1824: The Arkansas War: Chapter Fifteen

Arkansas Post
October 5, 1824

    It took a day longer to reach Arkansas Post than Zachary Taylor had expected. He’d assumed that, this being the autumn, the White River would be fairly low and fording it would be easy enough.

    And so, in fact, it had proved—once they got to the river. What he hadn’t realized was how difficult the terrain between the Mississippi and the White rivers would be in the first place. No settlers had moved into this part of the Delta yet, and the natural landscape was essentially unmodified. Swamps, bayous, oxbow lakes, a profusion of creeks—everything that cavalrymen detested.

    Crossing the White itself hadn’t been a big problem, although they’d had to travel upriver a ways to find a ford. But, finally, a day late, they’d arrived at Arkansas Post.

    More precisely, would have arrived—except by now, town was under siege.

    “A day late, and a dollar short,” Taylor muttered to himself. “For want of a nail. Hell and damnation.”

    He didn’t even have the advantage of high terrain, from which he might be able to spot the gaps in the siege lines. There wasn’t any high terrain worth talking about, in the area. The only reason he was able to observe the Post at all, from reasonably close range, was simply because most of the area north of the river hadn’t been cleared yet and the terrain was stilly heavily wooded.

    That there were gaps in the siege lines was certain, for the good and simple reason that the terms “siege” and “lines,” applied to Crittenden’s army, were laughable to begin with. That wasn’t really an army out there, it was a just a very big lynch mob. Or bandit raid, take your pick. Given the nature of Crittenden’s forces, the distinction was pretty much meaningless.

    Unfortunately for Crittenden—this much was also obvious, even from Taylor’s limited vantage point—the lynchees who were the target of the mob’s attention were hardly the sort they’d have found in a local county jail. First, because they were armed. Secondly, because the authorities in Arkansas had apparently taken the time since the Confederacy was founded four years earlier to turn a ramshackle French trading post into a fort.

    A frontier fort, granted, with wooden palisades instead of stone walls. But Taylor could see that they’d even dug a moat around the fortified town, on all three sides that weren’t already sheltered by the Arkansas, and kept it filled with water diverted from the river. No dinky little ditch, either. This was full-scale military construction, with a twenty-foot moat, glacis, scarp, counterscarp, the whole works. There were even berms protecting the four-pounders positioned just outside the walls of the fort—with gates right behind them through which the guns could be hauled if it appeared an enemy was making a successful assault on the outer fortifications.

    Not that there was much chance of that, with an enemy like Crittenden’s mob. The Arkansans had kept the glacis meticulously clear of any growth, and had cleared the area well beyond it. Any assaulting force would have to cross at least five hundred yards in the open, the last thirty yards while climbing up a glacis; then, have to cross the moat—whose waters were undoubtedly at least eight feet deep—and then have to clamber up a scarp, before they could finally reach the fort’s guns. Which, by then, would have been withdrawn into the palisade anyway. All the while, being swept by canister fired from four-pounders manned—Taylor was sure of this, too—by some of the same veterans of the Iron Battalion who had broken British elite regiments at the Mississippi in 1815 and routed the Louisiana militia at Algiers five years later.

    Even the U.S. Army would suffer major casualties in any such assault, against defenders like these. Taylor himself wouldn’t be willing to try it without a minimum of three regiments in the attacking force—and only if those were regular units, not state militias. In his estimate, the likelihood that Crittenden’s yahoos would be able to storm the fort was about that of the proverbial snowball’s chance in Hell.

 

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    Not far away, looking at Arkansas Post from the opposite side of the river, two other men reached the same conclusion.

    “Well, shit,” said Ray Thompson.

    “We are well and truly fucked,” agreed Scott Powers. Sighing, he squatted on the ground, propping himself with his musket. “God damn Robert Crittenden. God damn all Crittendens. God damn every Kentuckian who ever lived. Louisianans, too.”

    Thompson squatted next to him. “So what do we do now?”

    Powers gave him a sideways glance. “Meaning no offense, Ray, but what’s ‘we’ got to do with it? You got hardnosed creditors. I don’t.” He inclined the musket forward, pointing toward Arkansas Post. “You want to get your head blown off trying to take that place, you go right ahead. Me, this was just supposed to be a steppingstone to Texas. I’ll take Mexican regulars over these crazy Arkansas niggers any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.”

    Thompson scowled, but didn’t make any response. He and Scott were pretty good friends, all things considered. But “friendship” in their circles had some clear and definite limits. That Powers would abandon him in a instant if he thought it necessary, was a given.

    The opposite was also true, of course. And now, somewhere in the back of his mind, Thompson was starting to gauge that possibility.

 

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    “Non,” Charles Lallemand said forcefully to Robert Crittenden. “Absolument pas!” He pointed stiffly at the fort across the river, and shifted to heavily-accented English. “We have no more chance of storming it than we do of swimming back to Alexandria.”

    “Less,” his brother Henri-Dominique added, with a sneer. His eyes ranged over the mass of men clustered on the south bank of the Arkansas. Most of them were shouting curses and jeers at their opponents across the river, brandishing their muskets in what they apparently thought were warlike gestures. A fair number of them were even firing at Arkansas Post. At a range of perhaps four hundred yards, and getting low on powder.

    It might be possible to plumb the depths of American stupidity, but Henri-Dominique suspected the line necessary would be so long that only a team of oxen could hold it up. Why had he and his brother ever agreed to this madness in the first place?

    The answer, alas, was obvious. Money. Their enterprises in Alabama had turned out poorly, and they’d not been able to resist Crittenden’s blandishments concerning the wealth of new plantations in the Delta. So perhaps their own stupidity was not much shallower.

    Glumly, while his brother Charles and Robert Crittenden continued their argument, Henri-Dominique studied the Arkansas fortifications across the river. About the only consolation he could find was that at least they’d been designed by a man who’d also once served in the Emperor’s colors.

    Poor consolation, though. The Empire was gone, vanished, and there was today to be dealt with. Henry-Dominique and his brother had both known, of course, that Driscol was a veteran of the French army. But they’d never expected anything like this. And, unfortunately—he took a moment to curse himself and Charles along with Crittenden and his men—they hadn’t taken seriously the few reports they’d gotten about the nature of the fortifications at Arkansas Post. In their experience, an American “moat” was a poor excuse for a ditch, a “walled fort” was a glorified log cabin, and such terms as “glacis” and “counterscarp” were quite literally foreign.

    He was still surprised, though, at the quality of the design. He wouldn’t have thought a sergeant, on his own, would have been able to come up with it. Especially a sergeant whose service, by all accounts, had been entirely in units of the line.

    “Absolument pas!” his brother repeated.

    “Merde, alors,” Henri-Dominique added for good measures.

 

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    A few hundred yards to the west, and on the Post side of the river, Captain Anthony McParland had come to the same conclusions arrived at by Taylor and Lallemand.

    “No chance they’re going to take the Post,” he told the two corporals. “Not without a siege, anyway—and the Laird’ll be here long before that.”

    His grin was on the wicked side. “I’ll add that the stupid bastards got themselves penned up, on top of everything else.” He pointed backward, toward the river that was now hidden by the woods. “The Arkansas makes a loop, right there, just opposite the Post. General Ball told me that’s why the Laird shifted the town from the original French location. Any enemy who camps opposite the Post can be trapped against the river, real easy, since they’re in a sort of little peninsula. And I’ll bet you a month’s pay—mine against yours—that’s exactly what the Laird’s planning to do.”

    “What’s a ‘peninsula,’?” his cousin asked.

    The captain glared at him. “You’re supposed to know that already!”

    Sheffield Parker gave his fellow corporal a quick glance. “Cal was sick that day, when they covered it in the sergeants’ school.” To Cal, he explained: “It’s what they call a piece of land stickin’ out into the middle of the water. Like Florida. The whole state’s basically a big peninsula.”

    “Oh. Yeah. I was sick that day.”

    “You was malingering that day, you mean,” his older cousin growled. But there wasn’t much heat in it. In truth, he was more surprised that Parker remembered, than that Callender didn’t know. The “sergeants’ school” that the Laird had instituted in the army of Arkansas was a compressed sort of affair. Worse, even, than the officers’ training Anthony himself had gone through—and he well-remembered how many once-mentioned items he’d forgotten. For which he’d been chewed out promptly by his superiors soon afterward.

    “What do you want to do, sir?” Parker asked.

    The young black corporal was meticulous about military protocol in the field, unlike most of the white non-coms. So were most of the other black ones, now that Anthony thought about it. On some level, very deep, quiet, and still, he’d come to realize that the black soldiers in the army—the non-coms and officers, even more so—took the whole business more seriously than white ones usually did. All the white people of Arkansas, leaving aside the foreign missionaries, were still Americans in every sense of the term except formal citizenship. So they shared the generally casual attitude toward military matters that characterized most Americans.

    The blacks didn’t. For them, the army was all that stood between freedom and a return to slavery. A line so sharp, so clear, and so dark that they cleaved to military values the way a devout Christian cleaved to the cross. It was sometimes a little frightening. Anthony’s education had expanded a lot, over the years since the British war. He’d even studied the classics, now, some of them at least. There were ways in which the new little nation taking shape between the Ozarks and the Ouachitas reminded him of ancient accounts of Sparta, more than anything he remembered growing up in New York. Or the Swiss of a few centuries ago, that the Laird had told him about, whose pikemen were feared by every power in Europe.

    Sheff’s own mother had absorbed it, in the few months since the family had arrived in Arkansas. As much as she’d opposed her son joining the army in the first place, he also knew from his cousin that her last words to Sheff when he left for New Orleans were: “There be a war, boy, I want you back alive. But I rather see you dead than come back and cain’t tell me we won. You hear me?”

    Before Anthony could make a decision, one of the soldiers from the squad he’d sent out to make a reconnaissance of the area returned.

    “Sir, there’s some people not far away. U.S army soldiers. Maybe a dozen of them. And they got three black women with them. Well, a woman and two girls.” The soldier turned and pointed to the northwest. “About four hundred yards that way.”

    Anthony looked in the direction the man was pointing. But, of course, couldn’t see more than maybe fifty yards, and that only in spots. Still mostly uncleared, the area around Arkansas Post was heavily wooded. Mostly gum and oak trees, with some cypress here and there. For all practical purposes, most of the region was still a forest.

    The only cleared land, except for a few farms scattered about, was the area south of the river and right around the Post. And that had been cleared for purely military purposes. Anthony was pretty sure Crittenden’s army was so mindless that they still hadn’t figured out that the only reason they could all assemble easily in the peninsula opposite the Post was because it had been cleared for precisely that reason. It was a prepared killing ground—and they were the prey who’d stumbled into it.

    “Are the women captives?”

    “Don’t think so, sir,” the soldier replied, shaking his head. “The older woman’s riding a horse and the girls are sharing one. They real light-skinned, too. The girls, I mean. The woman—might be their mother—she’s high yeller.”

    Anthony’s lips quirked, slightly. The soldier was black, and like most black people the captain knew, he’d parse skin shades and tones even more meticulously than a white man. It was amusing, in a way—although it could be a rough at times on someone like Corporal Parker, who was very dark-skinned and had no white features at all in his face.

    On the other hand, the same was true of General Charles Ball, and nobody in their right mind in Arkansas—white, black, or red—treated him lightly. Not more than once, for sure.

    “All right. There’s no way we can get into the Post, anyhow, except after nightfall. We may as well go see what they’re up to. What’s the officer’s rank?”

    “Don’t know, sir. We didn’t get close enough to be able to see the insignia. But… he don’t look to be nothing like a lieutenant, I can tell you that. Nor even a captain, we don’t think.”

    A small unit of U.S. cavalrymen, led by a field-grade officer. What would they be doing here?

    Now, he was genuinely curious, not simply professionally interested.

    “Let’s go find out.”

 

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    One of Taylor’s men spotted the Arkansas unit, but not until they were forty yards away. Stiffly, the colonel realized that if this had been an ambush, they’d be in sore straits.

    “Friend or foe?” he called out.

    “Thought we might ask you the same thing!” came the response. “Seeing as how you’re trespassing.”

    The tone didn’t seem belligerent so much as amused, though. And Taylor couldn’t detect any trace of real hostility on the face of the Arkansas officer who emerged from the woods. He wasn’t carrying a weapon, either, although he had a pistol at his belt.

    “Captain McParland, of the Army of Arkansas. And you are, sir?”

    “Zachary Taylor, Lt. Colonel in the United States Army.” Since the next question was a foregone conclusion, he pointed a thumb at Julia Chinn, whose horse was standing next to his. “We’re an escort for Miz Julia Chinn here, and her two children. She’s—ah…”

    Not even Taylor was prepared to publicly refer to Julia as Senator Johnson’s “wife.” For a white man to marry a black woman was illegal in the state of Kentucky. Illegal in any state of the Union, so far as he knew, outside of some of the New England states. The colonel wasn’t sure if that legal proscription extended so far as to banning any third party reference to such a marriage that implied it was legitimate, but…

    Like any career professional officer, Taylor was chary of crossing such lines. Fortunately, an alternative explanation was at hand. That a man was a husband was something a legislature could decree. That he was a father was decreed by Nature and the God who had created it—and, in this case, the father acknowledged the fact publicly and openly, and always had.

    “The girls are Senator Johnson’s daughters,” he said. “Senator Johnson of Kentucky, that is.”

    Then, pointing to them: “Adaline’s the one sitting in front. Imogene’s behind her. The Senator and Miz Julia wanted them to attend the school in New Antrim. The one that’s being set up, I mean.”

    He could sense the relaxation in the Arkansas officer. More to the point, he could see several of the muskets in the woods that hadn’t quite been pointing at him, lifting away entirely.

    Still, there was never any harm in slathering the cake with some icing. “Sam Houston asked me to provide them with an escort.”

    Houston’s name might be cursed as often as praised in the United States, but it was a magic talisman in Arkansas. Now, the captain was smiling cheerfully, and waving his men forward.

    “Come on out, boys. Everybody’s friendly.”

 

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    While Captain McParland and the U.S. colonel conferred, Sheff Parker found himself having to fight off the urge to ogle the three women.

    Especially the girls. Lord, they were pretty. Even if they were still too young to be entertaining any such thoughts.

    “Stop staring,” Cal murmured. “You bein’ rude.”

    Corporal McParland himself, Sheff noticed, wasn’t looking any other place either.

    “You the one to talk.”

    “Prettiest girls I seen in an age. Too bad they’re so young still.”

    “Girls grow up.”

    But the moment Sheff said it, he realized how absurd he was being. First, because Senator Johnson’s family situation was famous all over the south. Notorious, maybe, for white people. But black folks didn’t feel the same way about it. Freedmen weren’t allowed to vote in Kentucky, no more than they were in any state of the U.S. that Sheff knew of, except maybe some of the New England states. But if they had been, every black man’s vote would have gone to Richard M. Johnson, any election he ever stood for. That would have been true even if he wasn’t also the man demanding the abolition of debt imprisonment.

    These were rich girls. Important girls. Beyond that, they were so light-skinned that even “high yeller” didn’t apply. Sheff might as well be entertaining fantasies about jumping over the moon.

    So, he looked away. And, an instant later, saw Cal do the same. He realized then, not really ever having thought about it before, that there could even be things that a white boy couldn’t entertain fantasies about either.

    That thought went through his mind like a crystal, bringing many things into clear and certain place that hadn’t been so before. There was no barrier to his friendship with Cal, he suddenly realized, except things that were not decreed in any page of the Bible he knew. And he knew them all.

    McParland was ordering a camp made.

    “It’s your turn to cook,” Sheff said. “Don’t argue about it. I been keepin’ track and you ain’t.”

    Life in the army did, indeed, lead to blasphemy. Even Sheff was sometimes guilty of it. “Hell of a state of affairs,” Cal complained, “when a curree adds and subtracts better than white man.”

    “Not my fault you miss so many days in school. And don’t you be pissin’ me off, or you won’t have nobody to help you catch up.”

    “Well. That’s true. I cook better’n you do anyway—even if that’s upside down too.”