1824: The Arkansas War: Chapter Seventeen

Arkansas Post
October 6, 1824

    “Imogene! Adaline! You come down from there right this minute! You hear me?”

    The twins standing on the gun platform above her tried, for a moment, to pretend they hadn’t heard their mother.

    “This second! I ain’t foolin’!”

    Imogene literally stamped her foot. Watching, it was all Zack Taylor could do not to laugh.

    “Mama! It’s exciting.”

    “Won’t be excitin’ you get a bullet in your head! Or be too excitin’ altogether. Get down here. I ain’t sayin’ it one more time.”

    Reluctantly, the two girls obeyed Julia, clambering down the ladder that led up to the platform with the peculiar combination of grace and awkwardness that seemed to be the uniform property of twelve-year-old girls. Most of all, that blithe indifference to propriety. Taylor’s oldest daughters Ann and Sarah were about the same age as Julia’s twins. Imogene and Adaline were just at the point in their lives when they were starting the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It simply hadn’t registered on them yet that proper young ladies didn’t give the world such an exposure of leg and ankle as they came down a ladder wearing dresses.

    Anywhere—much like a fort full of soldiers. Especially girls as pretty as these two seemed likely to be.

    Julia knew it, of course. As soon as the girls arrived on solid ground, she was looming over them, shaking a finger in their faces.

    “You bein’ a disgrace! If your father had seen this!”

    As stern a disciplinarian as their mother was, the girls—especially Imogene, whom Taylor had already recognized as the more rambunctious of the two—weren’t ready to give in yet.

    “It’s gonna be a battle, Mama!” Imogene protested. “We oughta be able to watch it!”

    The shaking finger now concentrated on her alone. “And watch your language, young lady! Your daddy ain’t sending you to no expensive school so’s you can talk about ‘gonnas’ and ‘oughtas’!”

    Blithely indifferent, of course, to the fact that Julia’s own lingo was every bit as colloquial as that of most frontier women. But the thought was simply one of amusement, not condemnation. Being the father of four girls himself, Taylor had more than once fallen back upon that most ancient and reliable staple of parenting. Do as I say, blast it, not as I do.

    Imogene was nothing if not stubborn. “’Sides, I’m worried about that young corporal. The one who sings so pretty.”

    Adaline even pitched in, though she was normally the more obedient of the two. “And I’m worried about th’other one.” She and her twin exchanged glances. “Me and Imogene already decided.”

    “Decided what?” Julia’s expression could by now only be described as a glower. The finger-shaking increased its tempo. “Don’t you two be thinkin’ about no boys! You too young for that! Way too young! Only thing you best be thinkin’ about—I’ll smack you, so help me I will!—is your lessons in school.”

    “School ain’t started yet,” Imogene said sulkily.

    Smack. “Don’t you sass me, girl! And don’t you be usin’ no ‘ain’ts,’ neither!”

    Chuckling, Taylor turned away from the scene. The sun hadn’t even come up yet, but daylight was starting to fill the sky. He foresaw a frenzied day for Julia, trying to keep her spirited daughters from finding ways to watch the battle that was about to unfold.

    Zack Taylor, on the other hand, was long past the age where he had a mother to answer to. Which was fortunate, because he had every intention of watching the battle himself. Not from simple curiosity, in his case, but from professional necessity. It wouldn’t surprise him at all if he found himself, some today, having to face the army of Arkansas. He wanted to get as good an estimate as he could of its capabilities.

    Since there was no point skulking about, however, he’d simply join Major Totten in the blockhouse that had the best view of the cleared ground on the riverbank opposite the fort. It was possible that Totten would order him to leave, but…

    Taylor didn’t think so. As polyglot as it might be, he’d already gotten enough sense of the spirit that infused the Confederate army—its Arkansas portion, anyway—to think that Totten and his officers would consider it ungallant to refuse a fellow officer such a straightforward courtesy. Enemies they might be on the morrow, but today was today and protocol was important for its own sake.

    He hoped he was right. The battle that was about to unfold was going to be fought by such rules as any Hun or Mongol would accept. But it was Taylor’s growing belief—certainly his personal desire—that if a war did erupt between the United States and the Confederacy, such savagery could be avoided in the future. And, if so, his own behavior and conduct today might make a difference.

    No skulking, then, and no spying. Just a straightforward request by an officer of one army to observe a battle being conducted by another. Who was to say, after all? The time might also come when the United States and the Confederacy were allies.

 

---

 

    When Taylor arrived in the blockhouse, Major Totten looked away from the firing slit he was peering through and gave him a courteous nod. “You’re just in time, Colonel. It appears that the Laird—ah, General Driscol—plans to start the battle by ravaging the enemy’s fleet.”

    He turned to one of his aides. “Lt. Morton, be so good as to lend Colonel Taylor your eyeglass. And please make room for him while you’re at it, so he can get a good view.”

    So.

 

---

 

    “Slow down, Henry!” shouted Captain McParland.

    He was wasting his breath, of course. He’d yelled out of simple frustration. Even if Shreve could have heard him over the sound of the engines, in the pilot house, Anthony knew perfectly well he wouldn’t obey. Shreve wasn’t under military discipline, and he was a lot more concerned about keeping his beloved Hercules intact than he was over such petty minutia as making sure they inflicted as much damage as possible on the enemy flotilla.

    “Don’t worry, Anthony,” said Crowell, leaning on his sponge staff. “We’ll manage, well enough—and there ain’t no way Henry’ll pay attention nohow. He do surely love this boat.”

    The steamboat was almost in range. If nothing else, the speed Shreve was making had the advantage of increasing the element of surprise. And Anthony would allow that the steamboat designer was at least not trying to keep to the very middle of the river. In fact, he was skirting the southern shoreline more closely than Anthony would have himself. Of course, he was a lot more familiar with the river.

    “And will you look at ‘em!” came a gleeful shout from another member of the gun crew. “Scurryin’ like chickens!”

    It was true enough. Any commander with any brains—or one who wasn’t being constantly distracted by the sort of squabbles that were bound to plague a force like Crittenden’s—would have seen to it that the river was patrolled by picket boats for hundreds of yards upstream and downstream. And would have had sentries along the shore extended just as far.

    But they’d seen none of that. No picket boats at all, and the one and only sentry they’d spotted had been fast asleep. Now that the Hercules was almost on the enemy flotilla tied up to the shore, of course, the sound of its engines was waking everybody up. But the men sleeping on those boats quite clearly had no thought at all except to either run or gape.

    McParland eyes swept the riverback ahead, looking for the battery. It had to be there, somewhere. Not even an amateur like Crittenden would have been dumb enough not to move his few cannons into position during the night.

    Anthony spotted it, then, and had to suppress a gleeful shout of his own. A genu-ine battery, sure enough. Sheltered behind an earthen berm, just like it should be. A great big one, too—bigger than Anthony would have thought Crittenden’s mob could have erected in the dark.

    Unfortunately, whether from inexperience or simple enthusiasm, they’d made it too big. Crittenden’s guns could fire on Arkansas Post across the river—but they couldn’t lower the elevation enough to hit anything on the river itself.

    “You know what to do,” Anthony said to the gun crew, as he headed toward the pilot house. “I’m going to go try and talk some sense into Henry.”

    He’d just reached the pilot house when the four-pounder toward the starboard bow cut loose. He didn’t turn to see what effect the shot had, though. The whooping and hollering coming from the gun crew made that plain enough.

    He opened the door and stuck his head in. “Tarnation, Henry, their battery’s too high to shoot at us, anyway. Slow down.”

    Shreve was squinting through the eyeslit, peering ahead toward Crittenden’s battery. Normally, of course, there’s have been a full window there. But he’d had most of the pilot house fortified by timbers in the course of the voyage down from New Antrim. The planks wouldn’t stop a cannon shot, but they’d handle musket fire pretty well.

    “Sam Hill, if you aren’t right.” A sudden and very wicked grin came to the steamboat designer’s face. “Tell you what, Anthony. I’ll go you one better. Get on back there, now! You’re going to be a busy man, for a bit.”

    As he turned back toward the gun crews, Anthony heard a sudden change in the noise coming from the engine. An instant later, he felt the Hercules starting to shudder a bit. Shreve, he realized, was reversing the thrust on the stern paddle-wheel. He was going to bring the boat to a complete stop—right smack in front of the whole flotilla.

    “Hot damn!” shouted the gunner on the rear four-pounder. That crew had just fired its own first shot. “Boys, I want to seen this gun firing till it melts! Move it!”

    The bow gun fired again, jerking back against the recoil lines. The round struck the stern of one of Crittenden’s keelboats and caved it in. It also slaughtered, in the process, the one man who’d been either too slow or too dumb to get off the boat in time. A big splinter flew into his back as he was trying to clamber ashore and ripped open most of his ribcage. Blood and bone bits went flying everywhere. The corpse hit the muddy bank like a sack of meal.

    Crowell was at that lead gun, and already had it swabbed out by the time Anthony looked back. The crew hauled the gun back into position, took cursory aim, and fired again.

    The aim hadn’t been as cursory as it looked, though. Or maybe they’d just been lucky. That shot hit one of Crittenden’s few steamboats. A little too high, unfortunately, so it simply smashed in part of the main deck instead of holing the hull. But it was enough to send the men gawking there racing to get off the boat, even if none of them looked to have been injured any.

    Good enough. There was no chance, other than by a fluke, that four-pounders would be able to destroy any of the steamboats in Crittenden’s flotilla. Not badly enough to prevent them from being repaired, at least. But repairs would take time, and time was one thing Crittenden’s army now had in short supply.

    Very short supply. In the lulls between cannon fire, Anthony could hear the faint sounds of the Laird’s regiments coming. The tone of voices raised in command, if not the words themselves; most of all, that unmistakable jingle-jangle of their gear that masses of soldiers made, approaching at a fast march.

    The four-pounder in the rear went off again, followed closely by Crowell’s gun. The same steamboat took another hit, this one in the hull. A keelboat rocked wildly, breaking loose its tether and starting to drift with the current. With that hole torn in its side, though, it likely wouldn’t drift more than a few miles.

    Didn’t matter. A few miles would be enough, even if the boat didn’t sink at all. The sounds of the Laird coming were starting to fill the dawn. There was no time at all, now, for Crittenden and his men. No time at all.

    “All right, Henry!” Anthony shouted. “You can get us underway again!”

 

---

 

    In the blockhouse, Zachary Taylor had come to the same conclusion. And he made it a point to jot down in his unwritten mental notebook that the two oncoming regiments of the army of Arkansas were able to march faster and for longer than any regiment of the U.S. army he’d ever known. It remained to be seen how well they’d been trained in battlefield tactics. But one thing was now sure and certain. Driscol must have had them practicing marches—relentlessly—for months.

    Taylor was not guessing. He was one of the few field-grade officers in the U.S. Army who was adamant himself about keeping troops well-trained and in good condition. Part of the reason his whole career had been spent on the frontier, with none of the usual assignments to Washington that might have advanced him more rapidly, was that he had a reputation for being a commander who could be sent to a poorly-trained and dispirited garrison stuck in a fort out in the middle of nowhere and rapidly bring order and discipline to what had been not much more than a half-trained and three-quarters drunk mob of gamblers, whoremongers and idlers.

    From what Taylor could determine thus far, on the other hand, Driscol’s tactics didn’t seem particularly sophisticated. Not that Taylor was fond himself of fancy tactics on a battlefield, but… Still. This was about as crude and blunt as it got.

    Driscol had shifted his regiments from column march into lines, not more than three hundred yards from the outlying units in Crittenden’s army. Risky, that. Taylor himself wouldn’t have chanced getting that close to an enemy while still in column formation. Not regular troops, at any rate. It took even a well-trained army two minutes or more to shift from column to line formation, during which time it was vulnerable to a vigorous counter-attack.

    Against a force like Crittenden’s, admittedly, there wasn’t much risk. They were just as sluggish as they were brutal and undisciplined. But trained soldiers under good officers would have been able to take advantage of that recklessness on Driscol’s part.

    And now that he had his two regiments formed up, Driscol was just advancing them forward, side by side. No cavalry screen on the flanks—in fact, he didn’t seem to have any cavalry at all—and not even any use of light infantry as a substitute. He did have a small battery of four-pounders, but those were still a considerable distance to the rear. The artillerymen were trying to bring them up on the flank, but the horses were having a rough time of it. That terrain was awfully soggy, this close to the river.

    Clearly enough, though, Driscol had no intention of waiting until he could bring his artillery to bear. He’d go at Crittenden with his infantry alone, relying on discipline and impact to keep his enemy off balance and prevent them from using their own artillery to good effect.

    It was going to be a pure and simple slugging match. A sergeant’s sort of fight. About twelve hundred men under Driscol’s command, against a slightly larger force of Crittenden’s.

    Under the circumstances, Taylor was pretty sure this was going to be as one-sided a slugging match as he’d ever seen. Whether between armies, pugilists—or rams in a field, for that matter. Unsophisticated, Driscol’s tactics might be; but those two regiments were advancing in perfect order, and in perfect cadence. Trained and trained and trained. Not blooded yet, most of them, but even green recruits, with good enough training and enough of it, could acquit themselves very well on a battlefield.

    He shifted the glass to observe Crittenden’s forces.

    Forces. Could ever a term be so misused?

    There was one large group of men, near the center of Crittenden’s army, that looked to be in something you could call a “formation.” Taylor had been told by Major Totten that the Lallemand brothers had joined Crittenden’s expedition, along with what was left of their French troops and some Alabamans they’d recruited. That was probably them. But there were less than three hundred men in those ranks taking shape. What was worse, was that none of the other loosely-knit groups of men in Crittenden’s army were following their example. Not even the groups clustered around his handful of field guns. In fact, they looked more disorganized than anybody.

    There was one man in a fancy-looking uniform some fifty yards from the Lallemand unit, racing back and forth and waving a sword. Taylor couldn’t make out his features at the distance, but he seemed like a young man, which Crittenden was.

    Probably Robert Crittenden himself, then. Taylor had met him once, on one of the several visits he’d paid to John J. Crittenden when he’d still been a U.S. Senator from Kentucky. Taylor liked John quite a bit, but hadn’t been much impressed with the younger brother. By all accounts, Robert Crittenden was something in the way of the black sheep of that very prominent family.

    For all the good Crittenden was doing, he might as well have been ordering the tide to recede. Even from the distance, it was as clear as the day itself—now that the sun was well over the horizon—that none of Crittenden’s men were paying him any attention at all.

    That was hardly surprising. From his years serving on the frontier, Taylor was quite familiar with the sort of men who filled the ranks of Crittenden’s army. Basically, they were gangs. Sometimes, outright loners, with maybe a partner or two. But, usually, they were part of a group of perhaps half a dozen to several dozen men, loosely organized and led by one or a few dominant characters. Many of them were outright criminals, and a goodly percentage of those who weren’t simply hadn’t been convicted yet.

    Their motives were about as rudimentary as their organization. Adventure, of course. Loot, whether in the form of money or—mostly, in this situation—slaves; evading debts; evading the authorities of one state or another. Often enough, evading other men like themselves. If the officer corps of the U.S. army stationed in frontier garrisons was notorious for its dueling habits, men like these made them seem veritable pacifists—except their “duels” were rarely formal affairs.

    There was another sort of a man in that army, to be sure. A different layer, it might be better to say. There’d also be men like Crittenden himself, with money to invest. Looking for the cheapest land there was, at least in financial terms. Conquered land, paid for only in blood.

    Someone else’s blood, they’d thought. They were about to learn otherwise.

 

***

 

            Julia finally gave up trying to keep the girls from watching at all. At least the slit they were now peering through was just a half-inch gap between two logs, on the lower level of the fort. Only the most extreme bad luck would bring a musket ball to either one of them.

    If any got fired at the fort at all. Julia was now peering through the same slit, and from what she could tell that was getting less likely by the minute. She couldn’t see much, since almost none of Crittenden’s army was visible from this angle, through such a narrow aperture. But she had a decent enough view of the army of Arkansas, as it marched up to the river bank. They were spread out wide now, in clearly delineated ranks, and were starting to bring their muskets level.

    Julia had no military experience of any kind. But a person facing such a completely menacing sight would have to be a lunatic to waste any shots at a fort all the way the other side of a river. She figured the girls were safe enough.

    From musket balls, anyway. Of course, there were other perils in life.

    “I’m so scared,” Imogene whispered.

    “Me too,” her sister chimed in.

    Julia made the mistake of being the reassuring mother. “We’re safe enough here, girls. I don’t think those men are even going to be attacking us at all.”

    Her daughters gave her a dismissive, sideways glance.

    “Not worried about us, Mama,” Adaline said.

    “Our beaus might get hurt,” Imogene explained. “Might even get killed.”

    “You don’t even know those boys! And you too young to be thinking such thoughts, nohow!”

    Her daughters ignored her, back to their intent peering. Softly—though not softly enough—Julia banked her head against one of the logs. Once, twice, thrice.

    “Imogene, your father finds out you eyeing that one boy! That curree be black as coal!”

    “He sings pretty.”

    Adaline, as usual, couldn’t resist the sibling rivalry. “My beau’s white.”

    “So what?” came Imogene’s cool response. “Bet he can’t sing at all. And even if he can, who’d want to listen? That funny accent he got.”

    “He’s from New York, originally.” Adaline’s tone was defensive. “I axed him. Not his fault he don’t talk right yet.”

    “’Doesn’t talk right,” her mother hissed. “And it’s ‘asked,’ not ‘axed.’ I swear, if you two—”

    The rest was buried under an explosion of gunfire, coming from across the river.

    “Oh!” Imogene shrieked. “They’re being hurt!”