Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[741] from the Rapidan, this movement is narrated, and although it was carried on in obedience to my express orders and under my own personal superintendence and command, he forgets to mention that I was there at all or had anything to do with it, simply because he was, and I was not, a captain in the regular army. I hope what I say may not give too great a sale to his book, which can be bought anywhere for a dollar.

In the attack on Newmarket Heights by my column of colored troops I violated for the first time a rule of my own military action. I admit that as generals go I was not fit to be a general, in that I never did, nay, never could, order a movement of troops to be made without carefully stopping to count the loss I was likely to make of men in doing it, however successful it might prove. Nor did I ever forget the still more important fact, whether the thing to be done by a given movement would be worth its cost. And I trust I was never overweighed as to those results by the consideration that if successful the movement would result in my military renown. In other words, for my own glory I never incurred large “butcher's bills.”

Unfortunately if I erred, it was because I deemed the lives of my men too valuable. Sitting in my tent at night, pondering with pen in hand, and making memoranda for a military movement in the morning, I could hear in the mess-tent near me many of the officers of my command gathered together enjoying themselves with music, and genial, hilarious laughter, and I could not help the thought from intruding upon me: How many of those young men am I condemning to death or mutilation on the following day by the order I am considering, to say nothing of the gallant soldiers to be condemned with them. Leaving out any sentiment in the matter, every man I have in my command has cost the government on the average more than three thousand dollars in his preparation to serve the Union. If I gain what I am to undertake, shall I not lose to the country more than its worth toward the termination of the war? And as these sounds greeted my ears, more than once the pen has dropped from my hand and with deep agitation I have paced my tent, painfully reflecting upon these topics. This shows I was no Napoleon, for he told his men at Saragossa, when they were falling around him, says the historian, “Never mind, boys; a single night in Paris will make this all ”