The road was deep-rutted clay, the horses daintily picking their way. Presently it plunged into a mile of dark woods, hickory, mostly, with a good sprinkling of chestnut and some poplar. It was natural ambush country. He didn’t expect
trouble, but he eased his pistol and made sure the carbine in the boot was clear. He saw Jack touch his own pistol.
Once it had all been forest like this, settlers downing a few trees for room to scratch out a cornfield and living mostly on game. Now countless fields like his own funneled produce down the river; fifteen years ago a half-dozen flatboats made the run but near five thousand had gone last year. The river opened the world to the American West. The Spanish were crazy to think they could stop this flow like corking a bottle.
Jackson was some disappointed in the new administration. He was a Democrat to the core and had been ready to march when the Federalists backed down. But since then you couldn’t hardly tell that a new philosophy had come to town. Same old business, so far as the frontier was concerned. Whatever happened to that 1795 treaty with Spain? The Spanish took years to vacate treaty lands and still closed the river whenever they felt like it. Any pissant official could hold you up for days, and you had no recourse. It was all international too, Spain still dreaming of peeling off the American West into a neutral buffer state supported by the Spanish crown. Maybe something was in planning up to Washington, but if so they were taking their time. Still, that little Madison was tougher than he looked and was a friend of the West; he’d stood shoulder to shoulder with Jackson when Tennessee was fighting for statehood in the Congress. So there was still hope.
But Tennessee was the closest place to New Orleans, and Jackson figured that put it on the front lines. If the United States took action, it would call on Tennessee; if it didn’t, Tennessee might take action and call on the United States. Find out if they had any guts in Washington … .
He needed that major generalcy in short, but John Sevier stood squarely in his way. The bad blood between them went back six years. Sevier had commanded Tennessee militia for years, he the hero of King’s Mountain, won the Revolution, and so forth, long, long time ago. But then he was elected governor and that threw the militia post open and Jackson stood for election. He was twenty-seven years old at the time
and that looked plenty mature and seasoned to him. But Sevier had taken offense at his youth, it seemed. He’d jumped all over Jackson, said he was young and callow, and labeled him an upstart because he had no official military experience, though he’d led the boys into the deep woods on plenty of retaliatory raids to teach Indians they couldn’t just raid settlers whenever they wanted and he’d never lost a man. But Sevier, he just acted the dog in the manger, no other word for it. He put up a nonentity, George Conway, amiable but no military flair and no national view. Figured that would leave old Sevier himself still Mr. Tennessee Military. Governor wasn’t enough, you see. Like he owned the military. Finally he’d made it a test of his own reputation, and Jackson went down to humiliating defeat and that sort of treatment don’t sit well. Jackson wasn’t done with Sevier, not by a long shot.
Rachel said it hit pride harder than reputation. Maybe, but it was different now. He had made himself a power in West Tennessee and to be brushed aside again would be dangerous and perhaps even fatal to his hopes. Yet it was a tricky election, with scarcely a hundred senior officers voting and their interests sharply different from those of the people at large.
It was a time to think carefully.
“What I hear,” Jack said, as if unburdening himself, “is that Sevier plans to run his ownself, now that his three terms as governor are over. Wants his old job back.”
That was bad news—for Jackson and for Tennessee. Things were hotting up, and it would be at the national and international level. But Sevier couldn’t see an inch beyond state borders. Jackson’s vision was broad and sweeping; he was an American and his country was in danger. And Sevier was old, way up in his fifties someplace, and soft from sitting around for years being important. A day in the field would probably finish him. He would be a critical mistake for Tennessee. Reputation only carries you so far.
But he was still formidable. And there are many ways to serve; could Jackson risk a destructive defeat?
“Drover come in from Louisville yesterday says the talk
there is same as here—Spanish gonna close the river again.” Jack said. “Seems they figure if they punish the West, the old Spanish conspiracy talk in Louisville may get going again—split the Union talk.”
“Bastards!” Jackson cried. “I hate that conspiracy mouthing.” Before Kentucky and Tennessee were admitted, some of the boys flirted with Spain in hopes of getting the river open; but now talk of separating the West on behalf of Spain was treason! Leave it to him and he’d string a few of ’em up to a stout oak limb and put an end to such chatter. He had his suspicions that that scoundrel General Wilkinson was peddling the same dream to the Spanish, knave selling his country for gold. By God, he ever got a chance to prove it, he’d have the fat general dangling from the same limb!
Jack grinned. “Good thing you don’t talk that way from the bench.”
Jackson calmed. The outburst had done him good. “They hear it with the bark still on in my court,” he said. “But I’ll tell you, Spanish close the river, never mind separating from the Union. We’ll go down and separate Spain from New Orleans. Throw ’em in the sea, by God, let ’em swim to Cuba!”
“So,” said Jack, “I guess that election matters, don’t it?” Jack didn’t say a lot but he was a pretty smart fellow.
“I’ll think on it,” Jackson said.
Daniel Clark was
the
merchant capitalist of New Orleans, and every year he sent a factor north to Nashville and on to Louisville and Cincinnati, lining up cargoes for the seagoing brigs that came up the Mississippi. The factor this year, whose name was Umbrick, proved to be a laconic fellow with a gotch eye and Tennessee in his voice, probably a flatboatman who’d found a home with Clark. He was explaining what Jackson already knew, that Clark was the soul of honesty but no one could guarantee that any shipment would get through. They would take all Jackson could send, but he would send at his own risk, not their problem until it cleared the Spanish and was in their hands.
That alone told you how outrageous the Spanish really were, and there was plenty more in the way of outrages. You’d think a fellow as smart as James Madison could grasp the peril of the Spanish thumb on the western jugular.
“Carl Mobry died,” Umbrick said. “Word come awhile back.”
Jackson was sorry to hear that. He’d been shipping with Mobry for years and liked him personally. He was square. Umbrick said he’d gotten heavy, which made Jackson think of Rachel pressing her hand to her chest. Sometimes her heart went to fluttering something fierce and she was getting heavy too, though she struggled with it.
After a bit of polite palaver, Jackson asked what this would mean to his goods.
Umbrick shrugged. “I understand his widder woman plans to run the company.”
“A woman? I don’t know …”
“Me neither. She’s a New Orleans girl, relation of old Dan’l somehow. I understand she’s coming down. But I can find you a different shipper.”
“Sounds like she’s got guts,” Jackson said. Rachel was all courage and ran things perfectly well. “I’ll give her a try,” he said. “but she’ll have to be tough.”
“You bet, what with the news. You hear the French are coming back? Taking over Louisiana?”
“French! What the hell are you talking about?”
“They say Spain has done signed a secret treaty to give Louisiana back to France.”
“That’s supposed to be for sure?”
“Hell, nothing’s for sure in New Orleans. Rumors every day. But a lot of folks are listening to this one.”
Jackson pondered on that after Umbrick left. It did make kind of an awful sense. New Orleans was French through and through. France had owned it for a hundred years till England took it in the French and Indian War forty-odd years ago and gave it to Spain. The dons hadn’t yet made a dent in its Frenchness; you met a New Orleans man, he couldn’t wait to tell you he was French, not Spanish.
Until now, at least, Jackson had admired Napoleon for his military manner and his decisive use of force, to say nothing of the fact that he was fighting the British for whom Jackson had no affection; but now, by God, the man was beginning to resemble one of those octopuses they said would come out of the sea and wrap themselves right around a ship and carry it down. He’d fought the continent to a standstill and was building up his forces for more. And you could figure losing Louisiana even forty years ago would be a burr under such a man’s saddle. Big men think about righting national wrongs, and Napoleon was big.
France astride the western jugular …
“That could be a disaster,” he said.
Coffee grunted agreement.
The thing was that while the Spanish made trouble, they actually were weak. Their colonial army was small and scattered thinly along the river clear to Saint Louis. A brigade of Tennessee militia could deal with them, though it would make a hell of an international fuss. But France was a major power and had been victorious all over Europe. Napoleon’s blooded troops wouldn’t worry about a Tennessee brigade.
“The French get in solid, we’ll never get ’em out,” he said. Clouds had been building. A cold rain began, and they went inside the log store. The river had turned slate gray, matching his sudden turn of mood. “We’ll have to fight if they come. I mean, really fight. Have to get the nation behind us.”
He sat in a wooden armchair, stretched his feet toward the fire, and stuffed an old cob pipe. When it was drawing right, he lighted it with a glowing coal and filled the room with fragrance. Napoleon astride the American West’s lifeline? If it proved true, it would be fatal to the future. Tennessee had to get ready, and that meant that he had no choice.
“I think I’ll throw a Christmas barbecue,” he said. “At the new place. Butcher two or three steers and as many hogs and get ’em on the slow fires. Kegs of beer, plenty of whiskey punch. We’ll lay down a floor and get the fiddlers in and have a dance, Rachel’s choir for some good gospel singing. No preaching though. I’ll invite all the voting officers, them
and their ladies, we’ll put them up all around, and we’ll have one hell of a party.”
He pointed his pipe stem. “And before they get too far gone, I’ll talk to ’em. Tell ’em about the French and what that means if it happens and where the nation stands in the world and Tennessee stands in the nation. I’ll show ’em we’re on the front lines, and the day will come when the whole country will look to us to lead the way. Show them what will happen to them and their farms and their families if this comes and we knuckle under and let it stand.”
He nodded to himself, mulling this over, liking it. “Now,” he said, “old Sevier don’t talk like that. I’ve heard him. His vision is about to the end of his thumb. He’ll tell them how he won the revolution at King’s Mountain and how he loves Tennessee and they ought to vote for him ’cause it’s his right.”
He was up and pacing, the excitement of it fierce in his blood.
“But I’ll be telling them about real things, and I believe they’ll listen. I can beat Sevier, and by God, I’m going to do it!”
And he had a secret weapon he might use, but he didn’t tell Jack about that.
NEW ORLEANS, FALL 1801
The
Cumberland Queen
lay on the hook at English Turn, the great looping bend in the Mississippi some twenty miles below New Orleans that vessels could take against the current only when the wind was right. Danny Mobry stood at the taffrail watching mud brown water suck at the stern with an
insistent chuckling noise as brown pelicans wheeled and plunged to snatch fish from the water. The
Queen
had been on anchor four days, no sign of the wind changing; a dozen ships were anchored within view.
Danny had heard of English Turn all her life; legend said it was so called because in the days when the French still ruled the Mississippi, a British warship poked its way that far up the river. Frenchmen in pirogues appeared and told the English captain that he couldn’t get through, and if he did, shore batteries would blow him apart. So he turned and fled the hundred miles back down the river to the sea, while the French chuckled. New Orleans loved that story. But then, New Orleans was definitely, certifiably, everlastingly French.
Captain Mac used the time to square away his vessel, scrubbing decks and fo’c’sle of salt accumulated in a rough passage from the Chesapeake, savage water off Cape Hatteras and the tail of a hurricane in the Straits of Florida. Men deftly spliced new lines to repair frayed rigging. Spars were scraped and varnished, brightwork polished. One by one sails were laid on the deck and scrubbed, hosed down with river water from a two-man pump and hoisted to dry, snowy in the sun.
Carl had always said that Capt. William McKeever was a sound man who ran a taut ship and could be counted on to carry a cargo to Le Havre, negotiate a price, find a return cargo, and come in on time. Faced with the reality of running a shipping company alone, mistress of a dozen ships crewed by men who ranged from rough to dangerous, she had turned first to McKeever.
Shaking aside terrible memories—she thought she would never again go to the rotunda with its awful echoes—she had dressed in widow’s black and set out. Samuel had driven her to the quay in the Eastern Branch where the
Cumberland Queen
was moored in the shadow of the massive frigates at the Washington Navy Yard. She knew the vessel well, but now it seemed different and almost threatening. It was a merchantman riding high in the water with its cargo
discharged, a brig square rigged with two towering masts and slender three-pound guns fore and aft to ward off bumboat attack. McKeever was a stout man of about fifty, sandy hair giving way to a bald spot, blond hair matted on his arms, with a tiny wife named Molly who sailed with him on every trip.
He set out a small table on the quarterdeck near the highly varnished wheel, while Molly McKeever offered thick Turkish coffee in tiny cups that Danny understood was a welcoming ceremony. She sipped cautiously, admired the care he’d given the ship, and told him that Carl had left the company to her and she intended to run it. At that Mrs. Mac, as she said she liked to be called, sat up straight and gave Danny a dazzling smile of approval.
Captain Mac nodded. “We figured so, and I don’t see why you can’t do good. Carl thought you was right smart—you could tell that.” That Carl had made his feelings so evident surprised her, but she said nothing as he continued, “So, yes, ma’am, I’ll be right honored to sail under your orders. Carl always treated me good; you do the same and we’ll get on fine.”
The other captains were different. Obviously the very idea of working under a woman’s direct orders disturbed them. Three flatly refused, one with a string of obscenities. She sent McKeever with his first mate and a couple of ordinaries to make sure this one didn’t fire the ship as he left. She found she could rely on Captain Mac and decided to make him a 10 percent owner of the
Queen,
a share that could rise in time.
“Oh, Miz Mobry,” he cried, “that’s mighty fine of you. Maybe we better see how we get on.”
“We’ll draw the papers now to take effect in six months if all goes well.”
The real difficulty was with the shippers on whom she must depend for cargoes. Many were friends and she knew others as customers, but one by one they refused to do business with her. They were full of condolences for Carl, and they urged her to sell and settle down to comfortable widowhood. She rejected four offers to buy the firm, two of them decent. As to placing cargoes with her, they really didn’t
think a woman alone could run such a company. They said it would all fly apart, crews would dissolve, cargoes would be stolen, in a year there would be nothing left. The losses they could suffer if she collapsed and their cargoes disappeared could put them in debtor’s prison.
She felt she’d climbed the stairs over every wharf in Washington and a good many in Baltimore; it got so it took all her courage and nerve to walk up, all her strength to come down after another refusal with her shoulders squared and her chin high. Some were hostile because they felt running ships wasn’t a woman’s place, but most were just plain worried. Many said that if she lasted a year, then maybe …
A year was forever. She sat alone in the big house with its view of the Capitol and knew she was at the crisis point of her life. Selling the ships, the warehouses, all that Carl had built in thirty years seemed like killing his memory, which was all she had left. Darkness came; the building glowed in violet twilight. Tears started and she checked them. For a moment she had an overpowering desire to open the rum that Carl had liked and drink and cry, but she didn’t move and the yearning passed. The building loomed in the window, now bathed in moonlight.
Gradually her sense of the Capitol changed. The image of echoing voices in the rotunda as her husband died in her arms faded toward a new perception. For this building also was a tower of bravery, crowning a hill that just the other day had been a cornfield, anchoring a city that hadn’t existed, focusing a nation cradled in revolution and nurtured on dreams, all of it testament to courage and faith and conviction. In the shadow of such a totem, could she be less?
Sometime before the moon’s gleam passed from the looming dome, a plan came to her. If she could find just the right customer, someone entirely new …
Doing so took two months of calculating, arranging, planning and proposing, including a trip by stage to Boston and back that ate up agonizing days. On her return she sold three ships for capital and loaded the
Cumberland Queen
with finished goods likely to find a market in New Orleans; hardware,
notions, luxuries, French wines, satins and silks. Then, making sure Mrs. Mac was aboard and taking Millie and Samuel with her, she set out for the one place in the world where she had blood connections.
She remembered her uncle with awe. She’d been a girl when Carl snatched her away and Daniel Clark, for whom she’d been named, was a businessman of great weight. He was a master at dealing with the Spanish overlords who of ten made trouble for shipments from the north but for whom his trade nevertheless was a chief source of income in a province that never paid its own way to the Spanish crown.
But he hadn’t achieved such eminence by being soft, and she sensed that blood ran as thin as did friendship in matters of business. He had succeeded the original Daniel Clark, founder of the business, and she remembered mainly his austerity and the firmness with which he had eliminated Ireland from his accent. Now, older herself, she could see that a certain harshness of manner probably was essential to a successor taking control, but it had become his persona. So would he be moved to help her? As factor for upriver clients, he had plenty of cargoes to place, but would he risk losses for which owners would blame him? Unlikely, she thought. But she had something to offer.
Overnight the wind shifted. Chanting sailors on the windlass hoisted the anchor as sails bellied. They made English Turn in three tacks and late that afternoon moored to the levee at New Orleans. The turrets of the cathedral were visible over the top of the levee, bearing a startling force of memory. She sent a message to her uncle: She was here with urgent business; could he see her tonight?
She sat in a folding chair on the quarterdeck watching the evening sun give a golden cast to the levee and the figures along its crest and the fishermen unloading their catches on narrow wharves lying lengthwise. Someone was cleaning fish, hurling offal into the river, where it was snatched by gulls and seabirds that fought for dangling prizes in midair. The distinctive odor of alligator musk swept over the water from the swamps beyond. It had been years since she’d been
here, but the familiarity of it all brought tears to her eyes. But even wiping her eyes, she knew that this wasn’t home; her mother and father were dead and she’d never been close to her older brother, who had taken their small plantation and would not welcome her. Home was the new capital of the United States.
Presently she saw a tall, slender man wearing a planter’s hat and a coat of rakish cut come down the levee steps, moving rapidly with an easy grace. He mounted their gangway and tossed a salute to Captain Mac.
“Splendid-looking vessel, Captain! You bring honor to our port.” His voice was clear and bright; it flashed through her mind that he probably could sing. “Madame Mobry is here?”
Captain Mac led him up to the quarterdeck.
“Daniella!” he cried. “How wonderful to see you!”
She was startled. “Do I know you?”
“Ah!” He laughed, a quick bark. “What a blow to masculine pride! You don’t remember me, and I was sick with love for you. But that’s the way of all tragedy, you know, the fate of the ardent lover to be cast aside on life’s cruel dust heaps. I’m Henri Broussard.”
“Henri?” Dimly she remembered, a tall, skinny boy with dreadful pimples who’d been a pest, often near, rarely speaking. “But—but you were just a child.”
“A child! Madame, forgive me, I am two years your senior.”
“You couldn’t be! I was sixteen when—”
“I know too well. When Mr. Mobry swept you away to the United States, which I have detested on principle ever since. I was eighteen.” He struck a gallant pose. “And passion never beats more fiercely in a man’s heart than at eighteen.”
When she didn’t answer, he said quickly, “Forgive my chatter. I am commissioned to present you at Uncle Daniel’s house at nine. It’s only seven; I suggest we stroll in the twilight and reacquaint you with what once was your home.”
They climbed the steps to the top of the levee, which was a promenade, wide and paved with crushed shell, orange
trees in orderly rows. Couples strolled and vendors offered small glasses of lemonade and little cakes arranged fetchingly on sheets, some with languid fan overhead to drive off flies. Broussard led her along the pathway, bowing occasionally to acquaintances but not introducing her. He continued to expound on the passion he had felt for her long ago until she grew exasperated.
“Really, Henri, don’t you see I’m in mourning?”
“Forgive me, Daniella,” he said. “It is a joy to see you, but I do understand grief.”
He said this with such feeling that she glanced up quickly, wondering if he was playing with her, but he looked quite guileless. He also looked quite startlingly handsome, his face lean, his profile dramatic. She glanced down quickly, feeling disoriented and somehow inappropriate, and immediately noticed the strength of his wrist, held before him to accommodate her arm through his. It was thick and powerful; she thought he could break things with his hands, and she noticed curls of dark hair lying against his knuckles. She was shaken in some way that she couldn’t have imagined and didn’t like. She looked away from him, drinking in the familiar look of what had been home and was—definitely—home no longer.
The cathedral bells were tolling for evening worship, the windows of the Cabildo were dark, government foolscap put away and workers fled. Presently they came to the market on the levee, tables under awnings loaded with fresh fish, vegetables, cuts of beef and pork; hawkers sold cups of gumbo, braised meats on sticks, bottled beer cooling in tubs of water, rum in what looked like pewter thimbles …
Just short of the market Henri turned down the levee and they were in the great square, with more people hurrying toward the cathedral doors that now were closing. Others strolled, laughing, men holding women close, women looking up with promise in their eyes, boys skipping and yelling and sword fighting with sticks. There seemed music everywhere, drifting on night air, fifes and fiddles and banjoes and here and there a mouth organ, plaintive and sad. Couples
danced impromptu little turns to this music, rolling right into the dance and back out on walks made of crushed oyster shell, tossing coins to the players. The rhythm of it, the laughter, the careless abandon of the flow into the dance to emerge rejuvenated, invaded Danny’s mood for a moment, and she too wanted to dance and then remembered and then feared Henri would forget and turn to her. But he walked on and she walked beside him, as calmly as if her heart weren’t churning. How many times in her girlhood she had strolled here, noticing every hot-eyed glance from almost every man and boy she passed and acknowledging none, until Carl had swept her away to a new life.
New Orleans throbbed like a great city; she thought it more lively than Philadelphia though with eight to ten thousand people it was scarcely a sixth of that city’s size. Maybe it played a city’s role to the hilt because there was no other for a thousand miles in any direction. It was civilization’s outpost deep in a swampy wilderness.