Daniel Butterfield

Daniel Adams Butterfield (October 31, 1831 – July 17, 1901) was a New York businessman, a Union general in the American Civil War, and Assistant U.S. Treasurer in New York. He is credited with composing the bugle call Taps and was involved in the Black Friday gold scandal in the Grant administration.

Butterfield was born in Utica, New York. He graduated from Union College in Schenectady, New York, and was employed in various businesses in New York and the South, including the American Express Company, which had been founded by his father, John, an owner of the Overland Mail Company, stage-coaches, steamships, and telegraph lines.

Only days after Fort Sumter, despite having little military background beyond part-time militia activities, he joined the Army as a first sergeant in Washington, D.C., on April 16, 1861. Within two weeks he obtained a commission as a colonel in the 12th New York Militia, which became the 12th New York Infantry. By July he commanded a brigade and by September he was a brigadier general.

Butterfield joined George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac for the Peninsula Campaign in the corps of Fitz John Porter. In the Seven Days Battles, at Gaines' Mill on June 27, 1862, he was wounded, but also demonstrated bravery that eventually was recognized (in 1892) with the Medal of Honor. The medal citation read:

Seized the colors of the 83rd Pennsylvania Volunteers at a critical moment and, under a galling fire of the enemy, encouraged the depleted ranks to renewed exertion.

While the Union army recuperated at Harrison's Landing, Virginia, from its Seven Days of retreating, Butterfield experimented with bugle calls and is credited with the composition of Taps, probably the most famous bugle call ever written. He wrote Taps to replace the customary firing of three rifle volleys at the end of burials during battle. Taps also replaced Tattoo, the French bugle call to signal "lights out". Butterfield's bugler, Oliver W. Norton of Chicago, Illinois, was the first to sound the new call. Within months, Taps was sounded by buglers in both the Union and Confederate armies. (This account has been disputed by some military and musical historians, who maintain that Butterfield merely revised Tattoo and did not compose an original work. See External links section.)

Butterfield continued in brigade command at the Second Battle of Bull Run and the Battle of Antietam, became division commander, and then V Corps commander for the Battle of Fredericksburg. His corps was one of those assaulting through the city and up against murderous fire from Marye's Heights. After the debacles of Fredericksburg and the Mud March, Joseph Hooker replaced Ambrose Burnside as Army of the Potomac commander and Butterfield, by now a major general, became his chief of staff.

Hooker and Butterfield developed a close personal, and political, relationship. To the disgust of many army generals, their headquarters was frequented by women and liquor, being described as a combination of a "bar and brothel". Political infighting became rampant in the high command and Butterfield was widely disliked by most of his colleagues. However, the two officers managed to turn around the poor morale of the army and greatly improved food, shelter, and medical support in the spring of 1863. During this period, Butterfield introduced another custom that remains in the Army today: the use of distinctive hat or shoulder patches to denote the unit a soldier belongs to, in this case the corps. He was inspired by the division patches used earlier by Philip Kearny, but extended those to the full army and designed most of the patches himself.

Hooker was replaced after the disastrous Battle of Chancellorsville by George G. Meade, just before the Battle of Gettysburg. Meade distrusted Butterfield, but elected to retain him as chief of staff. This was a mistake. Butterfield actively undermined Meade, in cooperation with Daniel Sickles, another crony of Hooker's. Although the battle was a great Union victory, Sickles and Butterfield testified to the U.S. Congress Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War that Meade vacillated and planned as early as July 1 to retreat from Gettysburg, damaging his reputation.

Butterfield was wounded by a spent artillery shell fragment at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, and left to convalesce. He returned to duty that fall as chief of staff once again for Hooker, now commanding two corps in the Army of the Cumberland at Chattanooga, Tennessee. When these two depleted corps (the XI and XII Corps) were combined to form the XX Corps, Butterfield was given the 3rd Division, which he led through the first half of Sherman's Atlanta Campaign. Illness prevented his completion of the war in the field and he assumed quiet duties at Vicksburg, Mississippi, followed by recruiting and the command of harbor forces in New York.

After the war, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Butterfield Assistant Treasurer of the United States, based on a recommendation by Abel Corbin, Grant's brother-in-law. Butterfield agreed to tell Corbin and speculators Jay Gould and James Fisk when the government was planning to sell gold, a market that Fisk and Gould wanted to corner. If Butterfield tipped them off, Fisk and Gould would sell their gold before the price dropped. The scheme was uncovered by Grant, who sold $4,000,000 of government gold without telling Butterfield. This resulted in the panic of collapsing gold prices known as Black Friday, on September 24, 1869. On September 21, 1886, he married Mrs. Julia L. James of New York in a ceremony in London.

Butterfield died in Cold Spring, New York, and was buried with an ornate monument in West Point Cemetery at the United States Military Academy, although he had not attended that institution. Taps was sounded at his funeral. He was the author of the 1862 army field manual, Camp and Outpost Duty for Infantry. He has also been memorialized in the novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara—a character in the 20th Maine claims that their brigade bugle call was written by Butterfield and is based on his own name, sounding to the rhythm of "Dan, Dan, Dan, Butterfield, Butterfield".

External links

*Article about Butterfield and Taps, by Kathryn Shenkle of Arlington National Cemetery
*U.S. Army history of Taps
*Account of Taps that disputes Butterfield's composition
*Web biography of Butterfield

References

*Eicher, John H., & Eicher, David J.: Civil War High Commands, Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3