From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  And so William, often troubled with a foreboding of some great future disaster but impatient for any kind of decisive action, and feeling faintly disloyal because of his association with the dubious Wilkinson, wrote much in his diary these days, and enjoyed the tart flavor of sarcasm as he wrote it. He was beginning to understand George’s bittersweet attitudes about duty.

  And Fanny, whose old notions of marital rapture were beginning to sour in the long absences and preoccupations of her husband, was beginning to relish the sniggering tone of William’s writings when they came to her in the mail. She felt that only they in this family—and perhaps George, in his different way—were canny enough to see through the unquestioning naiveté of their parents’ precepts. From General Wilkinson, by way of William, she was beginning to acquire worldly wisdom.

  And so, when George began hatching his desperate scheme to forsake his ungrateful country and become a leader in the French Revolution, Fanny was the only one at Mulberry Hill who felt in the least able to condone it.

  REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE WAS AT WAR WITH THE MONARCHIES of Europe, Spain among them. George’s mind and soul were caught up in contemplation of his old allies’ glorious struggle so far away, and he worked less and less on his memoir these days, and spent more and more time at the public house, drinking and talking. One of the chief topics these days was the French minister.

  Citizen Edmond Genet, the revolutionist, recently had come as France’s minister to the United States, and he was being feted everywhere in the East. He was already speaking of France and America as allies in France’s war against the kings, and word had come downriver to the interested ears of Kentuckians that he was proposing an uprising of Louisiana French against Spanish authority.

  Frankfort, on the Kentucky River, had been chosen as the capital of the fledgling State of Kentucky, and one of George’s old lieutenants, Isaac Shelby, was the first governor. George and his father rode down to the new capital one day to see the place and get the drift of public sentiments. With them rode Dr. James O’Fallon, home for a while from the Southeast.

  Frankfort swarmed with people with big ideas and strong opinions. As a frontier capital it was a rough and rowdy place, full of opportunists and favor-seekers. Quite a few of George’s old soldiers were around, some of them now looking prosperous and important, many looking old and broken. But John Clark was moved by the way they greeted his son, and he saw that their greetings were bolstering George’s self-esteem.

  There was a common refrain in the discussions and arguments they heard in Frankfort. Many men of affairs were saying that since Spain and France were at war, Americans had a clear obligation to go down and help the Mississippi Valley French drive the Spanish rulers out of New Orleans. They kept reminding each other that without French help Washington probably would have lost the war for independence. Many said that if there were an invasion of Spanish Louisiana, they and their friends would join it, and open up the Mississippi to Kentucky commerce at last, while they were about it. Even Governor Shelby had sentiments like that, and furthermore, he hinted, so did such people as Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. And John Clark heard many a man say that his son George should come out of retirement and lead such an invasion himself. George did not tell his father about the notions that were swirling through his mind as they rode back to Louisville a few days later with a group of travelers and a militia escort. But he was beginning to conceive, with that old sense of boldness and long vision and moral righteousness, one last chance to get off his knees.

  George found in his own household a ready accomplice. Dr. O’Fallon was already involved in land deals discomfiting the Spaniards in the Southeast. He had traveled much in those parts and was already up to his neck in activities inimical to Spanish interests, and could be trusted to conspire further against them. He could also write and spell most respectably, in an elegant script. And so, in sessions late at night, at George’s desk, a new jug of whiskey sitting sealed on the mantel to test George’s willpower, an ambitious plan was conceived and drafted, and addressed as a letter from General George Rogers Clark to Citizen Genet.

  He began by stating that his desire to help the French Republic in its causes was as strong as it ever had been during his own country’s revolution, and then summarized the deeds that he and his American and French followers had done in the West. These same men, he said, at the very least 1,500 of them, would flock to his standard, and in one short season take the whole of the Louisiana Territory for France. Dr. James O’Fallon’s scalp prickled as he wrote down the forceful words George dictated.

  “Some of the first and best men in this Western country will certainly accompany me. All we immediately want is money to procure provisions and ammunition for the conquest.… For our pay and gratifications in land, as we abandon our own here, we shall confide in the justice and generosity of the great nation we shall serve, after our labors are over. To save Congress from a rupture with Spain on our account, we must first expatriate ourselves and become French citizens. This is our intention.”

  He stalked about the room thinking of his next phrases. Each time he came near the mantel, he would look at the jug and tremble. Never had he done anything so defiant, so final, as this, and it was excruciating to do it sober. He had loved his country more than his life, but now he had come to the point where he was ready to forsake it, and he needed to say why. He pointed to the paper before O’Fallon and continued.

  “My country has proved notoriously ungrateful for my services, and so forgetful of those successful and almost unexampled enterprises which gave it the whole of its territory on this side of the great mountains, as in this my very prime of life to have neglected me. Since I relinquished my command over the Western country, Congress has had not one successful campaign in it!” He paused, breathing hard. “All this is true, Jim,” he hissed. “Ye know that?”

  “I do.” O’Fallon was sweating, sitting on the edge of the chair as he wrote.

  Neither of them noticed the soft tread of Fanny, who had come to the door of George’s room looking for her husband. She was standing there when George concluded.

  “On receiving a reply from you, I shall instantly have myself expatriated. And as soon as commissions for myself and my officers shall have been received and due provision made for the expedition … I shall raise my men and proceed to action. I thirst …” He glanced at the jug on the mantel, then turned on his heel away from it. “I thirst for the opportunity!”

  And then he saw Fanny’s beautiful, pale face in the doorway, suspended like a waning moon in the darkness of her hair, her clothing, the gloom of the unlighted hallway; and for an instant she looked exactly as Terese de Leyba had looked the first time he had seen her face framed in an upstairs window of the Spanish Governor’s mansion in St. Louis.

  Spanish!

  * * *

  GEORGE WAITED FOR GENET’S ANSWER, BUT HE DID NOT SIT still and wait for it. He rode from town to town in Kentucky and got tentative promises, promises of enlistments, provisions, arms, and services, to be called upon when and if Genet should accept. George approached only the Kentuckians he could trust. Their eagerness to march against Spain under his standard restored his self-esteem bit by bit. He was beginning to feel like a warrior again—even like a patriot, ironically. But it was an anxious time. There was a slight chance that Genet might not like what he would find as he investigated the reputation of this ambitious partisan. Sometimes, late at night, when there was nothing more that could be done until morning, George would sit, stone sober as he had been for months, gaze at the lamp flame and think of the possibility of being rebuffed—or, worse, ignored—by Genet, and he would break out in a cold sweat. And Fanny Clark O’Fallon would look at George and think of the same possibility, and she felt that her brother had climbed hard and boldly to stand once again on a high precipice. If Genet accepted him, he might stay on the high place and be everything he once had been. If not, his fall would be terrible.

  DR. JAMES O
’FALLON HAD GONE AWAY AGAIN, ON MORE OF his mysterious business. And now, with Fanny watching the post for letters from him as well as from William, she was always at a window. She wanted to know where her husband was so she could write and tell him the news.

  She was pregnant again, and she had an awful, intuitive fear that she might well never see her husband again, that he might never see his second son.

  George was always watching for the post, too, waiting for some sort of a message from Citizen Genet. He worked at his memoir now and then, trying to concentrate on it; he had completed about a hundred handwritten manuscript pages. He wrote almost every day, also, trying to forestall the creditors and their lawyers who had plagued him for so many years. And he met often every week with old veterans of his who would come to bring or receive intelligence about the Spanish defenses in the Louisiana Territory. He was, through his spy system, learning as much about the Mississippi now as he had before his expedition in 1778. Once again he was playing on a mental chessboard half a continent wide, and this time his unsuspecting opponent was the Spanish Governor in New Orleans. But he could do nothing but plan until Genet’s answer came, if it should come, nothing but plan and wait for the post. And so one day in June when a post rider came trotting up the road between the locust trees, George and Fanny nearly collided in the front door going out to meet him.

  The letter was not for either of them, but for the family. It was stunning news, written again this time in the shaky hand of their Uncle George Rogers.

  His beloved second son, Captain Johnny Rogers, that brave, good, and enterprising man who had sailed the Willing to Vincennes in 1779 for his cousin George, had died in the prime of his life at age thirty-seven, still unmarried, a sudden death believed to have been from pneumonia.

  Everyone at Mulberry Hill, but in particular George, went into a profound state of grief that was a long time in lifting.

  ONE DAY A FRENCHMAN WITH THE BOLD GRACEFUL DEMEANOR of an adventurer and the smudgy, stale, unkempt look of a river boat traveler appeared in a carriage at the door of Mulberry Hill. His name, he said, was Michaux. He was a botanist and explorer. He was soon to be engaged, he said, in a journey of exploration for Thomas Jefferson, across the continent from the Mississippi to the Pacific, but in the meantime he had been diverted here at the behest of the French minister, to deliver a message to General Clark. He gave George a packet. It was from Citizen Genet. It was an officer’s commission from the French Republic. It had been filled in to designate George Rogers Clark a Marshall of France, a Major General, and the Commander-in-Chief of a special military unit to be known as “The French Legion of the Mississippi.” Michaux saluted. “I am at your service, mon general. I am to serve as your aide.” George’s parents stood watching, old, gray, shocked.

  George stood taller, his head whirling, too confused with his emotions, for a moment, to say anything. His reputation was still something!

  But now he would have to do what he had promised. He would have to expatriate himself. He would have to renounce his citizenship in his once-beloved Virginia, in the Kentucky he had founded and protected, in the United States that had so greatly profited by his efforts. George very badly wanted a drink. Instead, he took Michaux’s hand. “Good,” he said. “Now we can proceed.”

  Things began to move then. A thousand pounds of pork, four hundred barrels of flour, and a pair of brass cannon were sent over the mountains by Charles DePauw, an entrepreneur who had come to the continent with Lafayette. Major Busseron offered cannon from the artillery of Post Vincennes. George’s men began cutting timber from woodlands near Louisville for construction of an armed fleet. Ten tons of buffalo meat and another five tons of pork, several hundred bushels of corn, and a huge quantity of ammunition came on the next shipment from DePauw. George and Michaux rode much of the winter, confirming recruitments. Michaux was extremely impressed with General Clark’s influence over this formidable variety of men—county officers, planters, scouts, hunters, tradesmen, teamsters, rivermen. Yes, they were assured: about mid-February, if the rivers had thawed and if the million dollars promised by Genet had been delivered, the word would speed through Kentucky and the Tennessee country and along the Ohio and the Wabash and the Mississippi, and as many as five thousand armed men would come to the rivers and be ready to descend on Spanish Louisiana. Michaux watched George Rogers Clark move among these men and watched them gather around him, their faces wreathed in smiles, and his likewise; he watched men of no rank jump into the general’s path with a whoop and a grin, watched him dance them around in a bear hug, and thought, Oui, vraiment, voici égalité, fraternité. Michaux was astonished that a man some people called “a helpless sot” could remember so many names and so many details about men’s lives.

  Here, he thought, is a leader. I would not want to be in the shoes of the Spanish governor of Louisiana.

  “BY TH’ SWEAT O’ THE SAINTS, CAP’N CLARK, IT’S NOT A PLACE I’d chase a scotched bear into,” exclaimed Lieutenant Towles.

  “Nope,” William replied, peering through his spyglass, “but how ’bout a Little Turtle?”

  Towles gave a wan smile and a shake of the head, and peered toward the place. It was the awfulest tangle of tree trunks and root boles and dead limbs William had ever seen in his life, where some past tornado had blown down a whole forest on the swampy banks of the Maumee River, and it was full of Indians. In the snarl of gray-weathered trunks and rotting bark within the round of his lens he caught glimpses of half-concealed movement and colors: a dab of vermillion war paint, a flash of honed steel, a patch of red cloth. It was a natural fortress, and now the Indians of Little Turtle’s Confederacy—at least a thousand of them, according to the scouts—were forming their defense in it. Beyond the great blowdown stood Fort Miami, the British fort on American soil that had been supplying the Confederacy with guns and ammunition and knives. And it was obvious that here was the place where Mad Anthony Wayne’s slow, inexorable two-year advance was going to end in a showdown at last. Wayne had President Washington’s authorization to attack the British fort if he deemed it prudent, and to destroy it even though the two countries were not officially at war. His main objective, though, was to crush the tribes that had twice crushed the United States Army.

  Wayne had got his 2,500-man army into the heart of their country by avoiding four of the mistakes that had ruined Generals Harmar and St. Clair: he had kept a whole company of scouts out at all times; he had kept his cannons and supply trains up with the troops; he had maintained iron discipline over Regulars and volunteers alike; and he had never stopped anywhere even for one night without building fortifications. Wayne had constructed seven forts during his tortoiselike progress into the heart of the Algonquian country, and countless fortified campsites—one at the end of every day’s march. In all this time, not once had the tribes been able to catch Wayne off guard. They were calling him The Man Who Never Sleeps. They were also calling him The Long Knife, William had learned, and he had felt a deep, sad bitterness on hearing George’s sobriquet applied to a new leader.

  But now by good management Wayne was here; he had moved his hardened, polished army through an infinity of the world’s deepest woods and prickliest, swampiest landscapes. The reckless courage that had earned him the nickname of Mad Anthony in the Revolution had matured into this Alexandrian thoroughness. He was middle-aged, fleshy, and sat on his mare nearby now, his rheumatic thigh wrapped in layers of flannel; and his legions, their blue uniforms wet from a morning rainshower and the sweat of a three-hour march, were maneuvering into positions for the charge, and surely the Indians swarming in that tangle were licking their lips in anticipation of another hearty draught of blood. Here was Wayne’s parading army in blue, lining up for a frontal assault against a concealed hornet swarm in a gigantic brushpile, and to William it seemed that the whole phenomenal progress would prove to have been in vain, that Wayne was going to make the same fatal mistake that the other generals had made.

  General Wilkinso
n came riding along the ranks, looking pink, sleek and nervous, handing down General Wayne’s words. “Be set,” he told each company as he came along. “After the advance guard decoys them out, listen for the drums. Run over them with bayonets. Don’t shoot till they’re in full flight!” He reined in near William, leaned down and muttered: “I do believe he’s mad after all. Look at that pile of jackstraws! I swear we’ll all die in there!”

  Though this was what William had been thinking himself, Wilkinson’s criticisms seemed out of place, here on the brink of battle, and William replied, trying not to show his irritation:

  “I reckon this is time not to doubt but to pray.” Wilkinson, surprised, maybe disappointed, raised his eyebrows, grew pinker and poutier, and rode on to the next company.

  The muggy air was thick now with apprehension, as if every man’s nerves were giving off atoms of fear that combined with the others to create an invisible miasma of it all over the field. All the low voices, all the whispering of hooves and boots through the brush and of cloth on cloth, all the wheel-trundling, all the gun-handling and sword-drawing and the thousands of nervous adjustments of gear and clothing, combined to make a rushing sound like waterfalls. Every infantryman now stood with his bayonet gleaming and musket loaded with a ball and three pellets of large shot. Down by the river on their big warhorses sat the helmeted dragoons, with sabers drawn and resting aslant on their shoulders; their duty would be to slash their way around the Indians’ left flank, while the mounted Kentuckians of General Scott would prevent the Indians’ right wing from breaking out of the timber. If I was running this thing, William thought, I’d send Scott clear around ’em to cut off their escape. Wilkinson had proposed this to Wayne, but the commandant had his own notion, from which he would not depart: a swift, solid front of cold steel, nothing fancy.