1824: The Arkansas War (42 page)

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

J
ANUARY 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 the 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.

F
EBRUARY 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 historically 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.”

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.