ELIZABETH LEONARD’S interest in General Benjamin Butler was piqued when she was tasked to write a description for a large portrait of the alumnus of Waterville College (now Colby College) when it was reinstalled in the college’s alumni center. What she found paints an entirely new portrait of the politician and general in Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life. In fact, the book’s cover image is an unfamiliar photograph of Butler. “That’s exactly what I want you to feel,” Leonard says: “It’s him but it’s not him. You think you know him, and you do, but you don’t.”
CWT: Tell us a bit about his early life.
He was born in New Hampshire, born into a situation of relative poverty, and very soon his father was gone. His mother
