AUGUSTA — The Kennebec Historical Society’s October presentation, “Let’s Stop Calling Him ‘Beast’: Revisiting the Life of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler,” is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 19, at the Augusta City Center, 16 Cony St.

Elizabeth D. Leonard will be the presenter.

In 2013, when Colby College decided to restore to public view a large portrait of Butler in its new alumni center that had been presented to the institution in 1889, Leonard agreed to write the text to hang near it. In it, she explained why, even at his alma mater, Butler’s memory had remained tangled with epithets like “Beast,” a nickname derived from his stern treatment of the local secessionists and their foreign allies during his army’s 1862 occupation of New Orleans, according to a news release from Scott Wood, society executive director.

But the nickname is misleading, Leonard claims, and in this presentation, she will explain why she thinks it is well past time to retire it in connection with Butler, a former Colby student, unless it is meant in the way the Urban Dictionary defines the word, as “a person that is extremely talented at whatever they do and always display[s] great determination, dedication, and resilience to always win or want to win.”

Leonard is Colby College’s Gibson professor of history, emerita.

She earned her doctorate in U.S. history from the University of California, Riverside, in 1992, and is the author of several articles and seven books on the Civil War era, including “Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War,” “All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies,” and “Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky,” which was named co-winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize in 2012.

The presentation is free with donations accepted.

For more information about the program, call Wood at 207-622-7718.

 

 

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