1824: The Arkansas War Read Online Free Page A

workingmen—and they’re even happier with the freedmen exclusion laws than Calhoun is. Except, not being slave-owners, they don’t care a fig about the problem of runaway slaves. Let the darkies escape to Arkansas, and good riddance—and for sure and certain, don’t expect
them
to support a war to get them back. Much less volunteer to fight in it.”
    “I wasn’t
advocating
such an expedition, Mr. President, Secretary of State. Personally, I think it’d be sheer folly. But you asked my military opinion, and I’m simply trying to give it to you.”
    “Of course, General.” Monroe’s courtesy was back in full force. “Neither I nor the secretary meant any of our—ah, perhaps impatient view of the matter—to be inflicted upon you.”
    “Yes,” Adams grunted. “My apologies, Winfield. I didn’t mean to suggest you were a party to Calhoun’s madness. Please continue.”
    Scott nodded. “It would help a great deal, Mr. President, if I had a map to work from. Is there one at hand?”
    “I can have one brought, certainly.” The president began to rise, but Adams waved him down. “Please! The proprieties must be maintained. The best maps are in my office, anyway. I’ll get one for us. Just the trans-Mississippi region, Winfield?”
    “Yes, that should do.”
    Adams was at the door to the president’s office. “This will take a moment. There’s no point sending a servant. He’ll just waste time not finding it and then waste still more time trying to think up an excuse.”
    It was said rather sarcastically. Adams said many things rather sarcastically. It was a habit his wife chided him about. As did a veritable legion of other people, including Adams himself. He tried to restrain the habit, but…
    Alas. John Quincy Adams had many virtues. Even he would allow that to be true, as relentlessly self-critical as he was. But “suffering fools gladly” was not and never would be one of them.
    Still, he thought God would forgive him that sin when the time came. As sins went, it was rather a small one, after all. Even Jesus, if you studied the New Testament from the proper angle, suffered from it to a degree.

    By the time Adams returned to the president’s office, Monroe had cleared his desk of all the materials on it. Adams, with Scott assisting, spread the large map across the surface.
    “Good. This will make it all much clearer,” Scott said. “Let’s begin here, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi.”
    A long, powerful-looking finger pinned the spot, then slid to the north. “Then, up the Mississippi to St. Louis. At St. Louis—upstream again, you’ll notice—you move along the Missouri, skirting the Ozarks to the south. Then…”
    He looked up, giving the other two men a sardonic glance. “Then…
what?
”
    “There’s the Grand River,” Adams suggested, but with no great force. “Eventually.”
    “Ah, yes, the Grand. Also called the Neosho, I believe. Hard to tell from this map, but it doesn’t really
look
all that grand, does it? And do please note that you have to traverse a considerable distance before you can reach any headwaters of the Arkansas. By now, you’ve gone hundreds of miles upstream, followed by a land march with no means of supplying your troops except with horses and wagons. That’s difficult even without enemy resistance being encountered—and we’re bound to encounter some. From the indigenes, first—those are the Osage, you know, a fierce tribe—even before we come into Cherokee territory.”
    He straightened. “I won’t say it
can’t
be done. It could, certainly, with the expenditure of enough time, effort, and—most of all—money. There’s simply no way around it, Mr. President, Mr. Secretary. West of the Mississippi, the main rivers all run west to east, or northwest to southeast. There is no real help there for an army large enough to do the job that tries to approach the Confederacy from the north.”
    Monroe pushed aside a portion of the map