Benjamin Butler

Benjamin Butler was a man who thrived in the gray areas of law and war, a political general whose actions often sparked outrage and shifted policy. A successful Massachusetts lawyer with no military training, his political connections secured him a generalship at the start of the Civil War. Stationed at Fort Monroe in Virginia, he faced a dilemma: three enslaved men escaped to his lines seeking freedom. Their owner, a Confederate colonel, demanded their return under the Fugitive Slave Act. Butler, a shrewd legal mind, refused. He declared the men 'contraband of war'—property used to support the rebellion, and thus subject to seizure. This ingenious, if cynical, argument provided a legal framework for thousands of fleeing slaves to find sanctuary with Union forces, pushing the war gradually toward emancipation. His subsequent military career was checkered, marked by the disastrous Bermuda Hundred campaign and his harsh administration of occupied New Orleans, which earned him the Southern nickname 'Beast Butler.' After the war, as a Radical Republican congressman, he was a fierce advocate for civil rights and played a leading role in the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.