1824: The Arkansas War: Chapter Eight

County Down, Ireland
June 3,1824

    “You owe these people nothing, Robert,” said Eliza Ross. “That man, in particular.”

    She lifted her tea cup from the side table next to her divan and used it to point to his shoulder. “Except for half-crippling you.”

    The words weren’t spoken angrily, or even in a condemnatory tone. They were stated matter-of-factly, as someone might present another piece of evidence to be weighed when a conclusion is being drawn.

    Her husband was standing at the window of the Ross family seat in Rostrevor that gave him the best view of the Irish countryside. The hand he’d been using to hold back the curtains belonged to the same arm his wife had indicated with the cup. For a moment, half-smiling, he studied that arm. Then, took away the hand, letting the curtains swing back into place.

    “Hardly that,” he murmured. “A quarter-crippling, at worst. I can still use the arm, after all, and the hand’s fine. I just can’t lift much with it.”

    He didn’t add, as he could have, that the arm ached frequently, especially in bad weather. His wife knew that already; and, besides, that wasn’t really what was at issue anyway. Eliza was no more given to nursing old enmities than he was.

    Still at the window, he turned to back her squarely. And, from old habit, clasped his hands behind his back—ignoring the twinge of pain the gesture brought with it.

    “What did you think of the letter itself?” he asked.

    She finished draining the cup, set it on the side table, and looked down at the paper in her lap. Two sheets, it was, both covered with script written in some sort of particularly heavy ink.

    “His handwriting’s getting better,” she said, a corner of her mouth quirking a little. “Mind you, that’s not saying much.”

    Her husband’s mouth matched the quirk with one of its own. “Amazing he does as well as he does, if you ask me. There’s only four misspelled words in the whole letter—and three of them can be debated. I’ve seen worse dispatches from English noblemen, much less an Irish emigrant with no more than a village education. Even in English, much less French.”

    Eliza Ross picked up the sheets and held them closer to her eyes. She was a bit nearsighted. “And there’s that, too, Robert. Why does he write in French instead of English?”

    It was a rhetorical question, of course. So she moved right on to provide the answer herself. “Because Patrick Driscol, born in Ireland, learned most of his letters while serving in Napoleon’s army. Because he’s a man who has been England’s enemy his entire adult life. For years, long before”—this time, she used the sheets to point to Robert Ross’ left shoulder—“he ruined your arm.”

    Again, her tone was level, not accusatory. Just another fact, to be presented.

    “True,” he agreed. “All true.”

    She lowered the sheets back into her lap. “Robert, I feel I must remind you that your standing within English society has become somewhat frayed, of late. If you accept this invitation…”

    Firmly, her husband shook his head. “Don’t mince words, love. ‘Somewhat frayed’ hardly captures the thing. “Tattered as a beggar’s coat’ would do better.”

    Eliza took a slow, deep breath, and then let it out in a sigh. “Well, yes. Among Tory circles, at least.”

    She did not bother to add, as she could have, that for Anglo-Irish of their class, after the rebellion of 1798, “Tory circles” amounted to the only circles in existence. In Ireland, at least, if not always in England.

    She didn’t add it, partly because it was unnecessary. But, mostly, for the simple reason that she didn’t care much. A bit, perhaps, where her husband no longer cared at all. But not much.

    Abruptly, Robert Ross released the handclasp and strode—marched, almost—to the wall of the room opposite the window. Hanging there, in a heavy and ornate frame next to the door, was an illustration.

    A very odd one, to be so prominently displayed in such a house. The Ross family was an old and much-respected one among the Anglo-Irish gentry. Robert’s father, Major David Ross, had served with distinction in the Seven Years War. A still earlier ancestor, Colonel Charles Ross, was killed at Fontenoy in 1745, during the War of the Austrian succession.

    Their portraits, along with those of other distinguished ancestors, hung on many of the walls in the family seat. Along with, on another wall in the very room they occupied, all the distinctions accumulated by the current and most renown member of the line.

    Robert Ross himself, who had retired from the British army with the rank of Major General. On that wall—Ross could have pointed to it with his left hand, were he willing to ignore the pain raising the arm would have caused him—were the sort of trophies that precious few officers had ever accumulated, in the long history of British arms.

    There was the gold medal he’d received after the Battle of Maida in 1805, the British victory in the Peninsular War that most reports ascribed to the decisive leadership of Colonel Ross, as he then was. Hanging next to it was sword his fellow officers had presented him four years later, in 1809. Officially, it was another honor for Maida. But really, everyone knew, in appreciation for Ross’ actions and leadership during the terrible retreat to Corunna. His 20th Foot had more often than not been the rear guard in that retreat, holding off Soult and the French pursuers long enough to enable Sir John Moore’s army to reach the port and embarkation to England.

    Next to it hung the gold medal he’d received for the Battle of Vittoria, and the Peninsular Gold Cross. And next to those, the Sword of Honor.

    Other mementoes were there too, some of them personally meaningful if not as officially prestigious. Had he been so inclined, Ross could have covered the wall with his mentions in Wellington’s dispatches from the war. Quite easily. From his return to Iberia in 1812 until Ross was placed in command of the British expedition to North America in 1814, he’d led troops in every major battle in the Peninsular War except Toulouse. From 1813 on, following his promotion to Major General, as a brigade commander. He was largely credited with having saved the British army from disaster at Roncesvalles, and having played a key role in the British victory at Sorauren.

 

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    A brilliant career, until the expedition to America and the repulse of the British at the Capitol. But, even there, Ross’ personal gallantry had excited British admiration. And since Pakenham had been in command, not Ross, when the British army was beaten again at the Battle of the Mississippi, no opprobrium attached to him for that defeat.

    It might have, had he been forced to defend Pakenham from public censure upon his return to England, as he’d fully intended to do. But Pakenham’s valiant death at Lille in the final campaign against Napoleon had put paid to that. Another defeat, true, but Pakenham’s impetuous assault had delayed Napoleon long enough for Wellington and Blucher to trap the French army at Tournai and force the French emperor to surrender.

    There were other honors, on other walls, won by his predecessors; and portraits aplenty, of the predecessors themselves. All of which made the illustration hanging by the door seem out of place.

    Grossly so, in the opinion of many of the Anglo-Irish gentry who had, in the years since the wars, visited Ross at Rostrevor. Wellington himself had come, once, some three years earlier. The moment he spotted the illustration he’d exclaimed, “Oh, dear God, Robert! Why do you have that hanging on the wall?”

    Wellington had recognized it immediately, of course. Detested though it might be by most of England’s leading figures, the illustration was probably better known to the British populace by now than the portraits of any but kings and queens. First introduced to public attention in 1789 by Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, the founders of the British anti-slavery movement, it was a diagram of the slave trading ship Brookes.

    It was a horrid thing, really. Which was, of course, its whole purpose; neatly and meticulously displaying, in the form of a top-down diagram, exactly how slaves were carried across the Atlantic. Lying side by side, like so many spoons nestled in a silverware drawer—or so much meat in one of the new tin-lined cans.

    Of all the methods used by the anti-slavery movement to advance its cause, this single diagram had always been the most effective. Against it, the claims of slave traders that their business was a reasonably humane one, were simply froth against a cliff. Its copy, though not often so finely drawn, hung in taverns and workingmens’ homes and lawyers’ offices all over Britain. Not to mention, by now, perhaps a third of its churches. Well over half of them, if one counted only the Dissenting churches.

    After staring at the diagram for perhaps a minute, Robert said softly: “I owe Patrick Driscol nothing, Eliza. True enough. But I shall never forget what I saw in America. One memory, in particular, haunts me to this day. A man—black as he might be—with a collar around his neck. Like a watchdog’s collar, except the spikes faced inward, pricking the skin. The contraption is a common form of punishment for slaves, at least in Louisiana. The man cannot sleep, without injuring himself—possibly even dying.”

    “Yes, I know, Robert. You’ve described it to me.”

    Ross smiled, a bit crookedly. “An obsession, perhaps. But I find as I age—I’m nearing sixty, you know, now much closer to my death than my birth—I find myself obsessing over the afterlife. And I wonder, almost every day now, what God will have to say about my life, when my judgment comes.”

    He was back to that soldierly hand-clasping. His head swiveled, to bring the wall of honors and trophies under scrutiny. “Will he really be impressed by all that? You can find the same sort of wall, I can assure you, in the houses and mansions of many generals in many nations. For many centuries now. Each of us claiming, as we meet gallantly on the field, that the Lord favors our cause.”

    He looked away, back to the diagram. “Or will He present this to me? And ask me what I did, in battle against this monstrosity? How much will the defeat of Napoleon weigh, against this?”

    He heard his wife’s little laugh. “That damned Irishman! He’s corrupted your thinking, Robert.”

    The retired general’s smile grew more crooked still. “Perhaps. But what do you think, dearest?”

    She said nothing, for a time. Then, in the same level and matter-of-fact tone: “I think that I am your wife. The same wife who rode a mule across more of Spain than I wish to remember, after you were wounded at Orthes.”

    “Yes,” he said softly. “I remember. The weather was frightful.”

    “Not as frightful as the sunny day you set sail for America. I was sure I’d never see you again, Robert. And I almost didn’t.”

    He left off his examination of the diagram to look at Eliza. Her face was tight, perhaps, but quite composed.

    “I am your wife, Robert. And you shall not leave me behind this time. If you are bound and determined to return to America, in response to”—she clutched the sheets in her right hand and held them up—“the damned Irishman’s request, I shall not stand in your way. But you will not leave me behind. Not again.”

    “Surely you don’t fear—”

    For the first time, some anger came into her face. Not fury, simply exasperation. “Oh, stop it, Robert! You know perfectly well why Driscol is asking you to visit him. After—what has it been, now? Nine years? Nine years of the most peculiar correspondence in the world, but none of it was accompanied by any suggestion that you might actually come to America yourself, instead of simply giving him some advice from a distance.”

    She brought her left hand to the sheets. Looking, for a moment, as if she might crumple them altogether. But, after a slight pause, she used the hand instead to flatten the sheets back out.

    Then, smiled very crookedly herself. “And spare me the pious pose. I don’t doubt you mean it, well enough. But I know you better than anyone. You’re like an old race horse, looking at what might be your last starting gate.”

    “Don’t be ridiculous!”

    “Ridiculous? Patrick Driscol is expecting a war, Robert. That’s why he’s asking you to come, no other reason. And… so are you.”

    He unclasped his hands and waved the left. “I say again, ridiculous. It’s far too soon to predict any such thing, Eliza.”

    “Predict? Of course not. But generals are not in the business of predicting outcomes. You’ve said that to me a hundred times, if you’ve said it once. Generals are in the business of gauging outcomes. And you are gauging, Robert. Don’t deny it. Not to me.”

    He didn’t. For the simple reason that he couldn’t. Major General Robert Ross was, indeed, gauging what might be the last war of his life. And the one that might—just might—be the one that saved his soul.

 

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    After so many decades, he was tired of duty to King and Country. He’d paid that duty, paid it in full—and had the wounds as well as the honors to prove it. Wounds that ached everywhere he went, where the wall of honor was only there on the occasions he entered this room.

    “Besides, there’s Ireland,” he murmured.

    “What was that?”

    “Ah… never mind.”

    Eliza was considerably more broad-minded than most people of her class, but she still retained most of its basic outlook. Whereas at the age of fifty-seven there was very little left at all, in Robert Ross, of the young man from Anglo-Irish gentry who’d enlisted in the 25th Foot right after graduating from Trinity College in Dublin. Except courage and determination, he liked to think. The years and the wars had burned most of it away, especially that horrible war in America. And what had remained had been slowly scoured off by his years working with Clarkson and Sharp. He was no Quaker, and never would be, like so many of the supporters of the anti-slavery movement. But their piety was contagious, in its own way.

    The general who’d been active in the British army had never wondered much about such things. No need to, really, when it was obvious that God was an Englishman. But his years since Napoleon’s defeat rubbing shoulders with the men in the anti-slavery movement had undermined that certainty.

    What was left was Ireland itself. Bleeding, tortured Ireland. Ross had never seen anything he could do, in his life, that would have benefited Ireland. But perhaps he and another Irishman, on another continent, could prevent another such endlessly suppurating wound.

    It seemed worth a try, at least. There was some evidence in the New Testament, if you looked at it properly, that Jesus would favor the Irish. Quite a bit, actually. Perhaps more to the point, Ross had read the Bible front to back three times over, since his return to America. Noticing, each time, that nowhere was God’s color recorded.

    He might even be black. Worse yet, He might have no color at all. How, then, to explain one’s inaction, knowing of the Brookes? For Eliza, as for most Englishmen and Englishwomen—most members of the anti-slavery movement, for that matter—the blacks depicted as so many spoons in a drawer were miserable and suffering souls. Faceless, for all that.

    But, at the age of fifty-seven, Robert Ross could now see his own wife and children on that ship. Something which, he could now understand, Patrick Driscol had been able to see since he was a boy.

    “Dear God, I miss the man!” he said, as surprised as he’d ever been in his life.

 

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    Over dinner, when he told the children their plans, his oldest son raised an objection.

    “I’d like to go to.”

    Mrs. Ross shook her head. “David, your education—”

    “Oh, mother! I’m sick of boarding schools. Fine enough for the younger ones, but I need a change. Trinity can wait, a year or two.” Pouting, a bit: “Besides, it’d be good for me. Broadening of the horizons, all that. Boys my age do it all the time on the continent. The Germans even have a name for it.”

    “’Wanderjahr,’” his father supplied. “Yes, I know.”

    He and Eliza looked at each other. After a moment, she shrugged. “As stubborn as he is, I suppose we may as well. He’d just waste a year at Trinity with sulking.”

    Robert nodded. “Very well, then.”

    Naturally, that immediately stirred up the other four children. But there, Robert held the line. Leaving aside the fact that they were too young to be interrupting their educations and foregoing the salutary discipline of boarding schools, there was the factor of disease to be considered. At nineteen, David was old enough that he’d be taking no more risk than an adult.

    “No,” he said. Then, swiveling his gaze as he’d once had cannons swiveled: “No. No. No.”

 

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    Three days later, he set off for London. The ship he and Eliza and David would be taking to America wouldn’t leave for weeks yet, and he had some final business to attend to.

 

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    Clarkson approved. No surprise there. Thomas Clarkson was the brawler of the movement. The man who, though no more a Quaker than Ross, had decided at the age of twenty-five, in June of 1785, that slavery was an abomination. And had devoted the rest of his life to ending it—throwing into that cause his fine education at Cambridge, his unflagging energy, and his extraordinary skills as a political organizer.

    “When will you return, Robert?”

    Ross shrugged. “Hard to say. Not for a year, certainly. Probably two. Possibly three.”

    Clarkson’s gaze was direct, as always. Intense blue eyes looked out from under a veritable shock of hair, much of which was still the bright red of his youth.

    Looking down, rather. They were standing together in Clarkson’s cluttered office, and Clarkson was a very tall man.

    “And maybe never,” he stated.

    “Oh, that’s nonsense, Thomas. I can’t deny I’m looking forward to seeing America again. But you may rest certain that I have no intention of living there.”

    “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. You may not live there, but you could easily die there.”

    Ross made a little grimace, indicating skepticism. “You can’t ever rule that out, of course. But the risk of disease is not as bad as people think. Our army suffered terribly, true enough, those were under the worst conditions imaginable.”

    “That’s not what I meant, Robert,” Clarkson repeated. “And you know it.”

    Ross said nothing, for there was nothing to say. After a moment, Clarkson slouched into his chair. “Well, so be it. We’ll miss you greatly, Robert. Having a military figure of your prominence allied with us has been a tremendous boon to our cause, these past years.”

    “You think I shouldn’t go, then?”

    Clarkson shrugged. “I didn’t say that. Nor do I even think it.” He was silent, for a much longer moment, his elbow perched on the armrest and his chin propped on a fist. Now, however, bestowing that startlingly direct gaze on a stack of shelves covered with books and papers.

    Finally, very quietly, he said: “Whatever we do here in England—even in our Caribbean possessions—is really a side show. In the end, the issue will be decided in America. For the first time, over there in Arkansas, men are finally beginning to test all the premises upon which all sides in this dispute rest their case. If that test succeeds…”

    . He smiled then, for the first time since Robert gave him the news. “A soldier’s business, that, in the end. Which I am certainly not. Whether you have God’s blessing, I couldn’t begin to fathom. But go with my own, Robert Ross. Go with my own.”

 

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    Wilberforce disapproved. No surprise there either. Leaving aside the issue of slavery, and despite his notoriety as the leader of the anti-slavery movement in Parliament, William Wilberforce was a profoundly conservative man. He was opposed to extending the suffrage to men who were not propertied, and he was opposed to tactics which relied upon mobilizing the masses instead of persuading the elite. He disapproved in particular of women who chafed against their proper place in society.

    He disapproved strongly of the theater, too.

    “Why, Robert? What can you possibly do in America—not even the United States, but that preposterous little nation called Arkansas—that you can’t do here? Think, man! Please put our cause above your own whimsy. You are the only significant officer in the movement. I can’t tell you how invaluable an asset that’s been to us, in Parliament.”

    So it went, for two hours.

 

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    Ross divided the rest of his time in London between lesser luminaries in the movement for whom he had formed a personal attachment, and major luminaries in society as a whole for whom his attachments had grown very loose indeed.

    Still. Protocol, as it were.

    Wellington was gracious. No surprise there. He disapproved—quite strongly—of Robert’s attachment to the anti-slavery movement. But, in the Duke’s case, that was simply due to his general conservatism. Wellington was no admirer of slavery.

    Beyond that, the large and powerful Wellesley clan and its political allies had a debt to Robert Ross. The defeat of Wellington’s brother-in-law Pakenham at the Mississippi might have produced a corrosive political issue in the years after the war, with Wellington’s many enemies using the defeat as a stick against Wellington’s own military accomplishments. True, Pakenham’s valiant death in the final struggle against Napoleon had sapped most of that possibility. But the long and detailed analysis that Ross had published after the war concerning the campaign in the Gulf—which had been full of praise and admiration for Pakenham—had settled the question entirely.

    Finally,  there was politics, which was now Wellington’s field of combat.

    “I’m afraid many of my fellow Tories—Whigs too, never mind what they claim—are too influenced by their immediate commercial ties to the slave trade and the Caribbean plantations. There is every reason in the world for England to welcome the creation of another nation in North America, south of Canada, regardless of the color or creed of its inhabitants. Especially located where the Confederacy is, in the heart of the continent. If it survives, it would serve as a useful check on American ambitions. A natural ally for England.”

    The Duke gave Robert a skeptical glance. “Mind you, I question whether those niggers and wild Indians are up to the task.”

    Robert smiled thinly. “As to the first, we could visit Thornton’s grave and ask his ghost. He’s buried not far from here.”

    Wellington smiled back. Just as thinly, but it was a smile.  Thornton has been one of England’s best regimental commanders. He’d died on the Mississippi, and his regiment had been shattered, by the black soldiers of the Iron Battalion.

    “A point,” the Duke admitted. “Could the Americans field a force as good as Thornton’s 85th? Not likely. Not even close. But numbers do count, Robert, never forget that. There are now almost ten million Americans, and how many people in the Confederacy? Two hundred thousand, all told? Such a disparity in numbers cannot be overcome simply by valor and skill at arms.”

    They were standing in Wellington’s garden. Now that summer was here, and with Wellington’s small army of gardeners, it was a glorious place. Robert took a few seconds to admire the scenery, before answering.

    “Very true. But only true if those numbers can be mobilized. And as to that…”

    He scrutinized a nearby hedge, as if he were gauging the strength of an enemy line. “You might be surprised, if you met some of the leaders of those ‘wild Indians.’ John Ross, in particular, is quite a diplomat. Was, even when I knew him as a very young man. And there are many Americans who would not support such a war, I think.”

    The Duke was too familiar with foreign affairs to be put off so easily. “Not in New England, certainly. But what difference does that make? Andrew Jackson would, from everything I know of the man. And it was he and his forces—quite good ones, as you explained yourself at the time—who defeated us in the Gulf. If he went against Arkansas, could they withstand him?”

    Robert didn’t need to consider the question. He’d been considering it very carefully for some time now. “A full-fledged Andrew Jackson campaign, such as the one he mounted against us in the war? No, I don’t think they could. They’d put up a ferocious battle, but they’d lose in the end. Jackson could organize and lead a very large army of his frontiersmen. Large, at least, by the standards of North America. And he’s too capable, too determined—too relentless, most of all—for any nation with less than a quarter million inhabitants to withstand him. Not for more than a year or two, at any rate.”

    He looked away from the hedge, to the Duke. “But would he do so in the first place? He’s not a savage, I assure you, despite some of the reports of him in the newspapers here. A very shrewd man, in fact, and with political ambitions of his own. So I think it would depend on how the war started, and over what issues, and based on whichever constellation of political alliances. Things which are far too complex to ascertain in advance, certainly from a distance.”

    “But you are expecting a war?”

    Robert shrugged. “Say rather than Patrick Driscol is expecting a war. For myself, I wouldn’t venture an opinion yet. As I said, it’s too soon and I’m too far away.”

    The Duke sniffed. “He’s a sergeant.”

    Robert made no reply. Anything he said would simply stir up Wellington’s haughty nature, always close to the surface. In point of fact, Robert knew, Patrick’s assessment was not even the crude strategic sense of a sergeant. It was something deeper and cruder still. The gut instinct of an Irish rebel that the Sassenach would someday be coming.  Sassenach always came, until and unless they were beaten bloody, simply because they were Sassenach.

    And, as he’d once told Robert, the color of their coats didn’t define “Sassenach” at all. That much of wisdom the refugee from the rebellion of 1798 had learned, in the years that followed.

 

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    The rest of the afternoon went very pleasantly, reminiscing over old times. Two veteran soldiers, now grown rather distant, but once very close comrades-in-arms in the most desperate war in centuries.

 

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    The Duke of Clarence refused to see him at all. No surprise there, either, although it was quite rude. But the heir to the throne was one of slavery’s most public advocates.

    Truth be told, Robert had only requested the audience to satisfy a mild urge to poke a stick in the crown’s underbelly. Mad King George III had been succeeded by a dissolute King George IV, who was now likely to be succeeded by a younger brother who was possibly more dissolute still.

    Well, a day. He’d done his social duties. Now, there was a long voyage. And, at the end of it, a man waiting for him that Robert could not precisely call a friend, nor precisely call an enemy, nor precisely call much of anything.

    Except, not dissolute. Never that.