1824: The Arkansas War: Chapter Three

    “Probably shouldn’t have done that,” Sam admitted, a couple of hours later. They’d stopped at a creek crossing to let their horses drink.

    Chester studied the creek intently, as if the small stream was vastly more fascinating than any other body of moving waters on the face of the globe. “’Probably’ meaning how, Mr. Sam? ‘Probably,’ as in: ‘I probably shouldn’t have baited that bear’? Or ‘probably,’ as in: ‘I probably shouldn’t have stuck a pitchfork in Sam Hill’?”

    Houston grinned. “Oh, surely the latter. But since I’m not a sinner—well, not much of one—what do I have to fear? Sam Hill won’t have no hold on me, when the blessed day comes. Hand me the whiskey.”

    Chester rummaged in the saddle pack and came out with the bottle. He didn’t say anything, but the expression on his face made clear his disapproval.

    “And stop nattering at me,” Sam said.

    “Didn’t say a word.”

    “Didn’t need to.” He opened the bottle, took a hefty but not heroic slug from the contents, stoppered it up and handed it hack to Chester. “See? Just needed something to take the taste out of my mouth. Blasted meat was practically raw.”

    As always, the warm glow in his belly steadied his nerves. Which needed it, in truth. There’d been a lot of encounters like that over the past two or three years. They’d been getting uglier, too.

    The United States had been hit by a series of crises, coming in quick succession. Sam thought people would have handled the Panic of 1819 and the economic dislocation that followed. They’d also have handled—well enough, anyway—the Missouri Compromise that Henry Clay had engineered the following year, and the political tensions that came with it. Sam was no admirer of Clay, but he’d admit the man’s vaunted political skills had been fully evident in that crisis.

    But together, the Panic and the Compromise had brought the nation to a heated point just short of boiling—and then John Calhoun had seized upon the Treaty of Oothcaloga and the Algiers Incident to advance his pro-slavery political program. His speeches and actions had met a receptive audience in much of the south and the west. Almost overnight, it seemed, Sam Houston had gone from being a man generally admired both for his heroism in the war with Britain as well as his settlement of the most acute Indian land questions, to the architect of a fiendish scheme to undermine the supremacy of the European race in America in favor of its lesser races.

    “Still not sure how that happened,” he muttered, looking down at the back of his hand. “My own skin’s still as white as ever.”

    “What was that, Mr. Sam?”

    Houston glanced at Chester. “Just talking to myself.”

    He decided to change the subject. “When are you planning to buy your freedom, by the way? It’d be handy if you’d let me know a bit ahead of time, you rascal, so’s I don’t get caught in the lurch.”

    Chester went back to his creek-scrutiny. “Well. Wasn’t actually planning on it, all that soon, Mr. Sam. Thought I’d keep saving up my money. Once we get to Arkansas, I can put it in Mr. Patrick’s bank. It’ll be safe there.”

    “Wonderful! Now you’ll make me a liar, too.”

    Chester smiled apologetically, but didn’t look away from the water. “You didn’t say anything about it in the tavern, Mr. Sam. I was the one said I could buy my way free in ‘bout a couple of months. Wasn’t lying, neither. I could. But ‘could’ and ‘would’ is two different things. I just don’t see the point in being a freedman, when I wouldn’t have enough money left to do anything more than work for someone else. I’m gonna do that, might as well keep working for you. There’s really not all that much difference for a poor man, when you get right down to it, between a ‘master’ and a ‘boss’—and, either way, you’re the best one I know.”

    Sam rolled his eyes. “In other words, you’re agreeing with Calhoun. Slavery’s just the thing to elevate the black man. While his poor downtrodden white master pays the bills.”

    Chester’s smile widened, and lost its apologetic flavor. “Begging your pardon, Mr. Sam, but I don’t recall Mr. Calhoun ever saying anything about black men being free, at any time, for any amount of money.”

    Sam scratched his chin. “Well, no. Of course not. If Calhoun had his way, ‘freedmen’ wouldn’t exist at all. How’d he put it in his recent speech to the Senate?”

    His accent took on a mimicry of a much thicker and more southern one. “’ I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color as well as intellectual differences, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.’”

    Sam dropped the accent, and shook his head. “Not much room there for freedmen. Now that they’ve gotten exclusion acts passed in most states, Calhoun and his people are pushing to make manumission illegal altogether. Not to mention getting laws passed that makes teaching slaves how to read and write illegal.”

    Chester stopped smiling, then.

    “He’s a prize, Calhoun is.” Sam leaned over and spit in the creek. Not so much as a gesture of disgust—although that was there, too—as to get rid of the taste of raw meat he still had in his mouth. The whiskey had helped some, but not enough.

    For a moment, he contemplated taking another slug, but decided against it. He’d already drunk almost a quarter of the bottle this morning. He wasn’t worried about being able to ride a horse, of course. Sam could manage that with a full bottle under his belt. But he had an awkward interview coming up today, and needed his wits about him.

    “Come on,” he said. “The horses have had enough, and I’d like to make it to the senator’s house by mid-afternoon.”

    “Hi, Sam!”

    He grinned at the twin girls scampering around the front yard of Blue Spring Farm, as Richard M. Johnson’s house and plantation was called. “Settle down, will you? You’re making the horse nervous.”

    The admonishment had as much effect as such admonishments usually have on twelve-year-old girls. Fortunately, Sam’s horse was a placid creature.

    He decided to try the tactic of parental authority. “And you know your daddy doesn’t like it when his girls don’t act proper. Him being a United States Senator and all.”

    That had no effect, either, not to Sam’s surprise. Richard Johnson was a genial man toward just about everybody, especially his own daughters. Threatening them with his wrath was as useful as threatening them with a snow storm in July.

    In fact, they started laughing. And they were still bouncing up and down.

    Fortunately, the girls’ mother emerged onto the front porch.

    “Settle down! Right this minute, Imogene, or I’ll smack you proper! You too, Adaline!”

    That did it. In an instant, the girls were the very model of propriety and demure behavior. Their father might be easy-going, but their mother was not. Julia Chinn was so well-organized and disciplined she almost managed to keep the senator from losing his money.

    Almost, not quite. But Sam didn’t think anyone else could have kept him from going broke years earlier.

    After Sam got off his horse, he handed the reins to Chester, who began leading the horses to the barn around the side. Sam stepped up onto the porch and took off his hat. He gave a polite nod to the two disabled veterans sitting on chairs further down the porch, and then turned to the lady of the house.

    “Afternoon, Julia.”

    Her stern look vanished. “Hello, Sam. It’s so nice to see you visit again. It’s been… what? Over a year, now. You shouldn’t stay away so long.”

    Before he could answer, she waved a hand. “Yes, yes, I know. You’re a frightfully busy man.”

    Richard Johnson came out onto the porch just in time to hear the last words.

    “Frightfully busy troublemaker, more like,” he said gruffly. But he didn’t even try to disguise the smile with which he said it.

    As he and Sam shook hands, Houston took a moment to size up the senator’s appearance. It was…

    Even more sloppy and eccentric than usual. The clothing itself simply consisted of the plain and unassuming garments that Johnson had always worn, and which were part of his appeal to Kentucky’s poor farmers and the workingmen of the nation’s northeastern states. Nothing peculiar, in and of itself—except for the fact that the man who wore that humble apparel came from one of Kentucky’s premier families and was himself one of the state’s largest landowners. One of its largest slave-owners, too.

    No, it was the rest of it. His hair was disheveled, his cravat was askew—only half-tied, at that—and his boots had long since abandoned the status of “humble” and were pretty well past the stage of “worn down.” Give them another few months, and they be able to proudly claim holes in the soles and heels that were nothing but memories.

    The face, though, was the same. Johnson was a plain-looking man, and always had been. Unassuming, both in his appearance and his manner. If you didn’t know better, you’d find it hard to reconcile the man himself with his flamboyant reputation.

    Flamboyant it was, too, even by the standards of the frontier. The Great Hero who’d personally shot Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames after suffering terrible wounds himself in the battle—so the story went, anyway, and Johnson had never done anything to detract from it—was also the Great Almagamator. The disreputable fellow from Great Crossing—a U.S. Senator, to boot!—who lived in an open state of quasi-marriage with a mulatto and who persisted in treating his quadroon daughters as if they belonged in proper society. Even took them in his own carriage to church, of a Sunday!

    Andrew Jackson had shown Sam some of the letters he’d gotten, from outraged gentility in Kentucky and Tennessee, demanding that the general disavow his political ties to Johnson.

    “They can take that to Sam Hill,” Jackson had growled, tossing the letters back into a drawer of his desk. He even lapsed into blasphemy, for a moment. “I’ll be damned if I will. Johnson’s as stalwart as they make ‘em, even if he is a blasted race-mixer.”

    Fortunately for Johnson, most of his own constituents felt much the same way about the matter. Whatever they felt personally about his notorious relationship with Julia Chinn, they overlooked it in favor of the rest.

    Not the gentility, of course. During the six consecutive terms Johnson had served as one of Kentucky’s members in the U.S. House of Representatives, most of the state’s wealthy slave-owners had been indifferent to his personal habits. He didn’t represent them, after all, for the most part. The scandal-mongering with regard to Julia and the girls hadn’t really started until John J. Crittenden resigned from the Senate in 1819 and Johnson was appointed to fill out Crittenden’s term of office. A Congressman was one thing; a Senator, another.

    But most of Kentucky’s citizens were neither wealthy nor slave-owners. So far as they were concerned, Johnson’s family arrangements were his own business. What mattered was all the rest: The fact that he was a genuine war hero; the fact that he was politically allied with Andrew Jackson’s wing of the Democratic-Republican party; most of all, the fact that Johnson had led the fight to get debt imprisonment abolished in Kentucky and was striving to do the same thing on a national level.

    And, besides, every other personal habit of Johnson’s led poor settlers on the frontier to favor him. Both as a Kentucky legislator and now as a national one, Johnson had made great efforts to gain compensation for the recent war’s disabled veterans or their widows and orphans. If Blue Ridge Farm was notorious as a place where a black woman presided over the dinner table and black children sat at it, it was also famous as a place of refuge for disabled veterans and their families. The two veterans on the porch—one missing an arm; the other, a leg—would have half a dozen counterparts somewhere about the house or farm. Or their widows and orphans. No one in need was ever turned away from Richard M. Johnson’s estate—never mind that the aid itself was often passed over by the dark-skinned hands of his common-law wife.

    Kentucky’s gentility had been disgusted to see Johnson appointed to serve out Crittenden’s term in 1819. They’d been positively outraged to see him handily win the election for another term in the Senate in 1822.

    Sam saw that Johnson was eyeing him a bit warily. “You seen the General lately?”

    Sam shook his head. “Haven’t seen him in nigh-on seven months, Dick.” Since there was no point in letting Johnson fret on that score, when there were so many others he did need to fret about, Sam added hurriedly: “But I can assure you that the sentiments he expressed concerning you were just as warm as ever.”

    That was true, after all. Even if some of those “warm sentiments” had run along the lines of I can’t believe he’d treat a nigger like she was an actual wife!

    It wasn’t that Andy Jackson didn’t share each and every one of the common prejudices of his day. He most certainly did—and then some, often enough. It was just that in his own rough-hewn way, the General could often look past those things to see what really mattered to him.

    Poor white men mattered to Andy Jackson. Not too many other people did, but they did, for sure and certain. So, if one of their undoubted political champions chose to behave badly in some aspects of his personal life, Jackson would look the other way. And if the proper folk complained, they could take their complaints to Sam Hill and see what satisfaction they’d get in those very warm quarters.

    “Just as warm as ever,” Sam repeated forcefully. “My word on it.”

    Johnson’s grunt combined relief with satisfaction. “Well, they ought to be,” the Senator stated, as if to reassure himself. “Henry Clay makes a fortune suing people on behalf of land speculators and the Second Bank of the United States, and I go broke from waiving the fees for defending them.”

    That was also true… as far it went. Johnson was indeed famous as one of the few well-connected lawyers in Kentucky that a poor man or his widow could go to for legal assistance without being charged. Unfortunately, it was only part of the truth.

    There were a lot of reasons Richard Mentor Johnson was always on the verge of being broke. His personal generosity ranked on that list, yes—and pretty high up on it. But not as high as his casual attitude toward book-keeping, his inability to say “no” to just about every speculative scheme that came his way, and his predilection toward seeing only a blur instead of a line between his personal finances and those of the public. Not to mention his indulgence toward his brothers, who were only separated by a knife’s edge from being outright thieves.

    Sam liked Richard M. Johnson a very great deal. He’d never met a man who didn’t, no matter what their attitudes on such subjects as race, whom he didn’t think was a swine. But there was just no getting around the fact that, as often as not, both he and the General—not to mention the President of the United States—would like to take Johnson by the scruff of the neck and give him a real down-home shaking. Or thrash him outright, for that matter.

    Some of his aggravation must have shown, for Julia hastily spoke up.

    “Please come in, Sam. Something to drink? I’ve fresh-brewed some tea.”

    Sam was about to agree, when Johnson broke in. “Tea for Sam Houston? Don’t be silly, Julia. Sam’ll have some whiskey. I’ll join him myself.”

    The senator passed through the door into the house. Sam felt his resolve crumbling. A slug of whiskey did sound good—and it would relax him for what was coming.

    As he made to follow Johnson, Julian placed a hand on his arm.

    “How much trouble is he in, Sam?” she asked quietly.

    Houston shrugged uncomfortably. “Well… Nobody’s talking about arresting him or anything like that, Julia. But…”

    “But nobody’s going to advance him any more money, neither.”

    “No. Not a chance.” That wasn’t quite true, but close enough for the moment.

    She nodded and released his arm. “Thank you. I’ll join you in a while.”

    The restraint their mother’s admonition had placed on the girls finally broke.

    “Can we come in too?” Adaline demanded.

    “We want to talk with Sam!” her twin added.

    “Hush, girls! Sam and your father need some private time.” Julia shooed them away. “You can talk to him all you want over dinner.”