Of course she understood his pain and even the consequent anger, but he seemed to be taking it out on her and that was hurtful. If he loved her as he said, why would he let his letter reflect anger instead of joy? Or was he simply so consumed that he was blind to the reality? Or was there more to it?
There was that masculine arrogance that personified the New Orleans male for her and was so different from Carl’s open, bluff, hearty masculinity. Of course, Henri wanted a wife, and he wanted a woman who belonged to him or at least with him rather than to her business and who wasn’t a thousand miles away. But slowly it came to her with increasing conviction as she read between the lines that his anger was aimed less at America and the turn of fortune than at her … at her and her American independence and her capacity to function in a man’s world.
As this conviction took hold, her own anger rose and after a time she pinched out the candle and lay there, hostile and yet hurt. But at the same time she also wanted to see him, to hear his voice, feel the masculine vigor in his arms, have him kiss her and, yes, make love to her.
Danny was reading her uncle’s letter the next morning when Clinch Johnson came to visit. He wanted her to join him at dinner with a businessman from Baltimore who was anxious to open a shipping connection with the New Orleans that he visualized as sure to emerge from U.S. possession. She accepted with alacrity and then described Mr. Clark’s letter. It was short and said the Frenchmen there had reacted to the news with absolute fury, so he’d have his hands full for a while when he was appointed governor. Governor? He said Zulie told him he was assuming too much, but he thought not. After all, his trip to Paris obviously was the real cause of the French decision to sell—all else was the blather of uninformed men. Like all nations, the French reacted primarily to money, and he had made them see the losses they could incur. And then, who knew New Orleans and its people better and who had served with more loyalty?
“What do you think?” she asked Clinch.
“Mr. Clark is a fine man and a powerful businessman, but the idea that we’ll appoint as governor an Irishman who has no knowledge of the United States or of the principles of democracy strikes me as unlikely.”
She laughed. Clark would never be appointed, and his consequent anger would be a new problem when she arrived, but—
“What does Mr. Broussard think of it?” Clinch asked.
“Henri? Oh, he—” She stopped, staring at him. His suit was buttoned up sausage tight and his yellow hair stood like horns on the side of his head today, but his blue eyes were very clear. “How do you know about Henri? Surely I didn’t tell—”
“Well, Danny,” he said gently, “the shipping world really is very small.”
She digested that, watching him, and in a bit he asked when she would go to New Orleans to consolidate her position. He had offered her excellent practical advice, and now he added more to which she listened gratefully. She said she would go in four days if the
Queen
could clear that soon.
“Well,” he said, “I will be here when you return.”
The words remained with her and the image of him with his enigmatic smile, placid, solid, bound tight in his sausage coat with those yellow horns. Whatever had he meant? He was a very odd man, but he was a good friend and she liked him. He was … comfortable, and the idea that he would be here when she returned was pleasing. She turned to the paperwork supporting the voyage to come with high good cheer.
NASHVILLE, AUGUST 1803
Andrew Jackson was in Nashville when the news came that Napoleon Bonaparte was selling Louisiana to the United States, the whole gigantic kit and caboodle, magnificent empire that it was. New Orleans in possession, the Spanish soon to be forgotten, the French threat but a memory, American to its core!
Of course Nashville had exploded with joy and the boys began planning a celebration, bonfire and speech making and the preacher to put some benediction on them and a big dance and a barbecue to end barbecues, couple of steers and a half-dozen hogs, with tents and awnings to shelter folks who’d be coming from miles around. Men were clustered around the general shaking his hand, and he laughed and joked and slapped their shoulders, but he was making his way to the livery stable and his horse. Rachel deserved to share in this—God knows she’d had plenty of worry over it—and he would fetch her in for the doings along with her niece, on whom Jack Coffee was so sweet.
Rachel Jackson was at a table trimming extra crust from an apple pie before popping it into the fireplace oven. Over the table was a window with glass that scarcely waved at all that Jackson had imported from the glassworks at Knoxville as a promised taste of luxury, and through the glass she saw him coming.
He was much earlier than expected and that was a bad sign. He came at a fast trot, the set of his shoulders saying he had something on his mind, and she felt her heart start to flutter and she stood there, the heel of her hand pressed to her chest.
“Oh, my,” Hannah said softly behind her, and that made it worse. Hannah had an instinct about these things; she was only technically a slave—actually this was her kitchen.
He swung down, flipped the reins around a sapling by the door, and was in the house in a couple of strides. He was beaming. She felt balanced on a knife edge.
“It’s all over!” he cried, and threw his arms around her. “The French folded their cards and went home. We
bought
Louisiana! It’s ours, lock, stock, and barrel. I tell you, Rachel, it opens up the future like cracking the biggest watermelon in the field.”
He drew back, peering into her face. “Why the tears? It means the future is ours for the taking. Watch Tennessee now!”
Dumbly she nodded, smiling, her hands on his arms encircling her. No war … he wouldn’t be rallying Tennessee troops and marching off at their head. There wouldn’t be new widows and young men absent arms and legs desperately trying to run their little farms. There wouldn’t be the endless worries about a flatboat full of corn or cotton or tobacco that represented your fortune at the mercy of far-away papists who spoke a different language. She kept the books, she knew what commerce meant, she knew how grown men went pale and widows fell to praying when the Spanish closed the river. And Andrew wouldn’t be at special risk, leading troops. He’d always be at risk, that was his nature, but not marching into a storm of bullets.
“What wonderful news,” she whispered.
Jack drove the ladies in the spring buggy and the general rode alongside on a fresh mount; he was
the
leading figure in West Tennessee and he didn’t intend to arrive in a buggy. The women were still chattering about the news, Jack in his quiet way, smiling and once in awhile adding something. Rachel said she figured Mr. Jackson had had something to do with the decision in Paris all right, which Jack seconded warmly.
The general dismissed such tittle-tattle with a wave of his hand but privately thought it wasn’t so far from the mark. He’d always admired Bonaparte until the Frenchman had made himself a dictator. Napoleon was a fighting man of magnificent instincts, knew what Jackson himself knew so well: If you’re going to strike, strike hard and strike first and drive ahead, don’t give the other side a chance to breathe, but keep your head clear, know when to advance but know when to retreat toward new advantage. All this Bonaparte had demonstrated in the decision to sell Louisiana.
For surely it was a mark of sheer wisdom that the great man had been able to set aside pride and ambition and recognize the cold reality, which was, plain and simple, he could never have won in Louisiana. The American West, ever growing, ever stronger, would have taken it from him; and General Jackson would have been leading the way. Indeed, he himself had made it clear—to come here would have been to fight forever. He’d told that French attaché in Washington—Pichon, that was it—what they could expect. And that fellow Montane, said he was an American now but he sounded a good deal more like a French general to Jackson. And Jackson had told him too, one fighting man talking to another. He’d understood it all right.
So Jackson reckoned he’d had a hand in making the dictator see the light of reason, and he didn’t object when the boys set up a mighty cheer as he rode into the square right ahead of the ladies in the spring buggy. He rode into the
crowd, bowing and shaking hands with the men close to him, and didn’t dismount till he was on the brick steps leading up to the log courthouse. Then he held up his hands to quiet them and made them a speech at the top of his lungs that had them whooping and hollering for more.
The air was full of the odor of roasting hog and three separate men each brought in a barrel of whiskey and everyone was welcome. A barrel of cold tea for the ladies appeared and floating in it was what surely was the very last piece of ice brought down from northern lakes packed in sawdust. The fiddlers turned out and a banjo picker and Joe Simpson, who could make his mouth organ cry like a baby, and folks went to square dancing and when the sun went down lanterns and torches made it bright as day and the dancing went right on.
Louisiana was ours and the future was secure!
Before you could turn around, things began to boom. War had started up in Europe and both sides were hungry for American grain, and now farmers hereabouts were free to ship to the world via New Orleans knowing their produce would pass. That’s why the French had wanted it in the first place; now let them buy foodstuffs like civilized folk. When Spain had closed the river and everyone had gotten ready for war, Tennessee folks naturally held up their shipments. Jackson had built an extra barn to store corn and baled cotton he couldn’t sell, his own and his neighbors too.
Now there was a run on flatboats. Nathan Fosby—it looked like running off and falling in love with a black woman and getting his heart broke when she was killed had made him a man of the world somehow—opened a yard on the river and was building flatboats as fast as he could get logs downstream and sliced in the sawmill he’d set up in his yard. There would be a ready market for lumber in New Orleans after the boats arrived now that Americans would be moving in and the population would start swelling. Jackson
heard the price of lumber in New Orleans had already doubled and was on the way to tripling! That money was radiating back to Fosby and from him back to the timber cutters, and the good times were upon them.
The price of land was rising too. What had been going for ten dollars an acre cleared and ready to plant crops for the European market now was fetching twenty and twenty-five. Men were paying premium prices for lots on the outskirts of Nashville, as much as ten blocks from the center, planning a house in town when they got around to building it.
Everywhere you looked you saw something new and thrilling that told you Tennessee was right on the edge of a glowing future. That was the idea that old John Sevier couldn’t see. The old general, one-time governor and hungering for old glory, was locked in the past. Maybe that suited East Tennessee, but it didn’t suit the west end of the state nor the man to whom folks in the west looked. And that was the root of the trouble.
Archie Roane wasn’t a bad governor nor all that good either, but the problem was he liked the office and wanted another turn. The Constitution allowed three two-year terms. It also placed no bar on a former governor running again after a term out of office. Just what you’d expect; old Sevier filed for election. So Archie naturally dropped his bombshell. Sevier, he said, was hardly a savior of Tennessee who could do no wrong. He’d done plenty of wrong; he’d been up to his ears in the recent land fraud that had rocked the state. His authority for a statement that most Tennesseeans simply didn’t believe: the honorable Judge Jackson, who had uncovered the fraud.
Rachel went pale as paper when Jack Coffee brought the papers carrying Archie’s statement. She pressed her hand to her chest and would have fallen, but Jackson caught her and eased her onto a sofa and gave her two tablespoons of Dr. Simpson’s Elixir of Life, which she kept handy as a powerful
restorative. He spent the next hour assuring her that this was mostly talk, which she finally accepted though he could see she didn’t believe it.
It was more than talk, but he didn’t think it would involve her. She lived in terror of those awful days being reopened—the run to Natchez to escape her husband, the marriage when news of the divorce came, the crushing ending of adultery that they had lived with ever since … .
As for trouble with Sevier, best to go straight in. Jackson laid out the accusation in a letter to the
Knoxville Gazette,
right in Sevier’s hometown. In the land fraud, numerous Tennesseeans had bribed the North Carolina secretary of state to accept forged claims. It was over now, the secretary packed off to jail. Sevier had had some land warrants that weren’t worth much under an old law but would soar in value if falsely registered under a later law. The secretary of state had arranged the switch, and Sevier sent him three warrants in payment for his services. It was tangential to the main fraud but close enough, Jackson figured. He said the warrants were worth $960, given for a service worth a dollar had it been legal.
Sevier reacted like a bee-stung bull, pawing and roaring that this low pettifogging lawyer who’d had the temerity to steal the militia election from the militia’s natural commander now sought to destroy him with utterly false charges. The moment he could lay hands on him, he would give this upstart hard lessons in how a man of honor handled calumniators. As for the charges, what he had done was legal, the fee what he would have paid a lawyer to perfect the transaction.
The people paid little attention. Everyone was dealing in land, plenty of deals were under the table, and Sevier was their old hero. They went to the polls, tossed Archie Roane out, and put John Sevier back in the governor’s chair. The problem between the new governor and the state’s most prominent jurist festered on. Sevier made no immediate move, and Jackson waited till court took him to Knoxville. So it was cracking fall before the clash came.
It was a bright day, sun glowing, air still warm, oak leaves orange and gold, when Jackson convened court. Knoxville was practically a city and the courthouse showed it, courtroom paneled, the bench downright fancy. But he brought the vigor of the far frontier to his dispensation of justice and settled half a dozen cases before noon. Gradually he became aware of noise outside, the clamor of voices and hoots of laughter. He didn’t doubt it related to him, and so he stepped out to see.
Sure enough, a crowd had gathered on the courthouse green, the governor waving a heavy cutlass as he harangued them. He was a stout and solid figure with a soldier’s bearing, handsome enough for a man in his late fifties but of small caliber nonetheless. Jackson felt the people had made a dreadful mistake in electing him.
The crowd went silent as it spotted the judge at the top of the steps and Sevier turned, sword at the ready. Jackson touched the pistol under his coat, powder well set in the pan, .70-cal. ball patched in place, hammer on full cock, and went lightly down the steps, hickory cane in hand. Teach the governor a lesson and do it right now. He darted across the street without looking. A horseman yelled and the beast reared. Jackson had an impression of the animal, white and huge, foam flying from the bit tearing his mouth, and then he was across the street and advancing on the governor—
“Here he is,” Sevier roared, waving the sword, “this impudent jackanapes, this puppy who traduces men of honor, throws foul lies thick as falling leaves, snake’s tongue wagging in his ugly face, a pitiful boy trying to hoist his own star by attacking a man of consequence, a man of prestige—”
He advanced suddenly, raising the sword, crying, “What have you ever done for the people of Tennessee? You, a poor sneaking judge hiding behind your judicial robes, hiding behind your bench, who are you to criticize a man who has served this state his whole natural life! Rotten poltroon
scoundrel, what services have
you
ever rendered the people of Tennessee?”
The form of the attack took Jackson by surprise, and he found himself on the defensive. Services? What hadn’t he done? Served in the Senate, the House, the bench—
And Sevier shouted, “I know of no great services you have rendered the country,
except taking a trip to Natchez with another man’s wife!”
Jackson’s eyes bulged, he heard a roaring, it was as if his very skull would explode. “Great God,” he screamed, “do you mention her sacred name?”
He dropped the cane and clawed under his coat for his pistol, a hoarse shriek in his brain,
I’ll kill him!
They were a dozen feet apart. Jackson leveled his piece and fired just as someone hurtled into him, knocking his aim askew. Sevier’s pistol was out, the cutlass dropped at his feet, and he fired almost simultaneously. Jackson felt a bullet tug at his sleeve and heard someone howling, hit by one ball or another. He lunged forward to pistol whip the governor, and three men held him back while others restrained Sevier.