Word of the treaty spread through the continent with a painful slowness that we can scarcely imagine today. Nonetheless, by the end of February almost all British forces had evacuated U.S. territory.
There were two major exceptions. One was the coastal town of Castine, in what would become Maine. There Sherbrooke held out, hoping against hope that the government would change its mind and add the so-called “Province of New Ireland” to its Canadian possessions, or that Strong would remember his proposal of the previous year.
The other, of course, was New Orleans…
Charles Cerniglia, The War of 1812
* * *
March 8, 1815
About 10 a.m.
New Orleans
“Damned if I like this,” said Cochrane. “None of these people are going to leave, you know. They turned against that bloody-minded maniac precisely because they were loyal to their city, and you expect them to abandon it?”
“I don’t see that they have much choice,” said Keane, watching the sailors load supplies onto the fleet at the lakeside dock. “You might have encouraged them to come with us, rather than leading them on with false hope.”
“I didn’t think they were false promises. Now that this place is a republic…” They had been over this ground a good many times over the last couple of days. “If nothing else, I wish we could offer Lafitte and You privateer commissions.”
“Me?”
“Forgive me — Dominique You. That is his name.”
“Ah.”
“Sir!”
Keane turned to look. It was a messenger from one of Gibbs’ regiments.
“Sir, General Gibbs requests your presence at the west end of the city.”
“What’s this in aid of?”
“Some Yankees on horseback have shown up with arrest warrants.”
“Already?” Keane got moving.
A fair number of the buildings in New Orleans — especially the poorer homes, made of logs instead of brick — were still burned-out shells. If Keane hadn’t put his men to work putting out the fires the minute the Yankees had fled, and if there hadn’t been a river and lake handy to draw water from, the city might have been lost.
As he walked through the streets, he saw that more and more of the townspeople were walking in the same direction as himself. Most of them were armed. This couldn’t be a good sign. He quickened his pace.
At the edge of town, Keane saw the intruders. They were cavalry — a militia unit. He estimated their numbers at between three and four hundred, with plenty of remounts. General Gibbs and a couple of companies of British soldiers were blocking their path into the city.
“Colonel Thomas Benton,” he said. “For the purposes of this mission, my men and I have been sworn in as deputy U.S. Marshals. We’re here to serve this arrest warrant.” He pulled out a roll of parchment.
Keane looked at it. They had everybody here — Jacques Villeré who seemed to be in charge of the Republic’s provisional government, his son Gabriel who had killed his dog to escape the British, Destrehan, Plauche, Latour, Nolte, Ducartel, Seignouret, Dussau de la Croix and the rest of the Committee… He looked down. There were over a hundred names on this list.
“You might have come two weeks later,” said Keane. “By then we would have been out of your hair, and we would have persuaded your so-called ‘traitors’ to come with us.”
“Why do you think we were in such a hurry?” said Benton. “We don’t want them ‘out of our hair,’ we want them in our hands. We want to make them pay for what they’ve done. And there’s at least one other who is not on this list.”
“Who might that be?”
“The man or men who murdered General Jackson, of course.” Benton tried to keep his face and voice neutral as he said this, but didn’t quite succeed.
“General Jackson fell in battle,” said Keane. “He killed one of his enemies in the process. You can hardly call that murder.” He would have reminded Benton that the British had lost a leader as well, but he did not want to risk showing the guilt he still felt over that.
“Whoever it is — along with every man on this list — will have their day in court, I promise you. They can make their case then.”
Keane suddenly became acutely aware of all the muttering behind him. He turned. Something like the entire Louisiana militia was gathering in the streets, armed and looking ready to fight.
Keane was no prophet, but suddenly he could see the future very clearly. Even if he stood aside and did nothing, the militia could easily drive off Benton and his men today. But the dirty-shirts would come back, with General Coffee and ten, or twenty, or thirty thousand men. Even if every New Orleanian who could lift, point and fire a musket fought, they would be outnumbered… and after that would come something very much like the massacre they all feared.
Then Keane noticed that one of them was a woman in widow’s weeds. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
“Héléne Judith Toutant-Beauregarde,” she said when he asked for her name. “My Jacques… was at Pearl River.” Her black dress was loose about the waist. She wasn’t starting to show, but something in her complexion said to Keane this woman is pregnant.
At this point his treacherous memory whispered the phrase beauty and booty into his ear. His army had come with the intention not to save the city, but to loot it… among other things. The general was sickened by the thought of the fate that this brave young woman might have suffered at the hands of Englishman under his command. Thank You, God, for sparing her that, he thought. And thank You even more for sparing me that. Could the Lord possibly have spared her then, only to desert her now? Did he not have a duty to these people, as well as to the Crown?
“I remind you that you no longer have any right to stop us,” said Benton. “Tell your men to stand aside.”
Keane realized at this point that there were two people whose actions had brought things to this pass. He was one, and the other was dead. This might not be his fault, but it was surely his responsibility.
And it only got worse as he looked at the crowd behind the Beauregarde widow. The sight of all these women and gray-headed men and beardless boys assembled in the street behind the militia, clutching old muskets and cutlasses, cane-knives or whatever other weapons they could find… even a coward might have been moved to defend these people. And there was not a grain of cowardice anywhere in Keane’s army. His men were looking at him expectantly — even Gibbs. (Even black freedmen were in the crowd, armed like everyone else. In New Orleans, this was well-nigh a sign of the coming Apocalypse.)
“General Keane?” said Benton. The seconds were ticking past one by one, each one whispering four little words as it went by — Make up your mind. Make up your mind. Make up your mind.
So he did.
“No,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“No. You may not arrest anyone here.”
As the crowd cheered, Benton stared blankly. Finally he said, “On whose authority?”
Well, one might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. “On the authority of the Republic of Louisiana, which rests under the protection of the Crown.” There. He’d said it.
Benton was silent. He was almost the only one there who was. The crowd cheered and catcalled. Even the British soldiers were cheering. Finally, the Americans said something that was probably an ominous warning, even though it was completely drowned out. Then he and his men turned and left.
* * *
“I promise you, you won’t regret this,” said Jacques Villeré. Keane was already regretting it a little, but he knew he would have regretted the alternative even more.
“Is Mr. Claiborne still being held in Fort Charles?”
“So he is.”
“I should like to have him released to the Americans,” said Keane, “and I should like to speak to him first.”
“That seems reasonable,” said Villeré, with the air of a man granting a favor rather than obeying an order.
While Keane was sitting in Villeré’s office, waiting for the release of the former state’s former governor, Admiral Cochrane entered.
“I must say, I didn’t think you had it in you,” he said.
“Nor did I, until the moment came.”
“Well, rest assured — if you need a man to plead the rightness of our cause, I will not be found wanting.”
* * *
William C. C. Claiborne had been kept in decent health during his two months or more as a prisoner of war, but his militiaman’s uniform was worn and mended to unrecognizability.
“Well, am I being given my parole?” said the ex-governor.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And you truly intend to recognize this farce of a republic.”
“We remain loyal to our Louisianan allies, and respect their decision,” said Keane. “But in the interest of peace, I have a request to make of you.
“Go to Washington. Take your wife and children with you — I won’t have it said that I’m holding any hostages.
“Find President Madison and tell him this from me. I am willing to serve as mediator in this dispute between the United States and the Republic of Louisiana. Simply put, if your government can persuade these people to rejoin your union of their own free will, Admiral Cochrane and I will be more than happy to leave in full accord with the treaty already signed.” More than happy was not strictly true, but for this purpose it didn’t matter.
“You truly expect me to believe you,” said Claiborne.
“Think of me as you please. My chief purpose is to prevent needless bloodshed.”
Claiborne shook his head. “I think you mean what you say,” he said, “but I wonder what you would have done differently if it had been your chief purpose to start a war.”
To this, Keane had no answer.
March 25, 1815
7:30 p.m.
Vienna
Lord Clancarty sat at the desk in his suite, desperately trying to think of the best way to write his letter to Lord Castlereagh. That Bonaparte had escaped was already old news. They’d learned it in London not long after they learned it in Vienna.
At first, it hadn’t been cause for panic. Surely, they thought, surely the French would seize the man who had led them into so many disasters and hang him from the nearest tree.
They hadn’t.
This was not an emergency. Surely Marshal Michel Ney would bring the would-be Emperor to Paris in an iron cage as he had promised.
He followed Bonaparte to Paris in triumph instead.
Surely the French people would not suffer the overthrow of their good king Louis XVIII. Surely they would not allow themselves to be rallied for yet another war.
Guess what was happening now.
Clancarty tried to remember that the man was only mortal. He could be beaten — had been beaten, early on, in Egypt. His expedition to Haiti had been a failure, and it was only a pity he hadn’t led it personally.
But other memories rose up into his mind as well. Austerlitz. Jena. Auerstädt. Halle. Freidland. Wagram. Even thinking any one of those names felt like sticking a finger into an open wound. For years, it had seemed like the certain fate of all Europe to be part of a French Empire under that man’s rule.
Finally — finally, after the great beast had wasted the bulk of his army on a military adventure so grandiose than not even he could make it work — through the combined efforts of basically every other nation in Europe, he was defeated. It cost more, in lives and material, than anyone would reasonably expect. But last year, they did it. They beat him and they sent him off to the island of Elba. Let that be his empire.
And since then, everyone had been trying to pick up the pieces… and Clancarty thought they’d been doing rather well. The past quarter of a century had already started to seem like a bad dream, a nightmare in which royal families of ancient lineage could be overthrown by angry mobs and beheaded like chickens in the marketplace, and a clan of Corsican banditti could put crowns on their heads, proclaim themselves lords of creation, sweep all before them and destroy the order of centuries and no one could stop them. Now, at last, Christendom was awake, the fever had broken, the nightmare was over, and the world could rest safe at peace in the hands of legitimate kings from real dynasties…
Until now. He’s back. I thought we were shot of him. He’s back. We’ll have to do it all over again. He’s back. God, I know we’re sinners, but have we really sinned this much?
All this, Their Lordships already knew. What they didn’t know about was the suspicion with which the Powers were starting to regard each other. Who, exactly, had financed Bonaparte’s escape? Who had paid his bills until he gained control of the state? Whose bright idea was it to send him into exile so close to home? The Prussians suspected the Austrians, the Austrians the tsar… and everybody was looking askance at the British. It was their ships and men that had been given the task of watching over Bonaparte, and they had failed. According to Talleyrand, they “were guilty of a negligence which they will find it difficult to excuse.”
Sir Charles Stewart had made things worse, blithely saying that they had never actually committed themselves in writing to the man’s imprisonment. The looks on the faces of the Austrians and Russians and Prussians — and even the Spaniards — had spoken volumes. Hundreds of thousands of brave men died to put that beast in a cage where he belongs, and YOU left the door unlocked. Whatever happened to “England expects that every man will do his duty?”
Today, at least, Clancarty had done his duty. Together with the representatives of Austria, Prussia and Russia, he had worked out a treaty whereby each of the four Powers would raise an army of 150,000 for the express purpose of defeating Bonaparte.
Well, sort of. The British army was very professional, had possibly the best logistical support in the world… and it was very small. Clancarty wasn’t sure the United Kingdom could field 150,000 men. He was quite sure he didn’t dare commit them to it. So he had arranged an additional article to the treaty whereby His Britannic Majesty might contribute fewer men and more money — twenty pounds a year per infantryman and thirty pounds a year per cavalryman. The other signatories had nodded, with only a hint of contempt, as if they had expected nothing better.
Clancarty wasn’t worried that this new coalition (which one was it now? The seventh?) would break up over these differences — not while Bonaparte was on the loose. But not since the American Revolution had Britain’s standing in the world been in greater jeopardy.
We need Wellington, he thought. Whatever else we give the war effort, he must be part of it. Whatever he’s doing in America can’t be as important as this. Their Lordships won’t want to call him back so soon after sending him there, but they must. We must be seen by the world to be giving our best.
