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CHAPTER X – FLORIDA DELENDA EST

THE General, at the behest of the blooming Rachel, rests for three round weeks, which seem to his fight-loving soul like three round years. Then the Government sends him to Fort Jackson to dictate terms of peace to the broken Creeks.

The latter assemble, war paints washed off, in a deeply thoughtful, if not a peaceful, mood.

The General proposes terms which well nigh amount to a wiping out of the Creek landed possessions. The Creeks go into secret council, as it were executive session, and bemoan their desperate lot. They curse the English who urged them to that butchery of Fort Mims and then deserted them. Beyond relieving their minds, however, the curses accomplish no Creek good. They must still face the inveterate General, whose word is, “Your lives or your lands!”

The mournful, beaten Creeks come forth from executive session, and the great formal conference begins. The council is called on the flat field-like expanse in front of the General’s imposing marquee – for he has come to this mission with no little of pompous style, to the end that the Creek mind be impressed.

The Creek chiefs, blanketed to the ears, feathered to the eyes, sit about, crosslegged like tailors, in a half circle, their only weapon a sacred red-stone pipe. The General, blazing in a new uniform, comes out of his marquee. With him are Colonel Coffee, Colonel Hawkins, and lastly, Colonel Hayne, the brother of him who will one day cross blades in Senate debate with the lion-faced Webster, and have the worst of it.

As the General steps forward an orderly leads up his great war horse, as though the conference might lapse into battle, and he must be ready to mount and fight. To the rear, his hunting-shirt men, one thousand strong, are drawn out, as following forth those precautions which produce the General’s war horse. The Creeks, at these evidences of suspicious alertness, never move a bronze muscle; they pass the sacred redstone pipe with gravity unmoved, and puff away as though the last thing they suspect is suspicion.

Big Warrior makes a speech, and is followed by She-lok-tah, the tribal Demosthenes. The General shakes his grim head at their protests; there is no help for it, they must give him his way or fight. The Creeks bow to the inevitable, and give the General his way; which bowing submission is the less disgraceful, since both the Spanish at Pensacola and the English at New Orleans, in a brief handful of months, under pressures less stringent than are those which now and here in front of the Generali great marquee bear down the broken hopeless Creeks, will follow their abject example.

Having made peace with the Creeks on the Tallapoosa, the General lets his angry, warseeking eye rove in the direction of Florida. Many of the hostile Creek Red Sticks have fled to cover there, where they are made welcome by the Spanish Governor Maurequez, and petted and pampered by Colonel Nichols and Captain Woodbine of the English. The besotted Governor Maurequez has permitted these latter to land an English force, and, inspired by his native hatred of Americans and the sight of British ships of war in Pensacola harbor, has surrendered to them the last stitch of Florida control.

The General guesses these things and sends out scouts to make discoveries. Meanwhile, he marches his hunting-shirt men to Mobile, which his instincts – never at fault in war – warn him will be the next English point of attack. Word has reached him of the downfall of Napoleon, and he foresees that this will release against America the utmost energies of England, who in thirty odd years has not forgotten Yorktown nor despaired of its repair.

The General’s scouts are a sleepless, observant, close-going set of gentlemen, and fairly enter Pensacola. Presently, they are back with the news that two flags float in friendly partnership on the battlements of Fort St. Michael, one English and one Spanish. Also, seven English war ships ride in the harbor.

They likewise say that the popinjay Colonel Nichols is issuing proclamations to “The People of Louisiana,” demanding that, as “Frenchmen, Spaniards, and English,” they arise and “throw off the American yoke”; that Captain Woodbine is assembling the fugitive Red Sticks by scores, and reviving their drooping spirits with English gold, English guns, English gin, and English red coats.

Captain Woodbine, it appears, is so dull as to think he may make regular soldiers of the untamed Red Sticks, and drills them in the Pensacola plaza, where they handle their new muskets much as a cow might a cant hook, and look like copper-colored apes in those gorgeous red coats. The tactical, yet tactless, Captain Woodbine even makes his red command a speech, and is so unguarded as to refer to “General Jackson.” This is a blunder, since instantly half the assembled Red Sticks desert, taking with them the guns, gin, and jackets which have been conferred upon them. The oratorical Captain Woodbine is deeply impressed by the awful effect of the General’s name upon his red recruits, and their terror communicates itself to him. He has difficulty in restraining himself from deserting with them, but takes final courage and remains. Only he is at pains to delete “General Jackson” from subsequent eloquence, and never again mentions that paladin of the Cumberland in the quaking presence of a Red Stick Creek.

By way of adding to these hardy doings, the wordy popinjay, Colonel Nichols, fulminates new proclamations, comic in their ignorance and bombast. He believes that the formidable General can be whipped by manifestoes. As against this belief, however, most careful preparations move forward aboard the English ships, looking to the destruction of Fort Bowyer and the capture of Mobile; for Captain Percy of the Hermes, who has command of the fleet, is altogether a practical person, and pins no faith to proclamations and Indians in red coats when it comes to bringing a foe to his knees.

All these interesting items are laid before the General by his painstaking scouts, and he is peculiarly struck with the word about Captain Percy and Mobile. He sends back his scouts for another bagful of news, and begins to strengthen and stiffen Fort Bowyer, thirty miles below the town.

Having patched up this redoubt to his taste, the General puts Major Lawrence in command, and tells him to fight his batteries while a man remains alive. Major Lawrence says he will; and, not having a ship, but a fort, to defend, he follows as nearly as he may the motto of his heroic relative, and issues the watchword, “Don’t give up the Fort!” Leaving Major Lawrence in this high vein, the General goes back to Mobile to concert plans for its protection.

Captain Percy of the Hermes is a gallant man, but a bad judge of Americans. He tells the proclaiming Colonel Nichols that he will take four ships and capture Fort Bowyer in twenty minutes. Colonel Nichols has so little trouble in believing this that he conceives the deed of conquest already done. Full of hope and strong waters – for the English have not given the thirsty Red Sticks all their gin – he is so far worked upon by Captain Percy’s turgid prophecies as to issue a new proclamation, declaring Fort Bowyer taken, and showing how, presently, the English intend doing likewise at New Orleans. Having taken time so conspicuously by the forelock, the anticipatory Colonel Nichols – who has never been in the chicken trade, and therefore knows nothing of what perils attend a count of poultry noses before the poultry are hatched – goes aboard the Hermes, with Captain Woodbine and others of his staff; for he would be on the ground, when Fort Bowyer and Mobile succumb, ready to assume control of those strongholds.

It is no mighty voyage from Pensacola to Mobile, and a half day’s sail will bring Colonel Nichols and Captain Percy within point-blank range of Fort Bowyer. Taking a bright, cool morning for it, Captain Percy lets fall his topsails, and forges seaward, followed by the cordial wishes of Governor Maurequez who, glass in hand, drinks “Good voyage!” from the ramparts of St. Michael.

“All I regret is,” cries the valorous Governor Maurequez, in the politest phrases of Castile, “that you brave English will destroy these vagabonds, and thus deprive me and my heroic soldiery of the pleasure of their obliteration, when they shall have invaded our beloved Florida.”

Away go the English war ships in line, like a quartette of geese crossing a mill pond, the Hermes, Captain Percy, in the van. The fleet rounds the lower extremity of Mobile Point, out of range from Fort Bowyer, and lands Colonel Nichols with a force of foot soldiers and a howitzer. This military feat accomplished, the fleet, still like geese in line, bear up until abreast of the Fort, which is a musket shot away.

There is no time wasted. The Hermes lets go her anchors and swings broadside-on to the Fort. The others follow suit. Then, with a crashing discharge of big guns by way of overture, the fight is on.

Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes go by; shots fly and shells burst, and Major Lawrence still holds the fort. Evidently Captain Percy cut his time too fine! Then, one hour, two hours follow, and Major Lawrence’s twenty-four pounders are making matches of the Hermes.

As the merry war progresses, Colonel Nichols, with much ardor and no discernment, drags his howitzer to a strategic sand hill, and fires one shot at Fort Bowyer. It is a badly considered movement, the instant effect being to draw the Fort’s horns his way. The southern battery of the Fort opens upon him like a tornado, and he and his fellow artillerists retire – without their howitzer. The most discouraging feature is that a stone, sent flying from the strategic sand hill by a cannon ball, knocks out one of Colonel Nichols’s eyes. After this exploit, the one-eyed proclamationist, much saddened, but with wisdom increased, is content to stand afar off, and leave the down-battering of Fort Bowyer to the fleet.

This down-battering Captain Percy and his sailormen do their tarry best to bring about. But, as hour after hour drifts to leeward in the smoke of their broadsides, and the stubborn Lawrence continues to send his hail of twenty-four-pound shot aboard, it begins to creep upon Captain Percy, like mosses upon stone, that Fort Bowyer is a nut beyond the power of even his iron teeth to crack. As a red-hot shot sets fire to the Hermes and explodes her magazine, the impression deepens to apprehension, which, when the Sophia is reported sinking, ripens rapidly into conviction. Major Lawrence, with his “Don’t give up the Fort!” all but blots Captain Percy – who has tenfold his force – off the face of the Gulf, and he does it with a loss of eight men killed and wounded to an English loss of over three hundred.

Captain Percy, whipped and broken-hearted, shifts his flag and what is left of his Hermes’’ crew to the Sophia, and, pumps clanking hysterically to keep-himself afloat, goes limping back to Pensacola, lighted on his defeated way by the flare and glare from the blazing Hermes. As the English pass the extreme southern tip of Mobile Point, as far from the unmannerly batteries of Fort Bowyer as the lay of the land permits, they pick up the one-eyed proclamationist, Colonel Nichols, and his howitzerless men.

The fleet, battered, torn, sails adroop, with the Sophia three feet below her trim from shot-admitted water in her hold, reaches Pensacola. Governor Maurequez looks scornfully dark, but, Spaniard-like, shrugs his vainglorious shoulders and says to an aide:

“It is nothing! They are but English pigs! When this General Jackson reaches Pensacola – if he should be so great a fool as to come – we cavaliers of old Spain will tear him to pieces, as tigers rend their prey. Yes, amigo, we will show these beaten pigs of English how the proud blood of the Cid can fight.”

The Red Stick Creeks, furnished of a better intelligence, in no wise adopt the high-flying sentiments of Governor Maurequez. The moment the English come halting into the harbor, the awful name of “General Jackson!” leaps from aboriginal lip to lip. Hastily tearing off Captain Woodbine’s red coats as garments full of probable trouble, but taking with them his new guns, the frightened Red Sticks head south for the Everglades, first drinking up what remains of their gin. Not a hostile Creek will thereafter be found within a day’s ride of the General; all of those English plans, which seek the aid of savage axe and knife and torch, are to fall to pieces.

Captain Percy, made ten years older by that fight and failure at Fort Bowyer, goes about the repair of his ships; Colonel Nichols, omitting for the nonce all further proclamations, nurses his wounds; Captain Woodbine, having now no Indians, abandons his daily drills on the plaza; Governor Maurequez, whispering with his aide, brags in chosen Spanish of what he will do to thick-skull vagabond Americans should they put themselves in his devouring path; while over at Mobile the General hugs Major Lawrence to his bosom in a storm of approval, and gives that sterling soldier a sword of honor.

CHAPTER XI – THE TWO FLAGS AT PENSACOLA

THOSE two flags, one the red flag of England, flying at Pensacola, haunt the General night and day. His hunting-shirt men, twenty-eight hundred from his beloved Tennessee and twelve hundred from the territories of Mississippi and Alabama, are lusting for battle. He resolves to lead them into Florida, across the Spanish line.

“We must rout the English out of Pensacola!” he explains to Colonel Coffee.

“Pensacola!” repeats Colonel Coffee, looking thoughtful. “It is Spanish territory, General! There is the boundary; and diplomacy, I believe, although it is an art whereof I know little, lays stress on the word boundary.”

“Boundary!” snorts the General in dudgeon. “The English are there! Where my foe goes, I go; my diplomacy is of the sword.”

The General elaborates; for he is not without liking the sound of his own voice. Governor Maurequez, he says, has welcomed the English; he must enlarge that welcome to include Americans.

“For I tell you,” goes on the General, “that I shall expect from him the same courtesy he extends to Colonel Nichols. Nor do I despair of receiving it, since I shall take my artillery. With both Americans and English among his guests, if trouble fall out it will be his own fault, and should teach him to practice hereafter a less complicated hospitality.”

The General prepares for the journey to Pensacola. The treasure chest shows the usual emptiness, and he exerts his own credit, as he did on a Natchez occasion, to provide for his hunting-shirt men. This time the Government will honor his drafts promptly, for election day is drawing near.

One sun-filled autumn morning, the General and his hunting-shirt men march away for Pensacola, their hearts full of cheering anticipations of a fight, and eight days provant in the commissariat.

“We should be there in eight days,” says the General hopefully, “and Governor Maurequez and the English must provide for us after that.”

The General does not overstate the powers of his hunting-shirt men, and the eighth morning finds them and him within striking distance of Fort St. Michael. The General shades his blue eyes with his hand and scans the walls with vicious lynxlike intentness in search of that hated red flag. His heart chills when he does not find it. There is the flag of Arragon and Castile; but the staff which only yesterday supported the flag of England stands an unfurnished, naked spar of pine.

The General heaves a sigh.

“Coffee,” he says, pathos in his tones, “they have run away.”

“Possibly,” returns the excellent Coffee, who sees that the General’s regrets are leveled at an absence of English, and is anxious to console him, “possibly they’ve only retired to Fort Barrancas, six miles below, and are waiting for us there.”

The disappointed General shakes his head; he does not share the confidence of the optimistic Coffee.

“Send Major Piere,” he says, “with a flag of truce to announce to the Spaniard our purpose of lunching with him. We will ask him, now we’re here, by what license he gives shelter to our enemies.”

Major Piere goes forward, white flag fluttering, and is promptly fired upon by Governor Maurequez at the distance of six hundred yards. The balls fly wide and high, for the Spaniard shoots like a Creek. Finding himself a target, the disgusted Major Piere returns and reports his uncivil reception. The General’s eyes blaze with a kind of blue fury.

“Turn out the troops!” he roars.

The drums sound the long roll. The hunting-shirt men are about the cookery – being always hungry – of the last of those eight days’ rations. When they fall into line, the General makes them a speech. It is brief, but registers the point of better provender in Pensacola than that which now bubbles in their coffee pots and burns on their spits. Whereat the hunting-shirt men cheer joyously.

“The English, too, are there,” concludes the General. Then, in a burst of flattering eloquence: “And I know that you would sooner fight Englishmen than eat.”

At the name of Englishmen, the hunting-shirt men give such a cheer that it quite throws that former cheer into the vocal shade. Everyone is in immediate favor of rushing on Pensacola.

The General becomes cunning, and sends Colonel Coffee with a detachment of cavalry to threaten Fort St. Michael from the east. The Spaniards are singularly guileless in matters military. That feigned attack succeeds beyond expression, and the befogged Governor Maurequez hurries his entire garrison to those menaced eastern walls.

While the excited Spaniards are making a chattering, magpie fringe along the eastern ramparts, the General moves the bulk of his hunting-shirt forces, under cover of the woods, to the fort’s western face. Once they are placed, he gives the order:

“Charge!”

The word sends the hunting-shirt men at that mud-built citadel with a whoop.

The Spaniards are unstrung by surprise, and fall to pattering prayers and telling beads. In the very midst of their orisons, the hunting-shirt men, as in the fight at the Horseshoe, pour like a cataract over the parapet and sweep the praying, helpless Spaniards into a corner.

The work, however, is not altogether done. When Governor Maurequez gives the order to man the eastern walls against the deploying Coffee, he does not remain to see it executed.

Having sublime faith in the heroism of his followers, for him to personally remain, he argues, would be superfluous. Nay, it might even be construed into a criticism of his devoted soldiery, as implying a fear that they will not fight if relieved of his fiery presence, not to say the fiery pressure of his commanding eye. Having thus defined his position, the valorous Governor Maurequez, acting in that spirit of compliment toward his people which has ever characterized his speech, gathers up his gubernatorial skirts and scuttles for his palace like a scared hen pheasant.

Having swept the walls of St. Michael clean of magpie Spaniards, and run up the stars and stripes on the vacant English staff, the General and his hunting-shirt men make ready to follow Governor Maurequez to the palace. He is to be their host; it is their polite duty to find him with all dispatch and offer their compliments.

Full of this urbane purpose, they wheel their bristling ranks on the town. Approaching double-quick, they casually lick up, as with a tongue of flame, a brace of abortive blockhouses which obstruct their path. At this, an interior fort opens fire with grapeshot and shrapnel, and the hunting-shirt men spring upon it with the ruthless ferocity of panthers. To quench it is no more than the fighting work of a moment. The General, with his flag already on the ramparts of Fort St. Michael, now feels his clutch at the very throat of Pensacola.

Governor Maurequez, equipped in his turn of a milk-white flag, bursts from the palace portals.

“Oh, Senores Americanos,” he cries, “spare, for the love of the Virgin, my beautiful Pensacola! As you hope for heaven’s mercy, spare my beautiful city!”

The wild hunting-shirt men are in a jocular mood. The terrified rushing about of Governor Maurequez excites their laughter.

“Where is your humane General Jackson?” wails Governor Maurequez, in appeal to the hunting-shirt men. “Where is he – I beseech you? I hear he is the soul of merciful forbearance!”

At this the hunting-shirt laughter breaks out with double volume, as though Governor Maurequez has evolved a jest.

The alarmed Governor, catching sight of a couple of dead Spaniards, fresh killed in the struggle with the foolish interior fort, expresses his grief in staccato shrieks, which serve as weird marks of punctuation to the laughter of the rude hunting-shirt men. The laughter ceases when the General himself rides up.

“Thar’s the Gin’ral,” says a hunting-shirt man, biting his merriment short off. “Thar’s the man of mercy you’re asking for.”

Governor Maurequez starts back at sight of the gaunt face, emaciated by sickness born of those Benton bullets, and yellowed to primrose hue with the malaria of the Alabama swamps. The lean figure on the big war stallion might remind him of Don Quixote – for he has read and remembers his Cervantes – save for the frown like the look of a fighting falcon, and the fire-sparkle in the dangerous blue eyes. As it is, he feels that his visitor is a perilous man, and begins to bow and cringe.

“I beg the victorious Senor General,” says he, pressing meanwhile a right hand to his heart, and presenting the white square of truce with the other – “I beg the victorious Senor General to spare my beautiful Pensacola!”

“You are Governor Maurequez!” returns the General, hard as flint.

“Yes, Senor General; I am Governor Maurequez, as you say. Also” – here his voice begins to shake – “I must remind your excellency that this is a province of Spain, and ask by what right you invade it.”

“Right!” returns the General, anger rising. “Did you not fire on my messenger? Sir, if you were Satan and this your kingdom, it would be the same! I would storm the walls of hell itself to get at an Englishman.”

There comes the whiplike crack of a rifle almost at the General’s elbow. Far up the narrow street, full four hundred yards and more, a flying Spanish soldier throws up his hands with a death yell, and pitches forward on his face. At this, the hunting-shirt man who fired tosses his coonskin cap in the air and shouts:

“Thar, Bill Potter, the jug of whisky’s mine! Thar’s your Spaniard too dead to skin! If the distance ain’t four hundred yard, you kin have the gun!”

“What’s this?” cries the General fiercely. “Nothin’, Gin’ral!” replies the hunting-shirt man, abashed at the forbidding manner of the General, “nothin’, only Bill Potter, from the ‘Possum Trot, bets me a jug of whisky that old Soapstick here” – holding up his rifle as identifying “old Soapstick” – “won’t kill at four hundred yard.”

“Betting, eh!” retorts the General, assuming the coldly implacable. “Now it’s in my mind, Mr. Soapstick, that unless you mend your morals, some one about your size will pass an hour strung up by the thumbs so high his moccasins won’t touch the grass! How often must I tell you that I’m bound to break up gambling among my troops?”

The rebuked soapstick one slinks away, and the General turns to Colonel Coffee.

“Give the word, Coffee, to cease firing.”

The General’s glance comes around to Governor Maurequez, still bowing and presenting his white flag.

“Where are those English?” he demands.

The frightened Governor Maurequez makes the sign of the cross. He is sorry, but the pig English withdrew to Fort Barrancas at the first signs of the coming of the victorious Senor General, taking with them their hateful red flag. Also, it was they who fired on the messenger. If the victorious Senor General will but move quickly, he may catch the pig English before they escape.

The General, half his hunting-shirt men at his back, starts for Fort Barrancas. They are two miles on their way when the earth is shaken by a thunderous explosion. Over the tops of the forest pines a gush of black smoke shoots upward toward the sky.

“They have blown up the fort!” says the explanatory Coffee.

The General says nothing, but urges speed. At last they come in sight of what has been Fort Barrancas. It is as the astute Coffee surmised. The one-eyed Colonel Nichols and his English have fled, leaving a slow-match and the magazine to destroy what they dared not defend. Far away in the offing Captain Percy’s English fleet – upon which the one-eyed Colonel Nichols and his fugitive followers have taken refuge – wind aft and an ebb tide to help, is speeding seaward like gulls.