1824: The Arkansas War (24 page)

The blacks didn’t. For them, the army was all that stood between freedom and a return to slavery. A line so sharp, so clear, and so dark that they cleaved to military values the way a devout Christian cleaved to the cross. It was sometimes a little frightening. Anthony’s education had expanded a lot over the years since the British war. He’d even studied the classics, now—some of them at least. There were ways in which the new little nation taking shape between the Ozarks and the Ouachitas reminded him of ancient accounts of Sparta, more than of anything he remembered growing up in New York. Or the Swiss of a few centuries ago, that the Laird had told him about, whose pikemen were feared by every power in Europe.

Sheff ’s own mother had absorbed it in the few months since the family had arrived in Arkansas. As much as she’d opposed her son joining the army in the first place, he also knew from his cousin that her last words to Sheff when he left for New Orleans were “There be a war, boy, I want you back alive. But I rather see you dead than come back and cain’t tell me we won. You hear me?”

Before Anthony could make a decision, one of the soldiers from the squad he’d sent out to make a reconnaissance of the area returned.

“Sir, there’s some people not far away. U.S. Army soldiers. Maybe a dozen of them. And they got three black women with them. Well, a woman and two girls.” The soldier turned and pointed to the northwest. “About four hundred yards that way.”

Anthony looked in the direction the man was pointing. But, of course, couldn’t see more than maybe fifty yards, and that only in spots. Still mostly uncleared, the area around Arkansas Post was heavily wooded. Mostly gum and oak trees, with some cypress here and there. For all practical purposes, most of the region was still a forest.

The only cleared land, except for a few farms scattered about, was the area south of the river and right around the Post. And that had been cleared for purely military purposes. Anthony was pretty sure Crittenden’s army was so mindless that they still hadn’t figured out that the only reason they could all assemble easily in the peninsula opposite the Post was that it had been cleared for precisely that reason. It was a prepared killing ground—and they were the prey who’d stumbled into it.

“Are the women captives?”

“Don’t think so, sir,” the soldier replied, shaking his head. “The older woman’s riding a horse, and the girls are sharing one. They real light-skinned, too. The girls, I mean. The woman—might be their mother—she’s high yeller.”

Anthony’s lips quirked slightly. The soldier was black, and like most black people the captain knew, he’d parse skin shades and tones even more meticulously than a white man. It was amusing, in a way—although it could be rough at times on someone like Corporal Parker, who was very dark-skinned and had no white features at all in his face.

On the other hand, the same was true of General Charles Ball, and nobody in their right mind in Arkansas—white, black, or red—treated him lightly. Not more than once, for sure.

“All right. There’s no way we can get into the Post, anyhow, except after nightfall. We may as well go see what they’re up to. What’s the officer’s rank?”

“Don’t know, sir. We didn’t get close enough to be able to see the insignia. But…he don’t look to be nothing like a lieutenant, I can tell you that. Nor even a captain, we don’t think.”

A small unit of U.S. cavalrymen, led by a field-grade officer. What would they be doing here?

Now, he was genuinely curious, not simply professionally interested.

“Let’s go find out.”

One of Taylor’s men spotted the Arkansas unit, but not until they were forty yards away. Stiffly, the colonel realized that if this had been an ambush, they’d be in sore straits.

“Friend or foe?” he called out.

“Thought we might ask you the same thing!” came the response. “Seeing as how you’re trespassing.”

The tone didn’t seem belligerent so much as amused, though. And Taylor couldn’t detect any trace of real hostility on the face of the Arkansas officer who emerged from the woods. He wasn’t carrying a weapon, either, although he had a pistol at his belt.

“Captain McParland, of the army of Arkansas. And you are, sir?”

“Zachary Taylor, lieutenant colonel in the United States Army.” Since the next question was a foregone conclusion, he pointed a thumb at Julia Chinn, whose horse was standing next to his. “We’re an escort for Miz Julia Chinn here, and her two children. She’s—ah…”

Not even Taylor was prepared to publicly refer to Julia as Senator Johnson’s wife. For a white man to marry a black woman was illegal in the state of Kentucky. Illegal in any state of the Union, so far as he knew, outside of some of the New England states. The colonel wasn’t sure if that legal proscription extended so far as to banning any third-party reference to such a marriage that implied it was legitimate, but…

Like any career professional officer, Taylor was chary of crossing such lines. Fortunately, an alternative explanation was at hand. That a man was a husband was something a legislature could decree. That he was a father was decreed by Nature and the God who had created it—and, in this case, the father acknowledged the fact publicly and openly, and always had.

“The girls are Senator Johnson’s daughters,” he said. “Senator Johnson of Kentucky, that is.”

Then, pointing to them: “Adaline’s the one sitting in front. Imogene’s behind her. The senator and Miz Julia wanted them to attend the school in New Antrim. The one that’s being set up, I mean.”

He could sense the relaxation in the Arkansas officer. More to the point, he could see several of the muskets in the woods that hadn’t
quite
been pointing at him, lifting away entirely.

Still, there was never any harm in slathering the cake with some icing. “Sam Houston asked me to provide them with an escort.”

Houston’s name might be cursed as often as praised in the United States, but it was a magic talisman in Arkansas. Now, the captain was smiling cheerfully and waving his men forward.

“Come on out, boys. Everybody’s friendly.”

While Captain McParland and the U.S. colonel conferred, Sheff Parker found himself having to fight off the urge to ogle the three women.

Especially the girls. Lord, they were pretty. Even if they were still too young to be entertaining any such thoughts.

“Stop staring,” Cal murmured. “You bein’ rude.”

Corporal McParland himself, Sheff noticed, wasn’t looking any other place either.

“You the one to talk.”

“Prettiest girls I seen in an age. Too bad they’re so young still.”

“Girls grow up.”

But the moment Sheff said it, he realized how absurd he was being. First, because Senator Johnson’s family situation was famous all over the South. Notorious, maybe, for white people. But black folks didn’t feel the same way about it. Freedmen weren’t allowed to vote in Kentucky, no more than they were in any state of the United States that Sheff knew of, except maybe some of the New England states. But if they had been, every black man’s vote would have gone to Richard M. Johnson, any election he ever stood for. That would have been true even if he wasn’t also the man demanding the abolition of debt imprisonment.

These were
rich
girls. Important girls. Beyond that, they were so light-skinned that even “high yeller” didn’t apply. Sheff might as well be entertaining fantasies about jumping over the moon.

So, he looked away. And, an instant later, saw Cal do the same. He realized then, not really ever having thought about it before, that there could even be things that a white boy couldn’t entertain fantasies about, either.

That thought went through his mind like a crystal, bringing many things into clear and certain place that hadn’t been so before. There was no barrier to his friendship with Cal, he suddenly realized, except things that were not decreed in any page of the Bible he knew. And he knew them all.

McParland was ordering a camp made.

“It’s your turn to cook,” Sheff said. “Don’t argue about it. I been keepin’ track and you ain’t.”

Life in the army did, indeed, lead to blasphemy. Even Sheff was sometimes guilty of it. “Hell of a state of affairs,” Cal complained, “when a curree adds and subtracts better than a white man.”

“Not my fault you miss so many days in school. And don’t you be pissin’ me off, or you won’t have nobody to help you catch up.”

“Well. That’s true. I cook better’n you do anyway—even if that’s upside down, too.”

CHAPTER 16

Arkansas Post

O
CTOBER 5, 1824

That night, Taylor and his party, along with the unit from the Arkansas Army, snuck into the fort.

“Snuck,” insofar as a relaxed and almost open promenade—the U.S. party on horseback, even—could be given the term. The young black corporal with Captain McParland had led the way, advancing alone to within sight of Arkansas Post and calling out to the sentries.

Taylor had been rather impressed by his courage. Granted, there was no danger from any of Crittenden’s outfit. Taylor’s cavalrymen had scouted the area to make sure there were none such present. But the real risk in such a situation would come from the sentries themselves. As keyed up and tense as they were certain to be, they’d be quite likely to fire as soon as they spotted anyone moving in the area beyond the walls.

The corporal’s black face had helped, of course. There’d be no one in Crittenden’s army with skin anywhere near as dark. But the night was dark, too, with only a quarter moon in the sky, so sentries couldn’t be certain of anyone’s race at a distance. And while the green uniform of an Arkansas soldier was easily discernible in daylight, at night it simply looked like any dark garment.

Fortunately, the youngster was shrewd. As soon as he emerged from the woods he began singing “Blue Tail Fly,” with its well-known refrain:

Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care

Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care

Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care

My master’s gone away

Taylor found himself chuckling as he watched. Nobody in Crittenden’s army was likely to be singing a song about a slave’s glee at his master’s death from an accident!

The boy had a very nice tenor voice, too.

“Oh, he sure sings pretty,” he heard Imogene say.

He discovered that Arkansas Post was under the command of a Major Joseph Totten. A bit to his surprise, a white officer. Taylor had known, of course—Captain McParland being living proof he’d already encountered—that a number of the officers and even enlisted men in the Arkansas forces were white. But it was still a bit startling. Not so much the skin color itself as the apparent lack of concern that anyone seemed to have about it, one way or the other. Totten’s second-in-command was a Captain Davies, whose dark face seemed to have a subtly Indian cast to it. Quite possibly, the son or grandson of one of the early slaves taken by the Cherokees or Creeks in the past century. Manumission was far more common in the Indian tribes than it was among white Americans, and it often took the form of a former slave or at least their children marrying into one of the clans.

That, too, was a break with American custom. Andrew Jackson had created something of a scandal by giving Driscol’s sergeant Charles Ball a field promotion to lieutenant during the New Orleans campaign. That had been in clear violation of U.S. Army regulations, which did not permit black freedmen to rise to any commissioned rank.

Jackson being Jackson—with the great victory at the Mississippi to add luster to his reputation for fury—no one had dared to object officially at the time. But after Ball had resigned from the army, the authorities had quietly seen to it that there would be no repetition of the problem and that the promotion would not establish any sort of precedent.

Arkansas, clearly, had different rules. Taylor wasn’t sure if he approved. On the other hand, he was no more sure that he didn’t. He did not consider himself an intellectual officer, in the way that Winfield Scott was, but he thought a man had to be a plain damn fool not to understand that there was ultimately something dark and dangerous about having slavery at the foundation of a republic. Even though his own family’s considerable wealth—even his own position, to a degree—rested on that same institution.

That said, he had no more use for abolitionists than he did for men like John Calhoun. Fine and dandy to denounce slavery in the abstract—but how was one to get rid of it? Two great obstacles stood in the way, the second more immovable than the first.

The first, of course, was simple economics. Slavery was profitable, and the solid basis for most of the wealth of Southern gentlemen. Easy enough for a New England merchant—whose own family’s wealth might very well have derived a century earlier from the slave trade—to demand that a Virginia farmer bankrupt himself by freeing his slaves. Not so easy for the farmer.

But, even if that were done, what would happen next? How was a society to absorb two million freed negroes? That was the second rock below the surface, and the one that all schemes for abolition foundered upon.

Until now, perhaps. If the United States could not do it, what if its new neighbor
could?

Zachary Taylor didn’t know the answer to that question. What he did decide, that night, studying Major Totten and his staff of officers, was that he was glad the question was finally being asked by somebody, and in dead earnest.

Many miles away, on a steamboat at the confluence of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers, an English lady was pondering the same issue. In her case, a rumination brought on by the experience of the past two evenings, watching John Brown leading his large family through a reading of the Bible.

A large family which had just gotten larger, and darker, since Brown had calmly assumed that the three rescued negroes—having no other family any longer—would find a home with his.

“He simply doesn’t
care,
does he?” she murmured to her husband.

Sitting next to her in the sheltered rear of the
Comet
’s main deck, Robert watched Brown and his people for a moment before answering.

“No. He doesn’t.”

“I find him a somewhat frightening man.”

Her husband smiled wryly. “I find him considerably more than ‘somewhat’ frightening, my dear. Still…”

He trailed off. Eliza suspected he had no more of a ready answer than she did.

Still…

The day before, in conversation with the two young corporals before they’d left with Captain McParland, the black one had told her what Brown had said the first time he met him. To a band of slave-catchers.

I believe in the Golden Rule, sir, and the Declaration of Independence. I think that both mean the same thing. And, that being so, it is better that a whole generation should pass off the face of the earth—men, women, and children—by a violent death than that one jot of either should fail in this country. I mean exactly so, sir.

Said it calmly and matter-of-factly, just as he’d calmly and matter-off-actly slain the one slave-catcher who’d doubted him.

A frightening man, yes. A fanatic, some would say.

But Eliza had also heard the tale of the young black woman—bits of it, rather, since the poor girl was still half out of her wits. Faced with such incredible barbarity, the term “fanatic” seemed almost meaningless. She understood now, really for the first time, why her husband had found himself drawn into Clarkson’s movement. Understood, finally, why he insisted on keeping that horrid illustration of the
Brookes
on the wall of their home in Ireland.

Quietly, she rose from the bench and went over to stand by the guardrail. The quarter moon glinted off the waters of the Mississippi, a shining crescent half obscured by mud and slime.

If one allowed oneself—even for a moment—to consider that those spoons shaped like people nestled in a drawer were
actually
people…

She could hear Brown’s voice murmuring in the background. The words were indistinguishable, but she knew he was reading from Judges. A Calvinist through and through, Brown was partial to the Old Testament. His God was a wrathful deity.

Eliza being an Anglican, her God was a considerably gentler Creator. But she could no longer avoid the simple and obvious truth that if those spoons were
actually
people…each and every one of them a real human being…full and complete in every particular….

Not even the sweetest cherub in Heaven would show any mercy at all. Less—much less—than any man who ever lived, be he never so fanatic.

A shudder ran through her whole body. At that moment, the Mississippi seemed like a dark torrent rushing toward a pit of eternal damnation, carrying her with it. Scream as loudly as she might, no angel would hear. Nor care, if they did.

Robert was at her side an instant later, running his hand up her arm.

“Are you ill, dearest?” His voice was full of concern. “These waters are not healthy.”

A half laugh, half sob burst from her lips. “Not healthy!”

But, blessedly, the horrible vision was gone. She took a deep breath and sighed it out.

“No, I’m quite well, Robert. Just…a bad moment.”

She leaned her head into his shoulder. “You intend to see this through to the end, don’t you?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. “And our blessed rambunctious son, too!”

She laughed again, very softly, but there was no half sob to go with it. “Very well, husband. I’ll help. As best I can.”

Near midnight, Captain McParland and the two corporals left the fort again. On horseback, having been assured by Major Totten that the few enemy units who had crossed to the north bank during the day had retreated to their own camp before nightfall. They’d have no difficulty moving upriver to find Driscol and his army—who were surely coming, the major had no doubt at all—beyond the obstacles posed by the terrain itself.

The rest of McParland’s soldiers remained behind to strengthen the garrison at Arkansas Post.

After carefully asking permission, Taylor took the opportunity to inspect the fort. He was a bit surprised that Totten gave that permission. It was quite possible that a time would come, and not so far in the future, when Taylor might be investing Arkansas Post. If not he himself, some other officer in the army of the United States.

But there might lie the answer, as well. A potential foe, forewarned, might never become a foe at all. These things were always difficult to predict. For a professional soldier even more than most people, life was seen in the words of the apostle:
through a glass, darkly.