Mallory, and Townsend into the fort belonged to the First Vermont; the tale of their bold escape from the rebels was no doubt spreading quickly through the regiment, if not the entire garrison. Finally, closest at hand among the bleeding hearts, there was Butler’s new military secretary, Theodore Winthrop, the poet-turned-private (elevated now to the rank of major) who had sent correspondence to The Atlantic from his makeshift bivouac in the Capitol. When Winthrop left for the war, he had written to his family: “I go to put an end to slavery.”16
How was Butler to win the confidence—or even obedience—of such men if his first act as their commander was to send three poor Negroes back into bondage?
And it was not only a matter of calculation. The general was a more complicated person than he at first appeared. His features were brutish, his manners coarse, but inwardly, he nursed the outsize vanity of certain physically ugly men—vanity often manifest in a craving for approval and adulation. He also possessed a sympathetic, even occasionally sentimental, heart. He had fought hard in the state