1824: The Arkansas War: Chapter One

Washington, D.C.
April 25, 1824

    “Houston must have known.” The President’s head turned away from the window, presenting his profile to the other two men. The expression on his face was not condemnatory, so much as simply pensive. “Must have known for several years, in fact. Am I right, Winfield?”

    The tall, handsome general in one of the chairs in Monroe’s office shifted his position. Only slightly, of course. The very fancy uniform he favored didn’t lend itself well to extravagant movement while seated.

    “Oh, certainly,” General Scott replied. “Driscol’s been building another Line of Torres Vedras in those mountains. The original took Wellington over a year to build—and he had the population of Lisbon to draw on. Even with all the negroes who have migrated to Arkansas the past few years, Driscol doesn’t begin to have that large a labor force. And the Cherokees and Creeks are useless for that sort of work, of course. For the most part, at least.”

    The Secretary of State, the third man in the room, cleared his throat. “Perhaps...” John Quincy Adams pursed his lips. “The work stretched out over that long a period of time...”

    President Monroe shook his head. “I thank you, John, but let’s not be foolish. Sam Houston?”

    He chuckled. “I remind you that my son-in-law is the same man who, at the age of sixteen, crossed sixty miles of Tennessee wilderness after running away from home. Then, lived among the Cherokee for several years, even being adopted into one of their clans. He could find his way through any woods or mountains in Creation.”

    The president’s tone of voice grew somber. “Even drunk, as he so often is these days.”

    Monroe finally turned away from the window. “No, let’s not be foolish. He spends as much time in the Confederacy as he does here at home, since the treaty was signed. There is no chance that Sam Houston failed to see what his friend Patrick Driscol was doing. Nor, given his military experience, that he didn’t understand what he was seeing.”

    As he resumed his seat at his desk, Monroe nodded toward Scott. “It didn’t take Winfield here more than a few days to figure it out, when he visited the area. And—meaning no offense—Winfield’s not half the woodsman Houston is.”

    The general’s notorious vanity seemed to be on vacation that day. His own chuckle was a hearty thing. “Not a tenth, say better! I’ve traveled with Houston, a time or two. But it didn’t matter, on this occasion. Patrick provided me with a Cherokee escort, who served as my guides. He made no attempt to keep me from seeing what he had wrought in those mountains. Quite the contrary, I assure you. He wants us to know.”

    A bit warily, Scott studied the president. John Quincy Adams didn’t wonder as to the reason. James Monroe was normally the most affable and courteous of men, but they were treading on very delicate ground here. That most treacherous and shifting ground of all, where political and personal affairs intersected.

    Sam Houston’s marriage to James Monroe’s younger daughter Maria Hester in 1819, following one of the young nation’s most famous whirlwind courtships had added a great deal of flavor and spice to an administration that was otherwise principally noted for such unromantic traits as efficiency and political skill. The girl had only been seventeen at the time. The famous Hero of the Capitol—still young, too, being only twenty-six himself; and as handsome and well-spoken as ever—receiving the hand in marriage of the very attractive daughter of the country’s chief executive. What could better satisfy the smug assurance of a new republic that it basked in the favor of the Almighty?

    It hadn’t been all show, either. Very little of it, in fact. Allowing for his constant absences as the administration’s Special Commissioner for Indian Affairs, Houston had proven to be something of a model husband. He treated Maria Hester exceedingly well; she, in turn, doted on the man. And, thankfully, Houston’s notorious womanizing had vanished entirely after his marriage. There’d been not a trace of scandal, thereafter.

    His steadily worsening affection for whiskey, which had become a growing concern for the president, was something that Houston kept away from his wife. However much whiskey he guzzled in the nation’s taverns—that, too, had become something of a legend—he did not do the same at home. He drank little, as a rule, in his wife’s presence; was invariably a cheerful rather than a nasty drunk, on the few occasions when he did; and quit altogether, after his son was born.

    Even Houston’s stubborn insistence on naming the child Andrew Jackson Houston hadn’t caused much in the way of family tension. Monroe had made no formal objection of any kind, whatever he might have said in private. In any event, the president was far too shrewd a politician not to use the occasion to defuse the tensions with Jackson that had begun to build. As political tensions always did, around Jackson, the man being what he was.

    So, despite Houston’s faults—and which man had no faults? Adams asked himself; certainly not he—the President liked his son-in-law. So did John Quincy Adams, for that matter, and he was not a man given to many personal likings.

    Adams glanced at the general sitting in the chair next to him. So, for that matter, did Winfield Scott. At least, once he’d realized that Houston’s resignation from the Army and subsequent pre-occupation with Indian affairs meant that he was no longer a rival in the military.

    Yes, everybody liked Sam Houston. You could not have found a man in the United States who would tell you otherwise. Until they’d finally discovered that, beneath the good-looking and boyishly cheerful exterior, there lurked the brain and the heart of a Machiavellian monster.

    A few months after his marriage, all of Houston’s scheming and deal-making had come to fruition later that year with the Treaty of Oothcaloga.

    The Confederacy of the Arkansas had been born that day. At first, the great migration of the Cherokees and the Creeks which followed had been hailed across the nation as a stroke of political genius on the part of the Monroe administration. By none more loudly than Andrew Jackson, of course, who had by then solidified his position as the champion of the western settlers. But even Calhoun had grudgingly indicated his approval.

    For that one brief moment in time, the so-called Era of Good Feelings had seemed established for eternity. But, in hindsight, it had only been the crest of a wave. On January 13, 1820—almost five years to the day after he and his Iron Battalion broke the British at the Battle of the Mississippi—Patrick Driscol and those same black artillerymen routed the Louisiana militia in what had since come to be called the Battle of Algiers. The three years that followed had been a steadily darkening political nightmare.

    Houston was blamed for that, too, nowadays, by many people. His diplomacy had defused the crisis, long enough to allow Driscol and his followers to leave New Orleans and migrate to the new Confederacy. So, a full-scale war had been averted.

    But John Calhoun had never forgiven the Monroe administration for the settlement Houston engineered, and Monroe’s approval of it. Servile insurrections should be crushed and its survivors mercilessly scourged, he argued, not allowed to flee unscathed—and never mind that the “servile insurrection” had actually been the work of freedmen defending their legal rights against local overlords.

    To John Calhoun and his followers, a nigger was a nigger. Rightless by nature, legalistic twaddles be damned. The black race was fit only to hew wood and draw water for those who were their superiors.

    A few months after the Algiers incident, Calhoun resigned his post as Secretary of War in order to run for senator from South Carolina. He won the election, very handily, and had been a thorn in the side of the administration since. It had been Calhoun who led the charge in Congress to pass the Freedmen Exclusion Act, which would have required all freedmen to leave the United States within a year of manumission. Monroe had vetoed the bill, on the obvious ground that it was a gross violation of states’ rights, whereupon Calhoun had given his open support to freedmen exclusion legislation passed by various states and municipalities, and his tacit blessing to more savage and informal methods of exclusion.

    A duel had almost resulted, then, when Sam Houston publicly labeled him—Adams could not but smile, whenever he thought of the brash youngster’s handy way with words—“a Tsarist, a terror-monger, and a toad. Nay, say better—a toadstool. A toad can at least hop about. Calhoun is a fungus on the nation’s flank.”

    “What are you so cheerful about, John?” demanded Monroe.

    Delicate ground, indeed. Adams stifled the smile.

    “Ah, nothing, Mr. President, Just a stray thought that happened to cross my mind.”

    The look Monroe gave him was exceedingly skeptical. “Stray thought” and “John Quincy Adams” were not phrases that could often be found together. Anywhere within shouting distance, in fact. Disliked as he might be in many quarters, no one thought Adams’ brain was given to loose functioning—and he was generally considered the best-read man in America.

    But Monroe let it drop. Instead, he turned his gaze to Scott.

    “What’s your military assessment, General?”

    Scott shrugged. “The fortifications that Driscol’s built in the Ozarks and the Ouachitas pose no threat to the United States, Mr. President. They’re purely defensive works, and too far—much too far—from the Mississippi to pose any threat to our commerce.”

    Monroe nodded. “Yes, I understand that.” Perhaps a bit acerbically: “I have some military experience myself, you may recall. What I meant was—let’s be frank, shall we?—what threat do they pose to our army in the event the United States goes to war with the Confederacy? Or, to put it more bluntly still, if we invade Arkansas?”

    Scott looked out the window, for a moment. “Assuming Driscol’s in command? Which, of course, he would be, if he’s still alive when—if—that time comes.” He paused for another moment. “Let me put it this way, Mr. President. Were you, or anyone, to ask me to command such an expedition, I would strongly—very strongly—urge that an alternate route of attack be chosen.”

    “What alternate route, Winfield?” Adams demanded. It was not so much a question as a statement—and a caustically posed one, at that. If the President was known for his affable manners, the Secretary of State was not.

    Adams heaved himself out of his chair and went to another window than the one Monroe had been looking out earlier. The same window, in fact, which had been the focus of Scott’s examination. That window allowed a view to the west.

    Once there, Adams stabbed a finger at the land beyond. “Attacking the Confederacy from the south means marching through Texas. That means a war with Mexico, and probably Spain. An unprovoked war with Mexico—and no one except southern slaveowners would accept the premises for such a war as a provocation suitable for a casus belli—runs the risk of embroiling the European powers. The last thing we need. Not even Jackson would support that, as much as he hates the Dons.”

    He shifted his finger slightly to the north and jabbed it again. “The only other alternative is coming at the Confederacy from the north. That would be diplomatically feasible, but as a military proposition...”

    He shifted his gaze back into the room, to land on Scott. “You’re the expert, Winfield. What’s your opinion?”

    The general grimaced. “The logistics would be a nightmare. You’d have to move the troops down the Ohio to the juncture with the Mississippi. Then—”

    “Passing by free states as you went, each and every one of which will be opposed to the expedition,” Monroe injected. “They have no quarrel with the Confederacy. Rather the opposite, since many of them are happy to be getting rid of their own freedmen—and without the Confederacy, they can’t.”

    Scott’s grimace had never quite left his face, and now returned with a vengeance. “Yes, I understand that, Mr. President. You’d have to bivouac on the south bank of the Ohio and re-supply in Kentucky ports.”

    The president wasn’t about to let up. “I remind you that Richard Johnson keeps getting re-elected by the citizens of Kentucky, General. What’s he likely to say about that?”

    “He’d pitch a fit,” Adams agreed. “There’s not only the matter of his personal attitudes to be considered, either. Senator from Kentucky or not, living openly with a black woman or not, don’t forget he’s also the darling of the northeast workingmen—and they’re even happier with the freedmen exclusion acts than Calhoun is. Except, not being slave-owners, they don’t care a fig about the problem of runaway slaves. Let the darkies escape to Arkansas, and good riddance—and for sure and certain, don’t expect them to support a war to get them back. Much less volunteer to fight in it.”

    “I wasn’t advocating such an expedition, Mr. President. Secretary of State. Personally, I think it’d be sheer folly. But you asked my military opinion, and I’m simply trying to give it to you.”

    “Of course, General.” Monroe’s courtesy was back in full force. “Neither I nor the Secretary meant any of our—ah, perhaps impatient view of the matter—to be inflicted upon you.”

    “Yes,” Adams grunted. “My apologies, Winfield. I didn’t mean to suggest you were a party to Calhoun’s madness. Please continue.”

    Scott nodded. “It would help a great deal, Mr. President, if I had a map to work from. Is there one at hand?”

    “I can have one brought, certainly.” The President began to rise but Adams waved him down. “Please! The proprieties must be maintained. The best maps are in my office anyway. I’ll get one for us. Just the trans-Mississippi region, Winfield?”

    “Yes, that should do.”

    Adams was at the door to the President’s office. “This will take a moment. There’s no point sending a servant. He’ll just waste time not finding it and then waste still more time trying to think up an excuse.”

    It was said rather sarcastically. Adams said many things rather sarcastically. It was a habit his wife chided him about. As did a veritable legion of other people, including Adams himself. He tried to restrain the habit, but...

    Alas. John Quincy Adams had many virtues. Even he would allow that to be true, as relentlessly self-critical as he was. But “suffering fools gladly” was not and never would be one of them.

    Still, he thought God would forgive him that sin, when the time came. As sins went, it was rather a small one, after all. Even Jesus, if you studied the New Testament from the proper angle, suffered from it to a degree.

    By the time he returned to the President’s office, Monroe had cleared his desk of all the materials on it. Adams, with Scott assisting, spread the large map across the surface.

    “Good. This will make it all much clearer,” Scott said. “Let’s begin here, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi.”

    A long, powerful-looking finger pinned the spot, then slid to the north. “Then, up the Mississippi to St. Louis. At St. Louis—upstream again, you’ll notice—you move along the Missouri, skirting the Ozarks to the south. Then…”

    He looked up, giving the other two men a sardonic glance. “Then… what?”

    “There’s the Grand River,” Adams suggested, but with no great force. “Eventually.”

    “Ah, yes, the Grand. Also called the Neosho, I believe. Hard to tell from this map, but it doesn’t really look all that ‘grand,’ does it? And do please note that you have to traverse a considerable distance before you can reach any headwaters of the Arkansas. By now, you’ve gone hundreds of miles upstream followed by a land march with no means of supplying your troops except with horses and wagons. That’s difficult even without enemy resistance being encountered—and we’re bound to encounter some. From the indigenes, first—those are the Osage, you know, a fierce tribe—even before we come into Cherokee territory.”

    He straightened. “I won’t say it can’t be done. It could, certainly, with the expenditure of enough time, effort and—most of all—money. There’s simply no way around it, Mr. President. Mr. Secretary. West of the Mississippi, the main rivers all run west to east, or northwest to southeast. There no real help there for an army large enough to do the job that tries to approach the Confederacy from the north.”

    Monroe pushed aside a portion of the map and sat down heavily in his chair. “I understand. The gist of it is that there is no practical alternative, unless one is prepared to wage a long and costly war, to launching a major expedition against the Indian Confederacy except up the Arkansas River valley.”

    “Yes, sir. The Red River can’t serve, not with at least a hundred and files miles of it clogged up with fallen trees. The ‘Great Raft,’ they call it.”

    “And Driscol, being a very experienced soldier, knows that perfectly well.”

    “Yes, sir.”

    “So he designed his fortifications and lines of defense—his version of Wellington’s Lines of Torres Vedras in the Peninsular War—in such a way as to channel any attacker up the river.”

    “Yes, sir. His lines are brilliantly designed, too. Far better than I would have thought, to be honest. I think he must be getting advice from somewhere. Driscol was a sergeant in Napoleon’s army, not an officer. And the only sight he would have ever gotten of Wellington’s defenses would have been from a distance. Even with his huge army, Massena never made any serious attempt on Torres Vedras.”

    “How do you mean, ‘brilliantly designed’?” asked Adams.

    The general turned to face him. “Consider the problem he faces. Even with the recent flood of immigrants coming from the freedmen communities, added to the constant influx of runaway slaves and the settlers sponsored by the American Colonization Society, there still can’t be more than some tens of thousands of negroes in that Arkansas chiefdom, as the Confederates call their respective states. Certainly not more than eighty thousand, I shouldn’t think. Add to that perhaps ten thousand whites by now, all told.”

    “That many?” The president’s eyebrows were lifted. “Whites, I mean. I wouldn’t have thought…”

    He glanced at Adams. “Again, a smile. Why?”

    Adams had also resumed his seat. Now, he leaned his short, heavy frame back into it. “I can’t say I’m surprised, Mr. President. Not every white man in America shares Calhoun’s attitudes.”

    Nor do most of them come from Virginia gentry, as you do. But he left that unsaid, of course. “There are the missionaries, first of all. A very heavy presence of Quakers, naturally, and they tend to move in entire families. Then, a fair number—call it a heavy sprinkling—of young radicals. ‘Abolitionists,’ they’re starting to call themselves.”

    Monroe made a face. For all the President’s humane nature, which Adams would be the first to allow, the man was still the product of his upbringing. Though a slaveowner himself, Monroe—like his close friends and predecessors Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—considered the institution of slavery problematic at best, and probably an outright evil. Still, any drastic and rapid abolition of slavery was considered impossible, and the attempt to do it, economically and socially disastrous.

    Adams, a New Englander, thought it was probably impossible also, for political reasons. But he would have accepted the economic and social disasters abolition might bring, for the sake of the greater political disaster they would avert. More and more, he was becoming convinced that if slavery festered for too long, it would produce, in the end, one of the most horrible episodes of bloodshed any nation had ever endured. And would steadily undermine the foundations of the republic before it got there.

    But there was no point re-opening that debate here and now, so Adams continued to the next point.

    “I imagine that most of the whites there, however, are simply settlers. No different, really, from any western settlers. Scots-Irish in the main, of course.”

    “I’d think they’d bridle at being ruled by blacks,” Monroe said.

    The President was a very perceptive man, so the moment those words were spoken, his gaze moved to Scott. “And now you’re smiling, General. Why?”

    Scott coughed into his fist, as a way of suppressing his amusement. “You have to be there to understand the thing, Mr. President. Yes, it’s true that most of the chiefs—they’ve adopted Cherokee terminology—are negroes. Still, they’re elected—and whites can vote also. They can run for office, as well, and a disproportionate number of them get elected. Even the negroes in Arkansas are more likely to vote for a white man, all other things being equal.

    “What’s most important, however, is that the principal chief—that’s their equivalent of what we’d call the governor of the state—is Patrick Driscol. You can’t even say he gets elected in a landslide, since nobody ever runs against him.”

    He coughed, again, into a large fist. “They don’t call him that, though, except the Cherokees and Creeks who live in the province. Of whom, by the way, there are perhaps another five thousand. ‘Principal chief,’ I mean. I was quite entertained during the weeks I was there, I assure you, to discover that every white or black man I encountered refers to Patrick Driscol as ‘the Laird of Arkansas.’”

    The fist couldn’t possibly suppress the grin that came then. “Not to his face, of course.”

    Adams smiled. Monroe, who knew Driscol personally, laughed aloud. “I can imagine not!”

    After the moment’s humor was gone, Scott said: “Perhaps you remember Driscol’s young soldier, who accompanied him everywhere he went during the war. McParland? The young deserter whose faked execution I had Driscol stage, shortly before the battle of the Chippewa?”

    Monroe frowned slightly, dredging his memory. “Oh, yes. I remember him now. A country boy.”

    Scott nodded. “Yes. From a poor family in upstate New York. Except none of them live in New York, any longer. The entire family—uncles, aunts, cousins and all—pulled up stakes and moved to Arkansas, several years ago. And they’re no longer poor, either. They’re rather prosperous, in fact, since they own one of the furniture factories that Houston fostered in Fort of 98. Which, incidentally, has become surrounded by quite a large town. More in the way of a small city, by now. There are a number of advantages to moving to Arkansas, for a poor white settler, now that Driscol has established his rule there. For one thing, there’s far less danger from Indian attacks, for obvious reasons.”

    At Monroe’s gesture, the general resumed his own seat. “A large town—soon, if not already, a small city—protected by a powerful fortress which holds the only gate to the rest of the Confederacy and the Cherokee and Creek lands beyond. Driscol has nothing like the population of Lisbon that Wellington had. But he’s still got tens of thousands of men, and he designed those lines so troops could be moved rapidly from one point to another along the high ground. Any invading army will get battered back and forth as they march up the river valley, until they come to Fort of 98. He named it after the Irish rebellion, you understand? The one that brought death to his father and brother, and exile to him. I’ve seen it at close hand—spent two days studying it, rather, inside and out. Please trust me when I say it’s as formidable a fortress as any in the continent.”

    Scott leaned over; forcefully, his finger landed on the Arkansas. “That’s the only really suitable invasion route. And Driscol knows it. And he spent some time as a young sergeant in the French colors, staring up at Wellington’s Lines of Torres Vedras after having marched across all of Spain. And saw that his commander, Massena, never ordered a full assault. Massena had sixty-five thousand men in that army. How many soldiers will the United States send against the Confederacy of the Arkansas?”

    Monroe’s reply came instantly. “Not one, so long as I am president.”

    There was an awkward silence. Pleasantly, Monroe said to Scott: “Thank you for your advice, General. It was very helpful. And now would you give a moment, please?”

    Scott rose to his feet. “Certainly, Mr. President. I’ll be in my offices at the War Department, should you need me again today.” He turned and nodded to Adams. “A pleasure, as always, Mr. Secretary.”

    He probably even meant it, Adams thought. Winfield Scott and he got along quite well, as a rule. If for no other reason, because Scott was even less prone to suffering fools gladly.

    After the general was gone, the silence returned for a time. Finally, sighing, Adams spoke up. “There is some talk, I believe, that people might want me to succeed you, Mr. President.”

    “Yes, so I’ve been led to believe.”

    Monroe maintained a studied blandness in his expression and tone of voice. It was the firm protocol of the young republic that no gentleman suited to the chief executive in the first place would ever directly express any ambition for the post. As absurd as that apparent indifference might be. Even Henry Clay maintained the posture, though every suckling babe in the nation knew that the Speaker of the House lusted for the presidency as other men lusted for food or whiskey or money or women.

    Adams scratched under his chin. “Should that unlikely eventuality comes to pass, my answer would be the same as yours. Not one dollar spent to send one soldier against the Confederacy.”

    Monroe nodded. “Jackson’s answer might be different. He’s as savage as anyone on the subject of the runaway slaves for whom Arkansas has become a magnet. But he’s also far shrewder than most people realize. Even something of a genuine statesman, I think, in his own way. Finally, Jackson takes his honor seriously, and there is his vow to Houston. Which he might—or might not—feel has been satisfied by now.”

    Houston. Always Houston, it seemed. On Mondays, Adams thought the young man was the republic’s greatest blessing. On Tuesdays, its greatest curse. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, he was indifferent to the question, for the Secretary of State had many other things in midweek to occupy his mind. By Friday, he was back to blessing the youngster, and on Saturday to showering him with silent curses.

    Sunday, of course, was the Sabbath. On Sundays, Adams studied the Bible and tried not to think about the subject of Houston at all. Sometimes he even succeeded.

    “Yes, Andrew Jackson,” he said. “Impossible to know how he’d react, and what he’d decide. With Henry Clay, of course…”

    He left the rest unsaid. Monroe, however, did not.

    “Clay will do whatever serves opportunity, as he sees it. And since he can’t get the presidency without the support of Calhoun and at least the acquiescence of Crawford, that will determine his course.”

    “He’ll call it a great compromise,” Adams predicted.

    The room burst into momentary laughter, again. The moment over, Adams began rolling up the map.

    “Let’s hope we never have to find out.”