1824: The Arkansas War (32 page)

“I imagine I’ll just set them free, once we reach Memphis.” Bryant spread his hands. “I’m hardly equipped to be a jail-keeper.”

“Fine with me. They’ll have no choice but to flee the country altogether—or keep telling whatever lies might be in that report of yours.”

He swiveled his head to bring the two prisoners under his cold gaze. They were obviously trying their best not to look like the most relieved men in North America, but not succeeding too well.

“Excellent liars, I’m thinking,” Driscol mused. “We’ll know soon enough, of course. Before they get to Memphis, they’ll have to survive a few days in John Brown’s company.”

The looks of relief on the faces of the two adventurers vanished instantly. Driscol and Bryant shared a laugh.

“I recommend an immediate immersion in Judges,” the poet advised them. The reporter added a caveat: “But don’t try to claim any particular expertise. Arguing biblical text with John Brown—the mood he’s in, and given your history—would be about as insane as any act I can imagine. Short of invading Arkansas again.”

CHAPTER 21

Washington, D.C.

N
OVEMBER 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:

H
ORRID
D
ETAILS
C
ONCERNING THE
M
ASSACRE IN
A
RKANSAS

A river awash in blood

The banks covered with corpses

Driscol the Robespierre of the West

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 in it 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 straightforward 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 straightforward 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.”

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’s 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 seem 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 as 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 not the nation Porter wanted favored. Although he did not share the extreme views of the old Federalists, and never had, 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’s 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.”