1824: The Arkansas War

by Eric Flint

  Nor could they return to more civilized parts of the United States. Leaving aside what difficulties they might encounter because of Bryant’s articles—which could be serious, given that Clay might well be the next president—they had several other awkward issues to deal with. Scott had arrest warrants out for him, and Ray had creditors. Not the sort of creditors who demanded imprisonment for debt, either, as a last resort. The sort who started with broken knees.

  “All right, then.”

  “Oh, stop being gloomy,” Scott said. “We need to get to St. Louis anyway, on account of this.” He patted the pocket into which he’d stuffed the reward notice.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you pay any attention? I told you. Well, maybe not all of it. Andrew Clark’s cousin is the black sheep of the family. He’s the one person Clark could find shelter with, and he’s in Missouri.”

  “In St. Louis?”

  “Well. No.” Powers seemed to be avoiding his gaze. “Further west. Missouri Territory.”

  Ray rolled his eyes. “Wonderful. He’s a bandit, isn’t he?”

  “Some might call him that, I suppose.”

  “ ‘Some,’ ” Ray mimicked sarcastically. “Let me guess. Ninety-nine out of a hundred citizens of Missouri.”

  Scott grinned. “Nah, not that many. Maybe ninety-five out of a hundred.”

  He gave Ray a sideways look. “What? You worried about our good names?”

  Thompson said nothing. What was there to say?

  “What I thought. Face it, Ray. We ain’t exactly upstanding citizens, our own selves. Not even around bandits. Southern ones, for sure.”

  New Antrim, Arkansas

  DECEMBER 16, 1824

  “I don’t care if we go bankrupt, Henry.” Patrick Driscol’s rasp seemed more pronounced than ever. “What difference does it make if Arkansas goes under? I’ll be dead on a battlefield, you’ll be a slave picking cotton in the Delta, and even the engineer fellow here”—a thumb indicated Henry Shreve, who was scowling at him from the doorway—“is likely to be standing trial for treason. Never gave up his U.S. citizenship, you know.”

  “That’s not funny, Patrick!” Shreve’s scowl grew darker still.

  “No, I suppose not. It’s still true.” Driscol smiled thinly. “Of course, you could always have a sudden conversion on the road to Damascus. ‘Reconversion,’ I guess I should say. Hurry on down to Memphis, confess the error of your wicked ways, and offer your services to the Fulton-Livingston Company. Word has it they’ve already got the contract for supplying the U.S. Army, in the event war comes. I’m sure they’d hire you on.”

  Now Shreve’s scowl could have terrified an ogre. “Stop playing the fool! ‘Hurry on down to Memphis.’ In what? A rowboat?—seeing as how you’ve already seized everything I own, you damn tyrant. Worse than any Federalist who ever lived, you are.”

  Henry Crowell’s grunt combined amusement and exasperation. “Don’t forget the years he spent with Napoleon, Henry. Conscription—seizure of personal property—all out for the war effort. Nothing’s too low for the Laird. By next Tuesday, I figure he’ll start debasing the currency.”

  “Don’t call me that, damnation. I hate that term.”

  “Why? It’s true, Patrick. And before you start prattling about your republican principles—about which Henry’s right; you’ve shredded every one these past two months—you might keep in mind that the term is prob’bly worth another regiment, as far as the army’s morale goes.”

  Shreve’s scowl lightened a bit. “He’s right about that. Black heathen savages. Bad as Frenchmen. Vive l’empereur! Allons enfants de la patrie!”

  His French accent was quite good. Better than Driscol’s, in fact, although Driscol was more fluent in the language. So Crowell had been told, anyway. His own knowledge of French was limited to the Creole he’d picked up in New Orleans.

  “They’re hardly heathens,” grumbled Patrick. “Most of ’em are downright Calvinists, by now, since Brown started his preaching.”

  Shreve gave him a skeptical look. Driscol shrugged. “Well, fine. Some of Marie Laveau’s voudou in there, too, I suppose.”

  “John Brown doesn’t actually preach,” Crowell said mildly. “It’s more just that black folks admire the man so much. And why shouldn’t they? The Catholics are doing pretty well, too, actually. Especially since all that money started coming in from Pierre Toussaint to fund them.”

  Shreve rolled his eyes. “You had to bring that up, didn’t you?” Sourly, he crossed his arms and slouched in the doorway. “I can remember a time—O blessed days of innocent youth—when my world was a lot simpler. Sure as hell didn’t include rich black bankers in Arkansas and still richer darkies in New York. And a crazy Scots-Irishman to fan the flames of their insane ambitions.”

  Crowell’s grunt this time was simply amused. For all of Shreve’s more-or-less constant carping and complaining, the fact was that the Pennsylvania steamboat wizard had thrown in his lot with Arkansas as unreservedly as the poorest freedman. Henry wasn’t sure why, exactly, since it certainly wasn’t due to any commitment on Shreve’s part to abolition or even any deep faith in human equality. Shreve didn’t really care that much about such things, one way or the other. He had the mind and soul of an engineer, first, last, and always.

  In the end, Henry thought, that was the key. As much and as often as Shreve protested Driscol’s ways—which did, indeed, sometimes border on Napoleonic high-handedness if not outright tyranny—the fact remained that the Laird of Arkansas had supported and funded Shreve’s plans and schemes far more extensively than any person or institution in the United States had ever done. Or ever would, so long as the Fulton-Livingston Company could throw its money and influence around.

  But it was time to settle the current dispute. “Fine, Patrick. Seeing as how you’re being stubborn—”

  “When is he not? ” demanded Shreve.

  “—we’ll sink every dime we can into buying iron plate from the foundries in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. The ones who’ll still do business with us, anyway.”

  Seeing Driscol’s sarcastic expression, he chucked. “Which, I admit, is all of them. Amazing, in a way, since Ohio’s supposed to be solid for Henry Clay.”

  Shreve snorted. “ ‘Solid’ refers to politics. Money has no country.”

  He glared at Driscol. “Besides which, the United States is a republic. A nation of free men, where the idea that the government could tell a man what he could and couldn’t do with his own property is anathema.”

  “Especially when the property talks and has a black skin,” Driscol fired back. “So don’t preach to me about ‘freedom,’ Mister Shreve. I find myself quite willing to abrogate the lesser freedoms to maintain the great ones. We’re still going to buy all the iron plate we can, since we can’t make it in our own little foundries, so that when the bastards come up the river it’ll be our boats—yours, when I give them back after the war—who steam out of the encounter. And theirs which go under. Or would you rather we did it the other way around?”

  Put that way…

  Shreve threw up his hands. “Fine! I’m going back to work. Otherwise your lunatic scheme will sink the boats right there at the piers, all the iron you’ll try to bolt onto them.”

  “I wouldna dream of telling an engineer his business,” said Driscol, his Belfast accent thicker than usual. “Mind, I’d appreciate the occasional reciprocation.”

  But Shreve had already left.

  Washington, D.C.

  DECEMBER 18, 1824

  “Well, that’s it,” said Adam Beatty. “We’ll have a merry Christmas, gentlemen. With Louisiana’s vote having come in, everything’s been reported.”

  At the head of the table in the boardinghouse, Henry Clay rubbed his face wearily. “Summarize it, please.”

  “Nationwide, Jackson has the plurality of votes, though not by as large a margin as it appeared he would in midsummer. That’s the ‘Arkansas effect,’ most likely, coming in at the last m
inute. Still, he’s got eighty-five electoral votes, just a little under one-third of the total. Adams comes a pretty close second, with seventy-six.”

  “In short,” Peter Porter said bluntly, “our two principal enemies—who’ve now formed an alliance, with Adams willing to throw his support to Jackson—have a total of one hundred and sixty-one votes. Which is a clear majority in the electoral college. And the same percentage, roughly speaking, in the popular vote.”

  “A little over sixty percent,” Beatty agreed. “But it really doesn’t matter, because the electoral college is not where the issue gets settled, according to the Constitution. Since no single candidate won a majority, the three top candidates are the ones chosen from by the House. And there—”

  He smiled widely. “Henry’s the third man. Clear-cut, no question about it. He got forty-two votes to Crawford’s thirty-four and Calhoun’s twenty-five. All we’ve got to do, gentlemen, is turn that forty percent in the electoral college into fifty-one percent in the House.”

  Put that way, Porter mused, it didn’t sound so bad. But the sense he’d had of a situation steadily unraveling was getting stronger all the while. Because the other way to look at it was that the man who could only muster…

  Porter was good at arithmetic. Silently, in his head, he did the calculations.

  And was appalled. Henry Clay had gotten barely sixteen percent of the popular and electoral votes. Which Beatty was cheerily projecting he could triple—more than triple—in order to get elected, purely and solely based on political maneuvering in the House of Representatives.

  That it could be done, Porter didn’t much doubt. Clay’s ability to manipulate the House was practically legendary by now. But could a president elected in such a manner actually carry out the tasks and duties of the nation’s chief executive in the years to follow? That was another matter entirely.

  His musings were interrupted by Clay’s voice. “Peter, are the rumors we’ve been hearing about Van Buren true, in your estimate?”

  A bit startled, Porter looked up. “Well…It’s hard to know. Van Buren plays the game very close to the chest. But I think it’s likely, yes. Jackson, unlike Adams, has always had a clear stance on states’ rights, which is what matters to the New York Radicals. They simply don’t have the same concerns regarding Arkansas and the issues surrounding it that Calhoun’s people do, and some of Crawford’s.” He cleared his throat. “Some others of Crawford’s, I should say, since they were in that camp themselves.”

  Clay nodded, his expression weary but still alert. “In other words, Crawford’s camp is breaking up.”

  “Pretty much, yes. His Northern supporters shifting toward Jackson, his Southern ones in our direction. More toward Calhoun than us, though, and keeping in mind that it’s certainly not a split down the middle. Most of his support was in the South, to begin with. New York was really his only major Northern stronghold.”

  “The key’s the South, then,” stated Josiah Johnston. “It’s that simple. We haven’t got enough, even getting all of Calhoun’s and Crawford’s votes. And we can’t possibly hope to crack anything away in New England, that matters. Or Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Or Tennessee.”

  He stopped there, a bit awkwardly. Porter didn’t blame him. He could have added or Kentucky, probably. The two most populous border states had gone for Jackson, even Clay’s home state.

  Clay sat up straight. “All right. I agree with Josiah. It’s simple enough. We’ve got to keep Calhoun solid—that, whatever else—and win over Crawford’s Southern supporters. Then—”

  He took a deep breath. “Ignore New England altogether. Ignore Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Go straight at the Southern congressional delegations, and a few of the softer Western ones, like Indiana and Illinois. We can assume that Ohio and Missouri will remain solid for us. Persuade them that the allegiance many of their states showed for Jackson was an error, produced by the fact that news of Arkansas—and Jackson’s disturbing reaction to it—hadn’t had time to reach the populace before they voted. Surely they would have voted otherwise, had they known.”

  “Remember Arkansas Post!” Beatty exclaimed. “That’s the drum we beat.”

  Clay looked around the room. Everyone nodded. Even Porter, in the end. What else was there to do?

  CHAPTER 26

  Washington, D.C.

  DECEMBER 19, 1824

  “Please, Colonel Taylor, have a seat.” General Brown half rose from the seat behind his desk when Zachary entered his office, motioning toward a chair next to the one occupied by General Winfield Scott. A bit to the side sat Thomas Jesup, the army’s quartermaster general.

  Taylor would have felt awkward under any circumstances in such august company. Since the reorganization and drastic reduction in the size of the army ordered by Congress in 1821, Jacob Brown was the only remaining major general, and thus the commanding general of the entire U.S. Army. Winfield Scott was one of its two remaining brigadier generals of the line and commanded the eastern department of the military. For the moment, at least. Rumors were that he and Brigadier General Edmund Gaines, who commanded the western department, would soon be exchanging posts.

  In short, he was sitting in an office with three of the army’s four generals. Nor were they “political generals,” although Brown had begun his career as a political appointee. All three of them were considered by the entire U.S. military—except for a few rivals in the officer corps like Gaines—to be the army’s best fighting generals. Brown had been in overall command of the Army of the Niagara, which had won the first major American land victory in the war with Britain; Scott, the general in command of the forces that triumphed at the Chippewa; Jesup, then a colonel, had commanded the 25th Infantry regiment that Scott had used in the battle to drive back the British right flank.

  The presence of Jesup was a bit reassuring, since Jesup had been Taylor’s principal supporter in the army’s high command since the days they’d worked together in the northwest frontier. Still, the situation was nerve-wracking. Zachary had been half expecting to receive a summons for a court-martial since he arrived in the capital.

  He decided to deal with that immediately. “General, I’m quite aware that I had no specific orders to report to Washington. Still, as soon as I was assured that my post in Baton Rouge was in good order, I felt it incumbent—”

  Jesup chuckled. Brown waved his hand. “Oh, relax, Zack. You’re not in any trouble.”

  “Not from us, anyway,” Scott murmured.

  Taylor glanced at him. Then, looked back at Brown.

  “The reason I asked you here,” the major general said, “is because of these.” He leaned over and picked some papers from his desk. The movement was stiff and ungainly, as his earlier rise from the chair had been. Brown had suffered a bad stroke three years earlier and was still recovering from the effects.

  Even from the distance, Taylor recognized the handwriting on the sheets. Which was hardly surprising, since it was his. Well…

  Brown’s stiff face broke into a smile. “First, by the way, let me congratulate you on the sudden and marked improvement in your penmanship.”

  Taylor felt himself flushing a bit. “Not mine, actually. I’d suffered, ah, something of a sprain in my wrist. Miss Julia Chinn wrote the dispatches for me, at my dictation.”

  Jesup frowned slightly. “Chinn. Isn’t she Senator Johnson’s woman?”

  “Wife, I believe, in reality if not in law,” corrected Scott. He gave both Jesup and Brown a quick, hard glance. “Shall we get to the point, gentlemen? We wouldn’t have invited Colonel Taylor here if we didn’t think he was trustworthy.”

  Trustworthy of what? Zack wondered. But from the look Scott was now giving him, he realized he was about to find out.

  “Here’s how it is, Colonel,” Scott continued. “I’m from Virginia, as you are. So’s Thomas Jesup. Our august commander”—a thumb indicated Brown—“on the other hand, is a Pennsylvania Quaker.”

  “More of a New Yorker, reall
y,” Brown said mildly, “although I was born in Pennsylvania. And I abandoned pacifism quite some time ago.”

  Scott ignored him, his eyes still intent on Taylor. “Not a single New England abolitionist in the lot, you’ll notice. That said, all three of us think John Quincy Adams would make the best next president of the United States. Failing him, Andrew Jackson—yes, even me, despite my well-known feud with the man. But what’s most important is that all three of us think the election of Henry Clay, which now seems almost certain, is going to be a disaster. Not simply for the nation, but for the army in particular.”

  Brown winced. Jesup was scowling openly.

  For his part, Taylor was simply trying to keep from gaping openmouthed. Even by the standards of the U.S. Army, whose top officers politicked aggressively, this sort of blunt and open statement concerning current politics was almost unheard of. From any officer, at least, who didn’t expect to be relieved from duty.

  Which—

  Scott smiled crookedly. “Oh, I shan’t give the bastard the satisfaction of discharging me. The day it’s officially announced that Henry Clay will be the sixth president of the United States, I shall tender my resignation from the army.”

  “So will I,” said Brown. “My health is poor, as it happens, so that gives me a graceful way to do it.” He gave Scott something of a sly glance. “Unlike what I suspect will be Winfield’s more flamboyant language.”

  “The tactics Henry Clay is using to win the presidency are a stench in the nation’s nostrils,” stated Scott, “and I will not hesitate to say so publicly when the time comes. Leaving aside everything else, he’s recklessly using the army as if we were simply a card in his game. He knows perfectly well that the army is far too grossly understrength to be talking as if a victory over Arkansas is simply a matter of will and purpose.”

  Jesup cleared his throat. “I’ll stay. They’d find me hard to replace, and they won’t care that much anyway.”