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

“ [842] they not a right to have a reasonable time to go away?” Has a man who does wrong any right from his wrongs? They did this to get out of the service. An army is governed by martial law. It is not a town meeting; it is not civil law that controls it. The Duke of Wellington defines martial law to be the will of the commanding general exercised according to principles of natural equity and justice. Was not this act perfectly just to these conspirators and mutineers? Upon that definition of the law I am willing to have every act of mine examined. Do as nearly justice as you can. In regard to his officers, the commanding general can have no temptation to do anything but right. These officers I never saw,--I only knew their acts.

I kept them at work only a few days; I doubt whether they even worked. They were not very bad, only very foolish. Their friends wrote to General Grant, and he wrote to me, and I said: “Let them out.” I only wanted to stop the practice spreading. Because if that practice had been allowed to prevail, it would have demoralized the army in a very little time.

There is another thing about which I would like to say a word. It has been said that offenders should be tried by a commission. It seems to be supposed that there is some peculiar virtue in a military commission. Now, what is a military commission? It is this: The commanding general selects three or more officers to advise him after hearing the evidence, what to do in a given case; and that is all there is to a commission. If he chooses to sit himself, hear the testimony,--and I think I ought to have been quite as competent to do that as any of my officers,--if he will take time for it, work late enough at night and get up early enough in the morning to so do, all the power is in him that there is in a military commission. He must revise and approve all they do or it is null. Why should not the judgment of the commanding general be as likely to be right as that of his subordinates? In no other case is he obliged to call a council of war to advise him what to do, and the commission is only a council of war. He can and ought to act on his own responsibility when the lives of thousands are in the balance; why not in punishing a rascal who has crept into the army?

This matter is not well understood. In the acts of Congress military commissions and courts-martial are associated, and no discrimination