1824: The Arkansas War: Chapter Twenty Two

Part III

November 3, 1824

    When Peter Porter entered the dining room of the lodging house on Ninth Street near Pennsylvania Avenue where Henry Clay was residing in the capital, he found that the Speaker of the House and his close political associates had taken it over, for all intents and purposes, and turned the chamber into what amounted to a staff headquarters. Fortunately, the landlady was an amenable woman. Easily intimidated, at least.

    “Peter!” called out Josiah Johnston, cheerfully. He waved a hand at an empty chair at the large table in the center of the room. “Take a look at the latest reports. The situation gets brighter day by day.”

    Porter came up to the table and gave the newspapers spread across it no more than a glance. He’d already seen them, and they were much of a piece. The headline on one newspaper that had been vigorously backing the Crawford campaign was typical:

    He pulled out the newspapers he had tucked under his arm and handed one of them to Henry Clay, who was sitting at the head of the table. The other three, he tossed onto the table.

    “You’d better look at this before you start celebrating. It’s the latest issue of the National Intelligencer. I commend to you in particular the article by William Cullen Bryant. You can’t miss it. The Intelligencer gave it half the front page.”

    He pulled out a chair and sat it in heavily.

    Clay had already put on his eyeglasses and was scanning rapidly through the article. After a minute he exclaimed, “This is a tissue of lies! I’ve never met these two men in my life. Never even heard of one of them. This Powers fellow, whoever he is.”

    Johnston, who’d been scowling as he read the same article, looked up. “It’s simple, then. You issue a straight-forward denial, and point out that the Intelligencer, being well known for its Federalist sympathies, has a long history—”

    “Won’t work, Josiah,” Porter said bluntly. He gave Clay a look that was not entirely friendly. As much as Porter generally admired the Speaker, and thought he would make by far the best new president of the United States, the man was not without his faults. “I’m afraid that Henry was using hyperbole when he referred to a tissue of lies. That there are some lies in the story, scattered here and there, I don’t doubt. In fact, I know one of them to be a lie, because Thompson and Powers were most certainly not at the meeting reported in this article.”

    He gave Clay another look. The Speaker avoided his eyes, choosing to look out the window.

    “Yes. I know that for a fact, because I was at the meeting—and so was Henry. And while Thompson was not at the meeting, it is indeed true that he was the man we were instructed to have the money sent to. That’s why, you might notice, Henry can say he never heard of Powers.”

    The landlady was entering with another pot of tea and an extra cup. Porter shoved the pile of newspapers aside to make room for the service, gave her a polite nod, and waited until she’d left the room.

    “I never heard of Powers, either,” he continued. “But I don’t doubt that most of this report is accurate enough.”

    Across from him, the Kentucky legislator Adam Beatty had been reading the same article. Now, he laid down the newspaper and shrugged his shoulders.

    “What difference does it make? This report is coming in too late to have any effect on the election. But even if it had come in sooner, I doubt it would have made a difference.” He chuckled. “I can assure you all, gentlemen, that my constituents are outraged by the events in Arkansas and demanding action. So are people all over the south. In fact, I was told just yesterday by one of Crawford’s people that new recruits are flocking to the Georgia militia, lest their wives and children—”

    “—be subjected to depravities at the hands of rampaging African savages,” Porter concluded for him. “Leave off, Adam. You’re not giving a campaign speech here. And you know just as well as I do that there is no chance whatsoever that the virtuous damsels of Georgia—or Tennessee or Mississippi or Missouri or Louisiana, for that matter, which are considerably closer to Arkansas—are at any risk at all. From Arkansas negroes, at any rate. Choctaws might be a different matter. But all reports—including Bryant’s—are agreed that the Choctaws are migrating to the Confederacy in the aftermath of the Crittenden incident. So are the Chickasaws.”

    He peered down at the offending article. “If this is accurate—and I’m quite sure it is, in these particulars—the total forces that met in front of Arkansas Post amounted to no more than two or three regiments on each side. Hardly enough, even without subtracting the half, to launch an invasion of the United States.”

    Beatty was quite unabashed. “Sure,” he said, grinning. “So what? There wasn’t any real chance the Creeks could overrun Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia, either. That didn’t stop the massacre at Fort Mims from being a rallying cry eleven years ago—and I will point out to you that the slaughter at Arkansas Post was far worse.”

    Porter restrained his temper. Truth be told, he didn’t much care for the westerners and southerners who had come to represent an ever-growing percentage of Henry Clay’s coterie. They had a blithe disregard for simple logic that offended his New England upbringing, and an instant readiness to resort to naked emotionalism in the conduct of public affairs. Almost as bad as Jackson and his people, in that regard.

    Almost… but not quite. Firmly, Porter reminded himself that his support of Clay derived from far more cogent and profound sources. Without Clay’s American System, the manufacture and commerce of the nation would be stunted. The United States would remain a bucolic, agrarian backwater in the world, always at the financial mercy of England and other European powers.

    “I say again, ‘leave off,’” he growled. “The comparison is absurd. At Fort Mims, white people were massacred by Indians breaking into a fort. At Arkansas Post, they were massacred by negroes trying to keep them out.”

    Beatty shrugged again. “All true—and again, so what? If you think the average westerner or southerner is going to care—especially southerners—I can assure you that you are quite mistaken. All that matters here is that white men—lots of them—were butchered by niggers. A wave of patriotism is sweeping the country in response.” He pointed a finger at Henry Clay. “And it will sweep our man into the president’s house.”

    Patriotism, no less. Porter found Beatty to be perhaps the most offensive of the lot.

    “All very well and good,” he replied, forcing himself to keep his tone civil. “If Henry wins a straight-forward majority in the Electoral College. But none of us have ever thought he could. Our campaign strategy was always to get him enough electoral votes to force the election into the House of Representatives. Where…”

    He left off the rest. Henry Clay’s control of the House of Representatives was doubted by no one in the United States, least of all his closest advisers. The Constitution provided that, in the event there was no clear winner of a presidential election in the Electoral College, the House would choose between the three candidates who won the most votes. For the past year, therefore, their strategy had been predicated on that simple arithmetic.

    There had been five major candidates for president at the start of the election campaign: Clay, Jackson, Adams, Crawford and Calhoun.

    At one point, fearing that his popularity in the deep south was being too badly eroded by Jackson, Calhoun had almost retired from the race to run for Vice-President instead. But he’d eventually concluded that the continuing repercussions from the Algiers Incident and Jackson’s response to it had steadied his own supporters.

    In truth, Calhoun had no chance of winning the Presidency, nor even of being one of the three top contenders in the event no one won a majority. His support was completely regional, restricted entirely to the deep south. Essentially, he was running now as a power-broker. If someone won an outright majority of the Electoral College, of course, that would be that. But in the far more likely event that the decision was thrown into the House, Calhoun would have considerable political leverage in the negotiations that followed.

    Still, since at least the beginning of the summer, it had been clear that the election was narrowing down to the other four candidates. Three out of four, now, who’d wind up in the House in the event no one won a majority in the Electoral College. All they had to do was just make sure that Henry Clay ended up among the top three. The rest, the Speaker would take care of himself.

    “What’s your point, Peter?” asked Josiah Johnston. He, too, had been reading the Intelligencer. Now, he lifted it up. “And although you’re right, with regard to the past, I’m not at all sure this latest development won’t give him a clear majority.”

    Clay finally stopped looking out the window. “Not much chance of that, Josiah, I’m afraid.” He gave all the men at the table his winning smile. “I wish it were true, mind—it should be true—but we need to keep our feet on solid ground.”

 

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    He squared his chair around, propped his elbows on the table, and began counting off on long, slender fingers.

    The forefinger went up. “First, New England won’t budge from Adams’ camp, no matter what.”

    Then, the middle finger. “Neither, I’m afraid—not even after Arkansas Post—will Tennessee desert Jackson.”

    The ring finger came to join them. “I had hopes for Pennsylvania, as you know, but those seems to have been dashed. Pennsylvania—for reasons that still defy comprehension, given that it’s the foremost manufacturing state in the nation—is going for Jackson. Don’t ask me why.”

    Porter knew the answer, and was a bit amazed that Clay didn’t. For all his many marvelous qualities, not least of which was sheer intelligence, the Speaker could sometimes blind himself to unpleasant realities.

    It was hardly complicated. Pennsylvania had the most populistic constitution of any of the states, where South Carolina had perhaps the least. As far back as 1776, at the outset of the revolution, Pennsylvania had granted suffrage to all adult white males, with no property qualification whatsoever.

    Yes, Pennsylvania was now the largest manufacturing state in the nation, and thus—by right and reason—should incline toward Clay’s American System. And, indeed, it did. Pennsylvania’s delegation in Congress had led the fight for the tariff that had finally been enacted this year over strong southern objections—the first truly protectionist tariff in American history.

    But there were a lot more men working in those factories and workshops in Pennsylvania than men who owned them, and everything else about Jackson appealed to them. Nor, despite being a southerner, was the Tennessee senator seen by America’s northeastern and mid-Atlantic workingmen as being alien or hostile. Jackson had spoken in favor of the tariff and voted for it himself. In something like thirty separate votes in the Senate, he’d sided every time with Pennsylvania. In fact, Jackson was so favorable toward tariffs that John Calhoun routinely accused him of being a traitor to southern interests.

    Which… was true, leaving aside Calhoun’s histrionic way of putting it. Whatever else Andrew Jackson was—this was the man’s one quality that Porter respected—he was a nationalist. Jackson had made clear, many times, both as a general and a senator, that he’d always place the interests of the United States above the narrow interests of any of its geographical sections. In that respect, you couldn’t honestly say that Clay was any better.

    The real problem, of course, came thereafter. Jackson’s policies, should he become president, would favor the nation as a whole, true enough. But the nation he would favor was but not the nation Porter wanted favored. Although he did not and never had shared the extreme views of the old Federalists, Porter didn’t doubt for a moment that a republic needed to be led and dominated by its propertied classes. To do otherwise would surely begin the descent into chaos and civil strife that had brought down the ancient Roman and Greek republics.

    Clay had been droning on about the details—complex to the point of madness—of the negotiations with Adams’ and Van Buren’s people in New York. Now that he was coming to the point, Porter concentrated on his words.

    “—that seems to be the best we can do, after this latest arrangement. We’ll get no more than seven electoral votes from New York.”

    Beatty had been jotting down figures. “So. We can still count on Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and Louisiana, as we have from the beginning.” He jabbed his pen toward the newspapers piled on the table. “There’s certainly nothing in there that’ll change that equation. The reports are that militia recruitment is up in all the northwestern states, too.”

    It would be better to call those rumors than reports, Porter thought, although he tended to believe them accurate himself. Still, it didn’t necessarily mean much. The militias were a political powerhouse in most of the states, especially the western ones. They usually had a surge in recruitment during election campaigns.

    “—figure we can win in New Jersey also,” Beatty continued, “although we can’t be sure of it. Jackson’s got quite a following in the mob of that state, almost as much as Pennsylvania. And we’ve got a good chance in Delaware and Maryland. Still, even if none of the three come over to us, we’ve got enough to push Crawford aside for one of the three slots in the Electoral College. All the more so since the knowledge of the stroke he suffered last year is now widespread, despite all the efforts of his advisers to conceal his medical condition.”

    He laid down the pen, carefully. “New England, of course, won’t desert Adams. What that leaves, therefore, is the south. If we can reach a suitable accommodation with Crawford’s people and Calhoun, we might even be able to win a straight majority. Although I agree with Henry that that’s most unlikely. Still, we can certainly get enough votes to be included in the House’s selection. In fact…”

    His bright eyes swept the men gathered at the table. “I think we’ve got a very good chance of coming in with a plurality. Which we’d never thought we had before.”

    “That’d be a blessing,” Johnston grunted. He had his chair tipped back, with his hands folded across his stomach. “Without a plurality, Henry can win the presidency, if the election gets tossed into the House. But he’ll never hear the end of it, for the next four years. There’ll be endless accusations about ‘rotten deals’ and ‘corrupt bargains.’ Watch and see.”

    “The next eight years,” Clay said stiffly. “I have every intention of serving two terms in office. That said, I agree with Josiah. Let’s remember, gentlemen, that the whole purpose of this exercise is not to assuage my own ambition, but to advance the interests of the nation. To do that, I need eight years in the president’s house—”

    He rose and pointed dramatically out the window. “And the support of Congress. Enough of it, at least, to get my American System so firmly rooted in the country that no one can tear it back out.”

    The window he was pointing to faced west, as it happened, which was the opposite direction from the Capitol. But Henry Clay was never given to fussing over minutia, Porter thought wryly.

    He also had some wry thoughts about the Speaker’s insistence that his own aggrandizement was not involved. Many of the insinuations against Henry Clay were false, in Porter’s opinion. His reputation for sexual debauchery, for instance, was grossly exaggerated. But the accusation that he was as ambition as Lucifer was…

    Close to the mark, at least.

    Still, Porter knew that Clay meant what he said, it wasn’t mere flippery for the sake of cloaking personal goals. The frequent charge that the Speaker had no political principles at all was just wrong. He was quite committed to his project of strengthening the United States through his American System. If for no other reason, out of pride in having forged it in the first place. And that, in the end, was what mattered to Porter and men like him.

    Clay sat down. “So, yes, let’s hope for a plurality. It won’t matter, either way, in terms of the election. But it will matter for the next eight years.”

    “The election’s in three days, Henry,” Josiah pointed out. “It takes weeks for news to spread across a country as big as ours. How—”

    Impatiently, Clay waved his hand. “That’s news to the mob. Fortunately, in their wisdom, the founders of this nation saw fit to create a true republic. That means that what matters in the long run is not the opinion of the populace as such—which is often uninformed and always prone to emotionalism—but the opinion of its elected political leaders. They—not the mob—will be the ones who make the decisions. And while senators and congressmen are naturally influenced by popular opinion in their states, they are not bound by it. Not legally, not morally—certainly not politically.”

    His famous, broad smile appeared. “And many of  the congressmen have now arrived in the city. They’ll get the news, in plenty of time.”

    “What ‘news’?” Porter asked, half-dreading the answer.

    Dramatically, as he did most things, Clay held up the Intelligencer.

    “This!” he replied, shaking the offending newspapers. “Not only shall I not attempt to deny any of these charges—so-called ‘charges’—I shall take them for my own. Brandish them like a spear before battle, if you will.”

    Porter had to fight not to roll his eyes. “Henry, you’re gambling again. I strongly urge you to say nothing at all. Simply ignore the reports. It’s only one newspaper, as influential as it might be in some circles.”

    Clay’s sneer was every bit as broad as his smile—and just as famous. “Play it safe, you mean? I think not!”

    He rose again and pointed out the window. “No, gentlemen! To lead this great nation, boldness is always required!”

    At least he was pointing in the right direction, this time. The president’s house was that way, indeed.

 

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Washington, D.C.
November 6, 1824

    “’—has it come to this? Are we so humbled, so low, so despicable, that we dare not express our sympathy for suffering Louisiana, lest, peradventure, we might offend some one or more of their imperial and royal majesties?’”

    Standing at the window to his office listening to the Attorney General quoting from Clay’s speech of the day before, James Monroe barked a laugh. “Isn’t that the same language he used a few months ago to excoriate us for refusing to intervene in the Greek rebellion?”

    “It’s almost identical,” said John Quincy Adams, sitting in a chair nearby. “Oh, but it gets better. Please continue, Bill.”

    William Wirt scanned further down the newspaper in his lap. “I’ll skip a bit, Mr. President. There’s some pure verbiage here, mixed in with the merely histrionic.”

    The Attorney General cleared his throat and continued quoting from the speech. “Here’s where he gets—finally—to the point. ‘I would rather adjure the nation to remember that it contains a million freemen capable of bearing arms, and ready to exhaust their last drop of blood and their last cent, in defending their country, its institutions, and its liberty.”

    Wirt fell silent and lowered the newspaper.

    President Monroe continued to look out the window, gazing at the country’s capital city. After a few seconds, he said softly: “This is the same Henry Clay who praised us for our stance of forbidding any further European intervention in the New World. Albeit—to be sure—criticizing us for taking so long to do so. Am I not correct?”

    Adams laughed sarcastically. “And adding into the bargain that he was prepared to wage a war against the whole world for it, even England. Somehow, a man of his undoubted intelligence having failed to grasp what was clear to anyone with an ounce of sense with regard to foreign affairs, that our policy had the full if tacit support of that very same England he proposed to war against. Bah! He knew perfectly well, then, that his bombast with regard to England was as safe as a man threatening to wage war against the tide—when it is receding.”

    Adams pointed to the newspaper on Wirt’s lap. “Just as he knows perfectly well, now, that threatening to wage war against the European powers should they dare to interfere in the Arkansas situation is every bit as safe. If an attack on the Confederacy is launched by the United States, it will be condemned the world over. But no one will send any ships or troops to support Arkansas. How could they get there, anyway?”

    Monroe still hadn’t turned around. “You have to admit it’s a fascinating chain of logic,” he mused, “even for Henry Clay. I’m still not quite sure how he managed to segue from the need to defend the bleeding Greek heroes against the Turk oppressor who rules Greece, to the need to defend the states of our nation from which a band of criminals sallied forth to conquer a neighboring country of ours, which hasn’t threatened them at all. If you didn’t know better, you’d think Louisiana and Mississippi were groaning under Arkansas occupation.”

    Finally, the president turned around. “Has Jackson said anything?”

    Wirt shook his head. “Not a word, sir. Not in public, anyway, and even his private thoughts seem a mystery to everyone. Possibly even his closest confidants.”

    “Any guesses?”

    “With Jackson, Mr. President, it’s always hard to know. Most people are assuming he’ll side with Clay, if for no other reason that to keep Clay from undercutting his support in the west and the south. But…”

    Monroe cocked an eyebrow. “But you’re not so sure.”

    “No, sir, I’m not.”

    Adams had been listening intently. “Why, Bill? It’s the obvious move to make, for a presidential candidate in his position.”

    Wirt shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Yes, it would be. But I’ll remind you that it would have been politically shrewd for Jackson to have opposed the tariff bill, too. But he didn’t. In fact, he was one of the administration’s strongest supporters in the Senate. That cost him, in the southern states, probably as much as he gained in the manufacturing ones.”

    Monroe shook his head. “Not the same thing. No one’s ever doubted—not anyone who’s politically educated, anyway—that Jackson is a firm supporter of the principle that the United States is a nation, not simply an aggregate of states. In that respect, he’s quite unlike John Randolph or Crawford’s Radicals. It still doesn’t follow that in this instance he wouldn’t take the same stance as Clay.”

    “You could even say that the very same nationalist principles called for it,” Adams added. “If I might play devil’s advocate for a moment, one could argue that the massacre at Arkansas Post was a humiliation of the United States, that needed to be set right. As a matter of national pride, if nothing else.”

    Wirt gave him a level stare. Adams looked aside. “Well, you could.”

    “Finish the sentence, John,” the Attorney General said. It sounded a bit like a command, oddly enough.

    Adams smiled crookedly. “If you weren’t me. Or Andrew Jackson.”

    Wirt nodded. “Yes.” He turned to Monroe. “And that’s really my only point, Mr. President. There’s simply no way to know what Jackson will do. His origins, history, his background—certainly his temperament, which can be quite savage—will all be pulling him in one direction. But he’s also the same man who outraged Louisiana’s plantation owners by arming black freedmen in the war against Britain, don’t forget.”

    Monroe’s smile was almost as crooked as the one that had been on Quincy Adams’ face, a moment before. “Not to mention outraging the War Department when he gave that black gunner a field commission. Yes. I remember.”

    The President now looked at the Secretary of State. John Quincy Adams had risen and was standing at the same window the president had been gazing through earlier.

    “There’s always that about Jackson,” Monroe said softly. “One never quite knows until the moment, exactly where his principles might fall. But he is a man of principle.”

    Adams made no response. He seemed completely pre-occupied by the sight of the city beyond. Which was actually not that prepossessing, outside of the Capitol in the distance.