Patriotic Fire (5 page)

War at sea was not always so successful for the Americans, though. On the first day of June 1813, Captain John Lawrence was in Boston Harbor trying to refit and reman the
Chesapeake,
the same ill-fated American frigate that had been attacked by the British off the Virginia coast some six years earlier in an attempt to impress crewmen, an incident that contributed significantly to the outbreak of war.

Outside the harbor cruised
Shannon,
a thirty-eight-gun frigate; spying
Chesapeake
’s masts, she sent ashore a boat carrying a challenge to battle. Lawrence was at a definite disadvantage, since his crew was almost entirely without experience and included a large number of Portuguese of dubious commitment who spoke no English. Nevertheless, he ordered them to make sail and man the guns.

Just before six p.m. the two ships closed for battle. They were about evenly matched in armament, but the British ship had a far better trained crew. The cannon fire that tore into both vessels produced frightful effects. Theodore Roosevelt, an admired naval historian, described the action this way: “
Chesapeake
’s broadsides were doing great damage, but she herself was suffering even more than her foe; the men in the
Shannon
’s tops could hardly see the deck of the American frigate through the cloud of splinters, hammocks, and other wreck that was flying across it, [but] man after man was killed at the wheel; the fourth lieutenant, the master, and the boatswain were slain.”

After only fifteen minutes the two ships were so close that
Shannon
’s captain ordered grappling hooks thrown across and told his crew to prepare for boarding. At this unpleasant prospect, many of
Chesapeake
’s green sailors “became disheartened” and ran belowdecks. As this was happening, Captain Lawrence, who had made himself conspicuous by standing on the quarterdeck in full-dress uniform, was fatally shot by one of the British marines in
Shannon
’s fighting tops. Lawrence fell to the deck crying, “Don’t give up the ship!”—another of the memorable exclamations from the War of 1812 that soon found a permanent home in the language.

The fighting from then on was at close quarters and extremely savage
—Chesapeake
’s chaplain had his arm nearly severed by a blow from “a broad Toledo blade” wielded by
Shannon
’s captain—but soon it was over and the British victorious. One hundred and forty-eight Americans had been killed or wounded, and the
Chesapeake
was claimed as a British prize and taken to Nova Scotia.

Nevertheless, the Americans by this point were not just holding their own against the British in naval actions, they were actually ahead. Yet the strong presence of the British navy on the Great Lakes continued to hamper American operations on the Northern frontier, since the most efficient way to move men, ordnance, and matériel was by water, which the British could do with impunity, while the Americans could not. It was thus determined by the War Department to attempt to rectify the situation.

To that end, a twenty-seven-year-old naval officer, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry,*
 
¹²
was ordered in mid-1813 to the shores of Lake Erie, where five American warships were in the process of being built: two twenty-gun brigantines and three smaller two-gun schooners.*
 
¹³
Perry immediately conducted a surprise raid on a British-held harbor at the westward end of the lake, which contained two of His Majesty’s brigantines, and he captured both; although one ran aground and had to be destroyed, the other was joined to the growing American fleet. Perry also was able to purchase several merchant craft, which he armed and manned for warfare, bringing his squadron to a total of nine ships of one description or another. Then, on September 10, 1813, Perry sallied out of Presque Isle (now the harbor of Erie, Pennsylvania) in hopes of doing battle with the six warships of the British Lake Erie fleet.

His hopes were quickly fulfilled, though not without some trepidations. Like Lawrence on the
Chesapeake,
Perry suffered from a critical lack of trained seamen. Fortunately, the army commander in the area, General William Henry Harrison,*
 
¹⁴
scoured the ranks of his soldiers for experienced seamen, cannoneers, and marksmen and sent them to Perry with the foresight that if Perry and his navy could rid Lake Erie of the British, then his (Harrison’s) own job would be that much easier.

Under sail since dawn, Perry finally spied the British squadron on the western end of the lake just before noon, and the two adversaries began to close. Perry had the wind to his back, giving him a tactical advantage, and, as well, he could throw nearly a third more metal. The battle was fierce and ardent, but after two hours Perry’s flagship,
Lawrence,
had suffered some 80 percent casualties out of a crew of 136 and was turning into a wreck. Instead of striking colors, however, Perry had himself rowed over to the brig
Niagara,
where he continued the fight. Soon the heavier American firepower began to tell. By three p.m., four of the British ships struck colors, their commanders either killed or wounded, and two others that tried to escape were seized and captured. According to historian Hickey, “When the victors boarded the
Detroit
they found a pet bear lapping up blood on the decks and two Indians hiding in the hold.”

Temporarily, at least, Perry’s victory became a restorative tonic for an American public presently accustomed to bitter and disappointing news. As a military objective it was a brilliant success, since the British had been driven from Lake Erie altogether. Once again a significant literary sidelight occurred when Perry’s communiqué to Harrison was published: “We have met the enemy and he is ours.”*
 
¹⁵

Three

I
n June 1812, just a few days after the declaration of war, Andrew Jackson, major general of Tennessee militia, dispatched from the Hermitage, his magnificent home in Nashville, a letter to President Madison offering to transport his 2,500-man division of Tennessee infantry on an immediate invasion of British Canada with the intention of conquering Quebec “in ninety days.”

The offer was accepted by Secretary of War Armstrong, but orders never arrived. As the months passed, Jackson became infuriated that commanders such as Wilkinson and Dearborn—whom he rightly considered incompetent—were being tapped to lead campaigns up north while he languished in Tennessee with a full division of trained militia eager to get into the fight. Soon Jackson was able to conclude that he’d become persona non grata at the War Department as the result of stepping on too many toes, a habit long since perfected and honed. Still, the fiery militia general gnashed his teeth at Washington’s inaction, because it is doubtful that anyone in America loathed the English more than Andrew Jackson, and not without good cause; he was perfectly ripe for hating.

Like the new nation in which he lived, Jackson was suspended between a difficult past and an uncertain future. He had no formal military training, but as a leader of military men he had few peers; he was smart, honest, brave as a lion, and, like the lion, he could be a cold-blooded killer.

J
ackson was born on March 15, 1767, in the scrubby Waxhaw District of eastern South Carolina,*
 
¹⁶
a child of Scots-Irish immigrants who had come to America two years earlier. Andrew’s father died only a few days before his new son’s birth, after “straining himself” lifting a log, and now Andrew’s mother abandoned the farm, which the Jacksons had hoped would provide their living and fortune, and moved with the baby and his two siblings to a relative’s house nearby, where she took up duties as a housekeeper and babysitter.

To say that young Andrew grew up precocious would understate the case. He was more like a terror—fighting, swearing, gambling, smoking, and drinking, traits that would stay with him a lifetime—dashing the fond hopes of his mother that he would one day become a Presbyterian minister. Yet he was also smart and received a fair education, though he never quite mastered the skills of spelling and grammar.

By the time Andrew was thirteen the American Revolution had swept into the Upper Carolinas, spearheaded by the cruel and remorseless Scottish cavalryman Colonel Banastre Tarleton and his infamous green-coated dragoons, who ruthlessly raised the level of violence and brutality: hanging, burning, raping, and looting, and, in the process, touching off a civil war between patriots and Tories of the region that pitted neighbor against neighbor.

Andrew’s older brother Hugh died fighting the British at the Battle of Stono Ferry in 1779, and the following year the two remaining Jackson boys, Robert, sixteen, and Andrew, thirteen, signed up to fight with the cavalry of Colonel William Davie. By then the fighting in the Carolinas had turned so ferocious that no quarter was generally given by either side and massacres were commonplace. Because of his age and riding prowess, young Andrew was made a courier, but he certainly saw his share of war and developed a lifelong loathing of the British practice of it.

The following year both boys were captured by a British raiding party. When Andrew refused an “imperious” order to clean a British officer’s boots, the man struck him with his saber, slashing him savagely on his head and hand, leaving scars, both physical and mental, for the rest of his life. The raiders then looted the house, raped the women, and burned the place down, barn and all. Andrew and Robert were thrown into a filthy, bedless British prison in Camden and put on a diet of bread and water; a Tory stole Andrew’s pistol, shoes, coat, and hat, and both boys contracted smallpox, a scourge that had already wreaked havoc across the nation.

Plucky Elizabeth Jackson, hearing of her boys’ capture, rode into Camden and persuaded the British commander to include the two youngsters in an exchange of prisoners that was being negotiated. Robert was so weak from disease that he had to be strapped on a horse, while Andrew, barefoot, hatless, and coatless in the rain, walked the forty miles it took to get home. Robert died two days later, and it looked as though Andrew, too, was doomed, but nursed by his mother he pulled through.

Several months later, when Andrew seemed to be on the road to recovery, Elizabeth journeyed to Charleston to minister to her two nephews, who were ill aboard British prison ships in Charleston Harbor. At their parting, his mother gave young Andrew some advice: “Make friends by being honest and keep them by being steadfast. Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue for slander—settle them cases yourself!”

These words, like his scars, remained hard and dear to Andrew Jackson all his life, for it wasn’t long before he learned that his mother had died of cholera contracted aboard the prison ships. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Charleston, leaving him little to remember her by except those parting words and the pitiable bundle of her belongings that had arrived along with word of her death. Andrew Jackson, at the age of fifteen, was alone in the world—as he vividly remembered it, an orphan of the British war.

For the next three years, by all accounts, Jackson lived a dissolute life with no one to guide him or take care of him. He became a sort of glorified Huckleberry Finn, gambling, smoking, drinking, and, in his case, racing fine thoroughbred horses acquired with a small inheritance that his grandfather in Ireland had left him. Two years after the war ended, Jackson decided he wanted to be a lawyer and “read” law with a prominent attorney in Salisbury, North Carolina, where he lived above a tavern and, according to local residents, merrily dissipated himself, as the saying goes, with wine, women, and song.

Despite all this, in 1787 Jackson, now twenty, received his license to practice law. He had grown into a man just short of handsome, above six feet tall, lean and somewhat gaunt with deep, piercing, steel-blue eyes and a great shock of reddish-brown hair on his forehead. Perceptively, Jackson concluded that the Tennessee territory on the western side of the Alleghenies was a smart place to start a legal practice. Tennessee was still largely Indian land,*
 
¹⁷
settled by Americans just eighteen years earlier—and then by just one person, a man named William Bean. But raw new territories often provided spectacular opportunities for men learned in law, since there were always boundary disputes and property sales to be settled, wills and deeds to be drawn up, even the territorial laws themselves had to be written—all this in addition to the defense or prosecution of the abnormally large number of killers, thieves, and other miscreants who tended to inhabit such wildernesses.

Within a year Jackson was appointed to the post of territorial prosecutor and within another he was made United States attorney general for the territory. He settled in a dingy little hamlet consisting of about fifty primitive log houses on the Cumberland River at what is now the city of Nashville.

Tennessee was where Jackson fought his first duel, also within a year of his arrival,*
 
¹⁸
and within yet another he met and married his wife, twenty-two-year-old Rachel Robards. The circumstances of this last were to cause Jackson much trouble (and dueling) throughout his life, because both he and Rachel had relied on reports from Kentucky—where her first husband had gone after he left her—that a divorce had been granted there. When that news proved to be untrue, occasionally rude comments were circulated by the ambitious Jackson’s growing number of detractors to the effect that he was an adulterer and she a bigamist, and Jackson spent no small amount of time challenging any and all of these assertions.

As time went by Jackson progressed from prosecutor to judge, at the same time acquiring vast amounts of land in the area, upon which, using slave labor, he raised cotton, corn, and wheat and eventually built his splendid mansion, the Hermitage. He also built up one of the finest stables of racehorses in the South, winning (or losing, as the case sometimes was) large sums of money. Almost from the moment of his arrival in Tennessee Jackson’s career was meteoric. In 1796 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives; in 1797 he was elected to the U.S. Senate; in 1802 he was elected major general of the Tennessee militia.*
 
¹⁹

By this time the Jacksons had a growing brood in their household. After Rachel lost a number of infants in childbirth, the couple began taking in orphans or children whose parents were unable to properly care for them; one of these was legally adopted and christened Andrew Jackson, Jr.

During this period there were, occasionally, unfortunate vicissitudes. In 1806 Jackson became, arguably, the best pistol shot in Tennessee after killing a man named Charles Dickinson (whom everybody had
said
was the best shot in Tennessee) in a duel over a horseracing bet. In 1803 he had gotten into a dispute with then Tennessee governor John “Nolichucky Jack” Sevier, an old rival whom Jackson had publicly exposed for perpetrating large real estate frauds. When Sevier retaliated by insulting Mrs. Jackson regarding her alleged adultery, he was promptly challenged to a duel.

The governor did not wish to fight a duel with Jackson, however, pleading old age, his service in the Revolutionary War, and the likely resultant poverty of his large family, should he lose. But neither would he apologize for making a crack about Jackson’s “taking a trip to Natchez with another man’s wife [Rachel],” so Jackson promptly published a screed on the front page of the local newspaper in which he called Sevier all the ugly things that were fit to print, including a “coward.” Jackson then set out for the appointed dueling grounds to await the governor, who was not at all punctual. What happened next, by the account of Marquis James, one of Jackson’s biographers, is worth quoting in its entirety:

“For five days they encamped at the Point and had started to leave when Sevier appeared with several armed men. Andrew Greer rode ahead and addressed Jackson, who suddenly left off speaking and drew a pistol, dismounted and drew a second pistol. Turning, Greer perceived Sevier off his horse with pistols in his hands advancing on Jackson. Twenty steps apart they halted and began to abuse each other, the governor damning him to fire away. After a little of this both put away their arms. There were more words and Jackson rushed at Sevier saying he was going to cane him. [Then] Sevier drew his sword, ‘which frightened his horse, which ran away with the governor’s pistols.’ Jackson drew a pistol and the governor went behind a tree and damned Jackson: ‘Did he want to fire on a naked man?’ he asked. George Washington Sevier, the governor’s seventeen-year-old son, then drew on Jackson and Dr. Van Dyke [Jackson’s second] drew on Washington.

“Members of the Sevier party rushed up making amicable signs. They got the three men to put away their guns and suggested that the governor relinquish the field, which he did, swearing at Jackson and receiving [Jackson’s] comments in return as long as either could hear.”*
 
²⁰

So it sometimes went on dueling days, but Jackson’s next encounter was not to be so uneventful.

W
ith the War of 1812 four months old and still going terribly for the Americans, and with Jackson still brooding in Nashville with his militia division, something finally seemed to be happening. Washington had sent out its call for 50,000 volunteers from the various states. Unlike militia, these would come directly under the authority of the War Department, as would their commanding officer. The governor of Tennessee, William Blount, appointed Jackson to the post of major general of U.S. volunteers, certainly an exalted regular army slot for a mere militia officer. Tennessee’s quota had been 1,500 men, but 2,500—including the famed frontiersman Davy Crockett—joined up from mid-October until the end of December, walking or riding out of the canebreaks, mountains, and backwoods communities to form up in Nashville on the banks of the frozen Cumberland River. Jackson personally mortgaged much of his fortune to supply and equip them.

Unfortunately—or so concluded Jackson—his orders were not to march his force to the fighting fronts along the Canadian border, but instead to go to New Orleans and reinforce the despised Wilkinson, who had not yet left for his unsatisfactory performance in the north, and who was supposed to march on Spanish West Florida, where the Spanish and British were stirring up the Indians against the United States. Accordingly, Jackson moved his men eight hundred miles by river rafts down to Natchez, just above New Orleans, where he received a further communiqué from the War Department canceling the whole mission and telling him to disband his army and go home. Jackson did no such thing, at least not the part about disbanding his army. He believed that the new orders were nothing more than a smarmy ploy to get rid of him and to have his volunteers serve under Wilkinson. Instead, he vowed to march his men all the way back to Nashville himself, which he did, acquiring in the process the nickname “Old Hickory,” when somebody watching the general leading his men out of the wilderness remarked, “He’s tough as hickory,” after the toughest wood he knew. The name stuck, but it was also along this arduous march that serious trouble began to fester.

The Benton brothers, both officers in Jackson’s army, were from a prominent and wealthy family in Franklin, just outside Nashville. The younger Benton had become friends with one Lieutenant Littleton Johnson, who had developed a grudge against Lieutenant Colonel William Carroll, the brigade inspector. Johnson sent Jesse Benton to Carroll with a challenge to a duel. Carroll refused on grounds that Johnson was not a gentleman;*
 
²¹
Benton then declared that if that be so, he himself was one, and promptly challenged Carroll personally to the duel.