When you consider the source, the words are doubly shocking: “I have no purpose to interfere with the institution of slavery. I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” That’s President Abraham Lincoln talking in March, 1861, tacitly endorsing the concept of human beings as property.
With Richard Strand’s drama “Butler,” Northlight Theatre delves a little-known slice of history that unfolds about two months after Lincoln made the above stance on slavery. The story of a field slave named Shepard Mallory (Tosin Morohunfola) and Union General Benjamin Butler (Greg Vinkler) changed the way the United States viewed slavery, and re-defined the issues at the heart of the Civil War.
“What happens when the law is at odds with what’s morally right? That’s what this play addresses so powerfully,” says Morohunfola. “Butler” opens in May, 1861, shortly after Mallory escaped his plantation. Along with two others, he risked a perilous water crossing to seek refuge at Monroe Fort, under the command of General Butler. The conversation that ensued between the two men changed history.
“”The meeting between Butler and Mallory had huge repercussions as far as what the war was fought over, how long it lasted and how it ended,” Director Stuart Carden said. “What ‘Butler’ does so well is show how the scope of history can be shaped by two guys, face-to-face, in a room.”
Butler was a Constitutional Law stickler who vowed to uphold the law of the land in wartime and peace. That law included the definition of black people as property, a notion unequivocally bolstered by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
When Mallory showed up at Fort Monroe, the Civil War was in its infancy. The South had fired on Fort Sumter in April. Lincoln responded by amassing an army. Butler was fighting for the North, but he felt a sworn-duty to uphold the law, war or no war. Moreover, he had an awful lot in common with Jefferson Davis, the Mississippi Senator and soon-to-be elected President of the (newly seceded) Southern States of the United States.
“Butler voted with Jefferson Davis on around 50 different ballots during the Democratic Convention that took place the year before the play starts,” points out Vinkler. “He didn’t agree with slavery, but he wasn’t an abolitionist either.”
When he met Mallory, Butler was forced to come to a reckoning between morality and the law. “His eyes are awakened to the fact that this black man thinks and breathes and feels and deserves the same dignity and respect as all men,” says Morohunfola. “Mallory was a man with agency and intelligence and he forced Butler to see that while it might be legal, it’s wrong to treat people with oppression and violence.”
‘Butler’
When: March 11-April 17
Where: Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie
Contact: www.northlight.org; 847-673-6300
