Eagle's Cry

by David Nevin

  And the secretary won his heart when he said the West would always be American; he’d known that for a quarter century. Now, by God, that was well put! Having queried the visitor, Madison took the floor. The burden was exactly what Jackson wanted to hear—that they would open the river by force, if necessary. The little man said the president would never accept France on the Mississippi. Amen, said Jackson. Furthermore, it was too late now to return to the status quo, Spain in control. The United States must have sovereignty, the secretary said, it must own a chunk of land, perhaps a square mile or two, from which upriver produce could be transshipped with full rights guaranteed, perhaps the island of New Orleans itself, perhaps the whole eastern bank.

  Well, now we’re talking!

  If it came to fighting—and it would if we didn’t get our way right quickly—they would count on western militia backed by eastern volunteers, and if necessary they would call in the Royal Navy, which was more than ready to oblige. But it was his opinion—from the corner of his eye Jackson saw Ross nodding agreement—that the price of British help would be plunging ourselves into its war with France as an exceedingly subordinate partner, and that we could only accept as a last resort.

  Jackson was shaking his head. No, he understood that danger. He knew the British, that scar on his forehead to prove it from the days when Tarleton’s Raiders had swept into the Carolina uplands, and he didn’t want the British to get their hooks into his country. It seemed there was a whole lot more to this than he’d understood.

  So, Madison said, they needed time because he believed the French still could be brought to reason. If they would just pay attention long enough to see that they couldn’t win a war, they would come around. They were arrogant, but he judged them not insane.

  “I hope you’re right, Mr. Secretary,” Jackson said. “But you want to move right along. Way things are in the West, we’re facing ruin, and we ain’t going to wait forever. I know my people; and if this ain’t settled soon, they’ll go down and take New Orleans themselves. That time comes, you’ll find me leading the way.”

  35

  WASHINGTON, END OF 1802

  The fire, flames leaping over treetops, roar you could hear at this distance, awakened them. Low clouds that had blown in after dark were crimson with madly flickering light. He and Dolley knelt by a window.

  “The town’s on fire,” she whispered in awe. “Will it come here, Jimmy? We’d better—”

  But it didn’t seem to be advancing. “Hold on,” he said. Then he realized it was a towering bonfire hurling sparks into the air six or eight blocks away. It was Federalists clamoring for war while Democrats lay low. The flame roar was pierced by orator’s shouts in unintelligible fragments. They watched for a long time and then went back to bed.

  In the morning he found Johnny Graham and Meriwether Lewis at his gate. He was walking to the Capitol and they said they would walk with him. “Thing is,” Merry said, “this ain’t a good day to be out alone. There’s a fury running in the streets.” He smiled, a certain light of combat in his eyes. Merry was a changed man since the expedition had been authorized—that tightness around his eyes mostly vanished.

  Madison was glad to have an escort. At Sixth and Pennsylvania, work crews were shoveling up ashes from the bonfire. Someone shouted an obscenity that he realized with a start was meant for him. It made him feel naked and exposed. Johnny was amused, but Merry’s face tightened and he turned in that direction. Madison caught his arm.

  He was surprised to find that both young men had been at the bonfire and both had had fights. Merry said, “Quite a night, in fact. Must have been a thousand or so, plenty of bottles, speakers giving them red meat. That Griswold of Connecticut—you want to watch out for him, sir—he was saying things to curl your hair. And you know that little devil works for the chairman, Simon Pink? He was right up against the speaker’s stand taking notes! And I slid up to him and I said, ‘Simon, you’re going to get yourself killed.’ And he says, ‘Nah! Chairman’ll want to know what they’re saying. And these scoundrels, they can kiss my bum.’ And I said, ‘Simon, you’ve got more pith than I ever figured,’ and he gives me a big smile, looked pleased as punch.”

  Madison smiled. It didn’t pay to dismiss small men too quickly. He asked about the crowd. Were they riffraff?

  “Working men, out of work or soon will be,” Johnny said.

  “Baltimore too,” Merry said. “I spent a day there, got back yesterday. Waterfront looks deserted, businesses shut down, especially those dependent on western trade. Food costs already up. Grain houses standing empty, teamsters looking for fodder, teams slowing down. Hungry animals won’t work, and that means everything else is crippled. That big candle plant up from the bay, it’s closed. Taverns full of angry men; it’s as good as your life to go in some of those Baltimore saloons.”

  “I saw it from the mansion roof,” the president said. “Spectacular, to say the least.”

  “Metaphor for the white heat out there,” Madison said.

  “Oh, yes.” Mr. Jefferson sighed and slumped into a chair. “Pressure everywhere. Letters pouring in. Every editor in the country with his war drum going. The West ready to march. Another letter from that Tennessee firebrand, Jackson his name is, wants to go take New Orleans. Give the word and he’ll command. But all this bubbling; dare we wait much longer?”

  “But isn’t the real question, dare we not?”

  The State of the Union message, which the president must write and send to the Hill to be read to a joint session, was only a week away. Everyone expected it to take a definitive position. But what position? Stand by for war?

  God knew there was support for it. The commercial East—not the part that dreamed of cutting off the West to leave a tight little seaboard nation prospering on its shipping—was as militant as the West Connecticut and Massachusetts were becoming manufacturing states, stationary steam engines huffing away, mechanized looms thundering, new cast-iron implements appearing every year. The West was the market that took these goods in return for the corn and wheat—shipped via New Orleans, mind you—that fed the workers. The nation’s economy was more tied together every year, everyone saw that to shatter part was to shatter the whole. Foolish the Frenchman who couldn’t grasp that.

  Plunging ahead would be safer. Seize New Orleans before the French arrived. Satisfy the American clamor for action. But in the end that would finish common man democracy. It would prove the Federalists were right all along. They would say, and people would believe, that it was democratic weakness that had made war inevitable. And the people would turn back to government that was strong and reliable, and the democratic dream would die as aristocracy rose and monarchy loomed ahead. So Madison foresaw the ominous possibilities.

  Yet holding off was dangerous too. It would take time to raise an army and rally the Royal Navy, and if Leclerc struck in force, they might not have time. Still, seven hundred regulars were posted on the lower Mississippi, with two thousand militia standing by and the Tennessee militia ready to move on short notice. So they weren’t entirely defenseless.

  The other side of the gamble was that if they held off, things still might break their way. Leclerc was beginning to sound a bit mad, and the yellow fever season was sure to trouble the French troops. Reports from Europe said France and England were edging toward war again, which ought to keep Napoleon occupied. And their arguments—in which they had great confidence, given they were so patently true—might penetrate at last to find some few grains of common sense.

  The president was at his standing desk. He sighed and wiped his quill. “Do you consider yourself a gambling man?”

  Madison hesitated. He was sunk in a deep chair by a window. Morning sunlight glowed on the walls and made everything seem brighter than it was. A gambling man … was he? They were talking of gambling the nation’s future.

  It was a desperate crossroads, either turn a potential disaster. “I’ve played a few hands of whist.”

  “And wo
n?”

  “More often than I’ve lost, yes.” His mind flicked back to those comfortable days at Princeton in the college Aaron Burr’s father had started. “I rarely had to ask my father for more money at college.” Aaron had been a young student then. He’d bullied the college into admitting him at fourteen and had been glad to team with Madison at whist. In retrospect, even with the Revolution raging, those had seemed joyous days full of bright hope.

  “Then we’re agreed,” the president said. “Give ’em a State of the Union message with no more to hold onto than a greased pole. And take the consequences.”

  So in the end, Madison told his wife, they were gambling men: They would wait a little longer and risk being caught with preparations yet to be made if Leclerc struck soon. Troops, weapons, dealing with the British …

  Dolley said, “That’s not gambling; that’s making a judgment .”

  “I like that,” he said. But he knew it was a gamble.

  The clerk of the house had been droning on for twenty minutes, reading aloud the president’s message. Madison sat hunched inconspicuously in the gallery of the temporary oval chamber in which the House met, already dubbed the Oven for its shape and atmosphere on warm days. There was palpable tension in the crowded room, every congressman present, senators crowded around the edges, men sitting with hands cupped to ears, listening for what everyone in Washington expected. The administration had scarcely admitted there was a crisis, but now it could dodge no longer!

  Gradually a murmur started to run. Would the president still refuse to admit anything was wrong? At last the clerk reached the single paragraph on the subject—slanting reference to the French, no mention of the crisis on the river. So they gambled, walking armless up to war in hopes of staving it off.

  Into the silence a single piercing voice: “My God, is that all the craven scoundrel will say?”

  Madison slipped out but not quickly enough. Roger Griswold of Connecticut pinned him between a bench and an awful statue as members streamed around them. Griswold’s leonine face was red, and he was shouting.

  “A disgrace, a rotten disgrace, bereft of courage, mouse of a man lying about with his nigger mistress, afraid to act—and why? Because he’s in thrall to the French! Loves their sick, soul-rotten revolution, their murder of those who knew how to run the country, who had tradition and position and authority, turned everything to the rabble and that gave us the tyrant who abuses us. And you too, you miserable little scoundrel, tail tucked before the mighty Napoleon—”

  Roger must have had garlic sausage for breakfast; the evidence was on the air.

  “War is the answer,” Roger cried. “It’s common sense, common decency, national honor. Seize New Orleans and fight them when they arrive. Stand up like men. The Royal Navy would be at our service; they’d relish the chance to thwart the tyrant. Are you blind, for God’s sake? We’d welcome alliance with Britain, they’re our friends, our brothers, not this mincing Frenchman drenched in the foul perfume of tyranny!”

  He jabbed a finger into Madison’s chest. “So you’d better tell that effete master of yours—”

  Madison caught the finger and bent it back.

  “Ouch! What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’ll break it off, you jab it in my chest.” Madison bent the finger farther and Griswold cried out, his knees bending to accommodate the pressure. He backed away and Madison released the finger.

  Griswold stood there rubbing his hand. At last he grinned. “Jimmy,” he said, “you’ve got a touch of the terrier in you, I’ll give you that. But I’m right in what I said and you know it.”

  And as Madison caught a hack back to his end of Pennsylvania Avenue, he had to admit that while Griswold was not right and his idea of policy was a paradigm of Federalist fears and dreams, most Americans would be cheering him on.

  This clamor for war, Jimmy told Louis Pichon, should alert the powers in Paris as to how united—how very determined—the Americans were. France must see that it courted war … .

  The Pichons had come to dinner, Pirette with her new babe asleep in her arms. Dolley made over the child with abandon, knowing no excess would be too much for Pirette, but it struck her the little form was very small and disturbingly still.

  Louis raised a fresh concern. Philadelphia papers were quoting the president as saying he would put the nation under the protection of the Royal Navy.

  “Thus the extremes, Louis,” Jimmy said easily, “to which the first consul drives us.”

  The next day, taking tea at the mansion, they described the encounter.

  “Will he dare report it, do you suppose?” Tom asked.

  “I was watching Pirette,” Dolley said, “and from her expression, yes, he still reports. She’s terrified.”

  The Frenchwoman’s hand, at rest on the table beside her plate, had started to tremble. The quiver had grown more and more pronounced, and her lips had drawn down in a grimace that became painful to see. Louis, looking at Jimmy, hadn’t noticed; then Danny put her hand on Pirette’s and held it until it was quiet. Pirette looked at Danny with a tremulous smile of gratitude. It hurt for a woman’s agony to be a matter of state … .

  Then the president, standing with an elbow on the mantle, snapped her back to what mattered. His face had a thin look, nostrils drawn in, lips tight. “We’re cutting this very close,” he said. “How much time do you think we really have, Jimmy?”

  “Three months,” Jimmy said. “Not much more. Depends on when Leclerc can clear Santo Domingo, and he may have to delay. Persistent rumors say he’s having trouble.”

  Three months … Dolley suppressed an involuntary shiver.

  Pirette Pichon’s quivering hand had had a profound effect on Danny too. Placing her hand on Pirette’s had been an instinctive gesture born of a woman’s sympathy for another’s terror. But that terror had communicated, and Danny found herself worried—indeed, frightened—as she had not been before. Suddenly war was real and imminent. She had listened to Mr. Madison spell what plainly was the truth to Louis Pichon, and somehow that Louis so clearly understood it and despaired of his own inability to open his blind and reckless government’s eyes had finally opened her own eyes. Of course she had understood it was serious all along, but it had not been imminent and now it was and she could see her own ruin looming ahead.

  Henri wrote of New Orlean’s joy—soon it would be French again with all the vast superiority that that status conferred. The Spanish would be gone, the great leader Napoleon Bonaparte would make Americans pay through the nose for the massive benefit the French river conferred on them, honest Frenchmen would come at last into their place in the sun. Danny, of course, he hastened to add, wasn’t included in this wholesale condemnation of the rude nation to the north; she was a Frenchwoman to the core and would fit perfectly into the new New Orleans.

  She knew better, she had made herself an American and was pleased that her accent had almost vanished. It struck her suddenly that Henri was obtuse—handsome, clever, witty, elegant, but blind to reality. And the reality was that the French were implacable and the Americans would fight, and she and her business must surely be destroyed in the clash. She could get her ships out, but the sugar business and even the little wine business that interested Clinch would be instant casualties of war and she would be back in the desperate times she faced when Carl died.

  Yet the sudden pain of it went far beyond her own affairs. American though she was, she hadn’t lost her love for home. Oh, she could readily summon up the summer heat, the insects, the snakes, the mold that forms when humidity is high, the prideful self-satisfaction of individuals, the arrogance of the men—of whom Henri was an example—but that’s not what the city on the great crescent of the Mississippi meant to her. It meant the soft air in spring and fall, the gentle winters, the explosions of flowers, the gaiety and the music, the calls of men and sometimes of women in the market place furiously cajoling dice flung across a canvas sheet with an air of challenging the world.


  As fresh in her mind as yesterday, she could see, hear, smell the market, all hurly-burly and laughter and sharp dealings and fierce bargaining and half-serious threats. The endless festivities, the cotillions, the Quadroon Ball that drew the men and alarmed the women, the theater, the opera from Paris playing to packed houses, the shrieks of laughter at musical comedy. New Orleans was a tenth the size of Philadelphia, but in such matters it far outstripped the largest city in America and, as for Washington, don’t even attempt comparison. She could see the cool interior gardens, goldfish fat as catfish in the ponds, house fronts flush with the street as anonymous on the outside as ranks of soldiers, while the interiors were all tile and plaster and brilliant colors and burgeoning greenery and lavish ballrooms. The people there boasted they knew how to live, and they were right …

  It would all be destroyed, it would not survive as she knew it, what followed would be all different and foreign to her. She knew the Americans—once aroused they would fight to the death and nothing around them would survive. What would happen to her? To Henri? To whatever they meant to each other? Henri was foolish, but it wasn’t really his fault. He was inexperienced. He’d never left New Orleans but to hunt in the swamps. A wave of tenderness overtook her; she saw she was more than half seriously in love with this stirring, invigorating, downright exciting man, who was exasperated her beyond imagining with his demands and insistence and assumptions, preening his feathers of masculinity like some barnyard cock—