Benjamin Franklin Butler | Biography

Benjamin Franklin Butler (December 14, 1795 - November 8, 1858), lawyer and politician, was descended from Jonathan Butler, who settled at Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1724. Jonathan's grandson, Medad, migrated from Branford, Connecticut, to Kinderhook Landing (Stuyvesant) in Columbia County, New York. Here he married Hannah Tylee in 1794, and here their eldest son, Benjamin, was born the next year. After completing the scanty education offered by the district school, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1817. For four years thereafter, he was a partner at Albany in the office of Martin Van Buren, for whom he retained a lifelong admiration and affection. The year after his admission to the bar, he married Harriet Allen, whose parents (the mother a Quaker related to Benjamin Franklin) had moved from Nantucket, Massachusetts, to Hudson, New York, about the same time that his own father had left Branford. As Butler rose in his profession, honors and duties came to him rapidly. He was district attorney of Albany County from 1821 to 1824, and the next year was associated with John Duer and John C. Spencer in the important commission for the revision of the statutes of the State of New York. From 1827 to 1833, he was a member of the state legislature, which would have elected him to the United States Senate had he given his consent. At the same time, he declined an appointment by Governor Marcy to the supreme court of the state. He did, however, yield to the urgent invitation of his former law partner, Van Buren, now vice-president of the United States, to enter President Jackson's cabinet as attorney-general in the autumn of 1833--perhaps on Van Buren's assurance that his acceptance would not interfere with his continued practice in the courts of New York and Albany, the former of which cities might be reached in fifteen hours and the latter in a day and a night from Washington, "next season, when the railroad is completed." Butler held the office of attorney-general for five years, and added to its duties the secretaryship of war in the closing months of Jackson's administration (October 1836-March 1837) when Lewis Cass retired from the cabinet to become minister to France. He might have had his pick of cabinet posts under Van Buren, but the practice of law appealed more strongly to him than political office. Nor could President Polk persuade him seven years later to reenter the cabinet as secretary of war. He did, however, accept both Van Buren's and Polk's appointments as United States attorney for the southern district of New York (1838-41, 1845-48), a position which was less incompatible with his professional duties. The last ten years of his life (1848-58) he devoted entirely to the law, withdrawing more and more from general practice to the management of a small group of corporation cases involving very large sums of money. His rank among the leaders of the New York bar was firmly established. Chancellor Kent spoke of him as "this remarkable lawyer whose memoranda the student finds in all his books." Butler's interest in the law as a science led him to organize the department of law in the University of the City of New York in 1838 and to serve for several years as its leading professor. In politics, he was a staunch Jacksonian Democrat. He headed the electoral college of New York which cast its vote for Polk in 1845. As the contest over slavery grew more heated, however, he began to waver. He supported his old chief, Van Buren, who ran on the Free-Soil ticket in 1848, but he returned to the Democratic fold in 1852 to vote for Pierce and the finality of the compromise acts of 1850. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, however, drove him out of the Democratic ranks. With thousands of other Anti-Nebraska Democrats he joined the new Republican party, and he cast his last presidential ballot for Frémont in 1856. He appeared at a mass meeting in City Hall Park, New York, on May 13, 1854, to denounce the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. But he did not live to see the Republican victory in 1860 and the civil strife which followed. In the summer of 1858, he went to Europe to recuperate from his heavy labors and died in Paris of Bright's disease. His body was brought back to New York and buried from the Mercer Street Presbyterian Church, of which he had been a devoted member, although he would never accept any office in the church because there were articles in the Westminster Confession of Faith to which he could not subscribe. Aside from his legal opinions and arguments, the work in collaboration with Duer and Spencer in the revision of the statutes of New York, and the convention (approved by Act of Congress in June of 1834) by which he and five associated commissioners settled the controversy of fifty years' standing over the boundary line between New York and New Jersey, Butler left but a scanty literary legacy. His grasp of history and power of lucid exposition, however, are amply shown in his "Outline of the Constitutional History of New York" (1847), an address on the occasion of the forty-third anniversary of the founding of the New York Historical Society, tracing the changes in government in New York from the days of the Dutch rule down to the adoption of the Constitution of 1846 (published in the Collections of the New York Historical Society, 2 ser., II, 1848, 9-75).