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

[849] the service. I was not asked why I made the arbitrary arrests and confined parties to close imprisonment, treating them very well in some cases, and I now state I would do so again under the same circumstances and submit my action to the judgment of good. people.

There was, at Nassau, a gathering of pilots who knew the harbors of Mobile, Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington. These harbors, could only be entered by vessels in the charge of pilots who were, expert enough to run in in dark nights only, in order to get by our blockading fleet. The pilots, in the darkest night, could take large blockade runners in through the narrow channel where Porter with all his officers and sixty vessels, four of which had been blockade runners captured there, could not get in in two days in the daylight, even after he had “silenced” the forts that defended the entrance to, the harbor. There were not many such skilled pilots to be found, so I asked Admiral Lee if he would not, when any were captured by the blockade squadron on the Atlantic coast, send them to me. When I got them I put them in a comfortable place of confinement and shut them up, and if I could have got all those pilots we would have as effectually stopped blockade running as the capture of Fort Fisher itself did.

Now, these pilots were principally Englishmen, and as soon as they could write to Lord Lyons, the British Minister, then he would call upon Seward, and Seward would of course order them to be delivered up when they could be found. If I had put on the guard house book or prison register: “confined by order of Major-General Butler as a blockade runner,” or had had some other identifying description placed thereon, I should have had them all taken away from me, and therefore I did not go into their history or description; but great care was taken that their whereabouts should not be known.

I deemed this action justifiable under martial law, which is the. will of the commanding general exercised for the best interests of his country in war. I doubt if I could have convicted one of them if I had tried them in a court of law, because being foreigners and not having committed any offence in my country, although captured while on their way to commit an offence, the charges would hardly have passed judicial action.