1824: The Arkansas War

by Eric Flint

  What made Randolph’s actions particularly bizarre was that he detested Clay personally. When they met in a corridor of the Capitol shortly after the vote, Randolph stood his ground and hissed at the newly elected president, “I never sidestep skunks.”

  Clay smiled. “I always do,” he replied, and deftly skirted him.

  The border states split. Tennessee and Kentucky voted for Jackson; Missouri and Maryland, for Clay. No surprise there.

  Granted, a different sort of politician might have been embarrassed by the fact that his own home state had voted for another candidate. But Clay was above such picayune concerns. As well he might be, having managed the notable feat of getting elected as the nation’s chief executive with five out of six voters opposed to him.

  He did lose New York, which caused a momentary panic among his advisers. At the last minute, Martin Van Buren broke publicly with Crawford and Clay and threw his support to Jackson. Van Buren himself was a senator, not a congressman, so his own vote was irrelevant. But they didn’t call him the Little Magician for nothing. Van Buren had created the nation’s first really well-oiled political machine in New York, and the machine delivered.

  The decision came from the West. Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana all voted for Clay.

  Ohio’s vote was expected by everyone and really had little to do with the ruckus over Arkansas Post. Ohio had long been “Clay country” because it was the state that felt it had the most to gain from the newly elected president’s American System.

  So, in the end, Illinois and Indiana were the key—and their votes were purely the product of panic over Arkansas Post. Both states were new—Indiana had been admitted to the union in 1816; Illinois in 1818—and both bordered on “wild Injun country.”

  Most of all, both were sparsely settled, which made them feel vulnerable to the nebulous danger of being suddenly overrun by hordes of murdering negroes surging out of Arkansas. The fact that Arkansas was hundreds of miles away and no sane man could think of any conceivable way the Confederacy would or could attack Illinois or Indiana without stumbling over Tennessee and Kentucky—with their large populations and the nation’s two most powerful and best-organized militias—was neither here nor there. By that point, Clay’s partisans had pulled out all the stops and were fanning every spark of fear they could find into a blaze of terror.

  So, there it was. In the nation as a whole, in the presidential election of 1824, about 360,000 popular votes were cast. Of that total, the decision was made by the delegations representing 16,000 voters in Indiana and fewer than 5,000 in Illinois—and, in both states, by narrow margins.

  “In the history of the world,” Andrew Jackson would thunder the next day, “was ever a greater mockery made of the phrase ‘decision of the people’?”

  Needless to say, the question was not rhetorical. Old Hickory proceeded to answer it at length many times thereafter. To the end of their days, the mildest term anyone could remember him using to refer to Clay and his minions was “the rascals.”

  John Quincy Adams was more restrained. But the capital’s political observers noted that he immediately announced his intention to run for Congress from Massachusetts.

  The House, not the Senate, interestingly enough. Given that a Senate seat would also be available in 1826, and that the Senate was generally considered a more prestigious body, Adams’s choice seemed odd.

  But perhaps not so odd, in the opinion of the more astute of those observers. True enough, a “senator” was a more august personage than a mere “congressman.” But those terms were abstractions. The concrete reality remained that no senator—indeed, no person in the country save the president himself—potentially wielded more power and influence than the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

  True, the thought of John Quincy Adams serving in the same post that Henry Clay had transformed into such a political powerhouse was extraordinarily peculiar. Clay was the nation’s most adroit and adept politician, as everyone including his bitterest enemies would agree; Adams, its most awkward and inept.

  But perhaps that was what Adams was basing his calculations upon. After two years of Henry Clay in the White House, perhaps by 1826 the nation would welcome a Speaker—freshman though he might be—who was everything Henry Clay was not. Stubborn on matters of principle where Clay was lizard-quick, thoughtful and deeply read where Clay was clever and facile, and if not as gracious in his manners, more than his equal in intelligence.

  A week after the election, the announcement was made that William Crawford would be Clay’s nominee for the nation’s next secretary of state; John Calhoun, for its next secretary of war.

  That drew another round of thunder from Jackson. “So you see, the Judas of the South has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver. His end will be the same. Was there ever witnessed such a bare-faced corruption in any country before?”

  To no one’s surprise, Crawford said nothing. The Georgia politician’s physical ailment was now so widely known that everyone understood the appointment was a mere fig leaf. Crawford’s partisans would be allowed to use the State Department to pass around perks, privileges, posts, and the like, but Clay himself would direct the nation’s foreign affairs.

  Calhoun, still only forty-two years old, was in his prime. But he also made no public response to Jackson’s denunciations. Instead, he limited his riposte to an indirect one.

  He immediately announced that he would be urging Congress to approve a rapid and major expansion of the nation’s armed forces “to deal with the barbaric threat arisen on our western border.” Then, with an implied sneer, wondered how such an expansion could possibly be opposed by prominent figures—he did not mention Jackson by name—who had long advocated the same measure.

  That was a pointless tactic, given Old Hickory. Jackson’s response came the next day:

  “In times past, I advocated strengthening the nation’s armed forces to fend off foreign murderers, arsonists, and robbers. Calhoun calls for its expansion for the sole purpose of murdering, burning, and robbing neighbors who have never attacked us at all. Judas, did I name him? If so, I insulted Judas.”

  The most astute of the capital’s observers, however, ignored this predictable byplay. They were quite fascinated by something else.

  John Quincy Adams was starting to profess—in public—a liking for whiskey. So long as it was the corn-based whiskey distilled out West, not the Eastern rye-based stuff. What some people were starting to call “bourbon.”

  Arkansas Post

  FEBRUARY 9, 1825

  Patrick Driscol and Robert Ross were at Arkansas Post when Sam’s steamboat arrived. Not because they’d been awaiting him there, but because they’d been engaged in negotiations with Pushmataha and other major chiefs of the Choctaws.

  The Choctaws, Sam discovered, had almost all crossed the Mississippi by now and had taken up residence in the Confederacy. They’d not had much choice in the matter. Whether they were signatories to the Treaty of Oothcaloga or not, in the aftermath of Arkansas Post—not to mention the retaliations the Choctaws had taken on local settlers for Crittenden’s outrages—the states of Louisiana and Mississippi had mobilized their militias to drive them out. Alabama had eagerly sent its own militia in support. Not so much because they cared about the Choctaws but because it gave them an excuse to drive the last remaining Chickasaws out of northwestern Alabama.

  The Chickasaws, in the end, had crossed the Mississippi also. Whether or not they were the most warlike tribe in the Southeast, as both they and several other tribes contended, they were simply too small to stand against that sort of concerted attack. There weren’t more than five thousand Chickasaws in the whole world.

  So, by the time Sam arrived, Arkansas Post appeared to be under siege again—only, this time, not by fifteen hundred freebooters but by more than ten times that number of Indians. Fortunately, it was a relatively peaceful sort of siege, being waged by wheedles, threats, demands, proposals, and offers of compr
omise rather than by guns and bayonets.

  “Glad you’re here,” Patrick gruffed to him as he escorted Sam and his party off the boat. “Maybe you can talk sense into them.”

  “What’s the problem? There should still be plenty of land left for them in the trans-Poteau area. Blast it, that’s awkward. Have they settled on a name for it yet?”

  Driscol grinned humorlessly. “Indians, remember? Contentious bastards are worse than the Irish when it comes to finding a point of dispute over any subject under the sun. The Cherokees—the ones following Ross and Ridge, anyway—had pretty well settled on ‘New Kituhwa’ and seemed to have bullied and sweet-talked most of the Creeks into it. But no sooner did Pushmataha and most of the Choctaws arrive than they denounced the name as an instrument of Cherokee oppression. They’re arguing for ‘Oklahoma,’ on the grounds that since it means ‘red people’ it’s fair to all the tribes, which ‘Kituhwa’ isn’t. Ross seems inclined to concede the point to them, but Ridge is holding stubborn. His argument is that it may mean ‘red people’ in Choctaw, but it means no such thing in Cherokee.”

  His grin widened and even gained a bit of real humor. “The most delicious part of it—well, to a Scots-Irishman, anyway—is that I think they’re all going to finally agree to adopt English as the official language of the whole Confederacy. Seeing as how there’s no way any one of them will accept the language of any other instead. Ha! Damned Sassenach. Same dirty rotten trick they pulled on us.”

  A bit apprehensively, Sam looked up at the fort they were nearing. “They’re all in there?”

  “Every last chief of any note at all, from all four of the tribes. There’s even somebody claiming to speak for the Seminoles, although nobody’s paying much attention to him. Seeing as how most of the Seminoles—talk about stubborn—are still holed out somewhere in the Florida Everglades.”

  He gave Sam a sly glance. “Now that you’re here, though, I figure you can exercise that famous silver tongue of yours and persuade all of them to move the whole ruckus upriver to New Antrim. At least we’d be able to reside in the Wolfe Tone Hotel instead of this place, which”—his blocky, ugly face got blockier and uglier than ever—“is supposed to be a fort, damnation.”

  Sam shook his head. “Patrick, big as it is, the Wolfe Tone’s smaller than Arkansas Post.”

  An odd expression came to Driscol’s face. Half embarrassment; half…

  Pride?

  “Not any longer. Been a lot of new construction since you were here. Tiana persuaded me to add another extension. A wing I’d call it, except, well, it’s actually bigger than the rest of the hotel. We had to tear down two whole city blocks to make room for it.”

  Hurriedly: “The people living there got compensated, of course. Including the right to rooms in the new wing of the hotel, which—comes down to it—is in a lot better shape than the log cabins they’d been living in.”

  Sam peered down at him. “Laird of Arkansas, indeed. What’s next, mighty one? Do you figure on claiming all land in the Delta as your personal domain? Yes, I know, you’ll graciously allow the serfs to run their sheep on the land. The one or two you’ll leave them with.”

  “That’s not—!”

  “Oh, I think it’s quite funny. No sense of humor, Patrick; that’s always been your problem. But that aside, why did you expand the hotel? I’ll admit you’re not actually greedy.”

  Driscol grunted. “Didn’t have much choice. The new wing isn’t really what you’d properly call a hotel. It’s more like a giant dormitory.” Defensively: “And I’m not charging anybody more than maintenance costs to stay there. Tiana agreed to that. Even browbeat her father when the plundering algerine tried to talk us into raising the rates.”

  Sam listed an eyebrow. “Something I don’t know?”

  “Guess so. Though you must have been blind as a bat not to have noticed, coming as you did all the way from Washington. Started in the summer, once everybody figured Clay would most likely win the election. The biggest wave of freedman migrations since the very first days of Arkansas. I think we’ve gotten another fifteen thousand of them in the last three months. Another five thousand or so in the way of runaway slaves and maroons.”

  Now that he thought about it, Sam had noticed an unusual number of black people working their way down the Ohio and the Mississippi on flatboats. But he’d been so engrossed in his own ruminations—grief, too, still—that he hadn’t paid it much attention.

  Which he should have, he chided himself. Black people tended to shy away from traveling on flatboats down the rivers. Yes, it was an easier form of travel, but a much harder one from the standpoint of evading slave-catchers. There was also the danger of lynch mobs, passing by some towns.

  Something must have showed on his face. Driscol’s grin returned—but this was the troll’s grin. The savage, pitiless one that fit Patrick’s face to perfection when the mood took him. Sam’s best friend or not, he really was a frightening sort of man.

  “Oh, there’s been no trouble. John Brown’s doing, that is. Odd fellow, the tanner, no doubt about it. A man after my own heart, though. As a matter of religious principle, he refuses to join any army. But it seems his reading of the Bible allows him to raise what amounts to his own army. So, he did.”

  Sam’s eyes widened.

  “Oh, aye, lad! And not such a small one, neither. By now I figure he’s got something like four hundred men—at least half of them white, mind you—serving under his…well, can’t call them colors, really, since they don’t have a banner. But they’re his army, never doubt it. He doesn’t call them anything but stalwart lads, but they’ve taken to calling themselves Brown’s Raiders. For the past three months, they’ve been patrolling the rivers—in U.S. territory also. Everybody knows they’re there—especially would-be slave-catchers—but since they don’t wear uniforms…”

  “Who in the name of—” Sam shook his head. “Who are they? I mean, I know the Brown clan breeds like rabbits, but there aren’t that many of them.”

  “His own family’s the core of it, still. But most of them are just boys from Ohio and, mostly, Pennsylvania. Some other Northern states. Abolitionists, I’d call them, except this new breed has little of the Quaker in them. Nothing at all, actually. Bloody-minded fellows.”

  “I didn’t think there were that many abolitionists—outright ones, anyway—in the whole United States.”

  Driscol snorted. “Probably weren’t, a year ago. But—”

  He stopped abruptly. They were now not more than twenty feet from the bridge leading across the moat that surrounded the Post.

  “It started changing rapidly after the battle here, Sam. Which has been my whole life’s experience—and the reason I was utterly merciless in this place, be damned to what you or any other politician tells me. The old-style abolitionists were a handful, feeling sorry for the miserable negroes. Middle-aged, most of them, fat and prosperous. There are a lot more of the new-style ones—young men, overwhelmingly, and most of them from modest circumstances like John Brown himself—and they don’t feel sorry for negroes at all. Why should they? The negroes showed—in battle, where it counts—that they could take care of themselves, thank you. So now it’s just a matter of principle. People will petition to redress an injustice, Sam, but they’ll fight for a principle. That’s because injustice is a property of the weak and powerless, but principles belong to the strong.”

  Sam stared at him. He had a tendency to forget—and chided himself for it, once again—that beneath Driscol’s craggy forehead lay a brain that, whatever it lacked in the way of formal education and wide reading, was as acute as any Sam had ever known.

  Granted, it was a sergeant’s brain, with a sergeant’s harshly practical and ruthless way of gauging the world. But was that really such a handicap under these circumstances?

  Driscol cleared his throat. “And then…Ah, lad, I am sorry for it. I truly am, and so’s Tiana. But for whatever it might be worth, your wife’s death may have saved a nation’s
life. We’ll never know, but that’s what I’m thinking.”

  He looked away, down the Arkansas. Not avoiding Sam’s gaze so much as simply giving him some personal space. “It all changed again,” he said quietly, “after Maria Hester’s killing. There’ll be no going back now, Sam. Not for the boys John Brown is gathering around him. No going back, no give, no surrender—and damn little in the way of mercy, unless Brown himself calls for it. I swear to you, I think they’d even frighten the old Hebrews. They can’t possibly be any more Old Testament.” He grinned again, very crookedly. “Even the Tennessee and Kentucky state militiamen are giving them a wide berth on the rivers, as long as they leave the settlements alone and only go after slave-catchers.”

  Sam didn’t know what to say. As always—it hadn’t lessened a bit, not even after almost three months—the thought of his wife dying just took his breath away. A man with a silver tongue, struck speechless.

  When he was able to talk, he grasped at it. “You think so? About Maria Hester, I mean.”

  “Oh, aye.” Driscol seemed to swallow. Hard to tell, of course, with a neck like his. “I—ah—should perhaps give fair warning. You know—ah—that rich black fellow in New York? The one from Haiti who’s been sending so much money here.”

  “Pierre Toussaint.”

  “Yes, him. He’s a devout Catholic, so most of the money he sends goes to support the Church here.” For just a moment, the Scots-Irish Presbyterian surfaced. Patrick had been raised in that creed, even if he himself had long since become a freethinking deist. “Heathen lot, even if—well, I’ll grant they do a lot of good work. Charitable stuff. But the point is, they’re given to saints and icons and graven images and such.”

  Sam coughed. “Oh, come on, Patrick! Not even the Catholics—”

  “Not on their own, probably. But Marie Laveau decided she was a Catholic two years ago, and she’s been busy ever since importing as much of her voudou as she can into the Church.” Again, the Presbyterian surfaced: “Which isn’t hard, of course, being as the papists half-think like voudou anyway.”