From Sea to Shining Sea (89 page)

“Frankly, no,” he had replied, but actually it was, and so he had been keeping the diary for her during his tours of duty, and
actually enjoying it sometimes. She would write letters to him, gushing about how much she had enjoyed his clear and witty descriptions of so and so, and his anecdotes of this or that, in his latest batch of entries, and how she was keeping them for posterity. And after each such letter, he would try even harder to be witty and wise in his journal. As her husband was always away, and William was always in some training bivouac without much to do, their correspondences grew longer and more frequent. And little by little, one of her true intentions was coming true: her unschooled brother, whose education she had secretly taken upon herself, was learning to handle the written language. His handwriting had improved, from a scrawl at first resembling the blood-track of a mortally wounded centipede, to a very handsome cursive script. And though he still spelled the same word twice the same way only by coincidence, he was learning to express even abstract ideas and complex emotions by the written word.

The most intricate thing William was called upon to express in his journal-writings was his ambivalent feelings toward his commanding officer, General James Wilkinson.

At first William had hated being near him, remembering all the old suspicions about Wilkinson’s rise and George’s fall, all those unproven hints that somehow Wilkinson had been the one who had destroyed George’s reputation in the Virginia capital. People had used to say, back in those days, that James Wilkinson’s ambition could be seen darting through all the shadows. Wilkinson’s tenure as Indian Commissioner, after George had been forced out, had produced absolutely nothing of note, but somehow, after St. Clair’s defeat, Wilkinson had managed to get himself appointed commander of the Western forts.

But then while serving under Wilkinson’s command, William had, little by little, come to like the charming, worldly-wise Marylander, to want
not
to suspect him, and simply to enjoy the benefits of knowing him. After all, Wilkinson was such an able man, a talented man, a brave officer; surely he was not that mean. And if he had actually done so much covert evil to George, why had he befriended William so earnestly and favored him among his subordinates?

It was plain that Wilkinson
was
a masterful underminer. He was always making subtle mockeries of his own commander, General Wayne. He referred to him in private as Mars, or sometimes as Big Turtle, alluding to his ponderous and thoroughgoing methods. Wilkinson liked to ply his officers with good liquor, which he always seemed able to procure from somewhere, and when they were in a merry mood he would cultivate snide jokes about “that
cumbrous body,” General Wayne. William had hated himself for taking part in such merriment, but it was easy to do because he agreed in principle with Wilkinson’s criticisms. Wayne really did seem to be set upon a course of orthodox maneuvering that would once again play into the Indians’ hands.

And so William, often troubled with a foreboding of some great future disaster but impatient for any kind of decisive action, and feeling faintly disloyal because of his association with the dubious Wilkinson, wrote much in his diary these days, and enjoyed the tart flavor of sarcasm as he wrote it. He was beginning to understand George’s bittersweet attitudes about duty.

And Fanny, whose old notions of marital rapture were beginning to sour in the long absences and preoccupations of her husband, was beginning to relish the sniggering tone of William’s writings when they came to her in the mail. She felt that only they in this family—and perhaps George, in his different way—were canny enough to see through the unquestioning naiveté of their parents’ precepts. From General Wilkinson, by way of William, she was beginning to acquire worldly wisdom.

And so, when George began hatching his desperate scheme to forsake his ungrateful country and become a leader in the French Revolution, Fanny was the only one at Mulberry Hill who felt in the least able to condone it.

R
EVOLUTIONARY
F
RANCE WAS AT WAR WITH THE MONARCHIES
of Europe, Spain among them. George’s mind and soul were caught up in contemplation of his old allies’ glorious struggle so far away, and he worked less and less on his memoir these days, and spent more and more time at the public house, drinking and talking. One of the chief topics these days was the French minister.

Citizen Edmond Genet, the revolutionist, recently had come as France’s minister to the United States, and he was being feted everywhere in the East. He was already speaking of France and America as allies in France’s war against the kings, and word had come downriver to the interested ears of Kentuckians that he was proposing an uprising of Louisiana French against Spanish authority.

Frankfort, on the Kentucky River, had been chosen as the capital of the fledgling State of Kentucky, and one of George’s old lieutenants, Isaac Shelby, was the first governor. George and his father rode down to the new capital one day to see the place and get the drift of public sentiments. With them rode Dr. James O’Fallon, home for a while from the Southeast.

Frankfort swarmed with people with big ideas and strong opinions. As a frontier capital it was a rough and rowdy place, full of opportunists and favor-seekers. Quite a few of George’s old soldiers were around, some of them now looking prosperous and important, many looking old and broken. But John Clark was moved by the way they greeted his son, and he saw that their greetings were bolstering George’s self-esteem.

There was a common refrain in the discussions and arguments they heard in Frankfort. Many men of affairs were saying that since Spain and France were at war, Americans had a clear obligation to go down and help the Mississippi Valley French drive the Spanish rulers out of New Orleans. They kept reminding each other that without French help Washington probably would have lost the war for independence. Many said that if there were an invasion of Spanish Louisiana, they and their friends would join it, and open up the Mississippi to Kentucky commerce at last, while they were about it. Even Governor Shelby had sentiments like that, and furthermore, he hinted, so did such people as Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. And John Clark heard many a man say that his son George should come out of retirement and lead such an invasion himself. George did not tell his father about the notions that were swirling through his mind as they rode back to Louisville a few days later with a group of travelers and a militia escort. But he was beginning to conceive, with that old sense of boldness and long vision and moral righteousness, one last chance to get off his knees.

George found in his own household a ready accomplice. Dr. O’Fallon was already involved in land deals discomfiting the Spaniards in the Southeast. He had traveled much in those parts and was already up to his neck in activities inimical to Spanish interests, and could be trusted to conspire further against them. He could also write and spell most respectably, in an elegant script. And so, in sessions late at night, at George’s desk, a new jug of whiskey sitting sealed on the mantel to test George’s willpower, an ambitious plan was conceived and drafted, and addressed as a letter from General George Rogers Clark to Citizen Genet.

He began by stating that his desire to help the French Republic in its causes was as strong as it ever had been during his own country’s revolution, and then summarized the deeds that he and his American and French followers had done in the West. These same men, he said, at the very least 1,500 of them, would flock to his standard, and in one short season take the whole of the Louisiana Territory for France. Dr. James
O’Fallon’s scalp prickled as he wrote down the forceful words George dictated.

“Some of the first and best men in this Western country will certainly accompany me. All we immediately want is money to procure provisions and ammunition for the conquest.… For our pay and gratifications in land, as we abandon our own here, we shall confide in the justice and generosity of the great nation we shall serve, after our labors are over. To save Congress from a rupture with Spain on our account, we must first expatriate ourselves and become French citizens. This is our intention.”

He stalked about the room thinking of his next phrases. Each time he came near the mantel, he would look at the jug and tremble. Never had he done anything so defiant, so final, as this, and it was excruciating to do it sober. He had loved his country more than his life, but now he had come to the point where he was ready to forsake it, and he needed to say why. He pointed to the paper before O’Fallon and continued.

“My country has proved notoriously ungrateful for my services, and so forgetful of those successful and almost unexampled enterprises which gave it the whole of its territory on this side of the great mountains, as in this my very prime of life to have neglected me. Since I relinquished my command over the Western country, Congress has had not one successful campaign in it!” He paused, breathing hard. “All this is
true
, Jim,” he hissed. “Ye know that?”

“I do.” O’Fallon was sweating, sitting on the edge of the chair as he wrote.

Neither of them noticed the soft tread of Fanny, who had come to the door of George’s room looking for her husband. She was standing there when George concluded.

“On receiving a reply from you, I shall instantly have myself expatriated. And as soon as commissions for myself and my officers shall have been received and due provision made for the expedition … I shall raise my men and proceed to action. I thirst …” He glanced at the jug on the mantel, then turned on his heel away from it. “I thirst for the opportunity!”

And then he saw Fanny’s beautiful, pale face in the doorway, suspended like a waning moon in the darkness of her hair, her clothing, the gloom of the unlighted hallway; and for an instant she looked exactly as Terese de Leyba had looked the first time he had seen her face framed in an upstairs window of the Spanish Governor’s mansion in St. Louis.

Spanish
!

*     *     *

G
EORGE WAITED FOR
G
ENET’S ANSWER, BUT HE DID NOT SIT
still and wait for it. He rode from town to town in Kentucky and got tentative promises, promises of enlistments, provisions, arms, and services, to be called upon when and if Genet should accept. George approached only the Kentuckians he could trust. Their eagerness to march against Spain under his standard restored his self-esteem bit by bit. He was beginning to feel like a warrior again—even like a patriot, ironically. But it was an anxious time. There was a slight chance that Genet might not like what he would find as he investigated the reputation of this ambitious partisan. Sometimes, late at night, when there was nothing more that could be done until morning, George would sit, stone sober as he had been for months, gaze at the lamp flame and think of the possibility of being rebuffed—or, worse, ignored—by Genet, and he would break out in a cold sweat. And Fanny Clark O’Fallon would look at George and think of the same possibility, and she felt that her brother had climbed hard and boldly to stand once again on a high precipice. If Genet accepted him, he might stay on the high place and be everything he once had been. If not, his fall would be terrible.

D
R.
J
AMES
O’F
ALLON HAD GONE AWAY AGAIN, ON MORE OF
his mysterious business. And now, with Fanny watching the post for letters from him as well as from William, she was always at a window. She wanted to know where her husband was so she could write and tell him the news.

She was pregnant again, and she had an awful, intuitive fear that she might well never see her husband again, that he might never see his second son.

George was always watching for the post, too, waiting for some sort of a message from Citizen Genet. He worked at his memoir now and then, trying to concentrate on it; he had completed about a hundred handwritten manuscript pages. He wrote almost every day, also, trying to forestall the creditors and their lawyers who had plagued him for so many years. And he met often every week with old veterans of his who would come to bring or receive intelligence about the Spanish defenses in the Louisiana Territory. He was, through his spy system, learning as much about the Mississippi now as he had before his expedition in 1778. Once again he was playing on a mental chessboard half a continent wide, and this time his unsuspecting opponent was the Spanish Governor in New Orleans. But he could do nothing but plan until Genet’s answer came, if it should come, nothing but plan and wait for the post. And so one day in June when a
post rider came trotting up the road between the locust trees, George and Fanny nearly collided in the front door going out to meet him.

The letter was not for either of them, but for the family. It was stunning news, written again this time in the shaky hand of their Uncle George Rogers.

His beloved second son, Captain Johnny Rogers, that brave, good, and enterprising man who had sailed the
Willing
to Vincennes in 1779 for his cousin George, had died in the prime of his life at age thirty-seven, still unmarried, a sudden death believed to have been from pneumonia.

Everyone at Mulberry Hill, but in particular George, went into a profound state of grief that was a long time in lifting.

O
NE DAY A
F
RENCHMAN WITH THE BOLD GRACEFUL DEMEANOR
of an adventurer and the smudgy, stale, unkempt look of a river boat traveler appeared in a carriage at the door of Mulberry Hill. His name, he said, was Michaux. He was a botanist and explorer. He was soon to be engaged, he said, in a journey of exploration for Thomas Jefferson, across the continent from the Mississippi to the Pacific, but in the meantime he had been diverted here at the behest of the French minister, to deliver a message to General Clark. He gave George a packet. It was from Citizen Genet. It was an officer’s commission from the French Republic. It had been filled in to designate George Rogers Clark a Marshall of France, a Major General, and the Commander-in-Chief of a special military unit to be known as “The French Legion of the Mississippi.” Michaux saluted. “I am at your service, mon general. I am to serve as your aide.” George’s parents stood watching, old, gray, shocked.