The volcano erupts
Ben Butler in uniform. Library of Congress photo.
In a scandal featuring personalities Oakes Ames himself said were perceived as “scoundrels and swindlers,” perhaps it was inevitable that Ben Butler would get involved.
As Congress weighed what to do about the Credit Mobilier scandal in the early months of 1873, the Massachusetts Republican emerged as Ames’s chief defender in the House.
With the possible exception of Sen. Roscoe Conkling of New York, few figures on Capitol Hill were more controversial, colorful – or unusual. A droopy eye, receding hairline and prodigious paunch gave Butler a decidedly un-heroic appearance. One observer likened his gait to a “bass walking on its tail.” He often wrapped himself in a cape as he strode onto the House floor.
Despite — or perhaps because of — his idiosyncrasies, Butler was a valuable ally for the embattled Ames. After weeks of hearings and testimony, a House investigative committee led by Luke Potter Poland of Vermont called for the expulsion of Ames and Representative James Brooks of New York for their role in the scandal involving the lucrative construction subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad.
Butler seemed attracted to controversy much as a moth is drawn to flame. In 1860, he was a Democrat who attended the party’s convention in Charleston and supported the nomination of a Mississippi senator named Jefferson Davis. After the fall of Fort Sumter, he rallied to the Stars and Stripes and rose to become one of Lincoln’s “political generals” – officers who earned their rank through clout or influence rather than merit.
Butler was widely regarded – particularly below the Mason-Dixon Line – as a villain and a thief. As the Union commander in New Orleans, he enraged Confederates for ordering that any woman who showed contempt to occupying U.S. soldiers was to be “treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” His brother “was getting rich on confiscated cotton,” Shelby Foote writes, and Butler received the nickname “Spoons” for his alleged habit of pilfering silverware.
But the South had another reason for hating him. In the early days of the war he refused to return runaway slaves to their former owners. Butler declared they were “contraband of war” and allowed them to remain behind Northern lines. Congress endorsed the policy – “a signal,” James McPherson notes, “that if the conflict became an antislavery war it would become a Republican war.”
After the war, he became a leading Radical Republican who led the unsuccessful efforts to impeach President Andrew Johnson. In February, 1873 he rallied to the defense of Ames.
[image error]
Representative Oakes Ames. Library of Congress photo.
Butler spokes on Ames’s behalf during the second day of the expulsion debate. His much-anticipated speech packed the House gallery. “Gen. Butler was not eloquent, but he was savage – as savage as a meat ax,” Representative Julian Burrows would recall after Butler’s death in 1893. “It was not what he said that made the House listen to him, but the expectation of what he was going to say. He was like a volcano – always smoking and always giving a hint of an impending eruption.”
Butler offered a characteristically impassioned defense of his Massachusetts colleague. Ames was not a scoundrel, but a hero whose support of the Union Pacific warranted praise, not condemnation. His transactions with his colleagues were not bribes but business deals. The whole controversy, Butler declared, was concocted by scurrilous newspaper reporters and their editors who acted as if they, not the elected representatives of the people, understood best what Congress should do.
Butler’s “eruption,” to employ Burrow’s simile, played well in the House, where lawmakers were already inclined not to expel Ames or Brooks. “Everybody hung intently on his words,” the New York Tribune reported. “He made his hearers shout with laughter.”
In the end, the House voted to censure Ames rather than expel him. Butler, however, was not done. He succeeded in getting Congress to pass a retroactive pay raise at the end of the session. The ill-advised measure proved politically toxic and became, with Credit Mobilier and the aftershocks of a brutal stock market crash in September, 1873, another political liability for congressional Republicans.
In 1874, voters rendered their verdict on Credit Mobilier, the economy, and what became known as the “salary grab” when Democrats went from a 110-seat minority in the House to a 60-seat majority. It was the biggest partisan swing of the nineteenth century – and one of the Republicans who went down to defeat was Butler.
—
[image error]Order your copy of Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age at amazon.com.
div.wpmrec2x{max-width:610px;}
div.wpmrec2x div.u > div{float:left;margin-right:10px;}
div.wpmrec2x div.u > div:nth-child(3n){margin-right:0px;}
Advertisements
