18 Converging Events
When we reached New York I bade adieu to my friends of the President, with whom my voyage had been pleasant and most eventful, and hastened ashore, where our adventure was known already, making the arrival of the frigate an occasion for ferment in the city. I hurried to Fraunce’s Tavern, intending to write there a letter to Mr. Gallatin which should contain a full and truthful account of the battle and an apology for my voyage on the President. But upon the latter point I anticipated no trouble whatever, since I would be, as Captain Rodgers had put it, a most valuable witness, a civilian hitherto unknown to the crew of the President, and therefore my presence on board her had been a most fortuitous occurrence.
But rapidly, as I walked through the city, I could note the rising tumult, as I had noted it on the day Deguyo was seized, although it was now of a different character, for the temper of men’s minds was such, made so by long and persistent provocation, that they rejoiced at the shattering of the Little Belt and the slaughter of her crew—a just punishment for the battle which she had begun and some small repayment for the innumerable outrages which we had suffered. So in the street I witnessed no emotion save fierce joy, whatever the timid Federalists in their fine houses may have felt.
As I stepped in at the door of Fraunce’s Tavern I met Marian Pendleton, who was just about to come out.
“Why, Philip!” she cried in the greatest astonishment. “Where did you come from? We heard that you had been sent to Annapolis with a message and had disappeared. Father had it in a letter from Washington, and there was much talk there about you.”
“And I am surprised, too, to see you here,” I said without answering her question at once, but taking both her hands in mine. “I thought you had left for Washington weeks ago.”
“No, we have stayed on; we have found New York pleasant; our friends Mr. Mercer and Mr. Courtenay are also yet here; but tell me, where have you been?”
“At sea; I’ve come from a battle.”
“At sea! A battle!” Her face was pale, but her eyes had lighted up.
“Yes; I was on the President when she fought the Little Belt, and I’ve just landed from her.”
Then I told her the story, and she listened with sparkling eyes and a face in which a flush had replaced the pallor. She had all the feeling of our Western women against England, nourished as it was by the tales of the English-led and English-armed Indians who came down from the Northwest and slew and burned and outraged along the border. Women, the best of them, remember and cherish animosities longer than men. They, too, at times can cry for war as loudly as the men.
“Oh, Philip,” she said, “I am glad it has happened, and I am glad you were there!”
“Perhaps we will have war now,” I said, “and that may bring peace and security—nothing else will.”
Then she became pale again, and I knew that she was thinking of those things, other than glory, that war is sure to bring. Cyrus Pendleton himself came in, full of the news and flushed with its character, so different from all that had gone before, the red showing through the brown of his lean hawk face, his black eyes snapping.
“I tell you, Phil,” he said—he, too, seemed to have regained his ancient friendliness for me because I had been on the frigate—“we’ve put the burden on England; it’s her business now to show resentment. If she can stand this she can stand more.”
He talked on, full of joy, his fiery old soul ablaze. His was no parlour zeal; it was the warlike temper of a man who had carried his life at his rifle’s muzzle for twenty years, and was still ready, at sixty, to fight for what he thought the right. In many a log cabin on the border there was another like him. He was so anxious to go to Washington, that he might see what would happen and be present to lend what influence he had to make it happen as he wished, that he ordered Marian to do her packing and be ready for the start on the following morning. I asked to accompany them, and Mercer and Courtenay, who came in soon, decided to do likewise. I discovered that the handsome Miss Constance Eastlake was one of the reasons why Courtenay had lingered in New York, and I was glad to learn from Mercer that she liked Courtenay better than any other man, for I thought her a very fine girl, though not the finest of all. Men were ever fools about women, and yet could not keep away from them, said Mercer in conclusion, and for a little I was sad on his account.
Early summer was in all its freshness and bloom, and we decided that instead of making the journey in stagecoaches we would ride horseback to the capital. The inevitable Bidwell made his appearance as a member of our party, since he, of course, had not thought of leaving New York before the Pendletons.
Few finer or more pleasant journeys have been made than that which we took in the rosy month of June, 1811, from New York to Philadelphia, and thence to Baltimore and on to Washington. Good weather attended us, the roads were dry and hard; about us the country blossomed and bloomed, the apple and the peach trees were cones of pink and white, and the tiny wild flowers clustered in the grass. My prestige as a warrior, because I had been on the President in the fight, clung to me, and I profited by it to the utmost. I was forced to tell the tale of the battle again and again, and it required much power over self to keep to facts. I could not restrain a cut now and then at Bidwell, who did not seem to be of a warlike character, and once received a rebuke from an unexpected quarter.
“Mr. Bidwell is a courageous man, I think,” said Marian—Bidwell was too far away then to hear. “Perhaps he will show it when the opportunity comes.”
Cyrus Pendleton’s sudden attack of friendliness for me soon cooled a little, though I did not mind, and he still showed plainly that he wished Bidwell’s estate and his own to be united, with the marriage certificate of his daughter as the title deed. It was a curious fact, as I have said before, that our Kentucky blue grass barons, who were then England’s most embittered foes, copied her landed aristocracy as closely as they could, and the cherished ambition of them all was to found estates feudal in extent and character.
But our talk as we rode southward was not all of war. We had seen something of the richer and more cultivated East. Marian had been welcome in the society of New York, and we of the West, who knew so much of the hardships of life, had begun now to learn a little of its softer side. So it was of these things that we talked often as we rode on through the country that flowered the more as we continued our southward way.
We found Washington in a state of deep quiet, the affair of the Little Belt was growing old, and midsummer, which is very hot at the capital, would soon be there. The English seemed to be surprised that some of their own men and not Americans had been killed, and one day I saw a quiet man of amiable appearance, who, as I was told, was the new British minister, Mr. Foster. My excuses had been accepted by Mr. Gallatin without comment, but I noticed that he filed my report of the affair very carefully. Thus everything seemed quiet under the summer heats, but we could tell in a day that it was superficial, that behind this seeming veil of peace the storms were gathering. The first note came from the placid, amiable British minister himself, from whom so much of a soothing nature was expected, when he protested in a characteristic British way against our occupation of West Florida, an affair that concerned Spain and ourselves exclusively. From all the western country came the murmur of angry reply.
I was taken back into Mr. Gallatin’s office, the Pendletons and Mercer and Courtenay remained in the city, and the summer waned. The green and the freshness gave way to brown and dust, and men’s minds were filled with uncertainty. In Europe the power of Bonaparte on land swelled and grew as ever, and he threatened to become master of the whole Continent; the French legions marched only to victory. On the water the English rode supreme as of old; nowhere a foe dared to appear, and between the two, England and France, we were ground, as in all the years that had gone before. The thousands of impressed American sailors still sailed and fought against their will on the British ships, the British fleets still patrolled our coasts, seeking new victims, our own ships everywhere were exposed to search and confiscation, trade was going to ruin, there was no foot that did not feel the pinch of the shoe, and from all the regions behind the hills came the cry that it was better to fight; yet the Government made no preparations, though already, our negotiations with the chiefs failing, the formidable Northwestern tribes, led by the redoubtable Tecumseh and his brother, the Prophet, yielding to English hints and English promises, were in open war on the border, where they were confronted by the armed farmers of the West. I heard of this war with the deepest anxiety. Many of my own personal friends had gone with Harrison’s army into the Indiana wilderness, where the white man always fought at a great disadvantage, and there was no one in Kentucky who had not heard the tale of St. Clair’s terrible defeat, how his army was annihilated in the winter wilderness by an unseen foe, as Braddock’s English army had been forty years before. But the army was buried in the forest, and we were to hear nothing more of it until such time as chance willed for news to filter through the stretches of wooded desolation.
The autumn waned, following in the path of the dead summer, the woods gleamed with the brilliant foliage, the variations and the changing colours of Indian summer, the smoky haze rose on the horizon, the sharp touch of cold crept into the air, and the keen winds portended the coming winter. One heard nothing in the little capital of Washington but politics; President Madison’s re-election was assured, and it seemed that a war Congress would come in with him, though New England and the East would have nothing of it. Mr. Clay was a candidate for the House from the Lexington district, and everybody said that he would be chosen Speaker when he came to Washington, using all his power in that great position to bring on the proposed war. But still the Government prepared nothing for what was certainly coming. The great men theorized and talked of an ideal state which would know naught of war, which would have neither army nor navy, which in all its dealings with foreign states should rely upon the single principle of justice, closing their eyes to the fact that all the world was at war, that force not justice was the single principle then ruling all things, and the man who did not arm consigned himself to the wolves. The nearer war came and the more we talked about it, the less ready we were for it, and with a divided country the most sanguine, who are always the youngest, could well shrink before the prospect.
I walked up Pennsylvania Avenue a windy morning in November and saw Courtenay approaching, waving his hat in his hand and shouting hurrah to me as he came. I thought he was suffering from a mild attack of lunacy and told him so, but he continued his shouting, and when he reached me grasped my hand and shook it fervently.
“What on earth is wrong with you, Felix?” I asked.
“Nothing is wrong with me,” he replied exuberantly. “It is wrong with the other fellows and their English allies.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve beaten all the Northwestern tribes. The news came this morning. It was at Tippecanoe; there had been palavers about peace, and they treacherously rushed our men in the dusk before the dawn, but they were beaten and the great medicine man, the Prophet, was killed on the field. Their Northwestern confederacy has gone to pieces and the border is safe.”
This, in truth, was great and good news, and the whole city was soon rejoicing with a joy that it had a good right to feel, for the Northwestern Indians were a most formidable foe, who afterward proved themselves more than once to be better than their allies, the British regulars.