That's from my son Chris, who, as I told you before, is in the midst of a project of reading a biography of every American President. He reads his books in book form, so he texts photos of paragraphs when he's got something to share.
The paragraph above comes from Ron Chernow's "Grant" (commission earned).
How ugly was General Benjamin Butler? Pictures, here, at Wikipedia. He looks bad, but not as bad as those words make him sound. As Chris put it: "You have to really hate someone to describe them that way."
Here's Butler's General Order No. 28 (with rhetorical flourishes that may remind of a certain modern-day President):
Chris and I independently thought that seemed like a Trump tweet! The capitalization is so evocative. And that willingness to use strong interpretations of law to intimidate those who are affronting you....
Maybe Trump is tapping into a deep vein of American rhetoric.
संदेश
51 टिप्पणियां:
"A woman of the town plying her vocation" - oh why can't we still talk like this?!
Just need to add, "Thank you for your attention to this matter."
They're all whores, General.
"Department of The Gulf."
Not the Gulf of Mexico, mind you. Are we sure Trump didn't write this after getting into a beef with noted woman of the town, Nancy Pelosi?
General Butler was so hated by the people of New Orleans that chamber pots with his picture in them were very popular.
He was also called "Spoons" for his supposed habit of nicking silverware or any other appealing nicknack he saw in rebel houses.
His ugliness may not manifest completely in photographs. You might have had to see him in person for the ugliness of his personality to be seen in his face.
Interesting historical relevance. Nice.
From the Wikipedia article: "On June 7, 1862, Butler ordered the execution of William B. Mumford for tearing down a United States flag placed by Admiral Farragut on the United States Mint in New Orlean.... Before Mumford was executed, Butler permitted him to make a speech for as long as he wished, and Mumford defended his actions by claiming that he was acting out of a high sense of patriotism. Most, including Mumford and his family, expected Butler to pardon him. The general refused to do so, but promised to care for his family if necessary. (After the war, Butler fulfilled his promise by paying off a mortgage on Mumford's widow's house and helping her find government employment.) For the execution and General Order No. 28, he was denounced (December 1862) by Confederate President Jefferson Davis in General Order 111 as a felon deserving capital punishment, who, if captured, should be 'reserved for execution.'"
George Plimpton was a descendant of Butler and of two other Civil War generals named Ames (who were unrelated to each other). Mayflower passengers on both sides too. Beneath the blueblood veneer, he had some of Butler's eccentricity and exhibitionism.
"Maybe ... a deep vein of American rhetoric." Maybe? Hell, YES.
In the 1800 election John Adams called Thomas Jefferson "The unfortunate spawn of a mulatto father and a half-breed mother." I don't know about his father's genetics, but it sure was true about his mother, whose brother was one of my great grandfathers.
Or much more recently, during the signing ceremony for the Welfare Reform Act of 1967, LBJ said "This'll keep those n|ggers voting for us for the next 200 years."
There are countless others, just as coarse.
It's comical how much grief Butler got at the time and still gets. I think he was one of the North's "political" generals, so not a military man but someone who really knew how to push people's buttons.
The opposition description of Butler as a muck sack with sausages for limbs also gets echoed in the left's tinyhands orange baby hitler caricatures of Trump.
RR
JSM
The “repeated insults” referenced in Butler’s “infamous” order included emptying chamber pots full of urine, feces, and (presumably) menstrual blood over the heads of soldiers and officers simply walking up and down he streets. His order brought that to a halt, which was necessary. Victorious troops should not have to put up with having chamber pots emptied on their heads.
Butler is (in)famous for more reasons. As one of the first of Lincoln’s “political generals” he led the 8th Massachusetts militia regiment to invest Maryland’s capital city of Annapolis, and he helped keep Maryland in the Union by threatening the governor and legislators with being arrested by his soldiers if they tried to vote for secession. When Matylans’s Governor Hicks told him than no one would sell food to his troops, he redponded thst armed men don’t really need to pay for provisions. He also used his troops and volunteer troops from to restore rail service from Philadelphia to Washington, DC, somewhat alleviating the risk that the Confederacy could capture Washington.
Butler is most famous for declaring that runaway slaves who reached Union lines would be classed as “contraband of war” and therefore need not be returned to their owners. This was a concept which was endorsed by Lincoln himself and thereafter became the policy of the US Army itself. Normally contraband is defined to include inanimate things that the enemy can use to fight a war with, such as guns and gunpowder, but it does include things that are indirectly useful to the enemy, such as food and medical supplies. Butler noted thst slaves could be used to harvest crops, dig entrenchments, and build forts, and thus it made sense to prevent their use by the enemy. Many (Most?) historians regard Butler’s declaration that slaves were contraband of war axx so a step towards making the Civil War a war over slavery.
Butler was amazingly useful to the Union cause early in the war, but as a military commander he was both corrupt and incompetent, and eventually Grant forced him out of the army. Butler reentered politics as a Radical Republican and he was elected to Congress, where he became a pain in the ass to President Johnson. Eventually he became Governor of Massachusetts.
The reading of General Order 28 in Ken Burn's Civil War was awesomely malevolent IIRC.
Butler was a complete sack of "muck". he had a southernor hanged for tearing down the Union flag in New Orleans. He made negotiations to exchange POW's almost impossible (which is why Lincoln/Grant appointed him). He fancied himself a "Great Napoleon" but was completely incompentent as a Field General.
He was finally relieved of command after the disasterous "Powder Keg" attack on Fort Fischer.
Completely corrupt, he would have been at home in the Biden Administration, or working with Hunter Biden on some Ukrainian or Chinese business deal.
Like many in history, we're supposed to like him because he was good on the race issue. He may have been scum but he was good to the blacks.
The Confederate response:
"Now therefore, I Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, and in their name do pronounce and declare the said Benjamin F. Butler to be a felon deserving of capital punishment. I do order that he be no longer considered or treated simply as a public enemy of the Confederate States of America but as an outlaw and common enemy of mankind, and that in the event of his capture the officer in command of the capturing force do cause him to be immediately executed by hanging; and I do further order that no commissioned officer of the United States taken captive shall be released on parole before exchange until the said Butler shall have met with due punishment for his crimes.
And whereas the hostilities waged against this Confederacy by the forces of the United States under the command of said Benjamin F. Butler have borne no resemblance to such warfare as is alone permissible by the rules of international law or the usages of civilization but have been characterized by repeated atrocities and outrages, among the large number of which the following may be cited as examples:
#NoJudgment #NoLabels #AestheticPerception
Jamie said...
"A woman of the town plying her vocation"
I agree about the writing.
But was she any better than she ought to be?
John Henry
But was she any better than she ought to be?
Oh, well said, JH!
Time for me to revisit the 19th century literary oeuvre... So much fun.
Butler switched from Democrat to Republican and back again. At one point he was affiliated with the Greenback Party and was their candidate for president in 1884. You could get a piggy bank with Butler's head and the body of a frog. A frog because it was green, but also as a snarky reference to Butler's ungainly appearance. You still can get one, if you haunt the antiques auction circuit long enough.
I spent some time reading through that Wikipedia article on Butler. He was a colorful character.
"Now therefore, I Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, and in their name do pronounce and declare the said Benjamin F. Butler to be a felon deserving of capital punishment." At the Democratic Party Convention in Charlestown SC in 1860 Benjamin Butler voted for Jefferson Davis on all 57 presidential ballots.
Max Beerbohm
Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than they need have been. An anarchy of small curls were her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair asserting its rights over a not discreditable brow. For the rest, her features were not at all original. They seemed to have been derived rather from a gallimaufry of familiar models. From Madame la Marquise de Saint-Ouen came the shapely tilt of the nose. The mouth was a mere replica of Cupid's bow, lacquered scarlet and strung with the littlest pearls. No apple tree, no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor any Tyrian rose-garden, for the glory of Miss Dobson's cheeks. Her neck was imitation-marble. Her hands and feet were of very mean proportions. She had no waist to speak of.
This is the sort of post that keeps me coming back with a smile. Thank you!
I agree with Butler, Yankees should be forced to pay for their insults.
With apologies to Forest Gump: ugly is as ugly does
Forrest Gump. It's spelled that way for a reason.
"Benjamin Franklin Butler was a brilliant man. Few people who ever met him would have disagreed with that. He was one of the most exceptional officers on either side in the Civil War, and perhaps, if one was measuring sheer brainpower, the smartest. What he was good at, however, was not fighting battles. He was abysmally suited to that. It was, in fact, the collision of his coruscating genius and his appalling tactical incompetence that made him one of the most colorful and compelling figures in the American Civil War." - S C Gwynne, Hymns of the Republic
Ficta: "collision of his coruscating genius and his appalling tactical incompetence"
If only I knew history would so remember me, I would die happy....
RR
JSM
Narr: "Forrest Gump. It's spelled that way for a reason."
Was he named after Nathan Bedford? I never read the book.
RR
JSM
I point out that such abrupt changes in typeface (we would say font) and capitalization was very a common practice in job printing and newspapers of the late 1800s. Some examples: One Two Three Four
Nor should we forget the Trump = Hitler rhetoric, the courtroom injustices, the falsified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, the warrantless impeachments, and the assassination attempts solicited, organized, and carried out by Hillary Clinton's henchmen and the Democratic party generally.
"Was he named after Nathan Bedford? I never read the book."
Neither have I, but the prologue of the film makes the association with the dreaded Rebel cavalry leader quite clear.
""A woman of the town plying her vocation." In New Orleans, that's generally the way to bet anyway.
Yes, it is like a Trump tweet.
Chris and I independently thought that seemed like a Trump tweet!
If it was trump tweet it would have ended with "Thank you for your attention to this matter."
I thought of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
"The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion, is a cognitive bias where you suddenly notice something everywhere shortly after learning about it for the first time."
I gather it doesn't apply here, since we are not just 'recently learning' about Trump's rhetorical style? I don't know.
oh why can't we still talk like this?!
It's kind of amazing. Ken Burns' documentary on our civil war consisted largely of reading letters from ordinary people. And everybody is so damn literate.
"Call before you mental vision a sack full of muck...and then imagine four enormous German sausages fixed to the extremities of the sack in lieu of arms and legs."
Dude. I am king of the insults. And I would just keel over and die if somebody said that to me. "You fuck chickens for fun," I would say, and people would boo me for my low vocabulary.
"You fuck chickens for fun." Is there a better reason?
Yes, Forrest Gump is named after the Wizard of the Saddle. The Old South and the burdens of its history are important elements of the story, IMO.
Chris and I independently thought that seemed like a Trump tweet!
Two points:
No such a thing as a tweet existed back in the day and Chris found only one writing that sounded as ugly and narcissistic as a Trump post to X or Truth Social.
And this sentence spoken by Trump, is not a piece of modernist stream-of-consciousness pastiche.
Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
Read it again, "fellas."
That poster reprinting the order was meant as a condemnation of General Butler. Here’s the Lord Palmerston speech that is referenced, which is the source of the “Infamous!” title of the poster:
“Sir, having been appealed to as I have been by my hon Friend, I am quite prepared to say that I think no man could have read the proclamation to which our attention has been drawn without a feeling of the deepest indignation. It is a proclamation to which I do not scruple to attach the epithet infamous. Sir, an Englishman must blush to think that such an act has been committed by one belonging to the Anglo-Saxon race. If it had come from some man belonging to a barbarous race that was not within the pale of civilization, one might have regretted it, but might not have been surprised; but that such an order should have been promulgated by a soldier —by one who has raised himself to the rank of General—is a subject undoubtedly of not less astonishment than pain. Sir, I cannot bring myself to believe but that the Government of the United States, when they had notice of this order, must of their own accord have stamped it with their censure and condemnation. We received yesterday a despatch from Lord Lyons communicating from the American newspapers the paragraph read by the hon. Baronet—namely, the order of General Beauregard animadverting on and giving the text of the proclamation to which reference has been made. There will be no objection to produce that paper. With regard to the course which Her Majesty's Government may upon consideration take on the subject, the House, I trust, will allow me to say, that will be a matter for reflection. I am quite persuaded that there is no man in England who does not share those feelings which have been so well expressed by the hon. Baronet and my hon. Friend.”
I thought at first that the word “animadverting” was a typo, but it’s a bonafide ten-dollar word. Lord Palmerston was prime minister of the UK during our Civil War and Lord Lyons was the UK minister to the U.S. (we didn’t rate an ambassador in those days because we were a Republic).
The poster wasn’t a tweet but a retweet. The capital letters are the work of the retweeter, not the published order.
Jamie said...
Time for me to revisit the 19th century literary oeuvre... So much fun.
Andrew Wareham, writing in the 2020's uses it frequently, but usually in a 19th cent setting.
Looking it up before posting to make sure I had it correct, I find that it is still in use in England but started passing out of widespread use in the 1970s.
But yeah, language is really fun.
John Henry
JAQs project sounds very interesting. Have bios been written for every president? I am guessing yes but it would not surprise me if there were none for some of our more obscure presidents.
John Henry
Amazing, we see Butler’s language identified as Trumpian, and then, just like that, TDS is transferred in whole to Butler, and we use quotes from Jefferson Fucking Davis to support criticism of him in a very personal manner! The people of New Orleans were not resisting the federal government, no, they were just rightfully resisting a Trumpian bag of sausages that was preventing them from having slaves. I have now seen it all, fuckin a man.
Butler became a democrat governor of Massachusetts in 1892 and hired Clara Barton to do prison reform. He was the Hillary Clinton and Fauxahontas of his day. And all good people hate him!
I am astounded.
I was not referring to anyone on this blog in the above comment.
He looks to be about the size of Trump, although Trump has better hair.
I hop Chris will make a blog of the best and worst biographies. If I missed this, sorry. That would make for lively debate. Will he be doing the Robert Caro series? I'm a firm completionist, but even I could take no more.
Ron Chernow's biography of Grant is a fantastic read. I recommend it.
I thought Chernow's Grant was a plod, and quit outside of Vicksburg.
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