SOUTHERN HERO: MATTHEW CALBRAITH BUTLER, CONFEDERATE GENERAL, HAMPTON RED SHIRT, AND U.S. SENATOR

by Samuel J. Martin

As a member of a distinguished South Carolina family, Matthew Calbraith Butler led a most interesting life. His cavalry service during the Civil War saw him rise from regimental captain to major general in command of a division. He began the war with Jeb Stuart and participated in all of his early campaigns. Butler was wounded in the battle at Brandy Station and lost his foot as a result, but he returned to duty and the battles outside of Richmond in 1864, then hurried South to resist Sherman's advance into South Carolina. Unlike many other Confederate generals, Butler remained influential after the War. He served in the U.S. Senate for eighteen years, oversaw the end of Reconstruction in South Carolina, and was a major general during the Spanish-American War.

Genres: Civil War, History

416 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2001

Reviews

[Sean Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This a good biography of a long, varied, and controversial life. It has three parts: war, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age politics. In the Civil War he was an optimal cavalry commander, among the best to lead a division. Reconsecration and politics make up much of the book and Martin takes a decidedly hard-nosed and realistic position on the era which I generally liked. It also showed why Hampton's biracial coalition in South Carolina exploded. As to Butler, he is a complicated figure in so far as he could take surprising turns. A white supremacist, he was also politically more flexible than Martin Gary and believed blacks should go back to Africa because their was no way whites would ever truly embrace them, making him more a pessimist than anything else. As a Gilded Age senator he was seemingly one of the more decent ones, which might speak more to the era's low bar in that regard.