Charles Butler

Background

Charles Butler was born on January 15, 1802 at Kinderhook Landing (now Stuyvesant), Columbia County, New York to Medad and Hannah (Tylee) Butler and brother of Benjamin Franklin Butler.

Career

In June 1819 Charles Butler became a clerk, at a salary of $100 a year, in the office of Martin Van Buren at Albany, and later studied at Kinderhook and Albany in the offices of Judge James Vanderpoel and of Benjamin Franklin Butler, who had renewed a partnership with Van Buren. In 1822 he was made deputy clerk of the state Senate, an appointment which gave him the opportunity to become acquainted with many of the leading men in New York politics.

He was admitted to the bar in 1824, and, after practising for a few months at Lyons, moved to Geneva to become a partner of Judge Bowen Whiting, a state senator and the district attorney of Ontario County.

At Geneva he took an active part in the establishment of Hobart College, and, in the long absences of his partner at Albany, he not only conducted a large part of the law business of the firm but also acted as assistant district attorney of the county.

It was in this latter capacity that he prosecuted the kidnappers of William Morgan the Free Mason, in 1826-27, a case which attracted nation-wide attention and deeply stirred the political waters of the country.

In 1833 Butler made a journey to the West, "attended with great privations, fatigue, exposure, and difficulty, " which had an important influence on his subsequent activities and laid the basis for his large personal fortune. He bought real estate both at Toledo and at Chicago, and later acquired large interests in the Michigan Southern, the Rock Island, and the Chicago & Northwestern railroads.

In 1834 he moved to New York, where he resided for the remaining sixty-three years of his life. Always interested in the development of the West, as agent of the New York Life Insurance & Trust Company he loaned the farmers of western New York large sums of money for the development of the lands to which the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 had given enhanced prospective values, and for the conversion of their leaseholds from the large land-grant companies into estates in fee simple.

Meanwhile his extensive real estate interests in Chicago were looked after by his brother-in-law, William B. Ogden, who became the first mayor of Chicago upon its incorporation into a city in 1837. When several of the Western states threatened to repudiate their bonds (Mississippi actually did so) during the hard times which followed the over-confident extension of canal and railroad construction in the early thirties, Butler performed a service which won him lasting gratitude both in this country and abroad.

As agent for the domestic and foreign holders of the bonds of Michigan and Indiana, he spent weeks in Detroit (spring of 1843) and Indianapolis (winter of 1845 - 46) laboring to convince the legislators and governors of their responsibility for preserving the plighted faith of their states, in the face of public sentiment, "shared by 99 persons in 100, " that there was "no obligation resting on them to recognize or pay any of the bonds. "

In the end Butler succeeded in getting the bills passed and signed for the preservation of the public credit in both of the states.

Achievements

• Charles Butler was one of the twenty-four "Founders" of the Union Theological Seminary in 1836, a member of its first board of directors, and president of the board from 1870 to his death in 1897. Until his ninety-third year he was constant in his attendance at the meetings of the board and distributed the diplomas to the graduating class of the Seminary. In 1836 he became a member of the Council of the University of the City of New York, on which he served for more than half a century.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Golden Rules: Finding World-Class Excellence in Your Life and Work

    ( Bob Bowman, best known as the coach for the record-brea...)

  • The Feminine Monarchy: Or The History Of Bees (1623)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • The feminine monarchie or a treatise concerning bees, and the due ordering of them wherein the truth, found out by experience and diligent ... fondd conceipts. By Char: Butler Magd. (1609)

    ( EARLY LITERATURE. Imagine holding history in your hands...)

Views

The letters written to his wife from Detroit and Indianapolis, often at midnight, after fifteen hours of work with wabbling legislators and obstinate officials, furnish an interesting combination of childlike trust in Providence and shrewd political manipulation. Butler's services in the promotion of education were constant and conspicuous for a period of more than threescore years.

Personality

Charles Butler was a man of singular charm and sterling character, unheralded in his large charities, fond of books and works of art, simple and sincere in his religion.

Quotes from others about the person

• "There is to-day, " says his biographer F. H. Stoddard, "scarcely a railroad leading to or from Chicago, east, west, north, or south, with which he did not have important association and to which he did not render efficient service, so that his acts are written in lines of steel all over the west. "

Connections

On October 10, 1825, Butler married Eliza A. Ogden of Walton, New York, niece of his uncle William Butler's wife.

Father:

Medad Butler

Mother:

Hannah (Tylee) Butler

Wife:

Eliza Ogden Butler

1803–1878

Daughter:

Emily Ogden Butler

1840–1927

Brother:

Benjamin Franklin Butler

Friend:

Goldwin Smith

Friend:

Matthew Arnold

Friend:

J. A. Froude

He made frequent trips abroad and numbered among his friends some of the most eminent men of England and the Continent. J. A. Froude, Goldwin Smith, Charles Kingsley, and Matthew Arnold.

Friend:

Charles Kingsley

References

• The Life And Letters Of Charles Butler (1903)