THE saw-handles are cleaned and oiled and laid away to that repose
which they have won. No more will they be summoned to defend the
blooming Rachel. No one now speaks evil of her; for that tragedy which
reddened a May Kentucky morning has sealed the lips of slander. The
General does not speak of that battle at twelve paces in the poplar
wood; and yet the blooming Rachel knows. She, like her lover-husband,
never refers to it; but her worship of him finds multiplication, while
he, towards her, grows more and more the Bayard. Much are they revered
and looked up to along the Cumberland, he for his gentle loyalty, she
for her love; and the common tongue is tireless in reciting the story of
their perfect happiness.
The currents of time roll on and the General is busy with his planting,
his storekeeping, and his boat building. He is fortunate; and the
three-sided profits pile themselves into moderate riches. In the midst
of his prosperity he is visited by Aaron Burr. The late vice-president
has killed Alexander Hamilton--a name despised along the Cumberland.
Also he was aforetime the champion of Tennessee, when she asked the boon
of statehood.
For these sundry matters, as well as for what good unconscious lessons
in deportment were taught him by the courtly Colonel Burr, the General
fails not to take that polished exile to his heart and to his hearth.
Colonel Burr is in and out of Nashville many times. He comes and goes
and comes and goes and comes again; and writes his daughter Theodosia:
“I am housed with General Jackson, who is one of those prompt, frank,
loyal souls whom I like.”
Colonel Burr has been in France, and tells the General of Napoleon. He
draws a battle map of Quebec, shows where Montgomery fell, and relates
how he, Colonel Burr, bore that dead chieftain from the field. In the
end, he gives a dim outline of his dreams for the conquest of that
Spanish America, lying on the thither side of the Mississippi; and to
these latter tales of empire the General lends eager ear.
By the General's suggestion a dinner is given at the Nashville Inn in
honor of Colonel Burr. The General presides, and, with a heart full of
anger against Barbary pirates, offers among others the toast:
“Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!”
Colonel Burr, being dined, confides to the General how he is not without
an ally in the Southwest, and says that Commander Wilkinson, in
control for the Government at New Orleans, stands ready to advance his
anti-Spanish projects. At the name of “Wilkinson” the General shakes
his prudent head. He declares that Commander Wilkinson is a faithless,
caitiff creature, with a brandified nose, a coward heart, and a weakness
for breaking his word. The crafty Burr, confident to vanity of his own
genius for intrigue, insists that he can trust Commander Wilkinson.
Then he arranges with the General for the building of a flotilla of
flat-boats at the latter's yards, and goes his scheming way. Later, when
Colonel Burr is on trial for treason in Richmond, the General will ride
over the Blue Ridge to give him aid and comfort, and make street-corner
speeches defending him, wherein he will say things more explicit than
flattering concerning President Jefferson, who is urging the prosecution
of Colonel Burr.
The hours, never resting, never sleeping, march onward with our
planter-General, until the procession in its passing is remembered and
spoken of as years. Then comes the war with England. That saber scar on
the General's head begins to throb, and he sends word to Washington that
he is ready, with twenty-five hundred of his hunting-shirt militia, to
kill British wherever they shall be found.
The Government thanks him, and orders him with his hunting-shirt
followers to report to General Wilkinson at New Orleans. The General
does not like this, the Wilkinson in question being that red-nosed
renegade one, against whom long ago he warned the ambitious Colonel
Burr. For all that, orders are orders; and besides a fight under any
commander is not to be despised. The General presently hurries his
hunting-shirt forces aboard flatboats, and floats away on the convenient
bosom of the Cumberland. He will go down that stream to the Ohio, and so
to the Mississippi and to New Orleans. As they float downward with the
stream, the General recalls a former voyage when love and the blooming
Rachel were his companions, and is heard to sigh.
At Natchez, word from Commander Wilkinson meets the General. He is told
to land, and wait for further orders. The General takes his boys of the
hunting shirts ashore, and pitches camp. Privily he unbends in oaths and
maledictions, all addressed to the ex-grocer Wilkinson; for he thinks
the order, preventing his entrance into New Orleans, born of the mean
rivalry of that red-nosed ignobility.
The General waits, and curses Commander Wilkinson, for divers weeks.
Then occurs one of those imbecilities, of which only the witlessness of
Government is capable, and whereof the archives at Washington carry
so many examples. The General receives a curt dispatch from the war
secretary, “dismissing” him and his hunting-shirt soldiers from the
service of the United States. Not a word is said as to pay, or provision
for returning to the Cumberland. Having gotten the General and his
little army several hundred wilderness miles from home, the thick-head
Government, with no intelligence and as little heart, coolly reduces him
and them to the practical status of vagrants; which feat accomplished,
it walks away, as it were, hands in pockets, whistling “Yankee Doodle.”
Possibly, the Government thinks that the General and his hunting-shirt
friends can float upstream as they floated down. The angry General,
however, makes no such marine mistake, and the intricate oaths which he
now evolves and fulminates, as expressive of his feelings, would have
won the admiration of any army that ever fought in Flanders.
The General's credit is golden, since he has ever been a fanatic about
paying debts. Invoking that credit, he cashes a handful of drafts, and
marches home with his hunting-shirt contingent at his own expense. Also
he indites a letter to that war secretary which reddens the latter's
departmental ears, and causes his departmental head to buzz like a nest
of hornets. Later, the Government pays the General the amount of those
drafts; not because it is right--since the argument of right has little
Washington weight--but for the far more moving reason that Tennessee,
in a rage, is preparing to desert the boneless President Madison for the
Federalists. It is the latter thought which brings a ray of common sense
to the besotted Government, and his money to our General, now back in
Tennessee.
The bellicose General is vastly disappointed at missing a brush with
invading British; for, aside from a saber-engrafted hatred of all
English things and men, he is one to dote on fighting for fighting's
crimson sake, and is almost as well pleased with mere battle as with
victory. However, he is given scanty room for sorrowful reflections,
since fate is hurrying to his relief with a private war of his own.
The General, ever an expositor of the duello, and the peaceful hours
resting heavy on his hands, goes out as second for a Captain Carroll
against Mr. Jesse Benton. Captain Carroll is shot in the toe, and Mr.
Benton in the leg; whereat the General and the Cumberland public groan
over results so inadequate.
Being thus shot in the leg, Mr. Benton displays his bad taste by
falling into a fury with the General. He recounts what he regards as his
“wrongs” to his brother Thomas, and that intemperate individual loses
no time in taking up his brother's quarrel. The pair say things of the
General which would arouse the wrath of an image; with that, the General
calls for his saw-handles, and begins to plan trouble for those verbally
reckless Bentons.
The General takes with him as guide, philosopher and friend, his
faithful subaltern, Colonel Coffee. The two establish themselves,
strategically, at the Nashville Inn.
Across the corner of the public square upon which the Nashville Inn
finds hospitable frontage, stands the City Hotel. Sunning themselves in
the veranda of the latter caravansary, but with war written upon their
angry visages, the General and the faithful Coffee perceive the brothers
Benton. The enemies glare at one another, and the General says to
Colonel Coffee that they will now go to the post office. Since a trip to
the post office is calculated to bring them within touching distance of
the brothers Benton, Colonel Coffee at once discerns the propriety of
such a journey.
The pair go to the post office, staring haughtily at the brothers Benton
as they pass. The brothers Benton, for their side, being apoplectic of
habit, grow black in the face with rage.
Having visited the post office, and being now upon their return, the
General and Colonel Coffee again draw near the apoplectic Bentons,
glowering from their veranda. When within three feet of them, the
General abruptly whips out one of those celebrated saw-handles, and jams
its muzzle against the horrified stomach of brother Thomas Benton. That
imperiled personage thereupon backs rapidly away from the saw-handle,
which as rapidly follows; while the public, assembling on the run,
confidently expects the General to shoot brother Thomas Benton in two.
The General might have done so, and thus gratified the public, but
the unexpected occurs. As brother Thomas Benton backs briskly from the
muzzle of the saw-handle, brother Jesse, who is not wanting in a genius
for decision, whirls, and from a huge horse pistol plants two balls in
the General's left shoulder. As the warrior goes down, Colonel Coffee
empties his pistol at brother Thomas, who avoids having his head blown
off only by the fortunate fact of a cellar, into whose receptive depths
he tumbles, just in what novelists call “the nick of time.” As brother
Thomas lapses into the cellar, young Hays, a nephew of the blooming
Rachel, hurls brother Jesse to the floor, to which he makes heartfelt
attempts to pin him with a dirk, but is baffled by the activity of the
restless brother Jesse, who will not lie still to be pinned.
The whole riot has not covered the space of sixty seconds, when the
public, suddenly conceiving its duty to lie in that direction, seizes
young Hays, releases the recumbent brother Jesse, disarms Colonel
Coffee, fishes brother Thomas out of that receptive cellar, and carries
the badly wounded General to a bed in the Nashville Inn. The City Hotel
mentions its own beds, and lays claim to the injured General, on the
argument that the battle has been fought in its bar. The claim is
disallowed and the General conveyed to the rival hostelry aforesaid,
as being peculiarly his own proper inn, since it is there he has ever
repaired for billiards, mint juleps, and to hold conferences over pipe
and glass with his friends.
Once in bed, the local surgeons burst in and offer to cut off the
General's arm. The offer is declined fiercely and a poultice of
slippery-elm bark is substituted for that proposed surgery. This
latter medicament works wonders; under its soothing influences, and the
revivifying effects of whisky--both being remedies much in vogue along
the Cumberland--the General begins to mend.
The General, the patient object of a deal of slippery-elm bark and
whisky--the one applied externally and the other internally--lies in bed
a month. Then the awful word arrives of the massacre at Fort Mims.
Five hundred and fifty-three souls have been slaughtered, and Chief
Weathersford with all his Creeks, valor sharpened by English gold and
English firewater, is reported on the warpath. The news brings the
General out of bed in a moment. His friends remonstrate, the doctors
command, the blooming Rachel pleads; but he puts them aside. Gaunt of
cheek, face paper-white with weakness, left arm in a sling, he climbs
painfully into the saddle and takes command.
The General sends Colonel Coffee and his mounted riflemen to the fore,
with orders to wait for him at Fayettesville. Meanwhile, he himself
lingers briefly to enroll and organize his little army. A few weeks
later he follows the doughty Coffee, and the entire command--horns full
of powder, pouches heavy with bullets, hunting knives whetted to a razor
edge--moves southward after hostile Creeks.