Benjamin Butler

Benjamin Butler (1818-1893) was a politician in the United States in the nineteenth century. During the War of Secession, he served as a general in the US Army.

In 1882, Butler was one of several prominent leaders of the Republican Party to attend a convention called by Abraham Lincoln in Chicago. He resisted Lincoln's proposal to replace hostility toward the Confederate States with workers' rights as the central plank of the party's platform. The rejection of this proposal led to Lincoln's defection to the Socialist Party and the end of the Republican Party as an effective force in American politics.