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"A TERRIBLE MACHINE": General Neal Dow's Military Government on the Gulf Coast Frank L. Byrne More United States military officers governed more civilians during the Civil War than at any previous time in the nation's history. Numerous as were the rulers of the occupied South, only a few distracted the attention of their contemporaries from the excitement of the battlefield. Only one called down upon himself the rebuke of superiors, formal charges by his Confederate captors, and the final judgment of the United States Supreme Court. That man was Brigadier General Neal Dow. By his exercise of sweeping powers, Dow demonstrated the arbitrary righteousness and wrongdoing possible under martial law and in the process brought about a definition of its constitutional status. He thereby made himself, in war as in peace, a unique center of controversy. Prior to the Civil War, Neal Dow was the leading American fighter against Demon Rum. In 1851, this prosperous Portland businessman won wide renown as the author of the Maine Law, the first stringent state prohibitory statute. As mayor of Portland, he ruthlessly enforced his law, publicized claims of its success, and created a political movement which temporarily spread prohibition across much of the North. He and his followers became an important faction within the new Republican party. When secession and civil war followed his party's first presidential victory, Dow, though fifty-seven years old and without military experience, received a colonel's commission from Maine's Republican governor and recruited temperance men for the 13th Maine Infantry. The new colonel was short, being about five and one-half feet in height, but he was robust and had often proved his readiness to fight. His graying brown curls covered his neck and framed a high forehead above deep-set blue eyes. His cheekbones were bold, his nose sharp, his mouth wide and stern. In appearance, as in personality, Neal Dow symbolized Cromwellian morality to prohibitionists and to many Republicans, whereas to anti-prohibitionists and to most New England Democrats he epitomized the worst ß CIVIL W AR HISTOR Y of Puritanism. He could be sure that both friend and foe would be unusually attentive to bis wartime role.1 While Dow had anticipated joining in actual combat, a clash of personalities restricted him mainly to the governing of occupied territory . Early in 1862, he learned that Major General Benjamin F. Butler was raising a force in New England. Butler, a shrewd Massachusetts lawyer and politician, had sided with southerners at the 1860 Democratic national convention but, following secession, he had led his state's militia to defend Washington. Dow still despised this member of "the extreme pro-slavery and pro-rum democracy" and unsuccessfully maneuvered to keep the temperance 13th from being assigned to Butler's Democrat-dominated army. In February, 1862. when he reluctantly sailed with Butler on an invasion of the GuIi Coast of the Confederacy, Dow made little effort to conceal his distaste for his commander. "Ben" Butler was a paunchy, middle-aged man whose stringy hair failed to cover his great bald dome. Dow sneered that the general's cockeye made him "look out a different way and every way." Butler returned Dow's disfavor and when his troops occupied New Orleans in April, he left Dow and the 13th at the expedition's base on Ship Island, Mississippi. While Dow quickly won a promotion through influence at Washington, he still commanded only a few men on a seven-mile-long sand bar. He bitterly recognized that his service in the Department of the Gulf would be far from fields of glory.2 Even at his isolated post, however, General Dow was able to expedite some of his ideas on the conduct of the war. He long had ardently favored the abolition of slavery, and saw in the Civil War an ideal opportunity to advance his cause. While the national adrninistration had not yet converted the crusade for the Union into one for Emancipation, Dow's own superior, General Butler, had already set a precedent for treating fugitive slaves as "contraband of war." When Negroes began to escape to Ship Island from the nearby mainland of Mississippi, Dow...
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