Today's reading by Elizabeth Leonard was the first author event for our library and I reveled in every minute of it. What a treat to have this brilliant and charming woman in our humble library. Oh this is why we have a library. She read the preface and answered our questions. Outside you can see the children's story time happening, there was coding class in the meeting room and traffic in and out of the library. We were running on all cylinders. In the book she showed how Butler consistently worked on policy benefiting labor, women, and newly freed black people; and he did so in the face of constant criticism and harassment. He hated the Andrew Johnson's reconstruction plan of letting the South back into the Union with no real change in their politics. His policy of "contraband of war" in regard to escaped slaves was the first small step to emancipation. I hadn't realized that the idea of emancipation, totally not there at the beginning of the war, was a gradual evolution of thought. She quoted a lot from articles and letters written in that time and I loved the elaborate language and wish we could inject some of that into Twitter. Butler said of one critic that his "malevolence has exhausted the vocabulary of vituperation."