Eric Flint: 1824: The Arkansas War

Chester stopped smiling, then.

"He's a prize, Calhoun is." Sam leaned over and spit in the creek. Not so much as a gesture of disgust-although that was there, too-as to get rid of the taste of raw meat he still had in his mouth. The whiskey had helped some, but not enough.

For a moment, he contemplated taking another slug but decided against it. He'd already drunk almost a quarter of the bottle this morning. He wasn't worried about being able to ride a horse, of course. Sam could manage that with a full bottle under his belt. But he had an awkward interview coming up today, and he needed his wits about him.

"Come on," he said. "The horses have had enough, and I'd like to make it to the senator's house by midafternoon."

"Hi, Sam!"

"Hi, Sam!"

He grinned at the twin girls scampering around the front yard of Blue Spring Farm, as Richard M. Johnson's house and plantation were called. "Settle down, will you? You're making the horse nervous."

The admonishment had as much effect as such admonishments usually have on twelve-year-old girls. Fortunately, Sam's horse was a placid creature.

He decided to try the tactic of parental authority. "And you know your daddy doesn't like it when his girls don't act proper. Him being a United States senator and all."

That had no effect, either, not to Sam's surprise. Richard Johnson was a genial man toward just about everybody, especially his own daughters. Threatening them with his wrath was as useful as threatening them with a snowstorm in July.

In fact, they started laughing. And they were still bouncing up and down.

Fortunately, the girls' mother emerged onto the front porch.

" Settle down! Right this minute, Imogene, or I'll smack you proper! You too, Adaline!"

That did it. In an instant, the girls were the very model of propriety and demure behavior. Their father might be easygoing, but their mother was not. Julia Chinn was so well organized and disciplined that she almost managed to keep the senator from losing his money.

Almost, but not quite. But Sam didn't think anyone else could have kept him from going broke years earlier.

Sam got off his horse and handed the reins to Chester, who began leading the horses to the barn around the side. Sam stepped up onto the porch and took off his hat. He gave a polite nod to the two disabled veterans sitting on chairs further down the porch, and then turned to the lady of the house.

"Afternoon, Julia."

Her stern look vanished. "Hello, Sam. It's so nice to see you visit again. It's been:what? Over a year, now. You shouldn't stay away so long."

Before he could answer, she waved a hand. "Yes, yes, I know. You're a frightfully busy man."

Richard Johnson came out onto the porch just in time to hear the last words.

"Frightfully busy troublemaker, more like," he said gruffly. But he didn't even try to disguise the smile with which he said it.

As the two shook hands, Houston took a moment to size up the senator's appearance. It was:

Even more sloppy and eccentric than usual. The clothing itself simply consisted of the plain and unassuming garments that Johnson had always worn, which were part of his appeal to Kentucky's poor farmers and the workingmen of the nation's northeastern states. Nothing peculiar, in and of itself-except for the fact that the man who wore that humble apparel came from one of Kentucky's premier families and was himself one of the state's largest landowners. One of its largest slave-owners, too.

No, it was the rest of it. His hair was disheveled, his cravat was askew-only half tied, at that-and his boots had long since abandoned the status of "humble" and were pretty well past the stage of "worn down." Give them another few months, and they'd be able to proudly claim holes in the soles and heels that were nothing but memories.

The face, though, was the same. Johnson was a plain-looking man and always had been. Unassuming, in both his appearance and his manner. If you didn't know better, you'd find it hard to reconcile the man himself with his flamboyant reputation.

Flamboyant it was, too, even by the standards of the frontier. The Great Hero who'd personally shot Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames after suffering terrible wounds himself in the battle-so the story went, anyway, and Johnson had never done anything to detract from it-was also the Great Almagamator. The disreputable fellow from Great Crossing-a United States senator, to boot!-who lived in an open state of quasi-marriage with a mulatto and who persisted in treating his quadroon daughters as if they belonged in proper society. Even took them in his own carriage to church on a Sunday!

Andrew Jackson had shown Sam some of the letters he'd gotten from outraged gentility in Kentucky and Tennessee, demanding that the general disavow his political ties to Johnson.

"They can take that to Sam Hill," Jackson had growled, tossing the letters back into a drawer of his desk. He even lapsed into blasphemy for a moment. "I'll be damned if I will. Johnson's as stalwart as they make 'em, even if he is a blasted race-mixer."

Fortunately for Johnson, most of his own constituents felt much the same way about the matter. Whatever they felt personally about his notorious relationship with Julia Chinn, they overlooked it in favor of the rest.

Not the gentility, of course. During the six consecutive terms Johnson had served as one of Kentucky's members in the U.S. House of Representatives, most of the state's wealthy slave-owners had been indifferent to his personal habits. He didn't represent them, after all, for the most part. The scandalmongering with regard to Julia and the girls hadn't really started until John J. Crittenden resigned from the Senate in 1819 and Johnson was appointed to fill out Crittenden's term of office. A congressman was one thing; a senator, another.

But most of Kentucky's citizens were neither wealthy nor slave-owners. So far as they were concerned, Johnson's family arrangements were his own business. What mattered was all the rest: the fact that he was a genuine war hero; the fact that he was politically allied with Andrew Jackson's wing of the Democratic-Republican Party; most of all, the fact that Johnson had led the fight to get debt imprisonment abolished in Kentucky and was striving to do the same thing on a national level.

And, besides, every other personal habit of Johnson's led poor settlers on the frontier to favor him. Both as a Kentucky legislator and now as a national one, Johnson had made great efforts to gain compensation for the recent war's disabled veterans or their widows and orphans. If Blue Spring Farm was notorious as a place where a black woman presided over the dinner table and black children sat at it, it was also famous as a place of refuge for disabled veterans and their families. The two veterans on the porch-one missing an arm, the other a leg-would have half a dozen counterparts somewhere about the house or farm. Or their widows and orphans. No one in need was ever turned away from Richard M. Johnson's estate-never mind that the aid itself was often passed over by the dark-skinned hands of his common-law wife.

Kentucky's gentility had been disgusted to see Johnson appointed to serve out Crittenden's term in 1819. They'd been positively outraged to see him handily win the election for another term in the Senate in 1822.

Sam saw that Johnson was eyeing him a bit warily. "You seen the general lately?"

Sam shook his head. "Haven't seen him in nigh-on seven months, Dick." Since there was no point in letting Johnson fret on that score, when there were so many others he did need to fret about, Sam added hurriedly, "But I can assure you that the sentiments he expressed concerning you were just as warm as ever."

That was true, after all. Even if some of those "warm sentiments" had run along the lines of I can't believe he'd treat a nigger like she was an actual wife!