Heritage AuctionsThe Butler Medal was awarded by Major General Benjamin F. Butler to his United States Colored Troops.
The Artifact
A medal awarded by Major General Benjamin F. Butler to his United States Colored Troops.
Condition
The medal has some light wear, but retains great detail.
Details
In September 1864, Benjamin Butler’s Army of the James advanced to assault Richmond’s defenses, part of an attack ordered by Ulysses S. Grant in hopes of diverting Robert E. Lee’s attention from Grant’s intended movement against the Southside Railroad west of Petersburg. Butler sent his force forward in two wings on the morning of September 29. The right wing—comprising the X Corps plus a division of U.S. Colored Troops from the XVIII Corps—would focus on Confederate defenses atop New Market Heights, while the left wing—the balance of the XVIII Corps—advanced on Fort Harrison to the west. Ultimately, Butler’s attack drove the Confederates from their outer line of defenses, including Fort Harrison, and succeeded in distracting Lee, who in response to Butler’s action soon shifted 10,000 soldiers from the Petersburg defenses to reinforce Richmond.
During the fighting for New Market Heights, the African-American troops of Butler’s command distinguished themselves. Butler, a longtime abolitionist and champion of enlisting black men in the Union army, had had a purpose in involving his USCT soldiers so heavily in the attack: “I determined … to demonstrate the fact of the value of the negro as a soldier,” he later wrote. Fourteen USCT soldiers earned the Medal of Honor for their actions that day. To further recognize their bravery, Butler had this solid silver medal created, one of several hundred he presented the next year to USCT veterans of New Market Heights. The front of the medal—which is suspended from a red, white, and blue ribbon, with an oak leaf pin that reads “Army of the James”—depicts black troops moving forward in battle below the Latin phrase “FERRO IIS LIBERTAS PERVENIET,” or “Liberty came to them by the sword.” The back of the medal is inscribed “Campaign Before Richmond, 1864” and “Distinguished for Courage.”
Quotable
In his 1892 autobiography, Butler wrote about creating the medal: “I had done for the negro soldiers, by my own order, what the government has never done for its white soldiers—I had a medal struck of like size, weight, quality, fabrication and intrinsic value with those which Queen Victoria gave with her own hand to her distinguished private soldiers of the Crimea…. These I gave with my own hand, save where the recipient was in a distant hospital wounded…. Since the war I have been fully rewarded by seeing the beaming eye of many a colored comrade as he drew the medal from the innermost recesses of its concealment to show me.”
Price
$45,000 (realized at Dallas, Texas, in December 2020). “This exceptionally historic medal is eagerly sought by militaria, Civil War, and black history collectors, many of whom have spent a lifetime in fruitless pursuit of a specimen,” a Heritage Auctions representative noted at the time.
Related topics: African Americans
