Benjamin Franklin Butler was born in New Hampshire in 1818 to a privateer father who died of yellow fever, grew up in his mother’s boarding house for mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, and turned to law after West Point rejected him. This episode traces a combative lawyer who backed Jefferson Davis at the 1860 Democratic convention, then pressured the Massachusetts governor through banking contacts to make him a general. Early in the war he seized the Great Seal of Maryland to block secession votes, and at Fort Monroe in 1861 he declared escaped slaves contraband of war rather than return them.

In occupied New Orleans he enforced quarantines that checked yellow fever, hanged William Mumford for tearing down a U.S. flag, and issued General Order No. 28, earning the names Beast Butler and Spoons while his brother Andrew profited from rigged auctions. His Army of the James was bottled up at Bermuda Hundred, his powder boat at Fort Fisher failed, and Grant removed him in early 1865. In Congress he prosecuted Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and wrote the KKK Act of 1871, then after his election as governor of Massachusetts in 1882 appointed the state’s first Black judge before running for president in 1884.

• Chamber pots sold in the postwar South carried his portrait on the bottom.
• In Norfolk his associates ran cross-line trade that sent bacon, sugar and coffee to Confederate forces in exchange for cotton.
• He formed the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, the first official African American regiment in the U.S. Army.
• He named Clara Barton to head the women’s reformatory, the first woman to hold executive office in Massachusetts.
• Harvard broke tradition and denied him the honorary degree given to sitting Massachusetts governors.