1824: The Arkansas War (59 page)

Besides, there was at least one small benefit. He’d be able to make sure those two rascals were telling the truth.

“Send a squad down to Arkansas,” he told his aide. Then, thinking about it, amended the order. “No, better make it a whole company. The way that luna—the special commissioner—has been throwing arms around to Indians in the area, a squad might get ambushed. Under a flag of truce, of course.”

“Yes, sir. And they’re…”

“What do you think? Sam Houston was really the only eyewitness. See if he’s willing to come here and verify that we’ve got the right man.”

A
UGUST 22, 1825

“Yes, that’s him. I’m quite sure of it, Colonel Taylor.”

Sam had wondered how he’d react if indeed it proved to be the man who’d killed Maria Hester. Six months earlier, he’d probably have had to be physically restrained from attacking him.

Now…

The man glaring at him from a much-battered face just reminded him of a filthy rat. Not even a cornered one, but one caught in a trap, and knowing it.

He turned away, not ever wanting to see the man again in his life. Taylor’s rough, honest features were a relief.

“And thank you, Colonel.”

“My pleasure.” Taylor looked to the guards holding Clark. “Get him out of here, and back into chains.”

When he looked back at Sam, his face was a bit stiff. “Ah…”

Sam waved his hand. “Yes, I understand, Colonel. The crime was committed against an American citizen, on American soil. The prisoner will have to be returned there for trial.”

Taylor nodded. “Personally, I’d be quite happy to hand him over to you. Or Arkansas, for that matter. But—”

He rubbed his heavy jaw for a moment. “I think it’d be best, all around, if we did everything by the book.”

There was a slight stress on
everything.

“Yes, I agree. Everything by the book.”

Later that day, Sam met privately with the two men Colonel Taylor credited with the capture.

“I can guarantee you that Andy Jackson will pay his half of the reward, once he gets my letter. Clay’s half…”

He shrugged. “Who knows? And even if Clay is good for it, I’m not sure where you’d need to go to collect. You can wait for Andy’s money in New Antrim.”

The two men looked particularly shifty-eyed in response to that.

“Well. Ah.” That came from the one called Ray Thompson. It might even be his real name.

His partner, Scott Powers, echoed him. “Well. Ah.”

Sam grinned. “Don’t tell me you boys are in bad odor in the chiefdom of Arkansas?”

“Well. Ah.”

“Well. Ah.”

That was worth a chuckle. “What was it? Slave trading? Or were you part of Crittenden’s crowd?”

That was worth an outright laugh. “Both, huh? Anybody ever suggest to you that you’re not walking in the ways of the Lord?”

“Well. Ah.” That was Thompson. Powers managed to return the grin. “Yeah. Started with my mother. I was maybe five.”

A thought came to Sam. It was…intriguing, anyway.

“Tell you what,” he said. “You come back to New Antrim with me. I’ll guarantee your safety.”

Those
had
to be the two most skeptical looks he’d ever gotten in his life.

“Safety out, too?” asked Thompson.

“Oh, relax, will you? Nobody’ll lay a hand on you, all the way in and out of Arkansas. Fact is, I think the Laird’s more likely to be amused than anything else. Charles Ball, for sure.”

At the mention of Charles Ball, Sam thought they almost jumped.

“We’ll probably have to keep you out of John Brown’s sight, however.”

At that, they did jump. Not more than half an inch, though. Tough fellows, obviously. Rogues, rascals, and renegades, too, just as obviously. But Sam was pretty sure he could find a good use for such. Several good uses, in fact.

It took two weeks longer than anyone expected to get Andrew Clark back to Washington, D.C. Not because of his bad foot, which none of his captors cared about in the least. But simply because the army soon realized it had to detail sizeable units to escort the prisoner every step of the way.

As it was, they almost lost him at Uniontown. The crowd that surrounded the company was more in the way of a small army than the lynch mobs they’d encountered in St. Louis and the Ohio river towns.

Fortunately, the governor of the state was there also, and Shulze finally managed to talk the crowd out of the hanging they’d been looking forward to.

He’d been there by pure coincidence, as it happened. News of Clark’s capture and return for trial had spread all over the country by then, but Shulze hadn’t paid much attention to the details. He’d had no idea the prisoner was coming through Uniontown when he planned to be passing through.

Word had spread all over the country about the Second Battle of Arkansas Post, too. “Word,” in the form of extensive and detailed reports printed in every newspaper in the nation.

Not always the same reports in all the newspapers, of course. Most newspapers gave pride of place to the reports filed by Bryant and Scott, those being authoritative in terms of their authors as well as being the only really eyewitness accounts from all sides of the fray. But not all did. A considerable number of papers, especially in the Deep South, refused to run the Bryant-Scott accounts at all. Several of them went so far as to point to those reports as prime examples of the sort of pernicious abolitionist propaganda that the Georgian delegation to Congress had already announced it was going to demand be banned from being carried by the U.S. Postal Service.

Some newspapers emphasized one thing; others something else.
U.S. DEFEATS ARKANSAS
in one paper might be
MONSTER CASUALTIES IN ARKANSAS
in another. But there was enough commonality for one thing to be clear to everyone.

The Arkansas War was just starting, and it wouldn’t be over any time soon.

In Washington, D.C., the president and the war secretary announced that they’d be presenting to the next Congress, convening over the winter, a plan for the drastic expansion of the American military in response to the threat posed by the Confederacy. Or Black Arkansas, as Calhoun referred to it, not being a man given to euphemisms.

In response, Senator Andrew Jackson called for the formation of a new political party, since there was clearly no longer room in the existing Republican Party for both him and—“the rascals” was the mildest term he used—Clay and Calhoun. And he invited several key political figures in the nation to meet with him in advance of the convening of Congress, so that a common platform for the new party could be forged.

And that’s where Governor Shulze of Pennsylvania had been headed when he passed through Uniontown and, by pure accident, happened to be there at the right time to save Andrew Clark from a lynching.

At the Hermitage, in Nashville, another declaration of war was being prepared. A war, in this case, that nobody in the United States with any political sense at all thought would be over any sooner than the other one—and a goodly number thought would continue long after peace came to Arkansas.

Clark did eventually make it to Washington. The trial that followed was brief, as was the sentencing. Several congressmen from Georgia, at the last minute, made a somewhat bizarre attempt to persuade the president to commute Clark’s sentence to life imprisonment. Bizarre, at least, in its contorted logic.

But other than a few Georgians, only John Randolph rose in the House to defend the proposal, and his logic couldn’t be followed by anyone.

President Henry Clay turned them down flatly, even—very unusual for him—in a curt and almost uncivil manner. First, he said, because he had no proper jurisdiction over the matter. Granted that the District of Columbia was under federal authority, not being part of any state, murder was a local crime. So why didn’t Congress act directly instead of trying to shuffle the matter off on the president? And what exactly had happened to John Randolph’s principles concerning states’ rights and the ever-present danger of an overweening executive branch, by the way?

That last, with a sneer, which Clay did very well also.

Beyond that, he told them, even if the courts ruled that he could intervene, he would under no circumstances do so anyway.

“The bastard murdered an innocent young woman! Who might very well have been pregnant with child. Right there—not a mile away—on the steps of the Capitol! What in the name of God is wrong with—”

He broke off abruptly and resumed the seat behind his desk. “No, gentlemen,” he said. “The answer is no. Let the murderer hang by the neck until dead, and good riddance. And now, I’m sure you have other business to attend to. If not, I do.”

The murderer did hang, on January 23, 1826. But by the time the noose finally took his life, Congress had convened, and no one was paying much attention any longer.

No politician, at any rate. One observer at the hanging was a visiting plantation owner from South Carolina. When it was all over, he was heard by some of the guards to curse Andrew Clark with vehement bitterness, ending with “You dang fool! Why did you have to
miss?
”