When Men Grew Tall, or The Story of Andrew Jackson

by Alfred Henry Lewis

Colonel Burr, being dined, confides to the General how he is not without an ally in the Southwest, and says that Commander Wilkinson, in control for the Government at New Orleans, stands ready to advance his anti-Spanish projects. At the name of “Wilkinson” the General shakes his prudent head. He declares that Commander Wilkinson is a faithless, caitiff creature, with a brandified nose, a coward heart, and a weakness for breaking his word. The crafty Burr, confident to vanity of his own genius for intrigue, insists that he can trust Commander Wilkinson. Then he arranges with the General for the building of a flotilla of flat-boats at the latter's yards, and goes his scheming way. Later, when Colonel Burr is on trial for treason in Richmond, the General will ride over the Blue Ridge to give him aid and comfort, and make street-corner speeches defending him, wherein he will say things more explicit than flattering concerning President Jefferson, who is urging the prosecution of Colonel Burr.

The hours, never resting, never sleeping, march onward with our planter-General, until the procession in its passing is remembered and spoken of as years. Then comes the war with England. That saber scar on the General's head begins to throb, and he sends word to Washington that he is ready, with twenty-five hundred of his hunting-shirt militia, to kill British wherever they shall be found.

The Government thanks him, and orders him with his hunting-shirt followers to report to General Wilkinson at New Orleans. The General does not like this, the Wilkinson in question being that red-nosed renegade one, against whom long ago he warned the ambitious Colonel Burr. For all that, orders are orders; and besides a fight under any commander is not to be despised. The General presently hurries his hunting-shirt forces aboard flatboats, and floats away on the convenient bosom of the Cumberland. He will go down that stream to the Ohio, and so to the Mississippi and to New Orleans. As they float downward with the stream, the General recalls a former voyage when love and the blooming Rachel were his companions, and is heard to sigh.

At Natchez, word from Commander Wilkinson meets the General. He is told to land, and wait for further orders. The General takes his boys of the hunting shirts ashore, and pitches camp. Privily he unbends in oaths and maledictions, all addressed to the ex-grocer Wilkinson; for he thinks the order, preventing his entrance into New Orleans, born of the mean rivalry of that red-nosed ignobility.

The General waits, and curses Commander Wilkinson, for divers weeks. Then occurs one of those imbecilities, of which only the witlessness of Government is capable, and whereof the archives at Washington carry so many examples. The General receives a curt dispatch from the war secretary, “dismissing” him and his hunting-shirt soldiers from the service of the United States. Not a word is said as to pay, or provision for returning to the Cumberland. Having gotten the General and his little army several hundred wilderness miles from home, the thick-head Government, with no intelligence and as little heart, coolly reduces him and them to the practical status of vagrants; which feat accomplished, it walks away, as it were, hands in pockets, whistling “Yankee Doodle.” Possibly, the Government thinks that the General and his hunting-shirt friends can float upstream as they floated down. The angry General, however, makes no such marine mistake, and the intricate oaths which he now evolves and fulminates, as expressive of his feelings, would have won the admiration of any army that ever fought in Flanders.

The General's credit is golden, since he has ever been a fanatic about paying debts. Invoking that credit, he cashes a handful of drafts, and marches home with his hunting-shirt contingent at his own expense. Also he indites a letter to that war secretary which reddens the latter's departmental ears, and causes his departmental head to buzz like a nest of hornets. Later, the Government pays the General the amount of those drafts; not because it is right—since the argument of right has little Washington weight—but for the far more moving reason that Tennessee, in a rage, is preparing to desert the boneless President Madison for the Federalists. It is the latter thought which brings a ray of common sense to the besotted Government, and his money to our General, now back in Tennessee.

The bellicose General is vastly disappointed at missing a brush with invading British; for, aside from a saber-engrafted hatred of all English things and men, he is one to dote on fighting for fighting's crimson sake, and is almost as well pleased with mere battle as with victory. However, he is given scanty room for sorrowful reflections, since fate is hurrying to his relief with a private war of his own.

The General, ever an expositor of the duello, and the peaceful hours resting heavy on his hands, goes out as second for a Captain Carroll against Mr. Jesse Benton. Captain Carroll is shot in the toe, and Mr. Benton in the leg; whereat the General and the Cumberland public groan over results so inadequate.

Being thus shot in the leg, Mr. Benton displays his bad taste by falling into a fury with the General. He recounts what he regards as his “wrongs” to his brother Thomas, and that intemperate individual loses no time in taking up his brother's quarrel. The pair say things of the General which would arouse the wrath of an image; with that, the General calls for his saw-handles, and begins to plan trouble for those verbally reckless Bentons.

The General takes with him as guide, philosopher and friend, his faithful subaltern, Colonel Coffee. The two establish themselves, strategically, at the Nashville Inn.