Civil War
Butler was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1859, representing Johnson and Carter counties, and was reelected in 1861. He was one of fifteen legislators to vote against the state's military alignment with the Confederate States of America in May 1861. He was a member of the Johnson County delegation at both the Knoxville session (May 30–31) and Greeneville session (June 17–20) of the East Tennessee Union Convention, which petitioned the state legislature to allow East Tennessee to break away from Tennessee and form a Union-aligned state.
Described by fellow Unionist Oliver Perry Temple as "unshrinking" and "outspoken," Butler was arrested by Confederate authorities and charged with treason in 1862, but was acquitted due to lack of witnesses. He was arrested on a similar charge a short while later, but was released with the help of friends, and fled to Kentucky. He was authorized by General Ambrose Burnside to raise a Union Army regiment, but this new regiment was consolidated with the Thirteenth Regiment, Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry under Colonel John K. Miller in late 1863. Butler received the rank of lieutenant colonel, and served until 1864, when resigned for health reasons.
Butler was a delegate to the Republican National Conventions in 1864, 1872 and 1876. In 1865, he was a delegate to the Tennessee state constitutional convention. That same year, he was elected to the Tennessee Senate, but resigned to accept an appointment by Governor William G. Brownlow as judge of the state's First Judicial Circuit Court. He was chairman of the first state Republican executive committee of Tennessee. He was also a delegate to the Baltimore Border State Convention in 1867.
Read more about this topic: Roderick R. Butler
Famous quotes by civil war:
“Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)