Interesting guesses, everybody! (And this is turning into a very long chapter.)
David Daggett, of Connecticut (Berrien wanted to prove the Quids weren't just for Southerners anymore). He's racist even by 19th-century standards, but he's also a government-of-laws-not-of-men type who was an early proponent of a new state constitution for Connecticut, which was run by the 1662 charter until 1818.
Daggett hasn't done much of anything as VP, and he's so old that he probably wouldn't stay on the ticket in 1840 no matter what happened.
Not quite, but very soon. Not long, in fact, after they find out that Berrien ordered the Army to invade Texas anyway.
Oh, and in case anyone's wondering if that awesome
Oversimplified video might have exaggerated Gen. Harney's reputation as a beard with a trainwreck stuck to it… he was
worse than you think.
May 12, 1838
south of Fort Little River[1]
, Arkansaw
Even from up here, Lieutenant Alexander Stephens[2] couldn’t tell if what they were following had started out as an Indian trail or just a game trail. The last few farmsteads were back on the other side of the Red River. Up ahead—somewhere in all this forest—was the border. Just beyond that was the town of Granicus. And somewhere beyond that were Lamar, Quitman, and their merry men.
And from the looks of things, Harney was somewhere out there too by now. Stephens signaled for them to start pulling on the rope. His balloon was hitched to the back of a wagon being pulled by a mule train—which probably slowed Taylor’s men down, not that cavalry could make good speed in this terrain anyway.
Stephens got out of the balloon. At least it was easy to see they were on the right path. The trail was heavily trampled, and after two cavalry forces had gone through, well-nigh everything a horse might choose to eat was browsed away. Which meant they couldn’t stay long.
This had been a very confusing few weeks. First they’d gotten orders from the President himself telling them that they were now at war with the Spanish Empire. Taylor had left Lauderdale in command of the fort with just enough men to defend it and taken the rest with him up the river.
Before they’d even made it into Arkansas, Taylor had gotten a notice from Speaker of the House Daniel Webster, co-signed by Senators Clay and Southard and Rep. Adams, informing them that in the interests of clarity, he should know that Congress had voted not to declare war on New Spain or the Spanish Empire.[3] This was accompanied by messages from Secretary Poinsett and General Scott, to the same effect.
Shouldn’t Scott be on his way to Canada by now? Perhaps he sent the note just before he left.
Two days after that, when they were almost back to Natchez, word from the reserves at Coffeesburg had come.
General Harney had received direct orders from the president to march for Texas. As expected, he’d obeyed them.
As
unexpected, he’d disregarded all subsequent communications.
His army had nearly had its own civil war. Harney had given his men some sort of speech, culminating with the words that “the knell of power was sounded in Europe when the first Pilgrim vessel sought a harbor on the western shores of the Atlantic.”[4] As many of the officers had pointed out—and as Taylor had certainly pointed out—they’d taken an oath to the Constitution, not to the fellow in the Oval Office, and the Constitution was very clear on who did and did not have the power to declare war. If Congress said there was no war, there was no war. That had been good enough for most of them, but not for General Harney and a couple of thousand young volunteers. They hadn’t all been cavalry, but Harney had swiped enough of the Army’s horses to get them all mounted.
Having heard this, Taylor sent the rest of his men back to Natchez under the command of Call[5] and gone in pursuit with three regiments of cavalry and a wagon team with an observation balloon.
But they were too late. Harney and his hooligans were somewhere on the wrong side of the border along with the filibuster. What they were going to eat over there was anybody’s guess.[6]
“So… no sign of them?” said Taylor.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Damnation.” Taylor shook his head. “‘Hero of Mount Hope.’ Five minutes’ conversation with that man and I was thinking to myself, ‘I am in the presence of a madman.’ Didn’t think he was this crazy, though. So now we probably will be at war before too long. Which means I need to get that fort ready for an attack, on top of everything else.”
“Everything else,” Stephens knew, meant preparing to invade Louisiana again and face Wellington and the
Volonté in battle. More men were supposed to be coming to the Louisiana front, but no one seemed to expect anything to happen before September. Stephens had heard rumors of secret weapons being built somewhere upstream, but he had no idea what they were.
If I did, they wouldn’t be secret
weapons, now would they? Whatever they are, I doubt they’ll make as much difference as having a whole new enemy to fight.
May 15, 1838
north of Nacogdoches, Tejas
General José de Urrea leaned down and sniffed the waters of Bayou La Nana.
Well, at least I know where they are now. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t stop him from pissing in it. So he didn’t need the report from his scouts to tell him where the enemy was. They were upstream—lots and lots of them.
What he did need his scouts for was to tell him if the enemy knew where he was, what they were planning to do, and—most importantly—if they were just a band of bandits or if there were real soldiers among them. That would tell him whether or not this was really a war. It would also tell him how likely he was to win the coming battle.
And here came one now, splash-galloping down the streambed.
“I was spotted, sir!” The scout gasped as if he’d been the one doing the running, not his horse. “A Yankee scout saw me and ran north.”
“How was he dressed?”
“Blue coat. Shiny buttons.”
Shit. That was a U.S. Army uniform.
So what were they going to do now? If they chose to attack, he would need to meet them, and the best way to do that would be to form a line of battle. If they chose to retreat, he would need to chase them, and the worst way to do that in these woods would be to form a line of battle.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now go back out there and see how many there are, and what they’re doing next.”
***
So. They have chosen violence. Any minute now, the Yankees—no regimental colors beyond a U.S. flag and something that might have been someone’s idea of a Texas state flag, but enough for about two regiments—would come charging down the streambed. Probably. It was the mostly likely avenue of attack for cavalry in this hilly, forested terrain.
“Fifth, forward twenty paces on the left, ten on the right! Nineteenth, foward ten paces on the left, twenty on the right!” He turned to one aide. “Bring forward the artillery. All of it.” He turned to another. “Tell Col. Comonfort[7] to go west, just, behind the ridge of those hills, and then bring his regiment north—and to take our remounts with him.”
“Remounts, sir?”
“Yes.”
Urrea spent the next few minutes refining the line of battle he’d ordered, shaping it into a crescent with the horns pointing north. This sort of complicated maneuver was more suited to the parade-ground than the battlefield—it taught men discipline and precise obedience. But it sometimes had its uses in combat, especially if you wanted to aim as many guns and cannon as possible at a narrow front, and you wanted the enemy to be able to see that you were doing it.
And, on his right… yes. It was just Col. Comonfort’s cavalry regiment behind the ridge, but the army’s remounts raised a cloud of dust that from here looked like it belonged to a force three or four times the size. Urrea allowed himself a moment of satisfaction.
An impenetrable barrier to the south. A large cavalry force to the west. They’ll either retreat or go east. And if they go east, we can chivvy them southeast, away from town. Maybe they’ll find the road and take it back across the border—good riddance—or maybe they’ll keep going southeast. They’ll find the further you go, the thicker the woods get, until you realize you’ve blundered into the Conchate—the worst horse country north of Tehuantepec. Considering I had to come up with this plan on the spur of the moment… not bad.
And here they came, in a column, perhaps thirty or forty abreast. Urrea got back on his horse and took up position with his ranks. In a minute the enemy would be within volley range.
Thirty seconds.
Twenty seconds. Some of them were already shooting, the revolvers in their hands making unfamiliar little pops. The man in the lead had a particularly splendid beard.
Ten seconds.
They’re not retreating. They’re not going east. They certainly aren’t in line of battle. Do they know something we don’t, or…
Never mind.
Now.
“FIRE!”
The noise of the volley from muskets and cannons blotted out all hearing, all thought, for a second or more. The smoke from it made it impossible to see. Urrea was counting out thirty seconds.
Three. Two. One.
“FIRE!”
Another volley, almost as crisp as the first. Somewhere in the smoke up ahead, the enemy was returning fire—returning quite a lot of it, far more than he would have expected from the size of the front line. But not enough to match a volley from Urrea’s line of battle—not even in bullets, let alone cannonballs. Even as he counted out thirty more seconds, he thought
What the hell are they doing up there? Advancing? Retreating? Dancing the quadrille? They can’t defeat us like this. Is there some other enemy force we don’t know about, waiting to take us in flank?
“FIRE!”
After the third volley, the sound of gunfire from up ahead died down.
Or I’ve just gone deaf… but if they were still coming, I think I’d still hear the hoofbeats. Wait for the smoke to clear. He looked down. The stream seemed to have shrunk, and was running with swirls of red.
Mother of God, how many men did we just kill?
The wind picked up, and showed him. The stream up ahead was plugged with bodies. The water that was getting through was red with the blood of men and horses. It couldn’t have been more than a portion of the attacking army, but the rest of it was heading north into the distance.
Urrea ordered his men forward. He found the body of the bearded man wearing the general’s uniform, a bullet hole in the chest.
Whoever you were, you were brave, thought Urrea.
You were also an idiot. You didn’t even think to take the obvious avenue of escape. That was a waste of a perfectly good trap.
What to do next? He could go south back to town, then take the Royal Road over the border to Natchitoches, which was poorly defended and which the Americans would have trouble reinforcing with the Great Raft in the way… which also meant he could burn it to the ground without having any effect on their ability to invade.
What a stupid place for a war. We’re like two men trying to slit each other’s throats with our toenails out here.
“First, we find some clean water,” he said. “Then we clean up this mess, before people back in town start getting sick. Then we go to Granicus.” If the Yankees had reinforcements, coming, it would be risky meeting them there…
but if we don’t even try to defend our border, we never had any business calling this land our own in the first place.
Two other men came up, holding a third between them. “One of the prisoners, sir—we found him trapped under a fallen horse. I think he’s the one you wanted.”
General Urrea looked the wet, rumpled prisoner up and down, then smiled. “Señor Navarro,” he said. “The man who wanted slavery more than he wanted New Spain. They’ll be very pleased to see you down in México.”
May 26, 1838
The U.S./New Spain border
Literally and metaphorically, the town of Granicus smoldered behind Urrea as he prepared to meet whoever was in charge. A dozen buildings that Yankees had seen fit to shoot from had been burned yesterday.
Who knew there were this many of them? There are at least as many Yankee settlers in Tejas as ours, and ours are mostly Irish and Austrians and such.[8] We have let things slide, and now we either have to drive these people out or govern them and try to win their loyalty.
His men were keeping an eye on the sullen inhabitants as they paced out walls surrounding where the courthouse had once stood, where Urrea meant to build what he’d decided to call the Presidio San Agustín del Nuevo Tucsón[9].
A man on horseback was coming under a flag of truce, with an honor guard and some sort of wagon. The rope to an observation balloon was rising from the back of the wagon. Urrea had only ever seen such a balloon once before, inside Mayagüey when the rebels had it under siege. Most of the battlefields he’d fought on, there’d been too much cover for eyes in the sky to be any use.
We need to get some of those things. They know exactly what we have and where we have it, and I have no idea what they’ve got. That’s no way to win a battle.
But they were the ones who’d asked for a cease-fire. Which Urrea had agreed to, not least because he was running low on ammunition. A hastily-made coffin rested on the ground beside his horse, quite ripe on this hot day.
Which was good. It meant both he and Zachary Taylor—for that was the Yankee general’s name—had reason to get through the small talk as quickly as possible.
“The body of your general. He fell at Bayou La Nana, where we recovered this flag.” While the interpreter was translating that, Urrea presented Taylor with a pair of neatly folded U.S. flags. “Muddy, but a little cleaning will take care of that. And
this flag”—the one underneath was much cleaner—“was raised over the town hall in Granicus. In the future, I recommend you keep them where they belong.”
One advantage of having a conversation through interpreters was that it gave you a moment to think. General Taylor showed no sign of either intimidation or anger at the warning, and he nodded as he inspected the flags for any sign of vandalism or dishonor. There were none. Urrea preferred to vent his fury on things that were a danger to him and his men.
“You requested this cease-fire,” said Urrea. “How long do you want it to last?”
“As far as I’m concerned, it can last till Judgment Day,” said Taylor. “We’re not supposed to be at war in the first place.”
Now that was news. “This general thought differently.”
“General Harney—that was his name, if you care—followed illegal orders. I don’t. You want a fight, you come to my fort and we’ll be happy to oblige. You don’t want one, you can stay right where you are.”
“It sounds like your army has come down with a bad case of politics,” said Urrea. “I know what that’s like.”
The expression of sympathy seemed to make Taylor angry rather than anything else. “It
won’t happen here, by God. Not if I have anything to say about it. Until Congress declares war or your Viceroy declares war, there is no war. Not here. If it suits your purposes to tell ‘em back in your capital that you put the fear of God in me, you go right ahead and do that. You can guess what I’ll be telling ‘em back in Washington.” He turned to his men. “Take Harney here back to Little Rock, and see if that town has a proper mortician.”
As Taylor was turning away, Comonfort leaned in a little closer. “Do you trust him, sir?”
“I don’t
trust. Let’s smile at them and keep our guns ready.”
“But not use them?”
Urrea shook his head. “Normally when planning battle, it’s best to imagine the worst,” said Urrea. “But in this case, let’s imagine the best. Suppose we win. Suppose we send these men skittering away like cockroaches and go forth in triumph. By the time we reach the Mississippi we’ll be making soup of our own boots. It is as much as our logistics train can do to sustain us here, let alone over the border.”
[1] Which is couple miles northwest of where Fulton, AR is IOTL.
[2] He’s been promoted twice since we last saw him—expanding armies need officers, and he’s an educated man from a literate family.
[3] Although Webster didn’t say so during the debate, he was smart enough to figure out the same thing Sumner did—that Berrien was in on this plan for a very long time—and that he might not respond well to having such a long-running plan thwarted at the last minute.
[4] An OTL Harney quote.
[5] General
Richard Keith Call.
[6] I’m sure this will come as a great shock to everyone, but IOTL Harney was not good at keeping his men warm and well-fed, which was a problem when he marched through the Upper Midwest during the ’55-’56 winter.
[7]
Ignacio Comonfort
[8] IOTL, by 1834 the Anglo-Americans in Texas considerably outnumbered the Mexicans.
[9] Urrea was born in Presidio San Agustín del Tucsón—modern Tucson, AZ IOTL.