Butterfield

He was wounded and earned a Medal of Honor for gallantry in action while fighting with the Union Army in the Civil War’s fierce Battle of Gaines’ Mill in Virginia in 1862. He was the first officer to use distinctive corps badges and shoulder patches to identify his various Army units.

And it was he who composed the melody for “Taps” - the beautiful, mournful bugle call that tells men and women in the military that their day’s work is done.

Daniel Butterfield was born in Utica on October 31, 1831, the third son of John Butterfield, the famous entrepreneur who helped to organize the Pony Express, established the Butterfield Overland Mail, helped to form the American Express Company and found time in 1865 to serve as mayor of Utica.

Daniel graduated from Union College in Schenectady in 1849. The following year, he began his military career as a private in the Utica Citizens Corps. By 1859, he was a colonel in the state militia. When the Civil War began in 1861, he was appointed a brigadier general and later was promoted to major general.

It was during the war that he wrote the melody for “Taps.” It all began with a problem Union officers were experiencing on the battlefield. If troops from more than one brigade were close together on a hillside or along a road, how could a commander use an Army regulation bugle call to order his men to assemble, or charge, or retreat or gather for mess? How would the troops know whether their commander or another one had ordered the call?

General Butterfield solved the problem for his men by composing a bugle call for them only. Its purpose was to put them on alert. When they heard the nonregulation call he had composed, they knew that a regulation call soon would follow and it would be for their ears only.

His call consisted of three whole notes and two catches of three quick notes each.

Several months later — in July 1862 — General Butterfield was resting in his tent at Harrison’s Landing in Virginia after a seven-day battle.

Nighttime arrived and the camp bugler sounded “lights out” or “taps” — at that time a melody the Union Army had borrowed from the French.

As the general lay on his cot, he — really for the first time — listened carefully to the bugle call. He thought: “It is not smooth, melodious and musical. We can do better than that.”

He called his own bugler, Oliver W. Norton, to his tent and asked him to help compose a new melody for “lights out.”

The general could not read or write music, but his wife could. When several months earlier he had composed the special bugle call to alert his men, it was his wife who had jotted down the notes he had whistled.

Butterfield Monument

Now, in that small tent at Harrison’s Landing in July 1862, General Butterfield showed bugler Norton the notes his wife had scribbled on the back of an envelope.

Norton played the tune. The general changed a note here, the timing there. By midnight, they were finished.

The next evening, when the time for “lights out” arrived, Norton stood alone on a hillside where Butterfield’s brigade was encamped and played the Utica general’s melody. It was the first time that the “Taps” bugle call we know today was officially played.

Years later, Norton wrote: “The music was beautiful on that still summer night and was heard far beyond the limits of our Brigade.”

Other buglers and commanders had heard the call that night and soon the hauntingly beautiful melody spread throughout units in the Union Army.

Some Confederate brigades adopted it, too.

Today, the “Taps” melody composed by Major General Butterfield and bugler Norton is the regulation military call for “lights out” and funerals.

General Butterfield died on July 17, 1901, at age 69.

He is buried at West Point where a large monument covers his grave. It is 35 feet high and made of white marble. Rising from a terrace foundation are 16 slender columns, each 10 feet tall. On them are recorded the 43 Civil War battles — including the one at Gettysburg — in which the general from Utica participated.