1824: The Arkansas War: Chapter Fourteen

The Arkansas River, south of Arkansas Fort
October 4, 1824

    “I’m starting to get a little worried, Scott,” Ray Thompson confided to his friend. The two of them were resting in a field, leaning against a tree stump, watching what remained of a small farm cabin burn to the ground. By now, it was mostly embers.

    “You’re just starting to get worried?” Powers jibed. “Gol dern, I wonder why. Could it be that it just dawned on you that Crittenden set off without having any resupply figured out? Oh, but I forget. We were gonna ‘live off the richness of the land,’ weren’t we?”

    He half-leveled his musket at the smoldering cabin. “Insofar as a nigger’s ain’t-got-a-pot-to-piss-in shack qualifies as ‘the richness of the land.’ Insofar as it would have, I mean, if these crackers and yahoos weren’t burning everything down the moment they come to it.”

    Thompson couldn’t help but smile a little. He wasn’t any fonder of most of their “compatriots” than Powers was. Both of them—quietly and privately, of course—had shared a laugh after four of Crittenden’s men had been blown to shreds at Brown’s tannery and another half dozen had been injured. It turned out that the damned abolitionist had left kegs of gunpowder behind, strategically situated. When the mob started burning down the tannery without investigating the premises first, the charges had exploded.

    But the smile faded very quickly, and Thompson returned stubbornly to the subject. “Quit making jokes, Scott. Or have you got some magic sack full of food I don’t know about?”

    Powers sucked his teeth, idly watching a group of men raping one of the two black women they’d found in the shack. That was the young one. The older of the two—presumably her mother—was huddled over the corpse of a middle-aged black man lying in the dust some ten yards away. She was weeping softly, seemingly oblivious to everything else around her.

    “No, I don’t,” he admitted. “But we’ll find what we need at Arkansas Post.” He nodded toward the corpse. “I figure he wasn’t lying none. Not after his ears were cut off.”

    Gloomily, Thompson studied the body. Other than the skin color, it was impossible any longer to tell much about the man. His nose had been cut off also, along with his genitals and both of his hands. After the group that had been torturing him at Crittenden’s command to get information were done, there hadn’t been any point in keeping him alive. You’d have had to offer money to get anyone in the slave market at New Orleans to take him. So, the crackers had amused themselves for a time, before he finally bled to death.

    Crittenden might have told them to stop wasting time, but he’d left right after the negro had told them of the storehouses in Arkansas Post. Of course, whether they’d have listened to him or not, was another question. Except for the men under the command of the Lallemand brothers, Crittenden’s army was to “discipline” what a tornado was to “decorum.”

    Well… it wasn’t quite that bad. Most of the men belonged to groups of one sort of another. Even if the lines of authority were loose and informal, they existed at least on that level.

    As was demonstrated, in fact, just that moment. Another man came up, wearing an outfit that bore a passing resemblance to a “uniform” if you squinted and were willing to make some allowances. He had a real sword, too, not one of the big knives that usually did for one on the frontier.

    “Cut it out!” he shouted, grabbing the current rapist by the scruff of his neck and hauling him off the woman. There was something downright comical about the look on the rapist’s face; a combination of outrage, frustration and surprise.

    “Just relax, boys. We’ll be fuckin’ her all the way down the Mississippi,” the “officer” said, in a friendlier tone, lifting the man to his feet. “You betchum. We want that nigger pregnant by the time we put her up on the block. But we got to get going, before somebody else grabs the boat I got us.”

    That was standard procedure for slavers. Thompson had served for two years on the crew of a slave ship. That’s where he’d first met Scott Powers, who’d been an officer of the ship. Even though the international slave trade had been illegal in the United States since 1808, it still went on despite the risk. Mostly, of course, for the profits involved; but there were also the perquisites and the side benefits. Young black women would be segregated from the rest of the cargo and raped all the way across the Atlantic. Entertainment for the crew during the voyage—and a pregnant female was worth more on the slave block when they arrived. “Two-for-one” for the buyer; and, more important, proof that the female was good breeding stock.

    Grudgingly, the little crowd around the young black woman obeyed their commander. Two of them hauled her to her feet, one of them taking the time to yank her torn and dirty dress back down to her knees. The woman’s eyes seemed vacant until, wandering, they fell on the corpse lying in the dirt. Then she let out a wail before one of the men holding her slapped her face.

    “What do we do with this one?” another man asked, pointing with his pistol at the older woman still clutching the corpse.

    The commander studied her for a moment; then, shrugged. “May as well leave her. She’s too old to bring much, and we ain’t got enough food to begin with.”

    The man who’d asked the question looked back down at the woman. Then, cocked his pistol and shot her in the back of the head.

    The younger woman wailed again, and got another slapping.

    “Runnin’ low on powder, too,” the commander said sourly. But he didn’t carry the chastisement any further.

    Thompson didn’t blame him. Killing the woman had been pointless, but control over a crew like this was always a chancy thing. As excited and fired up as they were, Crittenden’s army had been killing, burning, raping and torturing anyone they ran across almost since they left Alexandria. Crittenden had barely been able to keep them in check until they passed beyond the borders of Louisiana—and then, only when they came across white people.

    Some of those activities had had a conscious purpose—especially the ones aimed at the Choctaw—but most of them had been as mindless as a shark’s feeding frenzy. Just the way it was, with expeditions like this, as a rule. Lallemand’s men were under better discipline, but Crittenden wasn’t so much “leading” this army as he was trying to half-steer a raft through turbulent rapids.

    Thompson and Powers watched the group as they dragged the woman into a keelboat and shoved her onto a bench alongside two other negroes they’d caught. Both young boys, in this case. Then, at a command from their leader, they pushed off from the bank and starting rowing down the Arkansas toward its junction with the Mississippi.

    “Damn fools,” Powers said. “For the price of three slaves! You won’t catch me heading off without enough men around to handle Choctaws, I don’t care if I find me a pot of gold. They’ll be riled right good, by now.”

    Thompson grunted his agreement. What concerned him, however, was that he was pretty sure a lot of the men in Crittenden’s force weren’t going to have the same horse sense. This was likely to be just the first of many small groups peeling away from the expedition once they’d gotten their hands on a few slaves. Not all of the men who’d come with Crittenden were looking to set up plantations in the northern part of the Delta. That took some money, no matter what else—access to loans, at any rate—and plenty of these boys didn’t have any more of a pot to piss in than a negro did. A fair number of them were, quite literally, former pirates.

    But there was nothing they could do about it, so he levered himself onto his feet using the musket as a brace. “Come on, we may as well catch up with Crittenden.”

    “Our own veritable Napoleon,” Powers sneered. But he was getting to his feet also. There wasn’t really any alternative, no matter what qualms and reservations they were both starting to have. Even leaving aside the risk of encountering Choctaws, the land behind them had been so thoroughly ravaged that they wouldn’t find enough food to get them back to Louisiana.

The confluence of the Arkansas and the Mississippi
October 4, 1824

    By mid-afternoon, Ball made his decision.

    “All right, General Ross. Much as it rubs me the wrong way, I admit you’re probably right. We oughta keep this boat here, not be running up the Arkansas with it.”

    Since it had taken Robert most of a day to persuade the black general of something so obvious, he was careful to do nothing more than nod agreeably. Ball was far from stupid, and a very experienced combat veteran to boot. But the problem was that, as was uniformly true of the officer corps of the army of Arkansas from Patrick Driscol on down, his experience was deep but narrow. It was an army led by sergeants, essentially. Granted, some of the finest non-commissioned officers Robert Ross had ever encountered, but without enough experience at higher command levels to really grasp that war was much broader than battles.

    The idea of taking such a critical piece of military equipment as a large steamboat armed with cannons—which could completely cut off any chance of Crittenden being re-supplied—in order to use it for what amounted to nothing more than a big water-going cavalry horse…

    From Robert’s viewpoint, the idea had been sheer insanity. But it had taken a whole night and most of a day to finally convince Ball on the matter. Again, not because the man was stupid, but simply because he wasn’t accustomed to thinking in strategic terms.

    Worse than that, really. Ball had been trained not to think in such terms. In the modern era of line warfare, massed muskets and cannons against equal masses—and naval warfare was no different at all—the last thing an officer wanted was sergeants who tried to think for themselves. There was no room in such utterly brutal and up-close combat for independent initiative. What was wanted, from the men and the non-commissioned officers who led them, was simply obedience, discipline and courage. Don’t think. Just face the enemy, fire, accept the casualties, reload, step forward, fire again. And do it and do it and do it—the very same thing, invariant and inflexible—until the enemy broke.

    Patrick Driscol might be an exception, to a degree. To begin with, he’d had the experience of serving as what amounted to Winfield Scott’s sergeant major in the Niagara campaign. And with his years of service in the French army during the Napoleonic wars, he had a much wider range of experience than someone like Charles Ball. Still, even Patrick was likely to be rigid and angular in his thinking. He’d be oriented toward war as a series of battles, rather than seeing war as a complete campaign.

    So be it. Robert was not frustrated, really, even if there’d been moments over the past twenty-four hours when he’d felt like hitting Ball on the head with a pistol butt. The truth was, he was in his element.

    It had been a long time. But he was finding that, near the age of sixty, his body might be creaking a bit—leaving aside the lingering effects of his wounds in the American war—but there was nothing wrong with his brain. He’d been, all false modesty aside, one of the half dozen best generals in the British army—and that, during a time when the quality of generalship had reached a peak due to the demands of the great war.

    His wife had commented on it, the night before. In a manner of speaking, the memory of which left Robert feeling half-embarrassed and half-smug.

    “And what brought that on?” she’d asked, smiling from under a sweat-soaked brow. Her hair, splayed across the little pillow in their cabin, had been almost as wet. It was a hot and humid climate, and neither of them were what you’d call “spry” any longer. He’d been covered with just as much sweat.

    How to explain?

    “Never mind,” she said, adding a little laugh. “Thank God I’m too old to get pregnant, or I’d be bearing quintuplets in nine months.”

    She reached over and stroked his cheek. “Robert,” she said softly, “I know you’re feeling… useful again. But please be careful. This is not actually our war, and you are not actually a general in it.”

    “Yes, dearest,” he’d agreed. Knowing, finally, that he was lying. Or would be, at any rate, before much longer. He would make it his war. Share it in, for a certainty.

    All through the next day, as he argued with Ball, one part of Robert’s mind had been attentive to his son. David, he understood, was making the same decision himself—and doing it with the verve and recklessness of a nineteen-year-old. By mid-morning, his mother’s protestations notwithstanding, he’d had a spare uniform refitted by the captain’s wife and was training with one of the gun crews.

    He looked to be quite good at it, too.

    It couldn’t be said that Ball actually “sulked” after agreeing to Robert’s proposal. But he was noticeably gruff toward his men for a time thereafter. If Ball had been harsh and even caustic during the moments of combat the previous day, Robert had found him to be very good-humored any other time.

    Fortunately, the time was brief. Before the sun had reached the western horizon, Robert was vindicated.

    Twice, in fact—even if, ironically, neither of the instances had anything to do with “cutting lines of supply.” But Ball was beginning to learn what any capable general knew in his bones—that a good strategic move always brought serendipitous results in its wake.

    “Hey, we’re non-combatants!” the captain of the captured steamboat protested.

    “Not any more,” Ball countered cheerfully.

    The captain stared at the Arkansas soldiers who were hacking away the front guard of his steamboat with axes. Then, stared at the soldiers manhandling a cannon from one steamboat to the other. It was a tricky operation, even with the two boats tied together in the middle of the river.

    “This is piracy!” he squawked.

    Robert cleared his throat, drawing the man’s eyes. “Actually, it’s not, by the laws of war. The Confederacy of the Arkansas has been invaded by an army coming out of the territory of the United States. Until and unless the United States makes clear through diplomatic channels that there was no official involvement—and takes rigorous and public measures to put a stop to such offenses—General Ball has no choice but to conclude that a state of war exists. That being the case, he has every right—indeed, the obligation as an officer—to seize enemy property that might be turned to military advantage.”

    He added a smile, for good measure. “Provided, of course, he follows proper military procedure and sees to it that his men remain disciplined and no outrages are committed against the persons owning the property. Which, I dare say, he has done meticulously in this case.”

    He turned the smile onto the American who’d been scribbling furiously in his notebook since the moment the steamboat had come into sight and been captured. “Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Bryant?”

    “Oh, yes,” the scribbler replied, not even looking up from his scribbling. “Been right the proper gentleman.”

    “Damn New Englander!”

    Bryant finally looked up from his notebook. “New Englander or not, captain, I remain a citizen of the United States. Registered to vote, I assure you. And I’m just as curious to know as General Ball is, how it came to pass that an army large enough to commit savageries that would have shamed the Huns managed to assemble, train, and launch an attack on a neighboring country from the state of Louisiana—without, so far as I can determine at the moment, any official of that state issuing so much as a peep of protest. Perhaps I shall ask you for an interview. Being as you are, I understand, a citizen of Louisiana.”

    The captain’s jaws tightened. Bryant went on, relentlessly: “I’m curious to discover if the State of Louisiana entertains a different translation of the Constitution than my native state of Massachusetts–or any other state of the Union, so far as I’m aware. I refer you to Article I, Section 8. The right to select officers for the militia is reserved to the states, true enough, but only Congress can declare war.”

    “That ain’t no Gol-derned militia! That’s just Crittenden and his boys!”

    “Ah. Pirates, in other words. Or bandits, if you prefer. May I quote you to that effect?”

    “You sure as Sam Hill can not. Those boys find out I said any such thing, my life ain’t worth a plucked chicken.”

    “Oh, splendid. That’ll do even better.” Bryant began scribbling in his notebook. “A knowledgeable local source who insisted on remaining anonymous for his own safety depicted Crittenden and his men as criminal extortionists, who would cold-bloodedly murder any man who exposed their nefarious activities to the light of day.”

    “I said no such thing!”

    “Actually, you did,” said Robert mildly. “If not in so many words.”

    Ball was less diplomatic. “Sure did. And fuck you. This boat now belongs to the Arkansas army. And if you don’t pilot it for me, you best stop worrying about what Crittenden’s men’ll do to you.”

    His black face could have served as the model for a bust entitled Menace.

    “You wouldn’t!” the captain protested.

    Ball sneered. “No, I wouldn’t. Don’t need to. You don’t do what I tell you, you be useless. Ain’t no room for useless men on this boat, so I’ll have to set you ashore. A ways down, though. In Choctaw territory.”

    The captain’s face paled. Ball swiveled his head to the south. “I do believe the Choctaws be pissed, right around now. Pissed like you wouldn’t believe. ‘Course, they might listen to you, when you explain you just an innocent bystander. But if I was you, I surely wouldn’t want to bet on it.”

    “All right, then,” the captain muttered.

    Less than half an hour later, the newly-expanded flotilla made their next capture. A keelboat, filled with white men and three negroes. One young black woman and two black boys.

    They didn’t put up a fight. Not with two steamboats alongside and cannons trained on them. And close to thirty well-armed men with muskets leveled.

    Bryant interviewed the blacks, who turned out to be captives. The boys, at least. The young woman—not much more than a girl, really—was too distraught to be coherent. Clearly enough, she’d been badly abused.

    Ball’s interview of the white men was extremely brief. There wasn’t any mystery about their identity, after all, even without the testimony of the two boys.

    “Hang ‘em,” he ordered, “I want to save our powder.”

    “You can’t do that!” shrieked the man who seemed to be the leader of the group.

    Ball’s expression had long since gone beyond “menace.”

    “Watch me, you pile of shit,” he said. “You’ll have the best view around.”

    After it was done, and the corpses had been pitched into the river, Ball took a few minutes to settle his anger. That was the mark of a good officer, too. Robert’s hopes for the man kept rising.

    Still higher, when Ball turned to him for advice.

    “What do you recommend now, General? I’d dearly love to have some knowledge of what’s happening upriver.” He nodded to the west. “The Arkansas, I mean.”

    The two steamboats were now positioned right at the confluence. Controlling both rivers completely, at least until such time as an opposing force of warships could arrive. Which wasn’t likely to happen any time soon, in Robert’s estimation. Unless he was badly mistaken, both the state of Louisiana and the American federal authorities had been caught by surprise by Crittenden’s expedition. Not the fact of it, so much as the timing. From what they’d been able to gleam, Crittenden had come into a sudden and unexpected windfall in terms of arms. The expectation had been that he couldn’t launch any serious attack on Arkansas until the following year, if ever.

    By now, after two decades of constant freebooting activity into Mexico and—in times past—Florida and Amelia Island, the mere fact that a band of adventurers had gathered somewhere in the Gulf and were making noise didn’t really mean that much. Even as large as group as Crittenden had assembled needed more in the way of arms and ammunition than personal weaponry. Following the Adams-Onis Treaty, the United States had clamped down on the former custom of providing unofficial assistance through government channels.

    As he pondered the answer to Ball’s question, Robert’s eyes fell on Bryant. The young New England poet and journalist had left off his interview of the rescued negroes and was back to scribbling. He had the look of an energetic and curious man, as well as an intelligent and well-educated one. It would be interesting to see what his investigations turned up, once he returned to the United States. Somebody had provided those arms to Crittenden—or the money for them, at any rate. And as quickly as it had happened, it had to have been one man or a small handful. No collection taken up from a large group contributing small amounts could possibly have done it so quickly and so secretively.

    A cabal, in short. The American public doted on tales of cabals and conspiracies in high places. Robert had hopes for the poet, too.

    But it was time to give Ball an answer, and the answer was obvious—even if Robert didn’t much like it. Still…

    Parker and the two McParlands weren’t the first young men he’d sent into harm’s way in his life. Not by several decades’ worth. He doubted they would be the last.

    “A reconnaissance is in order, I think. Now that”—he nodded toward the captured keelboat—“you’ve acquired the means for it, without jeopardizing your main force. I’d recommend Captain McParland for the commanding officer. Beyond that—”

    But Ball was already turning away, and Robert closed his mouth. There was really no need to give Ball advice on the rest.

    “Anthony!” Ball hollered. “You and Corporals McParland and Parker. Take enough men to man the oars on the keelboat and head upriver.” He pointed to the west, his finger indicating the Arkansas. “I want information, mind. Don’t be gettin’ in no pointless scrapes.”

    Robert hesitated. But before it was necessary to intervene, Ball corrected his own error.

    “Ah, never mind that. I don’t need the information so much as Patrick does. You do whatever you gotta to do to find him. Let him know where things stand down here.”

    Captain McParland nodded and began giving orders. Robert relaxed and went back to watching Bryant at his work.

    It was quite a bright day, he realized. Even now, so close to sundown.

    Just after sunset, many miles downriver, another keelboat finally drifted ashore. The sole survivor of the three men in the boat clambered painfully onto the east bank of the Mississippi.

    As exhausted as he was—the wound in his leg had kept him from sleeping—he was still shaking from the whole experience. Seeing most of his friends ripped to shreds by that incredible steamboat—since when did steamboats have cannons? he was still wondering—and then watching two of them slowly bleed to death, was never anything he’d expected when he joined up with Crittenden. He was only twenty-two years old.

    He’d barely gotten ashore when he half-sensed a threat. Turning his head, he got a glimpse of a war club coming before he lost consciousness altogether.

    When he woke up, his head ached and there was dried blood caked on the side of his face. He tried to wipe it off but discovered his hands were tied.

    What—?

    Everything was flickering. It took him a while to realize that night had fallen, and that he was seeing everything by the light of a fire in a small clearing. A while longer, to realize that he’d been tied spread-eagled between two trees in the clearing. And a bit longer still, to discover that he was naked.

    Not long at all, then, to realize the rest. The dozen or so men also in the clearing were all Choctaws, from their outfits. He was pretty sure they were, anyway. Indians all looked alike to him, but since he’d moved to Mississippi from South Carolina he’d gotten to know a little of the differences in the way the various southern tribes dressed.

    Knives, however—Indian, white or Creole, it really didn’t matter—all looked very much the same. And he was looking at an awful lot of them.

    “Oh, shit,” was all he could think to say.