by Chet Hagan
Planks of the heavy flatboat began to disintegrate under the pounding, tossing the men into the cruel waters. The thundering noise of the ice floes crashing together and the screams of the men became as one.
Young Dewey stared in horror as one of the soldiers was caught between two of the floes, crushed into a bloody nothing as the massive ice pieces rubbed together.
It took more than an hour for General Jackson and his officers to bring the flotilla ashore and to count the dead and injured. Two bodies were dragged from the water, both badly mangled. A roll call found yet another man missing and presumed drowned.
Broken arms and legs were common. Those who had been tossed into the river were stripped of their frozen clothing and warmed beside roaring fires, vigorously massaged by their companions in an effort to bring life back to limbs made immobile in the unequal battle against nature.
Jackson quickly appointed a party to move overland with the injured to seek medical care. The two bodies were to be carried along. The ground was too solidly frozen to bury them where they had died.
Lee sat with his drawing pad, attempting to re-create with his charcoal the death he had seen of that one man—to finish it before the protective mechanism of his brain would not let him see it any longer.
IV
IT was a month before Bon Marché heard from Lee. His letter, addressed to Mattie, was read by her at the dinner table.
Bravery was just a word to me before this, but in the last several weeks I have seen more bravery than I could have imagined. The bitter cold and the ice on the rivers have made this a painful journey. It has been tolerable only because of the brave acts of countless anonymous men every day that we move forward toward the ultimate test—the war itself.
My drawings are being made, as I had intended, but that, too, is difficult. I’ve had to forget about using ink because my supply has been ice since the day I left. Charcoal suffices for most of my work, but I’ve also done two oils. I’m pleased with them, partly because they were done under such extreme circumstances.
I admit to you that, right now, I envy the warmth I know you have at Bon Marché. Yet I am glad that I came on this adventure.
My fondest hope is that Father will find it in his heart to forgive me.
Mattie stopped reading for a moment. She looked up at her husband, believing that she saw tears in his eyes. But Charles sat glumly, silently.
Two days ago there was a terrifying event—an earthquake that churned up the waters and swayed the giant trees along the banks. The earth literally rolled, I think, and General Jackson said the hand of God was upon us. This morning we found that the quake had been so severe, in one area ahead of us, that it changed the course of the Mississippi.
“That must have been the same one we felt here,” Alma May said excitedly.
“I imagine it was, dear.”
Mattie went back to the reading:
Our initial goal is Natchez, where General Jackson anticipates receiving orders that will take us into battle against the English …
V
LIEUTENANT Lee Dewey had known Andy Jackson ever since his family had come to Tennessee. He had seen his rages, his excesses of emotion, before. But nothing approached the anger he saw in the fighter at this moment.
Natchez had been reached against the greatest of odds; infantry and cavalry were there, reasonably intact. Now Jackson had received a communication from General James Wilkinson from his headquarters in New Orleans. As he read it, his face darkened, his teeth ground together, the veins in his neck expanded and throbbed.
Andy tossed the dispatch to young Dewey.
“It is my desire that you should halt in the vicinity of Natchez,” Jackson’s superior had written. “Several circumstances prevent my calling you lower down the river: the impracticability of providing for your horses, the health of the troops; the policy of holding your corps on the alert…”
Lee looked up. “What does he mean, sir, about holding the corps on the alert?”
“It means, damn it, that that traitorous ass Wilkinson wants to keep us immobile!” Jackson stamped about the confines of the tent. “Impotent, as he is! He means to keep me out of the fighting because he fears that I and my brave men will show him up for what he is: an incompetent, cowardly scoundrel!”
“Yes, sir.” Lee wanted to say something that might cool Jackson’s anger. “Perhaps, sir, this delay will be a blessing in disguise. A lot of the men are ill.”
“The cure, Dewey, is for us to feel the heat of battle!”
“Yes, sir.” Lee went back to reading the dispatch. Wilkinson had informed Jackson that a brigade inspector would be sent to muster the Tennessee troops into federal service, and that a paymaster would be on hand to pay them: “These officers,” he had written, “will give every aid and facility, and if it is in my power to add to the comfort of the band of patriots under your orders, it is only necessary to point out the mode to me.”
And so they waited. A week. Two weeks. During that time Dewey had heard—from another officer, not from Jackson himself—that Andy had requested the War Department to send him to Canada, where the American cause had floundered. He wanted to fight. Somewhere. Anywhere.
On the fifteenth day of inactivity at Natchez, General Jackson called his officers together. His face was pained.
“I have today,” he told them, “received the following communication from the secretary of war, Mr. Armstrong.” He shifted the paper in his hand so that he could read it better: “‘The causes for embodying the Corps under your command have ceased to exist.’”
Several of the officers gasped.
“‘You will on receipt of this consider it dismissed from public service.’”
“No! No!”
Jackson pressed on: “‘Deliver over to Major General Wilkinson all articles of public property. Accept for yourself and the Corps the thanks of the President of the United States.’”
Andy stopped reading. There was a stunned silence.
The lanky commander smiled wanly. “Gentlemen, we are going home as we came—proud, unbowed by adversity. General Wilkinson”—a cloud came over his face once again—“has had the temerity to suggest that I encourage my men to enlist in the Regular Army. But, by God, he shall not have them!”
Jackson was roaring now. “Every officer is to pass the word that any Regular recruiting officer is to be drummed out of camp! Tell all the men that this Corps will march home intact! It is my solemn responsibility to these brave men to return them to their loved ones. And I shall do it, with my own means!”
The next several days were crowded with activity. Lieutenant Dewey was given the task of counting the sick. There were many of them … too many of them. Lee witnessed a bitter scene between Jackson and Wilkinson’s quartermaster, in which Andy demanded—and got—twenty days of rations. But wagons to carry the ill Tennesseans were not made available. Jackson had to hire eleven of them, paying out of his own pocket, with the horses necessary to draw them. Whatever else was needed for his men, and was not made available by the Regular Army, Andy bought on the strength of his signature scrawled on promissory notes.
It was mid-March when they left Natchez, facing an five-hundred-mile march.
General Andrew Jackson was afoot, striding out confidently in his mud-caked boots. The leader.
His own horses carried some of the ailing.
Lee Dewey followed along in Andy’s footsteps, his drawings and his journal in a pack on his back. But his steps were stumbling, erratic.
He had a high fever.
VI
ABNER Lower approached Charles in the stud barn. The chief overseer at Bon Marché had a mission, but he wasn’t certain how to carry it out.
“Charles,” he said hesitantly, “I’d like to have a moment or two of your time.”
“Certainly.”
“I’ve been asked by Franklin and Louise to speak to you.”
“Since when can’t my children speak for themselves!”
“That’s just it,” the overseer said. “It seems that on the subject of Lee no one can speak to you these days, not even Mattie.”
“So … the cabal against me is complete! They’ve even recruited you!”
“No, I would have recruited myself, Charles. This silence between you and Mattie is hurting everyone, me included. It’s not natural, Charles.”
“Mattie conspired with that damned Jackson to take Lee—”
Lower interrupted. “She didn’t. Lee made his own decision, as a man.”
Dewey grunted, leaning on a stall door. “Go on.”
“Schimmel tells me that there’s word that Jackson’s Corps is on the way home. All of us want you to do the right thing with Mattie before Lee gets home. You don’t want him to find this division when he returns.”
“You seem to presume a great deal about what I want.”
“I know how deeply you love your family, and that you must be just as miserable as everyone else is. Heal this thing,” Abner pleaded. “Apologize to her.”
“So it has to be me who does the apologizing!”
“Who else, Charles, but you?”
VII
“YOU should have seen him, Father! He was magnificent!”
Lee Dewey’s enthusiasm belied the weak voice in which he spoke. He was ill, desperately so; the doctor reported that he had pneumonia. His face was ghostly white now as he lay in bed in his room at Bon Marché, the worried family members gathered about him.
“You don’t have to tell us everything now,” Charles said, holding his hand. “Save your strength. You’ll have a whole lifetime to tell us of your adventures.”
“No, I want to, Father. I would have died if it hadn’t been for Andy. A lot of men would have died. Do you know that he walked nearly the entire eight hundred miles from Natchez? He gave his own horses to the men.”
Charles patted his hand. “You must rest now, son,” he said quietly.
“You’ve misjudged Andy,” Lee insisted.
“It seems I may have.” It was an admission that none gathered around the bed had ever expected to hear.
“You know what the men are calling him?”
“What?”
“Old Hickory. It’s a fitting name for him, Father. He is as tough as hickory.”
Dewey smiled at his son. “As are you. But tough or not, you need your rest. We’re all going to get out of here now and let you sleep.”
Charles leaned over and kissed Lee on the cheek. “God keep you, son.”
The Deweys filed out of the room, Angelica remaining to minister to Lee.
“Have you seen his drawings, Father?” Louise asked.
“No.”
They moved to the drawing room.
“You must look at them,” Louise continued. “They’re absolutely marvelous! They say more than Lee could ever tell us in words. August says they’re the finest things he’s ever seen. He says my twin has a great career ahead of him as a correspondent artist.”
Louise spread the drawings out on the desk, turning them over slowly as Charles and Mattie, their hands clasped, studied them.
Brushing a tear from his cheek, the patriarch of the Dewey family said to his wife: “It seems, dear, that my son has a unique talent.”
“Our son, Charles.”
“Of course—our son.” He held her in a tight embrace.
35
THE Deweys never would have known of it if Rachel Jackson hadn’t confided in Mattie.
Charles, several weeks after Lee’s return, rode to the Hermitage to thank Andrew Jackson for saving his son’s life.
“Andy appreciated it so much,” Rachel had said, “and I think that now, after all these years, they can find ways to be close friends.”
Mattie understood that it was best if she said nothing to her husband about knowing of the visit to the Hermitage. It had been a private thing for Charles, and she tried to keep it that way for him.
August Schimmel had printed several pages of Lee’s drawings, with some excerpts from his journal, in the Nashville Monitor. Also, he had sent one of the charcoal sketches to a New York publisher friend, and that sketch—showing the lanky Jackson marching defiantly along while, behind him, gravely ill men clung to the backs of his horses—was printed under the heading, “Old Hickory!”
Lee Dewey’s talent had spread the fame of the frontier general to the East Coast.
II
CHARLES Dewey’s newfound friendship with Andy Jackson was tenuous at best. What he had disliked about Jackson before still persisted: the quick temper, the resort to the pistol to settle any argument, the totally violent nature of the man. Charles recognized that his own angers were perhaps too close to the surface, and he made a determination to “like” Jackson, to excuse his excesses, to associate with him more and more.
He did that for Mattie.
And for Lee, whose admiration for General Jackson was a complete thing.
Charles reminded himself that Jackson was being badly used by the federal government. “A man of such obvious talent,” he had said to August Schimmel, “ought to be allowed to fight.”
The newspaper editor agreed with him, printing several editorials railing at the War Department for not employing Andy as a commander, especially since all else in the war seemed to be going so badly. Jackson, of course, agreed with the viewpoints expressed in the Monitor, and that, too, seemed to bring Charles and Andy closer together, in that Schimmel was perceived as being of Bon Marché.
Charles, then, kept silent when Jackson allowed himself to be dragged into yet another situation involving a duel. Dewey was appalled, because it obviously wasn’t Jackson’s fight at all.
Two officers of Andy’s disbanded army—Major William Carroll and Ensign Lyttleton Johnston—became involved in a public dispute. Over what, Charles didn’t care to know. But Johnston challenged Carroll to a duel, and Carroll replied that such a duel wasn’t possible because Johnston wasn’t a gentleman.
Enter Jesse Benton, the younger brother of Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson’s close friend and a colonel on the ill-fated expedition to Natchez. Young Benton, who was to have been Ensign Johnston’s second, found himself offended by Major Carroll’s comments about his friend and himself challenged Carroll to a duel.
“Andy’s been called in as a peacemaker,” Dewey reported to editor Schimmel, “but I can’t imagine he’s going to be very comfortable in that role.”
Charles was right. There was no peace.
The duel was set, with Jackson as the second for Major Carroll. It was a laughable thing. Jesse Benton was shot in the butt! The Monitor published the details of what had happened and all Nashville was amused.
But not Thomas Hart Benton. And, as it turned out, not Andy Jackson either. The dispute grew, the elder Benton writing to Jackson that the duel was seconded in a “savage, unequal, unfair, and base manner.” Jackson replied: “It is the character of the man of honor, and particularly of a soldier, not to quarrel and brawl like fish women.”
Dewey, worried, could confide only in Schimmel. “If the damned gossips would be quiet,” he said, “this thing might die. But they keep after Andy, fueling his temper. He told me yesterday that he’d horsewhip Tom Benton the next time he saw him.”
Schimmel shrugged. “Well, the Bentons are safely off in Franklin right now. Maybe a friend of Andy’s can keep them apart until it cools off.”
“Meaning me?”
“The others won’t, will they?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
Six weeks went by without incident. Dewey was in a good mood as he rode into town to have a meal with Jackson at the Nashville Inn.
He stopped off at the newspaper office when he reached town.
“The Bentons are in town,” his son-in-law said by way of greeting.
“Oh, good Lord! Where?”
“At the City Hotel.”
Charles hurried toward the Nashville Inn. He met Andy and John Coffee strolling toward the pos
t office. Dewey fell in step with them, trying to devise a plan in his mind to keep them from knowing that the Bentons were there.
His worst fears were realized!
The Benton brothers were standing on the wooden walk outside Talbot’s Tavern, next to the City Hotel. They glared at Andy; Andy glared back. But no words were spoken.
At the post office Jackson picked up his mail, and the three of them started back toward the Nashville Inn. Opposite the City Hotel, they saw Jesse Benton disappearing inside the hotel. Charles breathed a sigh of relief.
It was premature.
Suddenly, Jackson whirled and made for the door of the hotel, cracking his riding crop against his boot.
“Andy, don’t,” Charles said, grasping his arm.
The general shook himself loose, striding like a man possessed into the hotel, Charles and Coffee in his wake.
In the hallway, just inside the hostelry, stood the massive form of Thomas Hart Benton.
His whip held menacingly, Jackson moved at the elder Benton. “Now defend yourself, you damned rascal!”
Benton’s hand made a move toward his pistol, but Andy’s was already drawn, pointed directly at Benton’s face.
It became a stalking exercise, as Charles could only watch, fascinated by the drama. Jackson moved forward—one step, two, three. Benton retreated backward, keeping his eyes on the cocked pistol.
There was a shot!
Not from Jackson but from Jesse Benton, who had slipped through a doorway behind them and fired without warning. He had missed.
Two shots from Jackson at Tom Benton. Misses! It seemed impossible.
The elder Benton, pistols in both hands now, fired twice. One of the heavy balls smashed into Andy’s shoulder, imbedding itself. He fell heavily.
Seconds only had passed.
As Dewey, on his knees, crawled to attend to Jackson, John Coffee rushed at Benton, firing at him and missing also. He continued his attack with the butt of his now spent pistol.
Sounds of the gunshots had brought Andy’s other friends running from the nearby Nashville Inn.