Tuesday, July 03, 2012
General Daniel Butterfield: Tarnished Hero
BIOGRAPHY
We often forget that history is not only shaped by
events, but it is also made by individuals.
A case in point is Gen. Daniel Butterfield. The
circumstances of his modification of an existing bugle call to create the
mournful Taps we know today were explored in these pages last week.
But Butterfield himself is a perplexing and
enigmatic figure whose career deserves close examination.
His rise in the military was meteoric by any
standard. Shortly after the 1861 Confederate attack on Fort Sumter,
he joined the Army in Washington, D.C., on April 16, as a first sergeant.
Despite having little military background other
than part-time militia service, within two weeks he obtained a commission as
a colonel in the 12th New York
Infantry. By July he was in command of a brigade.
By September he was a brigadier general.
Butterfield joined the Fifth Corps of Gen. McClellan’s Army of the
Potomac for the unsuccessful Peninsula Campaign to capture Richmond , Virginia
Butterfield continued in command of a brigade at the disastrous second battle of Bull
Run and
the battle of Antietam, a
Union victory but also the bloodiest day of the war.
In the battle of Fredericksburg ,
he commanded the Fifth Corps, one of the two corps that failed to take the key
position of Marye's Heights, despite 16 frontal attacks.
When Gen. Joseph Hooker was given command of the
Army of the Potomac in January 1863, he set a bad example for the conduct of generals and their
staffs by creating a backstabbing network of political cronies that included his
chief of staff, Daniel Butterfield, now a major general.
During this period, his
headquarters was described by cavalry officer Charles F. Adams, Jr., as “a
combination of a bar-room and a brothel."
As an officer, Butterfield was thoroughly disliked
by other officers. After he was wounded at Gettysburg in July of 1863 by a fragment of a
spent artillery shell, a fellow officer wrote, "Fortunately for him and the
joy of all, he has gone home." But their elation was short-lived.
Butterfield returned to headquarters after a brief recuperation. Following his
mustering out of the volunteer forces in 1865, he returned to private life.
The Gold Conspiracy
During the Civil War,
the United States government issued large sums of paper money
backed only by credit. In the war years, the U.S. national debt rose from $64
million to over $2.8 billion.
After the war ended, the government began a
policy of buying back “greenbacks” with gold and using the paper money to buy U.S.
The conspirators needed two additional key
players: someone with access to newly elected President Ulysses S. Grant and
someone willing to tip them off when the government intended to sell gold.
They found the first in Abel Corbin, a 61-year-old
widower who had married Grant’s younger sister, 37-year-old Jennie. The other
player who would leak insider information to them was Daniel Butterfield.
Corbin convinced Grant to appoint Butterfield as
assistant secretary of the treasury. Stationed in New York in the sub-treasury building on
Wall Street, his job was to handle sales of gold by the government in the
nearby exchange called the Gold Room.
Corbin arranged a meeting with Gould, who immediately
handed Butterfield a personal check for $10,000. The new appointee, whose
annual salary was $8,000, quietly pocketed the money.
In order to gain leverage for the gold scam, Gould
purchased the Tenth National Bank in New
York , a Wall Street bank with a reputation for making
sweetheart deals with favored clients.
Whenever Grant visited New York , Corbin arranged for the conspirators
to meet with the president. Gould's pitch to Grant was that it would be
advantageous to Western farmers if the price of gold went up since a bumper
grain crop was forecast and gold was the medium of payment for international
transactions. Grant listened but remained noncommittal. Gould mistook Grant's
silence for agreement.
On September 1, 1869, Gould instructed his brokers
to purchase $1.5 million in gold for Corbin's account and another 1.5 million
for Butterfield. For every dollar increase in the price of gold, each would net
a $15,000 profit.
Gould and Fisk began buying gold aggressively. By
Wednesday, September 22, gold closed at $141, up almost four dollars. Gould and
Fisk together owned some $50-$60 million in gold. That day’s price rise
generated a profit of over $1.75 million for the two conspirators. Gold closed
on September 23 at $144.50, up another $3.50.
During the two-week gold-buying frenzy, treasury
secretary George Boutwell in Washington
had followed developments closely. On the evening of Thursday, September 23 he
met with Grant and reported that gold's gyrations had caused the stock market
and commerce to nearly come to a halt. Furious at having been used, Grant
instructed Boutwell to sell gold "to save the country from a panic" if
the price advanced on Friday morning.
By 9:30 the next morning, the price of gold was at
$150, with the conspirators snapping up every offer. By 11 o'clock the price
had crept up to $155 and was edging toward $160.
The treasury secretary reported these numbers to
Grant and suggested that the government sell $3 million in gold from the New York sub-treasury.
"You’d better make it $5 million,” said Grant. Boutwell hurried back to his
office and dictated a telegram to Butterfield, splitting the difference:
SELL FOUR MILLION GOLD TOMORROW, AND BUY FOUR
MILLION BONDS SIGNED BOUTWELL
To keep Butterfield from tipping off the conspirators, Boutwell issued a simultaneous press release. The news hit the gold exchange like a bombshell. Gold, which had been hovering between $160 and $162, plummeted to $133 in minutes. Dozens of brokerages and hundreds of gold buyers went bankrupt. The day would become known as Black Friday. It would take years for American business and agriculture to recover.
Jay Gould
and Jim Fisk survived simply by refusing to pay for the gold they had ordered. Butterfield
was allowed to resign his Treasury post.
In testimony before a committee investigating the
gold conspiracy, Butterfield raised eyebrows by insisting the $10,000 he
accepted from Gould was an interest-free real estate loan with no documentation
or repayment date.
To escape further scrutiny, Butterfield
took his family on an extended tour of Europe .
For two years he lived off his investments, studying the London
and Paris postal
systems, and waiting for the heat to die down back home.
He returned to New York
from Europe two years later and rejoined the
American Express Company, the business his father had founded. Butterfield
prospered, branching into ventures ranging from steamboats to apartment houses
to banks. He ran twice for Congress on the Republican ticket and was a serious
contender for that party’s nomination for governor in the 1890s.
Successful
and wealthy, he lived in grand style on Cragside, his estate overlooking the Hudson in Cold
Spring , N.Y.
On Memorial Day in 1901, Daniel Butterfield dedicated
the monument he had erected at the Fredericksburg
battlefield to commemorate the service of his Fifth Corps. A short time later,
he died of a stroke on July 17, 1901, at his home in Cold Spring at the age of
70.
Although not a West Point graduate, Butterfield
was buried in the West Point
Cemetery
The Butterfield house and grounds eventually
passed into the hands of the Fathers of Mercy, a Roman Catholic congregation of
missionary priests founded in France .
It was destroyed in a spectacular fire the night of December 20, 1979.
The Butterfield Statue Controversy
An amusing sidebar to the Daniel Butterfield story concerns a statue of him commissioned by his widow. In her will, Mrs. Butterfield had specifically directed the executors "to cause to be erected in the Borough of Manhattan, near or in Central Park, a colossal statue of Gen. Daniel Butterfield, representing him wearing a cocked hat and standing with his arms folded, as shown in a picture of him in a bronze bas relief in the rooms of the Historical Society at Utica, New York."
While the statue was being created, a running
battle began between the executors of the will and sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who
would later design and carve Mt. Rushmore in South
Dakota . Borglum had been asked to modify the statue
so often and so extensively that the exasperated sculptor signed his name on
the top of Butterfield's head. "That's the only part of the original
statue in which they didn't make one change," he commented wryly.
Borglum's statue was cast by the Gorham Company
and erected on February 23, 1918, not near or in Central Park but in Sakura Park
The sculptor had agreed to create and erect the
statue for $54,000 and had been paid $21,600. Claiming that the sculpture was
not artistic, did not resemble General Butterfield and was not colossal, the executors
of Mrs. Butterfield's will refused to pay the balance, so Borglum sued. A year
and a half later, a jury viewed the statue and returned the verdict that the
sculptor had complied with the terms of the contract.
Whether the balance, which covered the casting of
the statue, was ever paid is not known. Mrs. Butterfield’s estate was worth
millions, and money was not a problem.
