1824: The Arkansas War

by Eric Flint

  Eagerly, he pointed to the space just below the serpent. “There’s still room there, we made sure. So we can add ‘Pennsylvania Lafayette Battalion.’ ”

  “ ‘Battalion Number One,’ ” another of the little group proclaimed. “No way we’re gonna let those upstarts in Harrisburg claim it. They can be Number Two.”

  Sam had a weird sense of dizziness for a moment. Not a physical one, simply…

  More like a man might feel who contemplates what a barrel might feel if the men handling it lost their grip and it began to careen out of control.

  Which was altogether a crazy notion, in the first place.

  “Ah, fellows…The only way Henry Clay can start a war is if he’s president of the United States. In which case—”

  He cleared his throat. “You might want to reconsider taking up arms against it.”

  Now all of them were giving him that puzzled expression.

  “That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?” asked the same youngster who’d laid such proud claim to the number one.

  “Well…yeah. But.”

  But what? he had to ask himself. He realized now, for the first time, that the rage and grief he’d been consumed with for the past nine weeks had half blinded him. His own motivations—conscious ones, anyway—had been so emotionally rooted that he simply hadn’t considered how other people might react to the same events.

  The traitor Henry Clay.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d heard people use that expression. Often mixed in with “the slave power”—and almost always with “woman killers.”

  Nobody, including Sam himself, thought that Clay had any direct connection to Maria Hester’s death. For that matter, nobody thought she’d even been the assassin’s intended victim in the first place. He’d murdered her quite by accident while trying to kill her husband.

  But that simply didn’t make any difference to a lot of people. Henry Clay had stirred up the lurking reptile, hadn’t he? The fact that the murdered woman had been the daughter of the nation’s president was, in many ways, more important than the fact that she’d also been Sam’s wife. These were people—traitors—who would stop at nothing, who would commit any crime to force their slavery onto the nation.

  None of this might have been entirely rational. But there was an inexorable logic to it once you went deeper into the nation’s soul. There were, and always had been, two different conceptions of the “United States” abroad in the land. Often enough, residing within the same person—Andrew Jackson himself being a case in point, as was James Monroe. As had been, before them, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

  Now, perhaps long before it might have been otherwise, Henry Clay was driving that underlying contradiction right to the surface. Arkansas Post had been the catalyst. Not because it had to have been, but because Clay and Calhoun had made it so.

  The facts themselves were obvious to everyone, and not in dispute. Arkansas had been attacked and had defended itself. Perhaps with much greater harshness than was warranted—although not many people in the North and the border states would even agree with that any longer, since William Cullen Bryant’s gruesome depictions of the atrocities committed by Crittenden’s army had become widely spread.

  Still, there was no real dispute over the legalities involved. All the more, since Arkansas was an independent sovereign nation to begin with, established by treaty with the United States.

  So, what was the problem? The only answer Clay could give—pandering to Calhoun to get the votes he needed in the House of Representatives—was that the law be damned. The real issue was slavery itself. More precisely, Calhoun’s dissatisfaction with the institution’s current state of semi-disrepute and his determination to foist his extremist version of it upon the whole United States. From John Calhoun’s point of view, and that of the people who followed him, what was really at stake was the intolerable notion that black people could have any rights at all, even if they were not slaves.

  Most of the nation was simply choking on that. Black people might be inferior to white people—most definitely were, in the opinion of all but a handful—but that didn’t make them animals. Women were inferior to men, also, when you got right down to it. Certainly children were. Like freedmen, they weren’t allowed to vote. Like freedmen, their ability to exercise control over their finances was tightly circumscribed, as was their control over property in general. Like freedmen, their status in life was and would always remain—in the case of women, at least, if not male children—lesser than that of men.

  Did that mean they had no rights at all? Could a man choose to murder his wife with impunity? If he couldn’t—which he certainly couldn’t, not even in South Carolina or Georgia—then why could the same be done to black people?

  The nation’s single most popular political figure, Andrew Jackson, had done more than choke on the notion. He’d spat it right out and ground it under his heel, calling it a vile abomination to the principles of the republic. Whereupon the political figure who was the nation’s most respected—if not much liked outside of New England—had done the same.

  Andrew Jackson owned more slaves than all but a tiny number of Southerners, and John Quincy Adams had probably read more books than anyone in the whole country. Could both of them be wrong on the subject?

  Outside of the seven slave states of the Deep South, and with Virginia and the border states teetering back and forth, a national consensus was beginning to emerge.

  No.

  And if Henry Clay thought he could shove it down the nation’s throat simply by maneuvering in the House of Representatives to get himself made president…

  Made, not elected. By now the results of the national election were known to everyone in the country. Clay hadn’t gotten but one vote in six.

  Then to Sam Hill with Henry Clay. Was a whole nation—the majority of its population and its constituent states—to be labeled traitor by an American Alcibiades? Or was the term properly laid at his own feet?

  That’s what Sam thought, anyway, sitting on a horse in Uniontown at the onset of winter and looking down at a blue banner. And it occurred to him that this was the first thing he could probably call thought at all since he’d seen the life fading out of his wife’s eyes.

  “Sam,” she’d kept whispering until the end, looking up at him more in confusion than in pain. What made the agony complete—still did—was the trust that had also never left her eyes. Maria Hester had been just as certain that her husband would make it right as he’d been certain, from several battlefields, that there was no way in God’s earth he could possibly keep her from bleeding to death from that wound.

  There’d been nothing in him but guilt, rage, and grief since that moment. Until now.

  “I’ll keep it then,” he said abruptly, folding up the banner. Rolling it, more like. Folding, properly speaking, was an awkward business while one was sitting in a saddle.

  But soon enough it was done, and the banner stuffed into his saddlebag. He leaned over, extended his hand, and shook those of all eight of the youngsters.

  “I’ll look for you in the summer,” he said firmly. “If the traitor starts his war.”

  “We won’t fail you, sir!” exclaimed one of them.

  Sam shook his head. “Got nothing to do with me. Just make sure you don’t fail your state and your country.”

  He rode out of Uniontown to the same chant he’d ridden out of every town before it since Baltimore. To the New World!

  Louisville, Kentucky

  JANUARY 14, 1825

  He’d spent the time he could, after Uniontown, chewing on his thoughts. He couldn’t do more than that, between the rigors of the winter journey and the need to care for his young son. Chester was a help, of course; even more, Andy’s nursemaid Dinah and her teenaged daughter Sukey. But there was still plenty to keep Sam occupied.

  In Louisville, though, they’d have at least a week’s layover. It would be best to forgo overland travel and take a steamboat th
e rest of the way to Arkansas, since it would be much safer for Andy. The Ohio and the Mississippi were navigable in winter by a captain who knew his business, but the same captain would wait for the best possible weather, also.

  Louisville was hospitable, fortunately. Sam hadn’t been entirely sure it would be. Kentucky was a border state—and the same state that had produced Richard Mentor Johnson as a senator and Henry Clay as the Speaker of the House.

  But, in the end, the state seemed to be swinging the same way as its newly elected governor, Joseph Desha, and the Relief Party for which he was a champion. Whatever private thoughts they might have about the issue of slavery, or the ins and outs of Arkansas Post, their overriding concern was the still deep distress of the state’s poorer citizens since the Panic of 1819. Much of the nation might be coming to the conclusion that Henry Clay was a minion of Sam Hill, but Kentucky’s Relief Party had come to the conclusion several years earlier that the principal lawyer for the Second Bank of the United States was no “minion” at all. At the very least, he was one of Sam Hill’s chief demons. If not the creature himself, which some of the Relief Party’s more vocal partisans thought quite likely.

  Desha hadn’t been sworn into office yet. But it hardly mattered, since the man he was replacing in the governor’s office, John Adair, was also a leader of the Relief Party. Like Pennsylvania’s former governor Hiester, he’d fought in the Revolution and, years later, had been in command of the Kentuckian forces under Andy Jackson in the New Orleans campaign.

  The state capital of Frankfort being nearby, both men came up to visit Sam after learning of his arrival. Theirs was more in the way of a private visit to pay their respects than the sort of public spectacle staged by Hiester and Shulze in Uniontown. Kentucky was a slave state, after all. But they made no attempt to disguise their arrival, either, and the visit itself was most cordial.

  Sam remembered Adair, of course, since both of them had fought the British at New Orleans.

  Well, Sam had fought them, at any rate. Adair had never had to, beyond the clashes of the first days. The reason he’d never had to was that Sam—along with Patrick Driscol’s Iron Battalion, made up almost entirely of black freedmen—had met the British regiments who launched the opening assault on the west bank of the Mississippi. Opening and only assault, because their defeat had been so crushing and complete that General Pakenham had wisely chosen to withdraw from the field at Chalmette rather than launch the assault Adair and his men had been braced for.

  So, there was that, too. Now that his brain was starting to work naturally again, Sam was gauging the fact—quite significant, he thought—that most of the men in the United States with real command experience in combat did not share the blithe assumption of Clay and Calhoun that any war with Arkansas would be a trifle. The only outstanding exception that Sam knew about, in fact, was William Henry Harrison—and for that, there was the usual culprit to blame.

  Ambition. It didn’t matter what Harrison really thought. Like Clay himself, that would be subordinated to his personal goals. Which might make sense, looked at from a narrow and immediate perspective, but which, in the longer run, struck Sam as nothing less than a form of insanity.

  “Nice to see you again, General,” he said, exchanging a handshake with Adair. “Some whiskey?”

  “And you as well, Colonel. Yes, please.”

  Chester had the drinks poured within seconds. Once the glasses were in everyone’s hands, the serious dickering began. That was mostly with Desha, naturally. Adair was essentially there as a wise old man giving advice to his successor.

  “—not like to see Kentuckians on the wrong side of the Iron Battalion’s bayonets, Joseph; even more, their six-pounders—”

  Being the gist of it. Wise old man, indeed.

  By the time they left, Sam had the private agreement he wanted. There’d be no Kentucky militia forces sent against Arkansas in the event that man—they might as well have said “traitor” and be done with it—chose to start a war.

  He was pleased. Granted, the Kentucky militia wasn’t as good as Tennessee’s. But it was probably the second best state militia in the country.

  “You want the rest of your drink, Mr. Sam?” Chester asked after the two governors had gone. He held up the glass, which was still mostly full.

  “No. Just pour it out. No, that’d be a silly waste. Finish it yourself, Chester.”

  “I don’t drink, Mr. Sam. You know that.”

  A bit surprised—he’d been half lost in thought—Sam stared at him for a moment.

  “Oh, that’s right. Sorry, I forgot. Give it to Dinah, then.”

  “She don’t—”

  Sam threw up his hands. “I’m surrounded by temperance fanatics! Fine. Give it to the dog. Any dog you can find. Tarnation, it’s good whiskey.”

  Chester looked dubious. Sam snorted.

  “They’re Kentucky dogs hereabouts, Chester. Of course they’ll drink whiskey.”

  “Well. That’s true.”

  After he was gone, Sam checked the time. It’d still be hours before Dinah and Sukey would want his help with little Andy.

  Time enough to start. He went over to the writing desk in the hotel room—he’d made sure it had one, when he arrived—and took a seat. Then, settling down with paper and pen, he began working on his first letters to Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams.

  He’d get his revenge for Maria Hester, sure enough. But it had also finally dawned on him that his father-in-law’s advice, unheeded at the time, was undoubtedly correct. It was just as much a form of insanity for a man like himself to seek a different man’s form of vengeance as it was for Henry Clay to think he could lead a nation into a war by posturing like Achilles.

  Sam knew how to use a gun—cannons, too, and quite well—and would again if he needed to. But there were other weapons he’d learned how to use in the years since New Orleans. If the pen was not mightier than the sword on a battlefield, it was much the mightier weapon on other fronts.

  A different man might be satisfied by inflicting as much harm as he possibly could on the likes of Henry Clay and John Calhoun. For which purpose, guns would do nicely.

  What a trifling ambition.

  Sam scrawled the date at the top of the sheet: January 14, 1825.

  Ten years, almost to the day, since he and Patrick Driscol had won the Battle of the Mississippi. He’d been twenty-one years old, then. Now he was thirty-one, and already a widower.

  Still, he was a young man. With most of a lifetime left to devote to the conscious and deadly purpose of utterly destroying Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, all other men like them, and everything they stood for.

  He wasn’t at all sure that he could, of course. But he was positive and certain he could give it a mighty run. Mighty enough that when the time came, in the afterlife, that he saw two trusting eyes again, he wouldn’t have to look away with a husband’s shame.

  CHAPTER 28

  Washington, D.C.

  FEBRUARY 7, 1825

  Henry Clay was elected president of the United States on the first ballot in the House of Representatives. By the rules established in the Constitution, each state got one vote, determined by the majority of its delegation. Thirteen votes were thus needed for Clay to be elected president, since the nation had twenty-four states.

  That’s exactly what he got. Thirteen votes.

  The solid core came from the seven states of the Deep South, delivered by Calhoun’s people and those of Crawford’s who were not breaking away with Van Buren and the New Yorkers:

  Alabama

  Florida

  Georgia

  Louisiana

  Mississippi

  North Carolina

  South Carolina

  He also picked up Virginia, although it was a much closer call than he and his associates had expected.

  On the one hand, the state was politically dominated by the same class of slave-owners who ruled the roost in the Deep South. In fact, Virginia had historical
ly led the South in the direction of ever harsher laws regarding slavery as an institution and black people as a race. In 1785, it had been the first state to officially declare any person with “black blood” to be a mulatto and to legally define mulattos as negroes. In 1799, it had banished white mothers of mulattos with their children. In 1806, it had required slaves to leave the state within a year of manumission. And, finally, in 1819, Virginia had been the first—and was still the only—state in the union that outlawed blacks and mulattos, whether free or slave, from meeting for the purposes of education. It also forbade anyone, including whites, from teaching black people to read and write.

  On the other hand…

  The Old Dominion’s elite took great pride in its political history and saw Virginia as the nation’s preeminent state. And why should they not? Four of five presidents of the United States had been Virginians—and all of them had served two terms, unlike the one-term tenure of the sole outsider, John Adams. The Old Dominion had produced a similarly disproportionate number of the country’s political leaders in Congress and the judicial branch.

  So, even with their class interests inclining them toward following Clay, their well-honed political instincts were shrieking alarm bells. The manner in which Clay was taking the office—and no other term than “taking” could really be used—was far outside the parameters of what many of Virginia’s congressmen could easily swallow.

  But eventually, enough of them did. The quirky and unpredictable John Randolph perhaps swung the matter when he abruptly decided—following a train of logic that was semi-incomprehensible but, as usual, brilliantly expounded on the floor of Congress—that electing Henry Clay was essential to the preservation of slavery, an institution that he personally viewed with dubiety but whose stalwart defense was necessary to prevent the ever-growing encroachment of federal dictatorship upon the liberties of the states.

  “In a phrase,” John Quincy Adams caustically remarked afterward, “John Randolph felt it necessary to install a tyrant in order to forestall tyranny.”