The Two Presidencies of Benjamin Franklin Butler
At Pacificon/ConQuest, I had the great fun of listening to John Hill lecture on the underrated Union General Benjamin F. Butler. Before that, I only knew him by his New Orleans "Beast" reputation, although I had also known that he rid the city of yellow fever, and was an early advocate of emancipation and of recruiting black troops. (Butler even commissioned black officers of the 1st Louisiana Native Guard while commanding in New Orleans -- perhaps we see why the Crescent City got its nose so far out of joint, hmmm?) But since the South produced as many great writers after the war as it did great generals during it (in some cases, the same guys), Butler has come down to us, greatly defamed, as a villain.

And as an incompetent; if anyone knows anything else about Butler, they know Grant's famous line that Butler had gotten his army "as completely shut off from further operations directly against Richmond as if it had been in a bottle strongly corked." (Grant, bless him, tried to set the record straight in his memoirs, but the power of the soundbite was as overwhelming in 1864 as it is now.) But as an administrator, he was easily McClellan's equal -- his men never lacked for provisions, ammunition, or mail, and his medical corps was the best of the War. (He was by far the favorite speaker at Union veterans' groups after the War.) He was a great believer in combined arms, and a fanatical builder of bridges to expand his tactical options (again, in spite of his great soundbite at Waltham Junction that he had "no intention of building a bridge for West Pointers to retreat across"), and unlike McClellan, he was willing to take action against the enemy where he could. But a gift for snotty comments does not endear one to one's nominal subordinates, especially if one is a fat, pop-eyed Massachusetts Democratic Senator appointed to command to keep Lincoln sweet with War Democrats. So his junior generals dragged their feet and blamed him and each other for their fairly dismal performance in the Bermuda Hundred Campaign.

Anyhow, while John was talking, I noticed two places where Benjamin Butler held the Oval Office in his pudgy, spoon-lifting fingers.

The first is the Petersburg campaign, anent which Wikipedia slanders Butler by saying "Rather than striking immediately at Petersburg as ordered, Butler's offensive bogged down." Grant had ordered Butler explicitly to strike not at Petersburg, but at Richmond, in the other direction. But Butler kept sneaking off to try and attack Petersburg, which was essentially defenseless. Any of his three major assaults on Petersburg might have been successful:

* If he'd kept his smart mouth shut at Waltham Junction and thrown a bridge across the Appomattox, he could have forced Swift Creek and likely taken Petersburg over the next week, before Grant could countermand him.

* If he hadn't agreed (against his better judgement) to let Gillmore command at the First Battle of Petersburg on June 9, the far more aggressive Hincks would have brought his black infantry up to smash the "Old Men and Young Boys" when Kautz pierced the Petersburg defenses.

* We know that because Hincks' men were the only ones who took any part of Petersburg the next week at the Second Battle of Petersburg while Baldy Smith and W.S. Hancock dithered around like ... well, in fairness, like people who'd been at Cold Harbor and Gettysburg, and seen what happened to infantry charges. But still, they could have done it if everyone involved had just run at Petersburg like the proverbial bull at a gate. (And again, in fairness, it was Butler's concern for Hancock's supply situation that made Hancock five hours late to the battlefield.)

So let's assume that any one of these assaults works, and that Ben Butler rides into Petersburg in glory; Richmond falls, Grant closes the ring, and Lee is captured ... And for our purposes, the "Union Party" nominates Ben Butler instead of the other War Democrat, Andrew Johnson, to be Lincoln's running mate. If Booth still shoots Lincoln (a big if, but Booth wasn't going to be happy with Lincoln no matter what), then Benjamin F. Butler becomes the 17th President. And he's not impeached, because the guy who commissioned black officers, and got a price put on his head by Jeff Davis for refusing to return runaway slaves to the South, would have backed the Radical Reconstructionists to the hilt. Press play from there, with forty acres and a mule for all the ex-slaves...

The second possibility is a little more indirect, so stay with me. Butler, being a rich lawyer who hated West Pointers but wanted to be a general, was immediately interested in a wild contraption that the Army had rejected: the Gatling gun. He bought six Gatlings with his own money and deployed them (the first general ever to deploy machine guns, and take that, verdict of history) at Proctor's Creek (or the Second Battle of Drewry's Bluff) on May 16 1864, on the far right of the Union line. Unfortunately, the Confederate General Ransom attacked on the far left, and between a convenient fog bank and a great deal of personal pettiness on everyone's part, the Union got muscled out of position. But at that battle (approximately in the middle) was General Alfred Terry, who would go on to the no-doubt enviable job of being George Armstrong Custer's superior officer in 1876.

Now, let's say that the Gatlings are deployed on the left, and so is Terry. Ransom charges up, six Gatling guns open fire, and the Battle of Proctor's Creek becomes a bloody shambles of a draw. (The fog still comes in.) Now fast-forward 12 years, when Custer tries to tell Terry he doesn't want to take the Gatling guns with him into the Little Bighorn valley. Terry orders him to bring the guns -- he can't get the image out of his mind -- and Gall's amazing charge melts down in a hail of lead. Custer is the great hero of the day, and although his victory comes too late to get him the Democratic nomination in 1876, he easily defeats James Garfield in 1880. What kind of President would Custer have been? My wild guess is "disastrous," but if there was ever a safe time in American history to have a vainglorious incompetent as President, 1881-1885 was it. Would he have lost to James G. Blaine in 1884? It's probably the way to bet, but it's not a sure thing. What would be really annoying is if Custer's Presidency upsets the political applecart sufficiently that Grover Cleveland doesn't become President -- he was a decent guy and a pretty good President, considering the economic cataclysm visited upon him through no fault of his own.