When Union troops marched into New Orleans in the spring of 1862, the man they placed in charge of the conquered city was not a career soldier but a Massachusetts lawyer with a taste for politics and a reputation for bluntness. Major General Benjamin Butler, already disliked by many Southerners, would spend his eight months ruling the Crescent City turning it into one of the most controversial experiments in military occupation of the war. To those who suffered under his administration, he was simply the Beast. Benjamin Franklin Butler was born on November 5, 1818, in Deerfield, New Hampshire, the third child of John and Charlotte Butler.
His father, a War of 1812 veteran, had served along the Canadian border until a broken ankle cut his military career short. Afterward, John returned to his old trade as a sailor, making voyages that included at least one trip to New Orleans, and spending much of his time away from his family. He died of yellow fever in the Caribbean just a few months after Benjamin’s birth. Charlotte Butler was left to care for three children of her own, along with two stepdaughters from John’s earlier marriage.
She worked as a seamstress, but the income was nowhere near enough to support the household. She sent one son, Andrew Jackson Butler, to live with a relative, then moved with the rest of the family into her late husband’s household. It was a trying existence, but Charlotte was determined that her children, especially Benjamin, would be educated. At age seven, he was sent to Deerfield Academy, where he took quickly to reading.
His first book was Robinson Crusoe, but his real passion became American history. A series of family deaths in the late 1820s stripped away what little financial support the Butlers had. His grandmother Abigail, one of those who passed away, was remembered by one of Butler’s biographers as having taught him that the law and public policy often enshrine fundamental social inequalities, including between women and men, providing him and his mother a crucial source of inspiration for his own egalitarianism and commitment to democracy. Charlotte moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, to run a boarding house for the young women who worked in the textile mills there.
Benjamin attended a prestigious academy in New Hampshire for a short time before joining his mother and finishing his schooling locally. He graduated from secondary school in 1834 and set his sights on West Point, hoping the military academy would give him both an education and social standing. His mother sent him to Waterville College in Maine while she worked to secure him a spot, but by the time it became clear that all appointments from both Massachusetts and New Hampshire had been filled, Benjamin was already halfway through his college education. The pursuit ended.
His mother, devoutly religious, preferred Waterville anyway, hoping it would steer him toward the clergy. A pastor she knew had graduated from the institution when it was still called the Maine Literary and Theological Institution. Benjamin had no interest in religion. The college required students to attend church services, and he repeatedly asked to be excused, sometimes skipping them altogether, risking fines, suspension, or expulsion.
He rebelled against religious instruction and pressed his professors with complex theological questions he had no intention of answering. To pay for his tuition, he built chairs in the school’s carpentry shop for thirty cents a day and taught at a small school during winter breaks. His time at Waterville coincided with a wave of anti-slavery sentiment sweeping the Northeast. The murder of alumnus Elijah P.
Lovejoy, an anti-slavery newspaper editor killed in Alton, Illinois, for refusing to stop publishing, made the issue personal to many at the school. Anti-slavery societies sprang up on campus, but Butler did not join them. The only recorded instance of him taking a position on slavery during those years came during a debate within a student organization he likely helped found, where he argued that Lovejoy’s course was right. He won the debate.
That did not mean he agreed with the position, only that he argued it well. He also debated immigration, international law, and Andrew Jackson’s bank war. Much of Butler’s reputation at Waterville came from pranks and outright meanness. He allegedly stole or silenced the chapel bell, took signs, gates, pigs, and chickens, brawled with classmates, proposed to a local girl only to jilt her later, and stiffed a merchant for a suit of clothes.
The largest prank involved paying a local farmer to catch swallows nesting in his barn, then releasing them inside a church during an abolitionist meeting. The birds’ wings extinguished the candles, and in the darkness Butler and a friend went around kissing the girls in nearby pews. He paid the merchant for the suit years later. He graduated in 1838, nearly twenty years old, standing just five feet four and weighing under a hundred pounds, his frail frame likely the result of years of poor nutrition.
His mother secured him a berth on a cod-fishing boat operated by one of his father’s friends. The captain refused to allow books aboard, telling him to become a sailor. Butler fished along the Labrador coast, gained weight, and grew healthier, partly, he later said, because of his liberal drinking of cod liver oil. When he returned to Lowell, he heard a skilled attorney argue a case in court, and that moment decided his future.
He apprenticed with a local lawyer named William Smith and began a punishing reading schedule, studying legal books for about twelve hours a day. To supplement his income, he taught school, a job he loathed. Writing about his time teaching during winter breaks, he recalled exchanging home and all its joys, warm fires, lively parties, nuts and cider with friends, skating and sledding, for a district school and ten dollars a month. He lasted one term, remembered afterward that he gave the students a thrashing that would last a lifetime.
Just two years out of college, Smith encouraged him to take the Massachusetts bar exam. He passed. Almost immediately, Butler turned toward politics, stumping for the Democratic Party and giving his first political speech for Martin Van Buren’s re-election campaign. He joined the local militia like many young men of his time, loved the camaraderie, and came to believe that citizen soldiers were better than the regular army because the regulars drilled because they were made to, while the citizen soldier did so because he enjoyed it.
He rose through the ranks of the Lowell City Guard and eventually commanded the regiment to which his company was attached. As a lawyer in the textile city, Butler came to represent the Lowell girls, the mill workers his mother housed, in court cases against their employers over unfair treatment. He had sat around his mother’s boarding house table listening to their worries, and he worked to win them restitution and better working conditions. He believed the full and only end of government is to care for the people in their rights and liberties, to protect them in equality of powers, equality of rights, equality of privileges, and equality of burdens under the law by carefully and energetically enforcing provisions of equal laws justly applicable to every citizen.
One biographer suggested he took these cases because he had witnessed his mother’s financial struggles firsthand and wanted to help young women in similar circumstances. He ran his law practice out of an office in the Museum Building, which he owned, renting the remaining space to a museum, a theater, and other businesses for extra income. He had purchased the building with his good friend Fisher Hildreth. They had planned to become law partners, but Hildreth chose instead to become a farmer and newspaper editor.
The two remained close, and when Butler went to the Hildreth home for Thanksgiving dinner, he met Fisher’s sister Sarah, an aspiring actress. They married in May 1844. That marriage marked more than a personal milestone. It closed the door on Butler’s early years and opened the next chapter of a life that would soon move far beyond law offices, theater buildings, and family dinners.
Before long, that same relentless ambition and willingness to push against convention would carry him into uniform, and eventually into New Orleans, where the nickname the Beast would follow him for the rest of his days.