1824: The Arkansas War

by Eric Flint

  “Good!” proclaimed Marie. “And once Antoinette has made the proper icon, and you pronounce yourself satisfied, I will do the rest. Properly, this time. Pfah!”—that was a very rude gesture—“to what the priest says.”

  “Just stay out of it, Sam,” Tiana quietly counseled.

  He decided the counsel was good.

  CHAPTER 30

  New Antrim, Arkansas

  JULY 18, 1825

  The first thing Winfield Scott said to Patrick and Sam, after they’d taken seats in a quiet corner of the Wolfe Tone Hotel’s huge foyer, was this:

  “You understand, gentlemen, I cannot pass on to you any information that might be detrimental to the United States or its armed forces. At the same time, you have my pledge that I will not pass on to General Harrison—or any of his subordinates—any information that is not contained already in the reports Mr. Bryant and I will be sending to the newspapers back home.”

  It was said a bit stiffly, but pleasantly enough. Understanding and accepting the protocol, Patrick and Sam simply nodded. Then both of them turned their eyes to William Cullen Bryant.

  The poet-turned-reporter looked a bit uncomfortable. “Ah…I must insist upon the same conditions. My personal sympathies—well, never mind that. If nothing else, the reports General Scott and I will be filing must be viewed by everyone as uncompromised.”

  Sam kept a placid expression. Patrick’s face twisted into something close to a sneer. Winfield Scott sneered outright.

  “Oh, that’s ridiculous, Cullen!” he exclaimed. “No matter what we do, Clay and his supporters will accuse us of spouting a pack of lies. So will every newspaper in the administration’s camp. They’re already saying so, before we’ve even filed a single report. What’s involved here isn’t practical; it’s simply a matter of our personal honor.”

  Bryant looked stubborn. “Yes, I know they’ll accuse us of lying. But it doesn’t matter, Winfield, nor do I agree with you that it’s simply a matter of honor. At least half—more like two-thirds, I suspect—of the population of the United States is reserving their judgment. What we report will have an influence—provided it’s not tainted with charges of bias, that aren’t coming from people who have an obvious bias of their own.”

  “Gentlemen, please,” Sam said smoothly. “It’s really not a problem. We have full confidence in your integrity, and you can rest assured we will respect it, on our part.”

  Winfield Scott’s eyes ranged up and down Sam’s figure. The gaze was curious and perhaps a bit cold.

  “It’s an attractive uniform,” he said abruptly. “Though I think that fur hat will get very uncomfortable now that we’re in midsummer.”

  Patrick smiled. “Oh, we’ve got summer headgear, General Scott. But we’ll wear the fur hats except when it’s unbearable. It’s a small thing, but it helps remind the troops that we’re expecting a winter campaign.”

  Scott turned the same curious perhaps-a-bit-cold gaze onto Driscol.

  “You don’t think it’ll all be over within a few months, then.”

  “Not hardly,” Sam stated. “By the first snowfall it’ll just be starting.”

  Scott looked back at him. “Are you…uncomfortable in that uniform, Colonel?” He glanced at the insignia. “Excuse me. Brigadier, I should say.”

  Sam didn’t hesitate. He’d now had almost half a year to think about it, since he’d taken Arkansas citizenship as soon as he’d arrived back in February.

  “No, not in the least. That’s because I don’t really think of it as a change in uniform to begin with. As far as I’m concerned, the uniform I used to wear has been stolen by a swindler and his accomplices. The political principles for which I’m fighting today are no different than they were on the day I stood”—he gestured at Patrick—“when then-Lieutenant Driscol and I stood side by side facing the redcoats in front of the Capitol.”

  “May I quote you to that effect, General Houston?” Bryant asked. His pad and pen were already in hand.

  “Oh, yes,” Sam said brightly. “Please do.”

  An hour later, Patrick offered to give Scott and Bryant a tour of New Antrim’s military installations. They accepted, of course, leaving Sam alone in the foyer’s corner.

  Not more than fifteen seconds after Driscol and the two reporters left the hotel, Salmon Brown took the seat formerly occupied by Winfield Scott.

  He began without preliminaries. “We figure they’ve landed close to six thousand troops at the confluence, almost half of them regulars. The only artillery they’ve got—so far, anyway—is the First Regiment. Colonel Abram Eustis is in command. They were stationed—”

  “In Charleston, South Carolina. Yes, I know.” Sam scratched his chin. “Interesting. It would have been a lot easier to bring in the Fourth Artillery under Armistead. What’s the infantry?”

  “They’ve got four infantry regiments. The First, the Fifth—which used to be the Fourth, it seems—”

  “That’s Harrison’s old unit,” Sam interrupted, “from the Thames campaign. They renamed it after the war, when they consolidated the regiments during the reduction. The Fourth did pretty well in the war with Britain, except for when Hull surrendered his whole army at Detroit. But nobody’s ever blamed the regiment for that. Harrison’ll be leaning on them heavily, I’m pretty sure. If it was me, I’d be more inclined to rely on the First Regiment. The Battle of the Thames was a long time ago, and who knows what shape the Fourth’s in today? The First, on the other hand, has been in Baton Rouge under Colonel Taylor, who’s an excellent troop trainer.”

  Salmon Brown shook his head. “Taylor’s no longer in command of the First. Colonel John McNeil is.”

  Sam’s eyebrows rose. “Then where’s Taylor?”

  “Don’t know for sure, Sam.” Like John Brown himself, his brother was not given to military formalities. “Word is, though, that he was sent up north. To St. Louis.”

  Sam’s eyes moved to the northern wall of the foyer as if he were trying to look through it. “St. Louis? What…Ah, never mind. Let’s deal with what’s at hand, for the moment. Which are the other two infantry regiments Harrison’s got down there on the confluence? The Seventh is probably one of them. They were stationed not far away.”

  “That’s right. Colonel Matthew Arbuckle’s in command. The other one is the Third, with Lieutenant Colonel Enos Cutler in command.”

  Sam chewed on it for a moment. “So. One regular regiment of artillery; four of infantry. The United States sent four out of their seven regular infantry regiments and a fourth of their artillery. Against which, we’ve got at the moment—all told—three infantry regiments and an artillery regiment.”

  He laughed, once, very sarcastically. “They’re overconfident. They should have sent six infantry and two artillery regiments. Six infantry, anyway. It’s always hard to pry artillery units out of their garrisons, because the local politicians put up such a fuss. Need ’em there to defend the town against—whoever. Barbary pirates, maybe, come all the way across the Atlantic.”

  “John and me figure they got you outnumbered three to two,” Salmon pointed out dispassionately. “That’s just in regular troops. Unless you decide to use the three new regiments.”

  “No, that’d be a mistake. Those recruits aren’t ready for a pitched battle on the open field in the Delta, yet. Send them into one, they’d just shatter—and it would take a year to rebuild their self-confidence.” He went back to scratching his chin. “And your arithmetic’s just about right, although it wouldn’t be if we could send all of our regiments down there. But we can’t. We need to keep the First in reserve as well as using it to train the new regiments. And we can’t risk the whole artillery regiment on the open Delta. We’ll need it intact when the war moves up the river valley, which it will. We always knew we couldn’t stop the United States from taking the Delta.”

  Sam shrugged. “On the other hand, our regiments will be stronger than theirs. We can muster at least six hundred men to a regiment, maybe seven. They�
��ll be lucky if they’re even half strength. I’m willing to bet not one of those infantry regiments down there has more than five hundred men actually present. At least one of them won’t have more than maybe four hundred. Desertion and absence without leave is rampant in the U.S. Army; always has been. Not much of a problem for us. Give it a few months, down there in the Delta—disease will make it worse.”

  He took a moment, doing the math. “Figure…they’ll have two thousand infantry, actually on the field, when we meet. We’ll have about one thousand, three hundred. They’ll have an advantage in artillery, but that terrain isn’t very good even for field artillery. Not anywhere near the river, anyway. If we maneuver properly, they won’t be able to move their ordnance up quickly enough. And the one thing I’m sure and certain about is that Arkansas infantry can out-march any infantry the U.S. Army’s got. Like I said, they’re overconfident.”

  “They got lots of militia troops, Sam. At least three thousand. About half of them are the Georgia militia. The rest are mostly Louisianans. A few units from Alabama. Nothing yet but a handful from Mississippi.”

  Sam’s sneer was magnificent. At least, he hoped so.

  “The Georgia militia.” He uttered the phrase the same way he might refer to offal or animal refuse. “Ah, yes. The same heroes who retreated precipitously from the Red Sticks during the Horseshoe campaign—I can remember Old Hickory’s choice words at the time—and then ravaged defenseless towns of friendly Creeks and our Cherokee allies. Jackson had choice words about that, too.”

  The situation seemed worth the effort of a gesture. So, although he didn’t chew tobacco, Sam rose, stalked over to a nearby spittoon, and used the device loudly. He didn’t miss, either.

  After returning to his seat, he pulled the cap off his head and plopped it into his lap. Winfield Scott was right. The blasted thing might look splendid, but it was going to be a pure nuisance in the months ahead.

  “One thing we’ll do,” he continued, “—I’ve already discussed it with Patrick and Charles, and General Ross agrees—is break those Georgia bastards. If we get any kind of a chance, anyway. Have they started their usual atrocities?”

  Salmon Brown disapproved of tobacco entirely. But for a moment he looked as if he wanted to use the spittoon himself. “They fell upon two families of Indians who’d somehow remained near the river. Quapaws, probably, or Caddos, not paying attention to anything except their immediate business. They wouldn’t have been Choctaws or Chickasaws.”

  He didn’t volunteer any details, nor was Sam about to ask. Georgia militiamen were notorious for their brutality and had been for decades. Disemboweling pregnant Indian women, after they’d been gang-raped, was pretty typical behavior. Sometimes the fetus would be mutilated also.

  They could do so with impunity, because the state of Georgia adamantly refused to discipline them. During the war with Britain, Andrew Jackson had become so furious with the depredations of the Georgia militia that he’d had an entire unit placed under arrest by regular troops. Unfortunately, he’d had no legal choice but to turn them over to the Georgia authorities—whereupon a Georgia jury had promptly declared them innocent of all charges.

  “Break them,” he muttered. Then, shaking off the moment’s anger: “Harrison’ll try to use the militia’s numbers, but they won’t be much use to him. Not against our regulars, at least. Against the Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws…It’s always hard to tell. Militias are prone to panic. Leadership’s always the key. With strong enough leaders, they can usually beat an equal number of Indians. Although…”

  Again he shrugged. “We’ll just have to see. Part of the reason they can is simply because the Indians don’t ever have much in the way of guns—and especially ammunition.”

  Salmon smiled. In that moment, he looked very much like John Brown’s brother. “That won’t be no problem here.”

  Sam smiled back. In addition to terrorizing slave-catchers and serving as a genuinely excellent spy network, over the past months Brown’s Raiders had also proved to be superb gunrunners.

  It had taken Henry Clay weeks after his inauguration to cajole and bully Congress into declaring war on the Confederacy of the Arkansas. But the very day after his inauguration, he’d made several sweeping decrees prohibiting the sale of weapons or other warmaking goods to the Confederacy.

  And what a laugh that had been! All the Northern and border states had immediately raised an outcry over federal tyranny, the trampling of states’ rights—Jackson leading the charge in the Senate—and even some of the Southern states had choked on the measures. Virginia’s John Randolph, contrarian as always, had immediately turned from being Clay’s loudest supporter in the House to his loudest critic.

  The only immediate effect had been to double the transfer of arms that Brown’s Raiders carried down the rivers. It wasn’t until the federal government was finally able to get enough armed steamboats patrolling the Ohio and the Mississippi that the flood was stymied at all. Even then, it was never stopped altogether.

  By which time, the proverbial barn door had been locked after the horse escaped. Arkansas was still a bit short of heavy iron plate for armoring the steamboats. But it already had enough cannons and muskets and powder and shot to fight for years.

  It hadn’t even had to pay for most of it. Clay’s campaign and election had stirred the sparks of Northern abolitionism into glowing coals, and Clay’s War was fanning them now into roaring flames. A political sentiment that might have taken decades to develop was now growing explosively. There were still not more than a few hundred abolitionists in the United States willing to take up arms themselves, on behalf of “bleeding Arkansas,” either as part of Brown’s Raiders or the small Lafayette Battalions that were springing up here and there. But thousands of people were willing to donate arms of some sort—and tens of thousands willing to donate money, most of them asking no questions about what the money was spent on.

  Salmon was long gone by the time Scott and Bryant returned with Patrick, late in the afternoon. Sam made sure of it. Brown’s Raiders were a double-edged sword, and they had to be handled carefully. Mostly unseen, a mysterious presence lurking in the heavily forested rivers and the mountains and the woods, they were something of a terror to the enemy’s soldiers. But if Arkansas let them get too visible, the political repercussions were likely to outweigh the military gains. As it was, Clay’s partisans—not to mention the entire press of the Deep South—were doing their level best to portray the Mississippi valley as being overrun by murderous fanatic abolitionists.

  “Overrun” was absurd, of course. “Fanatics” could be argued. But “murderous” was the plain and simple truth. Patrick had put it quite well. Brown and his men were reminiscent—perhaps frighteningly so—of the Hebrews of the Old Testament. Doing God’s will to defend the Promised Land, and not at all concerned as to how many Philistines got chopped to pieces in the process. Those of them who weren’t John Brown’s brand of Calvinist when they joined the Raiders soon became so.

  It was a peculiar variety of that harsh strain of Protestantism, admittedly. John Brown was actually quite tolerant of religious differences and didn’t care about theology at all. He’d even accept Catholics in the Raiders, if they were black, and make no attempt to persuade them to abandon popery. But they’d still join every night in the Bible readings. And if Brown’s interpretation of the Old Testament was perhaps a little eccentric, it had the great advantage for irregular soldiers of being very clear and straightforward. As Patrick Driscol liked to put it, every other verb was “smite.”

  Winfield Scott was—had been—undoubtedly the best trainer of troops in the United States Army. He’d proved that during the war with Britain, and after it he’d been placed in charge of developing the army’s new manual of drill and field regulations.

  So it wasn’t surprising that the first thing he said after resuming his seat in the hotel’s foyer was “I commend your decision not to send those three new regiments into combat quickly. But�
��”

  He glanced at Patrick and then shook his head. “Dear God, are you really that confident? Patrick—Sam—you have to meet Harrison in the Delta. At least once, even if it’s a draw. Even if it’s a defeat, when it comes down to it, as long as your forces can be extracted afterward and you bloody him badly. Whereas if you allow him unchallenged possession—”

  Abruptly, he closed his mouth. Then swallowed.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen. It occurs to me that if I insist you respect my personal integrity, I must place the same condition upon myself. Not my business, after all, to be counseling officers of what is, in fact and leaving sentiment aside, a nation that is at war with my own.”

  Patrick nodded solemnly. Every bit as solemnly, Sam said, “Yes, of course.”

  But he was finding it hard not to laugh, and he was quite sure Patrick was waging the same struggle. They’d come to the same conclusion themselves, four months ago. Robert Ross had been particularly adamant about it. Sam remembered the conversation as if it’d happened yesterday.

  “We’ve got to fight them as soon as they cross the river. Not a month later, not a week later—well, perhaps a week, but no longer than it takes to march our forces down there. Speaking of which—”

  “Relax, Robert,” grunted Driscol. “We’ve been using a good half of the forced labor—sorry, the shiftless bastards who’re shirking the colors—to finish the road to Arkansas Post.”

  “It’ll be ready by the end of May,” Charles Ball added, “and there’s no way they’re coming any sooner than that.”

  “No chance at all,” agreed Houston. Of the four generals and four colonels sitting around the table in the Arkansas Army headquarters, Sam had by far the best sense of American politics. Ross was British, Driscol was a Scots-Irish immigrant, and the other six officers were all black men whose color had made it effectively impossible for them to engage in politics until they settled in Arkansas. “It’s now mid-March, so Clay will have just gotten inaugurated. Figure it’ll take him till the end of April before he can get Congress to declare war.”