A Yankee Regiment in Confederate Louisiana

The 31st Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in the Gulf South

Larry Lowenthal

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807172490
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The 31st Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment was one of only a handful of New England units to serve in Louisiana and the Gulf region during the Civil War, and, of those, it remained there the longest. Its soldiers, most of whom were impressionable young men from small towns in central and western Massachusetts, assumed numerous roles, functioning as infantry, cavalry, and mounted infantry when needed. The regiment operated as an army of occupation; participated in siege warfare at Port Hudson, Louisiana; marched and fought in long field operations such as the Red River campaign; engaged in guerrilla warfare; and garrisoned coastal defense fortifications. It also had the distinction of being the first Federal unit to enter and occupy New Orleans.

Larry Lowenthal's authoritative history of the 31st is the first comprehensive examination of this remarkable regiment and its men. When veterans of the unit attempted to write its history in the late nineteenth century, they were not able to complete the task, but they did collect a large quantity of primary-source materials and deposited them in a Springfield, Massachusetts, museum. Lowenthal's work draws heavily from that unpublished cache. Among the documents are highly personal letters, diaries, and first-person recollections that offer vivid and unrivaled accounts of the unit's military experiences, as well as its soldiers' impressions of the people and physical conditions they encountered in Louisiana. The men also offer their unvarnished opinions on a variety of subjects.

Lowenthal, a longtime historian and former U.S. National Park Service employee, relays many of the stories in the soldiers' own words. Their impressions of the South—which they viewed as essentially a foreign country—are highly revealing. Critical issues such as slavery and abolition, as well as more private matters such as personal experiences and military life, are also discussed. To all of this, Lowenthal brings a modern perspective, presenting a crucial picture of the period's people and their views of the South and active military life. A Yankee Regiment in Confederate Louisiana is a welcome addition to the literature on occupied Louisiana and the Union Army's service in the Gulf South.

1

BORN IN CONTROVERSY

1861–FEBRUARY 1862

In the fall of 1861, Benjamin Franklin Butler, having not yet acquired his unforgettable and indelible nickname “The Beast,” was busy recruiting New England men to serve in the Union army. This was the gestation period of the 31st Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a time of troubles and portents that shaped the unit throughout its service. True, numerical inevitability dictated that there would be a thirty-first regiment, if only to fill the space between thirty and thirty-two, but the character the 31st displayed during its existence was largely determined by Butler. He was its sire, and although his direct involvement with it lasted not much more than a year, its history cannot be understood without examining this remarkable man.

We often find that the controversies that surround a person during his lifetime are carried forward by historians—one hopes in a more thoughtful form. Butler attracted controversy as a warm body draws mosquitoes, so it is not surprising that scholarly disputes about his career continue to rage. In an age of outsized, wildly individualistic personalities for whom pride was by no means a sin, Butler still stands out. He was born in the rustic New Hampshire village of Deerfield on November 5, 1818, of distant Irish ancestry, presumably a descendant of the powerful Norman-Irish Butler family.¹ His father, John, was obviously a hero worshipper. When his first son, Andrew Jackson Butler, was born in 1815, the child’s namesake was famous primarily for his victory at the Battle of New Orleans in that year; his terms as a president who profoundly remade the American political system could hardly be predicted. But it was John’s next son who, like Jackson, turned out to be both a democrat in his public philosophy and a partisan Democrat in his political career, craving too the military glory Jackson had obtained.

Like his own distinguished namesake, Benjamin Franklin Butler had to climb a steep uphill path in order to advance in life. His deficiencies in wealth and family background were not compensated by a commanding physical presence, eventually standing only five feet, four inches tall (though his shortness was mostly in the legs). In addition, he had unusual red hair, a squeaky voice, and a lazy eye, which made it difficult to tell where he was looking or what he was seeing. His father had served courageously in the War of 1812, which is why he considered General Jackson a model, but he perished under obscure circumstances as captain of a privateer in the West Indies when Ben was only a few months old. Probably with some assistance from relatives, Ben’s mother supported the family. Her struggle undoubtedly gave her son a lasting appreciation of the difficulties confronting women in nineteenth-century society.

Pitted against massive disadvantages, Ben Butler arrayed a powerful intellect driven by irrepressible ambition. Whether or not his mother’s intention, when she moved the family to Lowell, Massachusetts, to operate a boarding house, it opened up limitless opportunities for her younger son. Lowell, on the Merrimack River, had been created as a planned city only a few years before by some of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts, who proposed to manufacture cloth using advanced concepts of technology, management, and capitalization. Sending Ben off to school, his mother hoped that he would become a minister, but it soon became apparent that he was unsuited by intellect and temperament for that profession. His dearest goal was to enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, but his family lacked the necessary influence, so he was not nominated, a rejection that left enduring resentment.² Upon observing lawyers at work, however, he instantly recognized the calling that would make the fullest use of his wide-ranging abilities.

After passing his bar exam in 1840, Butler rapidly built up one of the most successful practices in Massachusetts, specializing in the combative field of criminal law. This newfound prosperity enabled him to court and, after some delays and setbacks, to marry Sarah Hildreth. Based on their extensive correspondence, the two were a devoted, caring couple. Sarah was a well-traveled actress, intelligent, and self-confident; she did not hesitate to express her opinions. It was an intensely emotional relationship, and their complaints about missing each other when they were apart seem to reach beyond conventional courtesy. The marriage sustained Ben through his incessant struggles, and, although he was accused of many failings, infidelity was never one of them.

It was expected that a lawyer as conspicuous as Butler would enter politics. In his political orientation, true to his working-class, Jacksonian origins, he gravitated naturally to the Democrats, although the party was generally a minority in his home state. He appears as a delegate to the Democratic national convention in 1844, the year of his marriage. It was probably the last fluid period in the American party structure, after which the deepening sectional discord created an overwrought atmosphere, inflamed by fiery stump speeches. It was not a setting that was designed to restrain Butler’s passionate nature.

At the same time, Butler was actively pursuing his military ambitions, which his failure to enter West Point had only strengthened. Once the Civil War began, he was classified as a “political” general, indeed, almost a prototype of that disdained species. But this is a misreading of his history. While still studying for the bar exam, Butler had already marched the first steps on a military career, enlisting in a militia company formed in Lowell in 1839. He joined as a private, hoping to learn the profession from the ground up. In the years that followed, Butler worked his way up the ranks, “never attempting to pass a grade without filling a position in due order of promotion,” until finally elected colonel of his regiment.³

Butler’s unfailing common touch earned him the loyalty of the men he commanded. On one memorable occasion this brought him into sharp conflict with a newly elected governor. A member of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party that briefly dominated Massachusetts politics, the governor ordered him to disband a company made up of Irish Catholic Democrats; Butler refused. The governor seemingly won this confrontation by reorganizing the entire state militia to deprive him of command, but Butler, in a characteristically adroit flanking maneuver, positioned himself to be elected by the officers to fill a vacant brigadier-general position.⁴ As a result of skill and persistence over twenty years, Butler was one of the highest-ranking officers in the Massachusetts militia when the crisis of 1860 exploded. His probing intellect had probably led him to read at least as much military theory as officers in the regular army, and he was thoroughly familiar with military organization. Because the U.S. Army was small and scattered, most of its officers had not had the opportunity to command large bodies of men in maneuver. As Butler later wrote, by encamping with his brigade in the years 1857 through 1860, he “had commanded a larger body of troops, duly uniformed and equipped, than any general of the United States army then living except General [Winfield] Scott.”⁵ Yet since the state militias were voluntary, largely social organizations, their drills and training were often farcical. The important advantage that regular officers had over men like Butler, and which they never tired of flaunting, was that most had experienced combat during the Mexican War (1846–48), even if only at the company or regimental level.

As the country spun down the vortex of disintegration in 1860, Butler was swept along. Outside of the formal but increasingly shaky structure of the federal government, the Democratic Party was nearly the last institution holding the country together. Even religious denominations had divided. Butler went to the national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, in April as a delegate pledged to support Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois for the presidency. As it became apparent that Douglas could not prevail, Butler switched his vote to former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis of Mississippi on the grounds that the Southerner was a moderate who could hold the sections together. As the voting dragged on without resolution, Butler cast fifty-seven futile ballots for the Mississippian.⁶ Afterward, in the general election that followed, he ran for Massachusetts governor as a Democrat on a ticket backing Kentucky aristocrat John C. Breckinridge, the sitting vice president. Having antagonized most segments of his party, Butler received less than 4 percent of the vote. In normal times such a humiliating repudiation might have spelled the end of any political aspirations, but by then his attention was focused elsewhere. According to one of his modern biographers, Butler foresaw that the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, would win against divided opposition, after which some Southern states would try to secede from the Union. This would inevitably create the opportunity for the military glory he craved.⁷

Early in 1861, as the country faced its greatest crisis, Butler stood on the threshold of fame. Previously little known outside his home state, he was about to become a national figure, which meant that the controversy that always seemed to surround him would expand greatly in scope. Butler was one of those people who are best defined by examining the enemies he accumulated—in his case a diverse aggregation. What accounted for this assembly of animosity? Among his law colleagues there was the usual resentment of success, but beyond that many felt that Butler used sharp and unscrupulous tactics to win release for defendants who seemed obviously guilty. Moreover, he often did nothing to preserve the dignity of those he had outwitted. Having achieved financial success, he purchased a mill in Lowell, but his continued public expressions of support for the workers offended his wealthy fellows. Nativists, still numerous despite the fading of the Know-Nothings, objected to his ties to Irish Catholics. His opportunistic shifts at the 1860 convention had alienated most of the state’s Democrats, while the rising Republicans had no use for him. Once the war began, Butler created a whole new legion of enemies among regular-army officers, who despised him for pretending to know the secrets of their esoteric profession and for his scorn for the forms and regulations that governed their existence. In battle, where the first response of someone like Ulysses Grant or Braxton Bragg was usually a frontal assault, Butler was always looking for a clever flanking approach, much as he had done in his law practice. He also displayed his emotions like a badge, was often immoderate in his opinions, did not try to conceal his intelligence, and wore out associates with his abundant energy. Everything about Butler made it difficult for others to view him dispassionately. At the start of 1861, probably no one imagined that Massachusetts would ever have need for volunteer regiments numbered as high as thirty-one. But when that eventuality came to pass, those volunteers, often unsuspecting, picked up the long baggage train that Benjamin Butler had accumulated in his lifetime.

Butler’s experience at the national conventions had probably given him a clearer sense of where the country was heading than his more provincial colleagues. The Massachusetts militia had a reputation of being better prepared than its counterparts in other Northern states, but they were essentially parade-ground soldiers, by no means ready for battle. Butler understood the urgency of weeding out those who were physically or politically unfit for service and equipping the remainder for serious duty. In the first days of 1861, he called on newly elected Republican governor John Albion Andrew to advocate his case. The tortured relationship of these two men colored the wartime history of Massachusetts and left an indelible imprint on the 31st Massachusetts.

Superficially, Andrew and Butler had much in common. They were the same age and had both been admitted to the bar in 1840. Both came from the periphery: Butler from rural New Hampshire and Andrew from a small town in Maine (still part of Massachusetts when he was born). With the exception of John Butler’s military reputation, neither family was distinguished or prosperous. As members of the relatively small legal fraternity, the two men were acquainted, but, with their oversize egos and opposing political viewpoints, the outlook for harmony was unpromising. Andrew was not only a Republican but also a “radical,” the most dedicated abolitionist of any of the wartime Northern governors. Andrew accepted the need to prepare the militia for sterner duties; he was less sure about how much of this effort to entrust to his former gubernatorial rival. Meanwhile, Butler secured a contract for his mill to manufacture overcoats for the soldiers. He maintained that troops on active duty would require sturdier uniforms than those used for militia drills, but his critics saw this as exploiting the crisis for his own financial gain.⁸ Probably both statements were correct, but it furnished another example of the di...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. BORN IN CONTROVERSY: 1861–February 1862
• 2. A PERILOUS JOURNEY: February–April 1862
• 3. ON THE MISSISSIPPI: April–May 1862
• 4. THE OCCUPATION OF NEW ORLEANS: May–August 1862
• 5. A REGIMENT DIVIDED: August–December 1862
• 6. A DEVIOUS ROUTE TO PORT HUDSON: January–May 1863
• 7. THE ATTACK ON PORT HUDSON: May–July 1863
• 8. MOUNTED WARRIORS: July 1863–February 1864
• 9. THE RED RIVER CAMPAIGN: February–June 1864
• 10. THE RED RIVER BLAME GAME: December 1864–March 1865
• 11. GUERILLA WARFARE: June 1864–February 1865
• 12. MOBILE AND HOME: March–October 1865
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX