Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 January 1893 — A GREAT MAN GONE. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

A GREAT MAN GONE.

Death 'of Benjamin F. Butler at Washington City. Incidents In the Life of the Hero of Now Orleans and Bermuda Hundred. politician and lawyer of two generations, died at Washington city at 1:30, Wednesday morning. Benjamin Franklin Butler was a native of Deerfield. N. H. Capt John Butler, his father, did good service in the war of

i;u2. His mother was from the north of Ireland. At the age of twenty he graduated from Waterville college, Me., and went to Lowell, where he settled down to study law. Two years later he was admitted to the bar, and then he began that remarkable career which brought him as associates Webster, Choate, Fletcher, Curtis, Evarts, Cushman and others, and won for him a commanding place in the very front ranks of the greatest legal minds of the Country. Long before the war broke out he had two offices—one in Lowell and one in Boston—and had built up a practice worth >25,000 a year. His career as a politician before the war is a part of the 'history of that eventful period. It is not necessary to go into details as to his war record. In April, ’7l, he kept Maryland in the Union. In May of the same year he commanded the Department of Eastern Virginia. In August he captured Ft. Hatteras, and on the Ist of May, 1862, he took possession of New Orleans. He governed the city with an iron hand. November, ‘63, found him in command of tho Department of Virginia and North Carolina. After the war he reentered politics, and his varied career is too well known to need recital here, and his services as Congressman and Governor of Massachusetts were distinguished by great ability and unswerving integrity ,He was, altogether, a most remarkable man—a man of iron and of a combative temperament that delighted in strife and exciting campaigns.