USA > Maine > Kennebec County > Waterville > The history of Colby College > Part 17
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Meanwhile Lovejoy had made a decision which was to cause him criticism from many pacifist friends. He had long taken a firm stand against violence in settling personal or public issues. Now he decided to defend his press with arms. With a small band of followers he stood guard over his property in the ware- house.
The mob marched on the warehouse. Someone within the warehouse fired, mortally wounding a member of the mob named Bishop. The mob then brought a ladder and attempted to get incendiary material up to the roof. The man on the ladder was shot down. Meanwhile bullets, brickbats, and flaming torches were rained against the upper rooms where the press was being guarded. When a second attempt was made to use the ladder, Lovejoy and a few friends emerged from the building to force the climber down. A bullet from some unidentified
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gun struck Lovejoy in the chest. Though his friends carried him at once inside the building, he died in a few minutes. Neither side wanted more bloodshed, but the mob did succeed in smashing the press even before the defenders had removed the body of their leader.
Horror and indignation swept the North. If the abolitionist cause needed a cementing factor, here it was. If death at the hands of a pro-slavery mob was to be the end, let men boldly and valiantly confront it. Abolitionists came to be viewed no longer as fanatics, but as crusaders in a sacred cause. But all that took time. Many years would elapse before a little woman in Brunswick, Maine, would write Uncle Tom's Cabin, before John Brown would seize the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, before an Illinois politician would proclaim that the nation could not endure half slave and half free. But the fire of freedom had been kindled on that night of November 7, 1837, beside the Gilman Warehouse in Alton.
Opinion was, however, far from unanimous. The Cincinnati Whig edi- torialized:
Lovejoy, with a fanaticism as inexcusable as it was unaccountable, de- termined to persevere in his purpose, and for the fourth time purchased a printing press. Thus have ended the folly and fanaticism of Rev. E. P. Lovejoy. Deprecating mobs of all kinds, we are nevertheless of the opinion that Lovejoy was himself more to blame than anyone else. He kept the people of Alton in a continual state of excitement, and he must have known that a persistence in his mischievous course would end only in bloodshed.
Of the newspapers which had never supported Lovejoy, it was perhaps the St. Louis Bulletin that more accurately sensed the meaning of the tragedy. It said,
Be the offenses of Lovejoy what they may, even if he has violated every law of the land and outraged every feeling of society, the measure of his punishment has changed the offender to a martyr. The perse- vering, daring sinner has become an apostle of righteousness and a saint.
A hundred years later, when Colby College commemorated Lovejoy's martyrdom with historic ceremonies, a former President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, was the principal speaker. In a memorable address he sum- marized Lovejoy's achievement in these words: "Since his martyrdom no man has openly challenged free speech and free press in America."
Benjamin Franklin Butler was born in Deerfield, N. H., in 1818, the son of a captain in the War of 1812, who became a merchant trader, voyaging to the West Indies and South America, and dying of yellow fever at St. Kitts, before any of his three children had reached their teens. The impoverished mother moved her family to Lowell, where she kept a boardinghouse and received help from the parish of the Rev. Enoch Freeman's Baptist church. Both Freeman and Mrs. Butler hoped that Ben would become a minister.
When Ben was sixteen years old, he persuaded his mother to help him seek a military career. Reluctant as she may have been to abandon her ministerial ambition for her son, Mrs. Butler rounded up references and made a personal appeal to Congressman Caleb Cushing to appoint Ben to West Point. The Congressman coldly informed her that there were no vacancies in his district
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and that he had others on his waiting list. The result is stated bluntly by Butler's biographer, Robert Holzman:
Ben was horribly disappointed, but it taught him something he was never to forget-that political influence is the key to many desirable things. He also acquired a lasting contempt for all those who had attended West Point, a reaction that psychologists could easily explain.ยบ
The Reverend Mr. Freeman assured Mrs. Butler that it was all for the best. Ben could now attend a good Baptist college and become a minister. Expenses were low and instruction was good, said Mr. Freeman, at the Baptist College in Waterville, Maine, where his friend Rufus Babcock had just succeeded Jeremiah Chaplin as president.
When Ben Butler enrolled at Waterville College, in the fall of 1834, he had not quite reached his seventeenth birthday, and he weighed only 92 pounds. When he graduated four years later his weight had still not reached a hundred pounds. Holzman says he was "a smallish youth, infirm in health, of fair com- plexion, with reddish brown hair."
According to Butler's own autobiography, he was a leading college prankster who spent much time trying to outwit the faculty. He told how he had pleaded to be excused from attending chapel on the ground that, since the Calvinist doc- trine of predestination taught that the ratio of the saved to the damned was small, and that certainly the faculty must all be among the saved, his chance of being within the elect was so small that no amount of chapel attendance would do him any good. He boasted that he stole signs and gates, pigs and chickens, tied the clapper of the college bell, escaped expulsion by the skin of his teeth, and declared he received his diploma only because the faculty were glad to get rid of him. According to Ben himself, he was in college the "hell-raiser" his later contemporaries accused him of being in public life. A bit later we shall examine the facts about those college days, but first let us follow Ben through his stormy career.
After a brief period of teaching he became a lawyer in Lowell, served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1853 and in its Senate in 1859-60. In 1861 his military ambition saw initial fulfillment when he was made Brigadier General of Massachusetts Volunteers at the outset of the Civil War by a direct commission from President Lincoln. Made Commander at Fortress Monroe, he at once showed a genius for military organization, making that fort a model for subsequent army units.
After Admiral Farragut had taken New Orleans in 1862, Butler was given the unenviable task of military commander in a captured hostile city. He was determined to exercise the same discipline he had demanded at Fortress Mon- roe. He required a loyalty oath of all citizens who wanted to stay in business, and he ordered several executions. But he kept order in the rebel city. It was the women of New Orleans who gave him most trouble. How should he treat those defiant Confederate females who flagrantly displayed Southern flags in their hats, who haughtily stepped aside, even into the street, when they passed a Federal soldier on the sidewalk? If a Northern soldier entered a church, women would edge away as far as possible, or even get up and leave.
On May 15, 1862, Butler issued what became known as the notorious General Order 12. It read in part:
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As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subjected to repeated insults by the women of New Orleans, who call them- selves ladies, in return for the most scrupulous non-interference on our part, it is ordered that hereafter, when any female shall, by word, gesture or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or sol- dier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.10
That military order appalled not only the Southern gentry, arousing their historic chivalry, but it also antagonized the foreign consuls in New Orleans and the Episcopal clergy, who had earlier taken a conciliatory attitude toward the Union occupation. Butler was so blunt in both speech and action that he ap- peared to the New Orleans aristocracy as an inhumane tyrant. As Holzman says, "Any man in his position would have been unpopular, but his personality magnified his shortcomings, real or imaginary."11
When Butler moved from the St. Charles Hotel to a private residence, he selected the mansion of Confederate General Twigg. This gave rise to a story that pursued Butler all his life-that he had stolen silver spoons from the Twigg house, and indeed from other New Orleans homes. So to the soubriquet "Beast Butler" which the military executions had earned him was added "Spoons But- ler."
Historians agree that Ben Butler was a brilliant military commander. A keen strategist, he helped plan many successful campaigns. They agree also that he was unswervingly loyal to the Union, although his personal loyalty to President Lincoln has been questioned. Despite his bluntness and his sternness, Butler was a leader of men. On the Union side two men peculiarly held the devotion of their troops, George Mcclellan and Ben Butler, and both had political ambition.
There is considerable evidence that Butler was not in favor of Lincoln's reelection in 1864, and that for a time he considered coming out openly for Mclellan. Several historians, including Carl Sandburg, accept the statement which appears in Butler's published correspondence that Lincoln actually of- fered the vice-presidency to Butler at that time, as a means of assuring that Butler should not go over into the Mclellan camp. But the great historian Randall doubts very much the truth of that assertion. He found no evidence whatever for it except Butler's own unsupported word. Randall does contend, however, that Butler had a leading part in the shelving of Hannibal Hamlin and the nomination of Andrew Johnson as Lincoln's running mate.
After Lincoln's assassination and the end of the war, Butler may have re- gretted his earlier support of Johnson. He regarded the new President's continua- tion of Lincoln's policy of conciliation as weak and stupid. The South was beaten; let her now be crushed never to rise again. A tough policy was all that would satisfy tough Ben Butler. Elected to Congress in 1866, Butler became the leader of the radical anti-Johnson faction. In 1868 he threw all his energies into the impeachment trial, and opened that trial with a four-hour speech. Deeply disappointed, when the Senate failed to convict the President, the General de- cided to become a candidate for President himself. Still identified with the Re- publican Party, which he had come near to deserting in favor of his fellow general, George Mclellan, he soon had the political sense to see that no one stood any chance against the great popularity of General Grant. Suddenly Butler switched his own supporters to Grant, with the result that, when Grant became
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President, Ben became the dispenser of patronage in Massachusetts, what Holz- man calls "an autocrat in the Massachusetts political sphere."
During his eleven years in Congress Butler had become interested in the currency question. Back in his home state, he became New England's best known opponent of the return to specie payments. The Redemption Act of 1875 promised that beginning on January 1, 1879, the Treasury would redeem in gold any greenbacks that were presented for redemption. Butler joined the Greenback party, which advocated the issuance of fiat money-treasury notes put out without even the promise to pay in gold and silver.
Butler, who had now been a Republican, a Greenback, and a Republican again, renounced the Republican party in 1880, and avowed allegiance to the Democrats. With their nomination he won the governorship of Massachusetts in 1881.
Ever since Harvard had possessed the authority to confer honorary de- grees, its Doctor of Laws had been bestowed upon the Governor of Massachu- setts. But the University refused so to honor Governor Butler. One of Butler's accusations concerning the Tewksbury asylum had been that it handed over bodies, even dug them up from its cemetery, for the Harvard Medical School.
Butler was defeated for reelection in 1882, but four years later he made another sortie into the political arena. He accepted the nomination of the Green- back party for President of the United States. In 1880 that party had polled 300,000 votes, but in 1884 Butler got only 125,000, fewer even than those of the Prohibition candidate.
In 1889 the stormy figure who had graduated 51 years before came to Waterville and addressed the alumni of his alma mater. He chose for his topic "Union of the English Speaking Peoples," proposing that a political union be established, with Great Britain, Canada and the United States as its members. Thus Clarence Streit's . "Union Now" was anticipated by nearly half a century. The idea in 1889 was just as fantastic as Butler's greenbacks had been in 1879. Ben Butler was a man of unpredictable causes.
A comprehensive analysis of this puzzling figure in American history has been made by Holzman.
Ben Butler had the attributes that should have made him one of the greatest American heroes. He was a conspicuous success at law, busi- ness and politics, and as a military commander he was unsurpassed. He was a dauntless fighter, usually against tremendous odds. ... Why has he not survived as a truly great American? The answer is that, with all of his merits, he had more than his share of demerits. . . . In addi- tion to taking a strong personal position on every question, Butler of- fended people readily. ... He antagonized by his very manner. He laid himself open to attack by his disregard of red tape. His whole person breathed contention and effrontery. He was a vindictive fighter. . . . In everything he was an opportunist. He did not tie himself to permanent principles, nor was he bound by issues. . There is no scintilla of evidence that he profited personally from government opera- tions. Though he died worth seven million dollars, no one could prove that a penny of it had been secured dishonestly. ... Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was the ability to get things done. When something had to be done, Butler was the man to do it. If one's country is engaged in a great war, it is comforting to know that a Butler might be found, who could fight to win and no questions asked.12
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All that we have so far recounted about General Benjamin F. Butler can be found in previous publications; in his own autobiography published in 1892, in the five volumes of his official correspondence during the Civil War, in Bland's biography of 1879, and in Holzman's newer and more careful biography of 1954. Magazine articles and newspaper clippings about the man would fill a big barrel. There is one thing, however, that can be added in this chapter of the history of Ben Butler's college. What kind of person was he during the four years of his college course?
Public information about Ben Butler during his college years comes chiefly from his own pen. Admittedly he was an aged man when his autobiography called Butler's Book came from the press of A. M. Thayer and Company in Bos- ton in 1892. Possibly time had erased some memories, enhanced others, and even caused a few figments of imagination now to appear as historical fact. Whit- temore says nothing about Butler as a student except that he made chairs in the workshop.13
The one college episode which the autobiography discusses at length is his attempt to be excused from chapel attendance. He says,
I therefore sent a petition to the President, couched in the most modest and most carefully chosen language I could command. It was easy to foresee the result of addressing such a paper to a conscientious body of men thoroughly imbued with the belief that what I claimed was little if any short of blasphemy.14
At that time the records of the faculty, called the Executive Government of the College, were carefully kept. Whenever a petition reached them-and the President was required by regulations of the Trustees to lay all such papers before the assembled group-the substance of the petition and sometimes even its complete text was placed in the record. Between 1834 and 1838, when Ben Butler was one of its students, no such petition as the autobiography described is mentioned. It made a neat story to tell more than fifty years later, when an old statesman of many a stormy political scene was writing his reminiscences. Perhaps something like it may have happened, but so complete are the faculty records on other matters that we must register an honest doubt.
So persistent was the legend of Ben Butler as a campus prankster that as late as 1957, when Lloyd C. M. Hare wrote a long article on the General for the Vineyard Gazette of Vineyard Haven, Mass.,15 he presented as authentic fact that Butler was the leader of a group of 'juvenile delinquents' who harassed the faculty.
They burned lamps late in the night, and toiled diligently to think of questions and answers with which to confound the tutors, and were eminently successful in producing chaos in the temples of petrified learn- ing. For their pains they were dubbed blasphemous. The faculty had its small measure of revenge. Ben's scholastic standing was drastically reduced by a system of demerits dispensed for each saucy rebuttal. The lad's lean pocketbook was sadly nicked by repeated fines of ten cents each time he refused to attend prayers and sermons. When Ben graduated in 1838, the faculty was glad to see him go.
In 1900 the Boston Globe said:
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Ben Butler was a rowdy in college. Nothing was better suited to his nature than to be engaged in some brawl or up to some trick on a poor theologue. He bade blasphemous defiance to law, order, and the rules of the college. He tried to become president of one of the literary so- cieties. The mere mention of his name in such a connection so shocked the ears of the members that he met with signal defeat. Over and over again he tried his best to get the office, and over and over again he was defeated.
Even a graduate of Colby who signed himself "Eighty Blank," who had heard Butler's English Union address in 1889, went so far as to think that Butler did not even graduate from the College. He wrote:
Some of Butler's biographers state that he was graduated in the Class of 1838, but when I was a student at Colby we were told, when dis- tinguished alumni were mentioned, that Benjamin Butler had left col- lege before graduation, and we always inferred that his leaving was not of his own volition, as many escapades while he was in college were a matter of tradition, and were well known to all of us.
What are the facts which confront this very substantial tradition? What do the official records of Colby College have to say about Benjamin F. Butler of the Class of 1838?
Whenever a student was disciplined, by reprimand or fine or suspension, the fact was recorded in the faculty minutes. Numerous are such records be- tween 1834 and 1838. During those years Asa M. was censured for "violating the college laws by disorderly conduct in his room." William R. was "rusticated" to the care of a minister in Cherryfield. George A. was "put on special probation for idleness in attention to college duties." Walter J. was "expelled for neglect of study and immoral conduct." E. and C. were "put on special probation for repeated insulting disturbances in their room." Henry K. was required to "make confession before his class of the impropriety of his conduct in reading a certain composition on Monday the 24th instant, and must promise to give strict obe- dience to the college laws hereafter." Not a week went by without several stu- dents receiving fines of six and a quarter, twelve and a half, or twenty-five cents. During all this time, on all the pages of the record, the name of Benjamin F. Butler is never found as an object of discipline. In 1834-35 there are just two references to this student. On February 18, 1835, it was voted that "Freshman Butler be excused from absence till the eleventh of the month." When the col- lege year ended, the faculty on August 1 listed among those to be advanced to sophomore standing Benjamin F. Butler.
In 1837 Ben was assigned and satisfactorily performed a part in the annual exhibition. When the spring term started in March of his senior year, the faculty granted him an extension of two weeks to the already long winter vacation, in order that he might complete his engagement to teach a rural school. At the Commencement in 1838, he delivered his part in the graduation program at the Baptist church and received his diploma.
One who reads of Butler's many alleged escapades may suspect that he was just too clever to get caught, that the faculty records mention no disciplinary action against the fellow because he always kept one jump ahead of the authorities. But such a conclusion is unlikely. In those days, a tutor (we would now call him an instructor) lived in each of the two dormitories with the students. Dur-
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ing Butler's four years in college the total number of students did not exceed 70, including those who commuted. Furthermore, those tutors were young men who had themselves been students in the same college not more than two or three years earlier. They knew from recent and intimate experiences the ways of college boys. Ben Butler might have deceived the older professors, but it could hardly have pulled the wool over the sharp eyes and ready ears of Tutor Randall and Tutor Lamson.
So much for the negative evidence. Like all such negations, it is of course only indicative and proves nothing. Fortunately more positive evidence cor- roborates the assumption made from a perusal of the faculty records. That evidence is found in the records of the Erosophian Adelphi, the college literary society to which Butler belonged. This society was organized in 1835, and the third name on its list of members was Benjamin F. Butler. In March, 1836, when he was only a sophomore, Ben was elected lector of the society, in which capacity it was his duty to read what were called the anonymous contributions, about which we shall have more to say in the chapter on fraternities. This fellow, whom tradition pictures as a constant prankster without a serious thought, urged the Erosophians to obtain a locked box for the preservation of their records, and he was himself commissioned to carry out the project. It is interesting to note, a hundred and twenty years later, that, while many records of the early days have been lost, those of the Erosophian Adelphi have been preserved intact from the first meeting to the last.
In May of his sophomore year, Butler participated in the society's debate, defending the negative on the question, Does the manner of an orator's delivery exert more influence than the composition of his discourse? The next month he was on the winning affirmative side of the question, Ought the bodies of any persons except criminals be given up by the law for dissection by medical stu- dents? This is especially interesting in light of his attack more than forty years later on the authorities at the Tewksbury Asylum for doing the very thing he defended in that 1836 debate.
It is clear that, before he reached his junior year in college, the small hundred pound Ben Butler was already recognized by his fellow students as a serious and responsible leader. In June, 1836, he persuaded the Erosophians to open their library to any member of the college on payment of an annual fee of two dollars. Disgusted at the practice of members leaving during a meeting, Butler secured a vote of the Erosophians that the roll be called at the close as well as the opening of each meeting, and that members absent at either roll call be fined. That motion was made by the young man who was supposed to be the very sort who would be most adept at skipping out of meetings.
In November, 1836, Butler read before the society an essay on Politeness. In the following October he lectured before the society on the subject of Chem- istry, on the same occasion presenting to the Erosophian library a book on Animal Magnetism.
On April 4, 1838, only five months after Elijah Lovejoy had met death at the hands of the Alton mob, the Erosophians debated the question, Was the course pursued by the Rev. Mr. Lovejoy at Alton right and expedient? Ben Butler took the affirmative and won by a very close margin, eleven to ten. So divided was the opinion about Lovejoy's action throughout New England at the time that even in his own college, one of the societies could muster almost a ma- jority to disapprove his course.
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