The Butlers of Iberville Parish, Louisiana

Dunboyne Plantation in the 1800s

David D. Plater

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780807161289
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807161302
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1833, Edward G. W. and Frances Parke Butler moved to their newly constructed plantation house, Dunboyne, on the banks of the Mississippi River near the village of Bayou Goula. Their experiences at Dunboyne over the next forty years demonstrated the transformations that many land-owning southerners faced in the nineteenth century, from the evolution of agricultural practices and commerce, to the destruction wrought by the Civil War and the transition from slave to free labor, and finally to the social, political, and economic upheavals of Reconstruction. In this comprehensive biography of the Butlers, David D. Plater explores the remarkable lives of a Louisiana family during one of the most tumultuous periods in American history.Born in Tennessee to a celebrated veteran of the American Revolution, Edward Butler pursued a military career under the mentorship of his guardian, Andrew Jackson, and, during a posting in Washington, D.C., met and married a grand-niece of George Washington, Frances Parke Lewis. In 1831, he resigned his commission and relocated Frances and their young son to Iberville Parish, where the couple began a sugar cane plantation. As their land holdings grew, they amassed more enslaved laborers and improved their social prominence in Louisiana's antebellum society.A staunch opponent of abolition, Butler voted in favor of Louisiana's withdrawal from the Union at the state's Secession Convention. But his actions proved costly when the war cut off agricultural markets and all but destroyed the state's plantation economy, leaving the Butlers in financial ruin. In 1870, with their plantation and finances in disarray, the Butlers sold Dunboyne and resettled in Pass Christian, Mississippi, where they resided in a rental cottage with the financial support of Edward J. Gay, a wealthy Iberville planter and their daughter-in-law's father. After Frances died in 1875, Edward Butler moved in with his son's family in St. Louis, where he remained until his death in 1888. Based on voluminous primary source material, The Butlers of Iberville Parish, Louisiana offers an intimate picture of a wealthy nineteenth-century family and the turmoil they faced as a system based on the enslavement of others unraveled.

1

Edward G. W. Butler

The New Soldier, 1816–1822

The father of Edward George Washington Butler was Edward Butler. Born in 1762 and having served in the American Revolution, by the late 1790s he was a captain in the U.S. Army stationed in Tennessee. Captain Butler led a modest number of troops who manned Tellico Block House, a fortified frontier “factory,” or trading seat, in East Tennessee. Tellico was designated by President Washington as one of many such posts to serve as places where inexpensive goods could be exchanged for furs and other items originating with nearby Indians. Captain Butler, his wife, Isabella, and their two daughters celebrated the birth of a son on February 22, 1800. At the time, the post commander was conducting a review of troops on the small parade ground. In order to commemorate George Washington’s birthday following the former president’s death the previous December, such formalities were required by Commander in Chief General Alexander Hamilton at all military outposts. When he arrived home after the ceremony to find a newborn son, Captain Butler named him George Washington in honor of the revered hero. The infant’s mother, however, insisted on the first name Edward. Thus did the child receive his full name, Edward George Washington Butler.¹

Captain Butler was the youngest of five sons born to the Irish immigrant Thomas Butler, who became a prominent gunsmith in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, during the mid-eighteenth century. All sons of Thomas Butler received commissions in the Continental Army, Edward Butler joining in 1777 or 1778 at the age of sixteen. He rose from the rank of ensign to lieutenant while serving under his eldest brother, Colonel Richard Butler, in the 9th, 5th, and 3rd Pennsylvania Regiments. On July 14, 1788, Edward Butler married Isabella Fowler, a daughter of British Grenadier Captain George Fowler, who had fought against American colonists at Bunker Hill. Their union produced Caroline Swanwick Butler (b. 1789) and Eliza Eleanor Butler (b. 1790). When war with the Indians in the Northwest Territory broke out in 1790, young Butler returned to army duty. He won distinction and served as adjutant general to General Anthony Wayne. Butler was part of a force of the army’s 4th Regiment sent to Tennessee from Fort Washington at Cincinnati under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Butler Jr., another brother. Headquartered at Fort Southwest Point near presentday Kingston and the Tellico Block House, Thomas Butler Jr. protected the Cherokee Indians from encroachment by white settlers. He accompanied commissioners officially charged with establishing the boundary between the Cherokees and the State of Tennessee. Numerous settlers already were trespassing on Indian land, and the army commenced their removal following the boundary survey. Strong public opposition in Tennessee to the military enforcement of the boundary, however, led to the Tellico Treaty of 1798, which returned many homesteads to the former settlers. The newly established boundary separated the Indians’ territory from that of the state. Appointed by his brother Thomas to be a U.S. commissioner, Captain Butler assisted in marking the new treaty boundary.²

Because its need to police the Indian boundary with Tennessee was minimized by the Tellico Treaty of 1798, Captain Butler’s 4th Regiment was discharged in 1802, and he was transferred to the 2nd Infantry Regiment. He now was weary of military life and of the frustrations of having to protect Indians whose boundaries whites continued to disregard. Captain Butler bought land located on the south side of Sulphur Fork of the Red River in Robertson County, Tennessee. He moved his family, which included a second son born in 1802 and named Anthony Wayne Butler, after Captain Butler’s former commanding general. The new home, christened Bellville, was constructed near Springfield, the Robertson County seat of government, just north of Nashville.

Among the friends of both Captain Edward Butler and Colonel Thomas Butler Jr. was Andrew Jackson. While a U.S. senator, Jackson criticized what he initially considered the overly zealous efforts of the army (and Colonel Butler) to safeguard the interests of the Cherokees, but he had become a family friend by the time Edward Butler moved to Tennessee. Soon after Butler received permission to establish a grist mill, he died on May 6, 1803. Left with four children and no nearby relatives to assist, his widow, Isabella, turned for help to Andrew Jackson, pleading for him to become the guardian of her two daughters and two sons. Jackson consented, promptly deposited a bond of $8,000, and received appointment as “Guardian for the Orphan children of Captn Edward Butler Decd.”³

For most of the remainder of his youth, Edward G. W. Butler spent his out-of-school time at the home of Rachel and Andrew Jackson. A visitor in 1815 described it as “a roomy log-house,” in front of which “was a grove of fine forest trees,” with Jackson’s “cotton and grain fields” to the rear. For the rest of their lives, the Jacksons remained devoted to all four Butler children, often advising and sheltering them. Rachel Jackson’s Donelson family was joined in marriage to Butler’s sister Eliza and to other Butler cousins. Their love for and commitment to Captain Butler’s family commenced a role of guardianship or adoption of many children of relatives or friends, including children of Captain Butler’s brother Thomas. Jefferson Davis, who visited the Hermitage as a child, later observed that the couple proved affectionate and generous to those in their charge, as well as to visitors. Jackson also became a dominant influence upon young Edward G. W. Butler.⁴

Isabella Butler remarried within a few years to William B. Vinson, a Marylander who invested in Robertson County land, but Jackson continued as guardian of her Butler children. The new stepfather took little interest in the Butler children and was not well accepted by them. By 1813, Jackson was arranging for the schooling and boarding of young Edward and then of both Edward and his brother, Anthony. Their school was Cumberland College in Nashville, which was guided by a prominent scholar, James Priestly. Its trustees included Jackson, Priestly’s sponsor and friend. Among the Butler boys’ schoolmates were Rachel Jackson’s nephew, Andrew Jackson Donelson, who would be a candidate for the vice presidency; the later Whig congressman and Louisiana governor Edward Douglas White; and William Selby Harney, destined to earn fame in the U.S. Army as an Indian fighter and negotiator and also as commander of a regiment of dragoons in the war with Mexico. The school’s curriculum contained courses on mathematics, moral philosophy, rhetoric, logic, and natural philosophy. Priestly’s resignation in 1816 coincided with Jackson’s decision to remove Edward Butler and to send him away for a higher education. With considerable help from President Monroe, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point by then had become a desirable place for influential citizens to seek appointments for their sons. Jackson strongly supported a professional cadre of army officers, and he sponsored the sixteen-year-old Butler as a candidate for West Point in 1816. At that time, the general believed no school was better.⁵

Butler’s orders of July 8, 1816, from Secretary of War William Crawford commanded him to report “on the month of September next” to West Point, where, if he passed an exam, he would receive permission to enter. The criteria for admission were stated in the notice: “Each Cadet . . . must be able to read distinctly and pronounce correctly; to write correctly; to write a fair, legible hand; and to perform with facility and accuracy, the various operations of the ground rules of arithmetic, both simple and compound; of the rules of reduction; of single and compound proportion; and also, of vulgar and decimal fractions.”

In March 1816, the War Department established rules for the cadets requiring them to pursue a four-year course of study and to take examinations twice yearly. After the four years and completion of their work, an “Academy Board” ranked cadets by order of general merit and made assignments based upon their ranked positions.⁶

The documented record of Butler’s schooling at the Academy is sketchy. Jackson diligently wrote Butler, but Cadet Butler “destroyed all the letters . . . received up to 1821,” including “a detailed account of [Jackson’s] operations before New Orleans leading up to and during the great Battle with the British, 1814–1815.” Even so, a fairly accurate picture can be reproduced. Butler’s military education took place during times of change in the Academy policy and personnel. His beginning was less momentous than that of his classmate George D. Ramsay: Ramsay arrived in 1814 at the cadet staging ground and awakened his first morning of army service to witness the execution of a soldier who was a court-martialed deserter. Ramsay was twelve years old. Although Butler recorded no such excitement in August 1816, his trip from Tennessee was arduous and lengthy. It began by stage to the East Coast, continued by several steamboats to New York City, and ended only after a slow steamboat or sloop voyage up the Hudson River. Three months later, in November 1816, Butler reported to Jackson that he was managing his studies, working on French and algebra, and was involved with “various duties belonging to a Soldier.” Cadets from the South, noted Butler, were becoming concerned about the onset of winter, for which they were unprepared, while “Yankee” students, fond of skating and other winter sports, were excited. “I never before experienced such blasts of wind as blow continually from the North.”

In his later years, Ramsay wrote a memoir of his experiences as a cadet, and those recollections list duties in the austere, if not primitive, environment of the school. They included making fires in the open fireplaces that yielded the only source of heat in the dorms, sweeping rooms, shoveling snow, and hauling water in deep snow from the hillside springs nearby. Although served on bare tables with benches for seats and scarcely edible, the food was welcome. In the words of another contemporary, John H. B. Latrobe, those in attendance ate “with our knives and two-pronged forks, on plain boards, and . . . the reply to the carver standing up at the head of the table when he asked a cadet what part of the roast or boiled beef he preferred, was ‘a big bit anywhere.’” Insufficient government funding forced the Academy to close in winter. The students took a “vacation” from December to late March. Like Ramsay, Butler probably remained at West Point in those months, using the time to study, to take artillery practice across the icy Hudson River, and to skate on ponds and the river, which provided the only bathing other than a washbasin.

The superintendent whom Butler first encountered, Captain Alden Partridge, instituted a modicum of reform in what was described as lax discipline and disorganized curriculum. While liked by cadets, Partridge was widely disliked by the faculty. A frugal and ascetic individual who had few associates that were “not connected with his official duties,” Partridge involved himself in all details of life at the Academy. But he neglected the “more enlarged sphere of duty.” Although the first-year cadets—called plebes—were required to be over fourteen years old, those rules were not enforced by officials in Washington. The ages of Butler’s 1820 classmates ranged at admission from twelve to nineteen. In addition, because new cadets were allowed to enter at any time, group instruction was almost impossible. Students commonly complained to their sponsors or parents about any incident whereby they experienced an “infraction on their rights.”⁷

The confused situation at West Point changed in 1817 when a new superintendent, Major Sylvanus Thayer, was appointed. In an interview near the end of his life, Butler described Thayer as a “gallant soldier of the War of 1812,” who, nonetheless, “knew nothing of tactics,” and who in 1819–1820 allowed first classman Butler “practical control of the drill of the Cadet Corps.” Despite gaps in his knowledge, Thayer proved to be the sort of leader that the Academy needed. Upon arrival, Thayer promptly consulted with his faculty to hear their ideas on courses and with their support was able to construct a better four-year course of instruction and training. The aims of the Academy under Thayer were not only to produce engineers, but to have graduates who were disciplined, were proficient in military tactics, and who conducted themselves honorably. Math and French were fundamental to the curriculum, the latter in order to allow for the use of the much-respected French military texts. Plebes also studied algebra, geometry—taught for the first time using blackboards—and trigonometry and “mensuration” (a term used to describe training in measurements). Second-year students undertook additional courses in drawing, analytical geometry, and fluxions, or calculus. By the third year, a cadet learned physics, chemistry, and topographical drawing, including battlefield drawing and extensive field work in surveying. Finally, in his last year, the cadet’s courses were in engineering, mineralogy, rhetoric, and moral and political science.

Besides initiating changes in the courses, Thayer tightened discipline and instilled a greater sense of unity and respect for the institution. When he arrived, for instance, Thayer found that the cadets were away on their “extended vacation,” a situation he corrected by ordering their immediate return. Thayer promptly dismissed forty-three of the cadets, termed “bad bargains.” Cadets thereafter were restricted to West Point and not allowed leave without permission. Summer vacations, except for one granted to members of the Third Class, were replaced with summer training marches, encampments, and living in tents. Prior to Thayer’s time, money was often sent indiscriminately to cadets by their sponsors or parents, fueling temptations and allowing many cadets advantages over their classmates. With some exceptions, Thayer restricted cadets’ income to what they received from the government. In order to solve a problem of lack of commitment to national service, Thayer made cadets pledge to serve at least one year in the U.S. Army after graduation. When the Board of Visitors arrived in 1819, its members were impressed with the changes. They reported to Congress and the secretary of war that “the Police and Administration of the Academy, and the moral and orderly conduct of the Cadets is scarcely susceptible of improvement” and praised Thayer for allowing his charges “no time . . . for dissipation or for contracting bad habits.”

Such well-meant goals were hard to achieve: the Board also noted the embarrassing existence of an ordinary nearby that the cadets frequented and recommended a “purchase of Mr. North’s land adjoining the West Point Tract. . . . The Tavern kept on this land within 100 Yards of the Cadet Barracks, & over which the Regulations of the Academy do not extend, has been productive of the very worst consequences to some of the Cadets, tho’ the vigilant Superintendence of the Commanding Officer has . . . diminished the evil . . . it still exists to too great an extent to render the Cost of removing it, an object of serious consideration.” According to historian Stephen Ambrose, even faced with such hurdles, Thayer brought to the Academy a personal aura that allowed him to institute needed reforms. His dedication made the “Cadets feel the strength of his intelligence, his character, and his discipline.”⁸

Not until Butler’s class endured examinations in June 1818 was any record of class standings published. His group numbered forty-two cadets, of which there were two sections. Butler stood tenth in his section of twenty-three. His grades placed him in the middle of the entire class. In 1817, meanwhile, Butler welcomed to West Point his fellow ward and schoolmate at Cumberland College, Andrew Jackson Donelson. At the end of his first year in 1818, Donelson was first in the Class of 1821. He then was advanced to the Class of 1820, and at the end the school year in 1819 Donelson stood fifth and Butler seventeenth out of twenty-eight cadets. At the time of their graduation in July 1820, Butler ranked ninth out of thirty cadets, and Donelson, second. Donelson ultimately became Jackson’s secretary, political advisor, and campaign organizer. Edward Butler always gave thanks for his good fortune in having attended West Point, and the Jacksons had reason to be proud of their protégés.⁹

As wards of Andrew Jackson, Butler and Donelson remained dependent upon the general for expense money. Unlike Donelson, Butler did not have familial access to the Jacksons’ funds. Butler’s guardian expected Butler family properties in Robertson County, Tennessee, and elsewhere to supply reimbursement for advances for both sons of Captain Edward Butler. However, the extensive land holdings that had been left to the Butler children were either unrewarding or depleted. As Anthony Wayne Butler completed Yale College in 1822, he sought funds from Jackson for education in the law. The family farmland in Tennessee generated little income, wrote Jackson, and “at present could not be sold for near its value.” Jackson managed to arrange for Anthony’s college education with Richard Butler, a cousin of the Butler boys who lived upriver from New Orleans at Ormond Plantation in St. Charles Parish. Anthony’s efforts at economizing frequently fell short, and Jackson informed the youth that he could not rely upon the general for legal training after college. Cadet Butler, too, felt the financial pinch. He received from Jackson a sum of $298 in September 1817 (reimbursement for $203 in travel expenses to West Point the prior year and for $95 during his first year there). Thereafter, Butler only was allowed an amount to take care of his living costs. It was too little, and during Butler’s last few months at West Point he and Jackson corresponded about the problem. Butler’s complaint was not the first on the subject. In April 1820, Donelson received $500 from Jackson, of which $400 was for his own use, and $50 each for Edward and Anthony. Even with a government stipend, Butler complained about his impoverishment:

I am almost ashamed to address you on the subject, but as I am about to leave this Institution, and after the strictest economy for three years being now nearly three hundred dollars in debt, I deem it necessary to apply to you for four hundred dollars, as I shall have to purchase a uniform and some other articles previous to commencing my new course. You will no doubt consider my application somewhat exorbitant, but when you reflect that my pay is but one hundred and ninety-two dollars a year and that we have to pay the most exorbitant price for all articles which we purchase, I trust that you will acquit me of the best pretentions to prodigality.

Ignorant both of his family’s financial situation and of the monetary resources over which Jackson had custody, Butler was reminded that any advances came out of the guardian’s own pockets, which—following the Panic of 1819—were also relatively empty. Butler was faced with creditors who expected payment and with the expense of acquiring “clothing necessary to enter the army.” He persisted in his pleas to Jackson and promised that he would visit the general personally “for the purpose of adjusting all matters,” if the secretary of war would grant him a few weeks’ leave. He soon found himself sharing with his sisters the obligations for unpaid expenses for rent, board, washing, and other necessaries incurred by their mother, who died in August 1821.¹⁰

We do not know how young Butler resolved his finances before he put on his new uniform and reported for duty, but somehow he managed. In April 1820, at the same time that he asked Jackson for money, Butler requeste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Edward G. W. Butler: The New Soldier, 1816–1822
• 2. Edward and Frances: “But . . . What about Julia?”
• 3. From Soldier to Planter: The Allure of Louisiana
• 4. A Sugar Plantation Family of Iberville Parish: The Butlers, 1831–1840
• 5. A Taste of Success: Dunboyne, 1840–1847
• 6. With the 3rd Dragoons: The War with Mexico, 1847–1848
• 7. “A Proper Sense of One’s Obligations”: Fulfillment, 1850–1860
• 8. “I Am No Submissionist”: Toward the End of Union
• 9. “Soil & Liberties Have Been Invaded”: The Trial of War
• 10. Hardships and Sorrows: Dunboyne Endings
• 11. The Pass: “A Place to Suit”
• 12. “Are You Afraid to Die?”: “No Daughter—I Am a Soldier”
• Epilogue
• Genealogical Charts: Descendants of Edward Butler
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations