Originally posted April 27, 2012 in The Immigrants’ Civil War
General Benjamin Franklin Butler may have been the third most hated man in the Confederacy. After Abraham Lincoln and William T. Sherman, Butler was reviled more than any other Union leader. While he is little known today outside the world of military historians, he was once internationally famous as “The Beast Butler.” He was also the man most responsible for winning New Orleans’ immigrants over to the Union side in the Civil War.
General Ben Butler was not a West Point graduate. In fact, before the Civil War he was not even a soldier. Yet within a year of the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, he would be a major general commanding a large Union army in one of the most successful operations of the war. What made Butler a key to converting New Orleans from the first city of the Confederacy to a Union stronghold wasn’t his knowledge of military science, which was virtually non-existent, but rather the tactics he learned as a Democratic street politician…