"Eric Flint - TOG 02 - 1824, The Arkansas War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flint Eric)

HoustonтАЩs notorious womanizing had vanished entirely after his marriage. ThereтАЩd been not a trace of
scandal, thereafter.

His steadily worsening affection for whiskey, which had become a growing concern for the president,
was something that Houston kept away from his wife. However much whiskey he guzzled in the nationтАЩs
tavernsтАФthat, too, had become something of a legendтАФhe did not do the same at home. He drank little,
as a rule, in his wifeтАЩs presence; was invariably a cheerful rather than a nasty drunk, on the few occasions
when he did; and quit altogether after his son was born.

Even HoustonтАЩs stubborn insistence on naming the child Andrew Jackson Houston hadnтАЩt caused much
in the way of family tension. Monroe had made no formal objection of any kind, whatever he might have
said in private. In any event, the president was far too shrewd a politician not to use the occasion to
defuse the tensions with Jackson that had begun to build. As political tensions always did around
Jackson, the man being what he was.

So, despite HoustonтАЩs faultsтАФand which man had no faults? Adams asked himself; certainly not heтАФthe
president liked his son-in-law. So did John Quincy Adams, for that matter, and he was not a man given
to many personal likings.

Adams glanced at the general sitting in the chair next to him. So, for that matter, did Winfield Scott. At
least, once heтАЩd realized that HoustonтАЩs resignation from the army and subsequent preoccupation with
Indian affairs meant that he was no longer a rival in the military.

Yes, everybody liked Sam Houston. You could not have found a man in the United States who would
tell you otherwise. Until they finally discovered that, beneath the good-looking and boyishly cheerful
exterior, there lurked the brain and the heart of a Machiavellian monster.

A few months after his marriage, all of HoustonтАЩs scheming and deal-making had come to fruition later
that year with the Treaty of Oothcaloga.

The Confederacy of the Arkansas had been born that day. At first, the great migration of the Cherokees
and the Creeks that followed had been hailed across the nation as a stroke of political genius on the part
of the Monroe administration. By none more loudly than Andrew Jackson, of course, who had by then
solidified his position as the champion of the western settlers. But even Calhoun had grudgingly indicated
his approval.

For that one brief moment in time, the so-called Era of Good Feelings had seemed established for
eternity. But, in hindsight, it had only been the crest of a wave. On January 13, 1820тАФalmost five years
to the day after he and his Iron Battalion had broken the British at the Battle of the MississippiтАФPatrick
Driscol and those same black artillerymen routed the Louisiana militia in what had since come to be
called the Battle of Algiers. The four years that followed had been a steadily darkening political
nightmare.

Houston was blamed for that, too, nowadays, by many people. His diplomacy had defused the crisis,
long enough to allow Driscol and his followers to leave New Orleans and migrate to the new
Confederacy. So, a full-scale war had been averted.
 But John Calhoun had never forgiven the Monroe administration for the settlement Houston engineered,
and MonroeтАЩs approval of it. Servile insurrections should becrushed and their survivors mercilessly
scourged, he argued, not allowed to flee unscathedтАФand never mind that the тАЬservile insurrectionтАЭ had
actually been the work of freedmen defending their legal rights against local overlords.