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

There has been, so far as I know, in the several histories, but one very belittling account of the origin of this method of disposing of captured slaves used in war, and that one is the emanation of malice and ignorance in “Abraham Lincoln, a history,” a book which was written by one man with two pens. Mr. John Hay says :--

Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war. General Butler has had the credit of first pronouncing the opinion formulating the doctrine, that under the course of international law the negro slaves, whose enforced labor in battery building was at the time of superior military value to the rebels, are manifestly contraband of war, and as such confiscable by military right and usage. There is no word or hint of this theory in his letter which reports the Mallory incident, nor any other official emanation of it by him until two months afterwards, when he stated casually that he had adopted such a theory. Nevertheless it is very possible that the idea may have come from him, though not at first in any authentic or official form. It first occurs incidentally in a newspaper letter from Fortress Monroe of the same date of the Mallory incident: “Again, the negro must now be reported as contraband, since every able-bodied negro not absolutely required on the plantation is impressed by the enemy into military service as a laborer on the various fortifications.”

Whether the suggestion was struck out in General Butler's interview with the flag bearer, or at general mess table in a confidential review of the day's work; or whether it originated with some imaginative member of his staff, or was contributed as a handy expedient by the busy brain of a newspaper reporter, will, perhaps, ever remain a historical riddle.

This double-named historian has stepped out of his way to attempt to rob me of the authorship of this theory of disposing of such captured slaves. As he evidently did not understand the matter about which he was speaking, he has noted the fact that I did not ask, in my letter to General Scott the morning after I met Colonel Mallory's agent, as to this theory or use the word “contraband,” and has produced it as evidence that the phrase was not used by me in the interview as to captured slaves. If he had read my letters to General Scott he would have seen that I was asking