1824: The Arkansas War Read Online Free Page B

and sat down heavily in his chair. “I understand. The gist of it is that there is no practical alternative, unless one is prepared to wage a long and costly war, to launching a major expedition against the Indian Confederacy except up the Arkansas River valley.”
    “Yes, sir. The Red River can’t serve, not with at least a hundred and fifty miles of it clogged up with fallen trees. The Great Raft, they call it.”
    “And Driscol, being a very experienced soldier, knows that perfectly well.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “So he designed his fortifications and lines of defense—his version of Wellington’s Lines of Torres Vedras in the Peninsular War—in such a way as to channel any attacker up the river.”
    “Yes, sir. His lines are brilliantly designed, too. Far better than I would have thought, to be honest. I think he must be getting advice from somewhere. Driscol was a sergeant in Napoleon’s army, not an officer. And the only sight he would have ever gotten of Wellington’s defenses would have been from a distance. Even with his huge army, Massena never made any serious attempt on Torres Vedras.”
    “How do you mean, ‘brilliantly designed’?” asked Adams.
    The general turned to face him. “Consider the problem he faces. Even with the recent flood of immigrants coming from the freedmen communities, added to the constant influx of runaway slaves and the settlers sponsored by the American Colonization Society, there still can’t be more than some tens of thousands of negroes in that Arkansas Chiefdom, as the Confederates call their respective states. Certainly not more than eighty thousand, I shouldn’t think. Add to that perhaps ten thousand whites by now, all told.”
    “
That
many?” The president’s eyebrows were lifted. “Whites, I mean. I wouldn’t have thought…”
    He glanced at Adams. “Again, a smile. Why?”
    Adams had also resumed his seat. Now he leaned his short, heavy frame back into it. “I can’t say I’m surprised, Mr. President. Not
every
white man in America shares Calhoun’s attitudes.”
    Nor do most of them come from Virginia gentry, as you do.
But he left that unsaid, of course. “There are the missionaries, first of all. A very heavy presence of Quakers, naturally, and they tend to move in entire families. Then, a fair number—call it a heavy sprinkling—of young radicals. Abolitionists, they’re starting to call themselves.”
    Monroe made a face. For all the president’s humane nature, which Adams would be the first to allow, the man was still the product of his upbringing. Though a slave-owner himself, Monroe—like his close friends and predecessors Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—considered the institution of slavery problematic at best, and probably an outright evil. Still, any drastic and rapid abolition of slavery was considered impossible, and the attempt to do it, economically and socially disastrous.
    Adams, a New Englander, thought it was probably impossible also, for political reasons. But he would have accepted the economic and social disasters abolition might bring, for the sake of the greater political disaster they would avert. More and more, he was becoming convinced that if slavery festered for too long, it would produce, in the end, one of the most horrible episodes of bloodshed any nation had ever endured. And would steadily undermine the foundations of the republic before it got there.
    But there was no point reopening that debate here and now, so Adams continued to the next point.
    “I imagine that most of the whites there, however, are simply settlers. No different, really, from any western settlers. Scots-Irish in the main, of course.”
    “I’d think they’d bridle at being ruled by blacks,” Monroe said.
    The president was a very perceptive man, so the moment those words were spoken, his gaze moved to Scott. “And now
you’re
smiling, General. Why?”
    Scott coughed into his fist as a way of suppressing his amusement. “You have to