Captain Putnam for the Republic of Texas Read online

  ALSO BY JAMES L. HALEY

  The Bliven Putnam Naval Series

  The Devil in Paradise: Captain Putnam in Hawaii

  A Darker Sea: Master Commandant Putnam and the War of 1812

  The Shores of Tripoli: Lieutenant Putnam and the Barbary Pirates

  Other Fiction

  Final Refuge

  The Lions of Tsavo

  The Kings of San Carlos

  Nonfiction

  The Handy Texas Answer Book

  Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

  The Texas Supreme Court: A Narrative History 1836–1986

  Burleson Century

  Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

  Passionate Nation: The Epic History of Texas

  Sam Houston

  Texas: From Spindletop Through World War II

  Most Excellent Sir: Letters Received by Sam Houston, President of the Republic of Texas, at Columbia, 1836–1837

  Texas: An Album of History

  Apaches: A History and Culture Portrait

  The Buffalo War: The History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874

  Juvenile

  Taming Texas: The Chief Justices of Texas

  (with Marilyn P. Duncan)

  Taming Texas: How Law and Order Came to the Lone Star State

  (with Marilyn P. Duncan)

  Taming Texas: Law and the Texas Frontier

  (with Marilyn P. Duncan)

  Stephen F. Austin and the Founding of Texas

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

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  Copyright © 2021 by James L. Haley

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  Ebook ISBN: 9780593085127

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Monica Cordova

  Cover art: (top) Based on oil painting by DeSimone, 1857 / Courtesy of the U.S. Navy Art Collection, Washington, D.C.; (bottom) Detail of “Sam Houston at San Jacinto” by Kenneth Turner, oil painting, 2000

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  Nearly twenty years ago I published a hefty biography of Sam Houston, which won a number of important awards and remains in print. Through several years of certified starving artistry while I wrote it, my work was underwritten by a generous patron, to whom I dedicated the work. He and I remained close friends, and it was my intention to similarly dedicate this Texas-based novel to him, in gratitude for his many kindnesses during the intervening years. He passed away shortly before this book was completed, and six weeks shy of his one hundredth birthday. Therefore, this book now is dedicated:

  In Loving Memory

  Joel Rudd

  1920–2020

  As to the state of the seaboard—keep the navy busy. To it we must look for essential aid!

  —Sam Houston

  CONTENTS

  1. Honor and Conscience

  2. The Nunnery

  3. Highly Important from Texas

  4. New Orleans

  5. Texas Warship Gonzalez

  6. Secrets

  7. Titania

  8. Beans and Flour

  9. The Tree of Liberty

  10. Reckonings

  11. Dicey

  12. Old Hickory

  Acknowledgments

  Further Reading

  1

  Honor and Conscience

  It was like drowning in tepid water, that was the worst—air so humid it was like sucking in water the temperature of his own body, so that if it were not for the observed rise and fall of his own chest, and his own careful observation that he was not, in fact, suffocating, Bliven Putnam might well have believed he was drowning. He had seen the brawling rivers of the Appalachians, which became the highways of commerce because the mountains were too steep, too rugged and forested, for wagons to pass through. But here in Florida the land was untenable for an opposite reason. Here one must travel on the rivers because—and it was nature’s triumphant irony—most of the land was too soggy upon which to march or ride. So here he was, in the stern of a longboat pulled by twenty sweating sailors, with a platoon of marines bristling with rifled muskets and bayonets like a caterpillar hunkered down along its keel. The oarsmen swept in silence up a sluggish warm river whose name was exhausting to pronounce, followed by three more boats, pulling slowly into a probable Indian war. What in God’s name was he doing here, in God’s year 1834?

  Bliven might have thought that now as a senior captain he would have been assigned a more dignified duty, coursing the deep in a ship of the line or at least in his own frigate. As a youth he would have contested for a prestigious command but now, at forty-seven, quite gray at the temples and his face lined with salt spray and the responsibilities of command, it did not rankle him. He had set out as a boy to see the world, and now he had done so to his satisfaction. It weighed on him as never before that Clarity had spent most of her life waiting for him to come home. He wanted to see his boys: Ben was seventeen now and in his first year at Yale College; Luke was thirteen, bored with school and as restless as he himself had been. Perhaps there was still time to be a father to them and not just some distant memory of awe and a uniform.

  Bliven would not say that he was tired—of the Navy, or of command, or of his life. He knew well that in the pecking order of naval officers, it was his own lack of avidity, his lack of competitiveness, for a major command that worked against him. That was well; he was content. The United States now deployed the navy of a major power, and the officers’ ranks were full of peacocks to strut and peck at each other. Abruptly he belayed that line of thinking. He should not mock, he scolded himself, for there were fine officers among that top line of command. Isaac Hull, Jacob Jones, and some other old hands were still vigorous and at their duties as they entered their old age. John Downes, now an impeccably experienced commodore, had just taken the fine frigate Potomac with her forty-four-long, thirty-two pounders to Malaya and taught those pirates the lesson that Bliven had lacked the firepower to do in 1820. There began to be talk now of mounting an expedition to explore the south polar regions, the last command on earth that he would have wanted, although the chill of an iceberg would be very welcome at this moment. Competition to lead it was sure to be fierce, and his own treasured first lieutenant from his first tour on the Rappahannock, Michael Miller, who had advanced to his own creditable commands, was a contender.

  The fondness of his recollection of Miller made him question whether perhaps he was tired after all. He had only the barest acquaintance with his present complement of boy-lieutenants, nor did he desire to know them more intimately. They were careerists at the beginning of their ambition, essentially uninteresting, and uninteresting because they were uninterested, lacking in passion for any other pursuit than their own advancement. Indeed, they hearkened back to the species of officer he recalled all too cle
arly from his boyhood on the Enterprise, duelists who tended to their duties only as needed, and not sparing to abuse those who served under them. The obligation to occasionally dine with them made him long for home as never before. Alan Ross, thank God, was still with him, continuing in the service as his steward and continuing now in private employment as his valet when they were not at sea.

  Bliven had tried for a time to keep together the core of his companionship from the Rappahannock in those days, but he had not been able. Wise Dr. Berend had retired to a town practice in his native Virginia, and so much to refute his complaint of the insufficiency of friends over the family he had outlived, he died much loved by his community and at a far advanced age. Tall Fleming, his wizard of a carpenter, was seized by his family in Roxbury after the Pacific cruise and never permitted to return to sea. Of those he relied upon in earlier years, only Evans Yeakel, his ever-alert bosun, remained. When Bliven had returned to the Rappahannock the year before and been piped aboard, Yeakel caught his eye and grinned so fiercely that he could scarcely finish the accolade on his silver whistle. Indeed, he had never left the ship even as Bliven himself had advanced to two other commands, becoming one of those traditional bosuns who attached themselves like barnacles to their vessels and sometimes found themselves at a loss how to carry on after she was paid off or broken up. Bliven had come back aboard to find Yeakel gray as a rat, and thicker, but still nimble despite accommodating the truss that supported his rupture—a new condition for him but a common malady among career seamen.

  No, Bliven was content to let other officers climb up each other’s backs in quest of better commands like iguanas seeking the sunniest rock. He found himself satisfied to have been placed once more over his dear old Rappahannock. Having taken her on her first cruises, to the Caribbean and the Pacific, it seemed poetic, or symmetrical, that he should take her home to Boston from her last cruise. After Malaya and the Sandwich Islands, the ship was assigned to the Mediterranean Squadron, while he was given command of a light frigate and returned to the Caribbean. The Navy wished to take advantage of his experience with the games of pirates, privateers, and newly independent countries. Upon the Rappahannock’s return from the Mediterranean, the combined judgment of the Navy was that her hybrid design was not a success, except on the point of her diagonal knee riders that supported the berth deck. That feature was continued into the newer sloops of war, but as the first of her species her list of needed improvements was too long to justify a rebuilding. With her replacement still abuilding, Bliven was given command of her a final time, for a routine patrol of the West Indies, for what should have been the most placid voyage of his career, showing the flag amicably in the British and French islands. Instead, this cruise had transformed itself into an intense and scarifying education on the human condition.

  At home, the issue of slavery had become so contentious, so divisive, that he endeavored not to think on it at all. Clarity’s abolitionist sentiment had become so militant that she gave him almost no peace, while his renewed correspondence with Sam Bandy, now nearly fifteen years in Texas after his ruin in South Carolina, pummeled him with the opposite considerations: the ruin of the South’s economy if slaves were liberated, the desperation that hundreds of thousands of freed men and women must face if they were turned out with no land or employment or skills and, as Sam phrased it, no one to take care of them. While Bliven loved Clarity as fiercely as ever, and missed her, he had looked forward to six months back in the Caribbean as a rest from the issue of slavery as a daily topic.

  * * *

  * * *

  What he discovered there came as a shock, however, and as their three longboats pulled slowly up their Florida river, there was ample time for him to digest the onslaught of unwanted realizations from the previous two months. On every British island it seemed the only topic of conversation was the impending law to take effect on August 1, 1834, that would outlaw slavery throughout the empire. And then discussion would turn in amazement to the almost prophetic tragedy that William Wilberforce, who was the driving engine of emancipation, who had utilized his forty-five years in Parliament to win that day, had died like Moses just short of reaching the Promised Land—but, like Moses, he had been permitted to see it, for he lived long enough to learn that the passage of his bill could not be stopped.

  Bliven’s next-to-last port of call in the Caribbean was at Jamaica. Kingston Harbour was a hidden labyrinth of shallows, with the first narrowing of its entrance passing beneath the Twelve Apostles battery off to port, a dozen guns whose firing, if an enemy approached, gave ample notice to the sixty-six big guns in the fortification at Mosquito Point, a mile farther in. Those ramparts overlooked a safe channel barely seventy yards wide, through which no hostile ship could survive to approach the city. It was the most brilliant defensive scheme that he could imagine.

  Bliven took equal interest in the shallows to starboard, beneath which lay the remains of Port Royal, the infamous pirates’ nest that a vengeful God had drowned in an earthquake in 1692, and then suffered the remnant to burn to the ground a decade later. Kingston, on the north shore, was founded by Port Royal survivors and now was a convenient place to hire a carriage for an easy ride to the capital at Spanish Town, fifteen miles to the west, where Bliven would make a courtesy call on the colonial governor. Much of the land along that road was reclaimed marsh, now given to plantations, and between that sight and animated conversation with his driver he learned that sugar was to this colony of Jamaica what cotton was to the American South, the cash crop upon which they depended, and which faced a bleak future without the forced labor of slaves. In the rolling miles between Kingston and Spanish Town, the vast cane fields were yet worked by an unending line of bent black laborers, glared at by overseers armed with whips and muskets and sidearms. Did they truly think that this way of life could be transformed in the darkness that would separate July 31 from August 1? What exactly did they believe it would change into? Of even greater consequence, in Kingston he was told that only one person in four was white and that of the blacks two persons in three were slaves, who would gain their freedom in another two months. What their society would look like in a year’s time, after emancipation, God only knew. But their premonitions sounded very much like Sam Bandy’s.

  From Jamaica Bliven and the Rappahannock sailed east to call at Port-au-Prince, in Haiti, to look in on what remained of the several thousand free blacks from the United States whom the American Colonization Society had encouraged to emigrate to that place. The society had recruited them, painted them a pretty picture of tropical life in a whole nation populated by other Negroes, paid their passage—and then turned their attention to other projects. Haiti troubled him more than anything else to that date. At home, the white planters in the South lived in terror of slave uprisings, which of course never actually transpired to the degree they imagined, but this former French colony gave them vivid reason for that fear. They had thrown off the French thirty years before, the only country known in human history to have gained its independence in a slave revolt, and, good God, look what happened: tens of thousands of white people massacred almost to the last crying baby. Then they turned the machetes upon themselves: freeborn black against former slave, native born against immigrant, French speaker against Spanish speaker, in the unspeakable War of Knives. In thirty years of nominal independence, uncountable hundreds of thousands were hacked down.

  The United States, which might otherwise have welcomed another country of the western hemisphere throwing off the colonial yoke, reacted to the violent pageant with horror and contempt. Southerners in Congress made certain that Haiti was never recognized; the State Department made a sport of playing all factions, both native and European, against each other; and American banks lent money for ruinous interest to any of the native forces who looted enough gold to justify the risk of a loan. For the past fifteen years the strongman had been Jean-Pierre Boyer, who managed to hold the country together, and he
convinced the French to withdraw their army by agreeing to pay an indemnity of a hundred and fifty million francs—an astronomical sum that they could not manage to pay, giving them even a century in which to do it. With so much violence afoot, Bliven counted himself lucky that the bay was so sheltered that he could anchor in its outer roads, where any threat could be seen coming. He obtained an interview with Boyer, whom he found wily and cynical, and dressed in such a fantastical uniform as would justify the most derisive accusation of how slaves would comport themselves if given power. Boyer was acutely sensible of the contempt in which the United States held his country, yet he was determined that Haiti should progress to take her place in the family of nations.

  Most of the émigrés sent by the American Colonization Society, Bliven learned, had made their individual and disillusioned ways back home. It was a complex and wretched history. For twenty years the A.C.S. had been funding two colonies of freed slaves, on the claim that it was only right and proper for them to have their own country, before it became clear that the true goal was to separate them and their free example from those still in bondage and thus tighten the South’s grip on slavery. The founding of the Haitian colony and Liberia in Africa were now widely recognized as a ruse. And of those who remained here, he found many living in an enclave in the mountains behind the town, clinging to the belief that life in a country of people of their own color must be somehow better than what they had known in the United States. They had not, to his observation, prospered. Indeed, from what he saw of Haiti, he descried no prosperity anywhere, only power held by the very few and the subjection of the destitute mass. These former Americans had not advanced in education; rather, they had assimilated into a society of the most benighted superstition, living in thrall to sorcerers who beat drums and sacrificed chickens and went into trances.