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

[962] and quarrels but simply to justify myself in my course, and I mention no names and I do not go into particulars. But if any of my colleagues in Congress, at that time, especially from my own State choose to criticise this part of my work, I shall be very happy hereafter to meet them upon this proposition with an answer in which, if it becomes necessary, I shall declare the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

A bill was reported by that special committee. By the bill this murdering of negroes by Ku Klux riders at night was to be deemed conspiracy, and punished by fine and imprisonment. But the prisoner would first have to be convicted by a Southern jury, and upon these juries other members of the Ku Klux could serve if their own cases were not on trial. That bill was passed, and the government made great show of enforcing it. The chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States even went down to give dignity to the trials and to expound the law; but nobody was convicted, with some few exceptions where the charges were made against some unlucky and unpopular white man of the South. After trying cases a few weeks, the chief justice gave up in despair, and the riders at night went on with their outrages until the good sense of the respectable people of the South put their condemnation upon it and then they stopped. But the outrages did not stop, and murders of white men and colored men on political inducements in some parts of the South have continued to this day. I take leave reverently to thank God that no drop of that blood sprinkles even the hem of my garments.

Early in the administration of President Johnson, under Mr. Seward, Secretary of State, attempts were made to negotiate with England for reparation for the acts — injurious to us — committed by her during the war. These subsequently became known as the Alabama claims, after the captures by the rebel cruiser Alabama and her consorts of our vessels during the war, which drove our commerce substantially from the seas. When the war broke out, America's commerce was the second largest in the world, and not far behind that of Great Britain. When the war closed, our flag had been substantially driven from the ocean. The ports of Great Britain and its colonies had been made depots from which arms, ammunition, and every manner of supplies were shipped to the Confederates. Not to any considerable extent was this the case with the ports of other nations, save, perhaps, of Cuba. It compelled us to establish,