Journal Article

Rehabilitating the Beast

Egerton, Douglas R

2023

Overview

Leonard, the author of numerous books about these decades, and particularly the Lincoln-Prize-winning biography of Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, knows this terrain well, of course, but as a professor at Maine's Colby College, she is also associated with the institution once known as Waterville College, where Butler studied while briefly considering a life in the ministry. (Apart from the fact that Colby has a large cache of Butler's materials, the ever-helpful Butler attempted to assist his future biographers by writing Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences (1892), which filled 1037 pages and contained another 94 pages of documents and correspondence.)1 As one has come to expect from her earlier work, Leonard's study is deeply grounded in archival materials, cites ninety-eight newspapers, and draws on a small library of books and articles. After winning a seat in the Massachusetts state legislature in 1853, Butler drafted a bill to compensate the Charlestown Ursuline convent and school that had been torched two decades before. Leonard regards that interpretation to be \"unduly harsh,\" noting that at Fort Monroe, Butler was liberating slaves who had been put to work by the Confederate military, whereas in this case he was dealing with masters he hoped to coax into again becoming loyal citizens. [...]as she correctly notes, Congress would not pass the second Confiscation Act until three months into Butler's tenure in Louisiana, and Lincoln would not issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation for another two months after that.

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Biographies / Correspondence / Emancipation of slaves / Loyalty / Presidential elections / War