1824: The Arkansas War

by Eric Flint

  Brown nodded and slumped back in his seat, rubbing his right arm. The general seemed very fatigued now.

  “Here’s the truth, Colonel Zachary Taylor,” said Winfield Scott, looking at him directly. “Who cares if you beat the Confederacy? We have no legitimate quarrel with them in the first place. Jackson’s right. This war, if it comes—which now seems well-nigh certain—will be nothing but ‘Henry Clay’s War.’ A war launched by an unprincipled schemer and demagogue to satisfy his own personal ambitions; a war which, in terms of its goal and purpose, is nothing more sublime than John Calhoun’s rabid determination to prove to the country that a nigger is a nigger and fit only to be a slave.”

  For a moment he looked as if he might spit on the floor. “Just fight us a good, clean, hard, and honest fight, Zack. That’s all. Best you can. So at least the real army will have something else to point to when Clay’s expedition comes to its catastrophe at Syracuse.”

  Taylor frowned. There was no “Syracuse” in Arkansas.

  Brown snorted. “Winfield, will you please stop showing off your classical education?” To Taylor, he said, “It’s a reference to the disaster the Athenians suffered in the Peloponnesian War when they followed the advice of Alcibiades and invaded Sicily.”

  “Oh.”

  Later that day, after he returned from the War Department, a message was delivered to Zack at his lodgings. From Thomas Hart Benton, inviting him to dinner at the Washington home of the senator from Missouri.

  Taylor had never had more than the most casual encounters with Benton, but the senator greeted him as if they were old friends. Which was perhaps not that surprising, since, just before dinner began…

  Andrew Jackson arrived. Ushered in through the rear entrance—to avoid being spotted, Zack assumed—but otherwise treated by Benton as if he were a long-lost brother.

  The only term Zack could think of was “bizarre.” To the best of his knowledge, the last time Andrew Jackson and Thomas Hart Benton had met in person was on the front porch—later spilling into the lobby—of the City Hotel in Nashville. Being as it was one of the more legendary affrays of the frontier, Zack even knew the details. That encounter had begun with Jackson threatening Benton with a pistol, then being shot in the shoulder by Benton’s brother Jesse, then exchanging shots—all of which missed—with Benton himself, who, for his part, was then assailed by Jackson’s friend John Coffee, whose first shot missed and whose subsequent attempt at pistol whipping Benton was thwarted by the now-senator’s fall down a flight of stairs in the hotel.

  Meanwhile, Jackson’s nephew Stockley Hays had wrestled Jesse Benton to the floor of the hotel, stabbing him repeatedly in the arm with a knife. Fortunately for Hays, when Jesse shot him at point-blank range with his second pistol, the gun misfired.

  Half raw violence, half comic opera. And here they were, twelve years later, the two principals in the brawl—acting as if nothing untoward had ever happened between them!

  Zack would have ascribed the weird situation to the old saw about politics making strange bedfellows, but…

  Politically speaking, they weren’t strange bedfellows at all. The feud between Andrew Jackson and Thomas Hart Benton had always been purely personal, stemming from Benton’s anger at Jackson’s behavior when the general—as he then was—had served as William Carroll’s second in Carroll’s previous duel with Jesse Benton. There had never actually been any serious political quarrels among any of the men involved. Twelve years later, Jackson was a Tennessee senator, Carroll was the governor of the state, Benton was a Missouri senator—and all three of them detested Henry Clay.

  So, Zack wasn’t surprised when, after dinner, the whiskey bottle was opened and talk immediately turned to his forthcoming assignment.

  Which Jackson and Benton both knew about—in considerable detail—not more than eight hours after Taylor himself had first been informed.

  Wide-ranging conspiracy, indeed. He almost felt sorry for Henry Clay.

  “I’ll see to it you get the Missouri militia put under your command, Zack,” said Benton.

  Taylor tried to stifle a wince but, obviously, was not entirely successful.

  Jackson laughed. “The colonel’s got no use for any blasted volunteers, Tom! Can’t say I blame him much. Until they’d been tested and horsewhipped, no militia I ever seen—not even Tennessee’s—was worth the contents of a spittoon.”

  “I’ve not had any great success with militia units in the field,” Taylor admitted cautiously.

  But Benton just grinned. “Who does? Yeah, sure, it’s proper Republican doctrine, and we all swear by it.” He waved his half-empty whiskey glass at Jackson. “Him, too, you betchum. But nobody with any sense wants to fight a real war with anything except regulars. Still and all—”

  He slurped some more whiskey. “The main thing is that I figure if you’re in charge of the militia, you can at least keep them out of mischief. Use ’em to garrison your supply depots, whatever. Otherwise—sure as sunrise if Harrison’s in charge—they’ll be sent down to Arkansas.”

  When he set down the whiskey glass, his good cheer seemed to have vanished. “Here’s the thing, Zack,” the Missouri senator said quietly. “When all the dust settles, I figure Missouri will still have Arkansas to deal with on our southern border. And I’d just as soon the war didn’t leave the kind of memories behind that winds up with ten or twenty years of border raids, ambushes, and massacres of isolated settlements afterward. You understand what I mean?”

  Taylor eyed him a bit warily. “Missouri’s a slave state, Senator.”

  “I told you. Call me Tom.”

  “Tom. No matter what I do, there’ll still be the problem of runaway slaves.”

  Benton sneered. Jackson was more pungent.

  “Fuck that,” he said forcibly. “That’s just a problem—and it ain’t that big a problem anyway. Problems can be negotiated. Put me and Patrick Driscol across from each other at a table, and within a day we’ll have a solution for it that won’t please anybody much but everybody can live with.”

  Zack shifted his skeptical gaze to Jackson. “I feel obliged to remind you, Sena—ah, Andy—that John Calhoun wouldn’t agree with you. Neither would most big plantation owners in the South.”

  “That’s because John Calhoun is a stinking liar and a man with a cesspool for a soul, and most slave-owners have the brains of rabbits.” The Tennessee senator half slammed his glass back onto the table next to him. Fortunately, it was empty by now.

  “I’m one of the biggest slave-owners in Tennessee, Zack. So is Dick Johnson. You want to know why neither one of us is hollering and yelling about it? Because the plain and simple truth—any slave-owner knows this, if he’s willing to be honest about it—is that the only slaves that run away from a master who treats his slaves properly are the ones who are troublemakers anyway. Good riddance, frankly. If I catch one of my slaves running away—sure, it happens, from time to time—the first thing I do is have him whipped. On general principles. But the second thing I do—always—is sell him, because I don’t want him around. And if he makes his escape to Arkansas, I just shrug it off. Let Driscol deal with the shiftless bastard if he can.”

  Taylor’s family were major slave-owners in Kentucky. And…

  Well, Jackson was right. If a plantation was managed properly, with the slaves decently housed and fed and the overseers kept on a short leash, most slaves didn’t run away. And the ones who did, sure enough, were usually a problem in any case.

  Still…

  “Calhoun’s not likely to agree with that, Andy, no matter what the evidence.”

  Jackson’s glare was a genuine marvel to behold. Given that it wasn’t aimed at Zack, at least. He’d hate to be on the receiving end of the thing.

  “I told you,” Jackson snarled. “Calhoun’s a heathen; I don’t care how many times he goes to church and invokes the name of the Almighty. Calhoun doesn’t care about runaway slaves any more than I do. What he does care about is his pagan notion th
at slavery is a positive good. Which it ain’t, as any man with any sense can plainly see. It’s an economic necessity for the republic, that’s all it is. So we keep it.”

  He held out his glass to Benton for a refill. “Who knows?” Jackson continued, after taking a sip. “Maybe Sam Houston’s right, and maybe someday we’ll give it up finally. But in the meantime we’ve got it—and Calhoun is bound and determined to lock slavery in forever. And that’s why he’s demanding a war. If a bunch of niggers out there in Arkansas can build a country of their own—whipping white men in the bargain, in a fair fight—then what happens to his heathen idolatry?”

  Taylor hesitated. Jackson was being very friendly, but…

  Mentally, he shrugged. This was another thing that just had to be said out loud. “I feel a need to point out to you, Andy, that if negroes can build a reasonable country of their own—and defend it—then….”

  But Jackson simply grinned. “Yeah, sure. Then what happens to my point of view?” He waved the glass about. “Or Tom’s. Or yours, for that matter.”

  Cheerful as could be, the Tennessee senator took another sip from his whiskey. “I’m not worried about it, though, because I think you got a better chance—lot better chance—of filling an inside straight than seeing negroes build a country that’s worth anything. Doesn’t mean they can’t defend it, mind you. Give ’em good leadership, and they make plenty good soldiers. They proved that in New Orleans, and they’re proving it again now. But all the rest? A stable republic, prosperity, learning, and education? No, I don’t think so.”

  He gave Zack a disconcertingly direct stare. “From the way you’re fidgeting a little, I take it you don’t agree?”

  Zachary had been nursing his own whiskey, too nervous in such company to be relaxed enough to match Jackson’s and Benton’s pace. Now he shrugged, and downed his glass in one gulp.

  “To be honest, Andy, I don’t know. A few months ago, I’d have agreed with you without even thinking about it. But I’ve been to Arkansas myself recently. And…I just don’t know any more. Some of those black people are right impressive. And that’s just the way it is.”

  Jackson didn’t argue the matter. Instead, he maintained that calm, level, blue-eyed stare while he finished his whiskey. Not by downing it, just with a steady even sip.

  When he was done, he set down the glass and grinned again.

  “Well, maybe that’s true. If it is, though, we’re in trouble. First, because we’ll have to listen to Sam Houston crowing ‘I told you so’ till we’re ready to strangle him. What’s worse is that all three of us—me for sure—are likely to have some fast talking to do in the afterlife.”

  So, what had been perhaps the most peculiar day in Zachary Taylor’s life ended with a laugh. And he was able to tell himself, as he half staggered his way back to his lodgings, that at least he’d joined a cabal that drank whiskey instead of wine. Even John Quincy Adams, apparently, these days. And wasn’t that another marvel?

  CHAPTER 27

  Uniontown, Pennsylvania

  DECEMBER 22, 1824

  It took Sam and his little party a month to reach Pennsylvania. That was at least a week later than he’d planned on when they’d left the nation’s capital. The delay had been partly due to a stretch of rough weather in early December that caused him to stay over in Hagerstown for a few days. Little Andy had been handling the rigors of the journey quite well, but they were now into winter, and Sam didn’t want to expose him to severe conditions.

  Much of the delay, however, had been due to something quite unexpected.

  Crowds. Small ones, true, in the smaller towns, and smaller still in the hamlets. But in every city or town or hamlet that Sam and his party passed through, crowds came out to greet them.

  Crowds, not mobs. There might have been someone in those masses of people who disliked Sam Houston, but if so they were quite wisely keeping their mouths shut. The mood and temper of the crowds was adulatory toward Houston—and Andrew Jackson—and just about as hostile toward Henry Clay as people could get short of loading firearms.

  Sam had begun his journey by taking the National Road, which started in Baltimore and had now been completed through most of Ohio. So, he’d traveled through most of Maryland on his way. At the last moment, Lafayette had decided to accompany him for the Maryland stretch. The presence of the Marquis meant that the crowds were especially large, and it had been difficult to gauge their sentiment. Obviously, Lafayette himself was the focus of much of the interest, more than Houston, although the two were now so closely tied in the popular mind that it was hard to separate one from the other.

  Very closely tied, indeed. Henry Clay’s political camp had a lot of influence and connections with moneyed interests, but it was weak when it came to controlling or influencing the newspapers. Most of the nation’s press had been either pro-Jackson or pro-Adams. Now that the two men had made a political alliance, a veritable torrent of anti-Clay material was pouring out of the printing presses everywhere in the country except the Deep South. And most of them had made sure to quote Lafayette’s toast to Sam and the New World.

  But if the presence of the Marquis accounted for most of the crowds in Maryland, once Sam entered Pennsylvania at Uniontown, that factor vanished. Everything now became very clear.

  The former governor of Pennsylvania, Joseph Hiester, was there to greet him, as was his successor, John Shulze, who’d just been elected. They were quite a pair. Both of them spoke English with a heavy German accent, being members of the state’s large German community—which was often called Pennsylvania Dutch but mostly consisted of immigrants from the Palatinate in southwest Germany.

  The former governor, Hiester, was a generation older than his successor and had retired after one term of office. Like Andy Jackson and Lafayette, he’d fought in the Revolution. The new governor, Shulze, was part of the extended Muhlenberg clan that was a long-standing powerhouse in Pennsylvania politics, partly because of their close ties to the Hiester family. Governor Shulze’s grandfather, the Reverend Muhlenberg, had been the founder of the Lutheran Church in America.

  In short, official Pennsylvania—and, in particular, the central political figures of the state’s large German immigrant population—had turned out to greet Sam Houston. Who was himself emigrating to Arkansas on the eve of a likely war with the United States.

  Pennsylvania was now solid Jackson country, and the state’s heretofore muted hostility to slavery had risen to the surface. In one of those ironies of history that Sam had become acutely aware of in his years as the country’s Indian commissioner, Henry Clay’s cynical and opportunist pandering to John Calhoun’s political attitudes had given the South Carolina senator’s extremist slavery program far more weight in the nation’s political life than it would have had otherwise. It had also, willy-nilly, transformed Andrew Jackson—a man who was himself a major slave-owner—into the nation’s principal spokesman against any deepening extension of the institution.

  Less than a year ago, only a small number of hard-core New England abolitionists had referred to the “slave power” as a menace to American freedom and liberty. Today, the phrase spilled trippingly off the tongues of Pennsylvania’s current and former governors—and if the phrase was spoken with an accent, so what? German immigrants were rarely slave-owners, and they had their own long and bitter memories of the oppressions of the high and mighty. There was nothing these two governors were saying, in their fulsome speeches to the crowd at Uniontown, that Pennsylvanians weren’t saying in the privacy of their own homes.

  The massacre at Arkansas Post wasn’t the issue any longer. Not to anybody, really, not even in the Deep South. In the way these things can happen in a nation’s political life, Arkansas Post had become the catalyst for crystallizing antagonisms within the United States that had been lying under the surface for a long time. Dormant, for the most part—until Henry Clay forced the issue. Ironically, the man who liked to be thought of as a great compromiser.

  Wh
ich, indeed, he was. The problem was that this time, Clay was greatly compromising the nation’s political stability in order to further his own personal ambition. He made Sam think of a captain at sea who, not knowing how to navigate, simply ran before the wind. Hoping, presumably, that the sheer swell of the waves would carry him over any unseen reefs ahead.

  The icing on the cake came the following morning as Sam was leaving Uniontown. A small group of young men came up to him and very solemnly presented him with a handmade banner.

  “A pledge,” said the youngster who seemed to be the leader of the group. He had not a trace of a German accent, which wasn’t surprising. The German immigrant communities were concentrated in the eastern and central parts of Pennsylvania. This far west, the population was more likely to be of Anglo-Saxon or Scots-Irish stock.

  Sam spread out the banner as best he could while sitting on a horse. It was the familiar Pennsylvania state flag, more square than rectangular, with the state coat of arms flanked by two rearing horses on a blue field. But the usual slogan under the coat of arms—Virtue, Liberty, and Independence—had been removed. In its place, someone had laboriously stitched a writhing serpent beneath the horses’ hooves, which bore the label “the slave power.”

  At least, Sam was pretty sure the effect being aimed for was “writhing.” An uncharitable soul might have used other terms, such as “lumpy” or “misshapen” or even “looks more like a worm than any snake I ever seen.”

  “Splendid,” he pronounced. He started to hand it back, but the youngster shook his head.

  “No, sir. That one’s for you. We’re having more made up, in case.”

  Sam hesitated. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know…

  “In case of what?” he asked.

  The youngster—he couldn’t have been more than eighteen, like all of them in the group—gave Sam a puzzled expression. “Well, in case the traitor Henry Clay gets to start his war. What else?”