An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson

by Andro Linklater

  Always sensitive to the smallest insult to his vanity, Wilkinson had been infuriated by Wayne’s refusal of the Christmas invitation. During the early months of 1794, Wilkinson periodically declared himself to be close to resignation. “I am unsettled in my purpose whether I shall join the army or not,” he told Innes, and with still more of a flourish told Brown, “I owe so much to my own feelings and to Professional reputation, that I cannot consent to sacrifice the one, or to hazard the other, under the administration of a weak, corrupt minister or a despotic, Vainglorious, ignorant General.” But in truth, as he recognized himself, he could never quit the army “because I know the profession of arms to be my Fort[e], and I verily believe that the Hour may possibly come when my talents into that line might be of important account to our Country.”

  Instead, he devoted himself to encouraging the opposition to Wayne until camp gossip took to labeling the two camps using terms such as “such an Officer is in favor of Wayne— and such a one is in favor of Wilkinson.” The depth of Wilkinson’s hatred could be gauged from an article he sent to a Cincinnati newspaper signed “Army Wretched” that damned Wayne for drunkenness, incompetence, wastefulness, and favoritism toward “his pimps and parasites.” Unfortunately for this attempt to stampede public opinion, General Charles Scott visited Wayne’s command headquarters at Fort Greeneville soon afterward and offered a different perspective on the general’s conduct. “During my stay I found him attending with great Sobriety & extream attention to the Duty of army,” Scott reported to Knox, “he paid the most Unwearied attention to the most minute thing possible in person.” When the government published Scott’s testimony in rebuttal, Wilkinson contemptuously dismissed Scott, once his friend and comrade-in-arms, as “a fool, a poltroon and a scoundrel.”

  By the spring, Wayne’s supporters had made him aware of Wilkinson’s hostility. Wayne’s suspicions were directed particularly at the failure of the victuallers Elliott and Williams to supply the army with enough food. In Wayne’s view, this was a deliberate attempt to sabotage his preparations for war, and he accused Wilkinson to his face of being “the cause of the fault of the Contractors.” His second- in- command retaliated in his own fashion, as Wayne discovered when a Philadelphia merchant reported that some senators were proposing to impeach the Legion’s commander “at the request of Wilkinson for Pedulation, Speculation, Fraud &c.”

  The longer the Legion remained inactive, the more poisonous the conflict became. No army can remain ready for battle—“in the crouch,” to use modern jargon—for long without the aggression beginning to spill over into feuds and quarrels. But for the Legion, the lengthy delay was especially damaging. Even after training was completed, federal negotiators continued their talks with Little Turtle and other Native American leaders in an attempt to arrange a new boundary that would guarantee Indian land rights, but allow settlers to move into the Ohio Valley. In the summer, as though the waiting had undermined their physical health as much as their morale, an epidemic of illness ravaged the troops. “We labor under a universal influenza,” Wilkinson told his friends, “and tertians [fevers], quotidians & intermittents rage beyond anything I have ever seen.”

  Yet while there remained a chance of signing a peace treaty with the Six Nations in the north and the western confederation in the northwest, Washington and Knox forbade Wayne to take any aggressive action. Chafing against the restraint, Wayne inched northward, constructing a fort that he named Recovery on the site of St. Clair’s defeat.

  Quite suddenly the talks broke down because Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and their allies could not bring themselves to yield up the swath of land in the Northwest Territory demanded by U.S. negotiators. In a historic misjudgment, they insisted on maintaining the Ohio River as the border. On June 30, 1794, more than a thousand Shawnee and other warriors under Blue Jacket launched a surprise attack on Fort Recovery, the site where St. Clair’s army had been annihilated. This time the attack failed, but it put an end to negotiations. Immediately Scott and the Kentucky horsemen were summoned to join the regulars, and on July 28 the Legion of the United States at last marched from Fort Greeneville.

  AS THE SECONDMOST SE NIOR OFFICER, Brigadier General James Wilkinson had command of the right wing. It gave him a close-up position from which to criticize Wayne. He duly carped at the decision to leave the biggest cannons behind and, more insistently, at the slowness of the advance— twelve careful miles a day, always surrounded by a swarm of cavalry and riflemen, and halting well before nightfall so that entrenchments and fortifications could be put in place. Instead of following the St. Marys River westward, out into the open prairie where centers of Indian population were situated, Wayne struck due north, still keeping to rough territory so that the army had to force its way through “Thickets almost impervious,” one of his men complained, “thru Marassies [morasses], Defiles & beds of Nettles more than waist high & miles in length.” This unexpected maneuver, made possible by the absence of heavy artillery, wrong-footed the western confederation’s army and put the Legion between Blue Jacket and supplies he expected from the British in Fort Miami, a newly constructed outpost, close to present Toledo, Ohio.

  When the Legion at last emerged from the undergrowth, they found themselves on the banks of the Maumee River, which flows northward into Lake Erie. Even Wilkinson, who had spent the previous days offering Wayne unsought advice on where they might be, was overwhelmed by the pristine beauty of the open countryside before them. “The River meandering in various directions thro a natural meadow in high cultivation & of great extent,” he wrote John Brown, “this meadow bounded by noble eminences, crowned with lofty timber on either side, with Indian Villages, scattered along the Eastern [bank] & the British flag [flying] upon the Western Bank; after a dreary Journey of more than 200 miles from the Ohio, thro an uncultivated Wilderness, [the scene] fills the mind with the most Interesting Emotions, and affords the most pleasing recreation to the Eye.”

  Once more, Wayne ignored his second-in- command’s advice to make a rapid move against Blue Jacket and instead spent days erecting yet another armed camp, Fort Deposit, where the army stored its tents and wagons. With his soldiers refreshed and unburdened, Wayne then marched northeast along the Maumee River towards the wooded hillside from which Fort Miami dominated the valley. On August 19, the Legion’s scouts found the Indians’ abandoned camp. Again Wilkinson and other senior officers urged immediate pursuit and attack, the kind of rapid maneuver that the Legion was designed for, but again Wayne chose the safer option of setting up camp.

  The delay allowed Blue Jacket to assemble a force of about thirteen hundred men, strengthened by some sixty Canadian militia, and to take up position between the Legion and Fort Miami with their center in a clearing in the wood where a cyclone had torn up the trees. Here, late on the morning of August 20, 1794, cautiously advancing in two columns behind a double screen of sharpshooters and light infantry, the Legion met the enemy they had spent eighteen months training to fight.

  The outlying skirmishers were halted by a volley of shots and, minutes later, were driven back by a charge from the Indian position. Immediately Wilkinson formed the right wing of the First and Third Sub- Legions numbering about one thousand men into line. Taking cover, the attackers began firing from a range of 160 yards at the nearest troops, Wilkinson’s right wing. The two forces were packed into broken, boggy ground between the Maumee River on Wilkinson’s right, forest in front, and low hills covered in heavy undergrowth on the American left. As the entire Legion extended in line, Wayne ordered forward the cavalry at the rear of his force, the regular dragoons under Captain Robert Mis Campbell behind Wilkinson on the right, and Scott’s Kentucky volunteers on the left.

  With drifts of musket smoke creating a heavy haze, and retreating riflemen hurrying back into the infantry lines while advancing cavalry came forward at speed, the Legion’s training paid its dividend. Instead of confusion, the line on the right wing opened to let Campbell’s horsemen gallop through,
then reformed so that when Wilkinson gave the order to charge, the the broken defenders had no time to reform. Closest to the enemy, Wilkinson’s men became the front line of attack following up the cavalry to send the Indians’ left flank into headlong retreat.

  From the clearing of torn- up trees that provided a defensive strongpoint, a counterattack under Little Turtle was launched against the Second and Fourth Sub- Legions on the left wing and in severe fighting threatened to turn them back. Here casualties were heaviest, and modern researchers have found the area most thickly strewn with spent buckshot and musket balls. But Little Turtle’s men were first outflanked by Wilkinson’s troops, then faced counterattack from the Legion’s left wing. In a maneuver practiced endlessly beforehand, the Second and Fourth Sub- Legions delivered a close-range volley and at once stormed toward the position in a roaring bayonet charge. The survivors fled, melting into the woodland so that the Kentucky horsemen, slowed by heavy undergrowth, never caught up, although the regular cavalry operating in open country along the riverbank pursued the enemy for two miles.

  The Native Americans never had any doubt about the significance of what happened at the battle that became known as Fallen Timbers. “We were driven by the sharp ends of the guns of the Long Knives, and we threw away our guns and fought with our knives and tomahawks,” a Shawnee chief confessed. “But the Great Spirit was in the clouds, and weeping over the folly of his red children [because they] refused to smoke in the lodge of the great chief, Chenoten [Wayne].” Wayne, the victorious commander, made it equally clear in his report that “the enemy are . . . at length taught to dread—& our soldiery to believe— in the Bayonet.” Reporting his own casualties of thirty- three killed and one hundred wounded, Wayne estimated the enemy losses at “more than double” his own. But to James Wilkinson and others who examined the result more closely, the issue seemed less clear-cut.

  Describing the battle to his most important ally in Congress, John Brown, now a senator for Kentucky, Wilkinson doubted the enemy had more than nine hundred troops and jeered at Wayne’s claims to have faced as many as two thousand. He criticized the Legion’s inability to force the British out of Fort Miami, blaming Wayne’s decision to leave the heavy artillery behind so that he only had a “little popgun Howitzer” to threaten its defenses. “We are Victorious & triumphant where ever we go,” Wilkinson declared in his best sarcastic tone. “We have been all the way to the British Post, we have beat thousands of Indians in a pitched Battle, we have commanded the British officer to abandon his Post, we have pillaged his gardens, insulted his flag, which we left flying, & yesterday got back to this place [Fort Deposit].”

  Some of these were valid criticisms—modern estimates of casualties, for example, suggest the United States lost forty-six killed and dead of wounds against fewer than forty Indian deaths—but they led to a profoundly damaging conclusion. Wilkinson convinced himself that the western confederation had not really been defeated, and that another campaign would be necessary “should the Savages determine to prosecute the War & at this moment I see nothing to contradict the Idea of the prosecution.” All that had been achieved, in his view, was an immensely expensive punishment raid involving a few casualties, some destroyed villages, and many burned fields—“We have in truth done nothing which might not have been better done by 1500 mounted Volunteers in 30 days.”

  His failure to appreciate the strategic impact of the battle had a long-lasting influence. Throughout his subsequent career as the senior military authority in four successive administrations, Wilkinson remained convinced that large forces of regular soldiers were an unnecessary luxury on the frontier. Militia and volunteers, he assured his political masters, could be just as effective.

  In reality, Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers, demonstrating as it did the overwhelming armed might of the United States, combined with the construction of a chain of forts from the Ohio to the Great Lakes, changed the thinking of a generation of Native Americans. Leaders such as Little Turtle of the Miami, Cornplanter of the Seneca, Blue Jacket of the Shawnee, and even the volatile Oneida Red Jacket accepted the pragmatic consequence that their people had to find some accommodation to the inevitability of U.S. expansion.

  So long as those Native Americans who remembered Fallen Timbers exerted influence, George Washington’s successors could build on the inclusive Indian policy that he and Knox had established. But one vital ingredient was the existence of an army large enough to overawe the native occupants of the land and restrain the movement of settlers who wanted to expand into their territory. The failure of Washington’s policy of assimilation was due not least to the activities of James Wilkinson.

  14

  THE BATTLE FOR COMMAND

  VICTORY SHOULD HAVE DRAINED the poison from the Legion. In a generous report on the battle to Knox, General Wayne praised the entire force for the “spirit & promptitude” with which it obeyed orders. Having commended all his troops, he singled out a few “whose rank and situation placed their conduct in a very conspicuous point of view, and which I observe with pleasure, and the most lively gratitude. Among whom I beg leave to mention Brigadier General Wilkinson and Colonel Hamtramck, the commandants of the right and left wings of the Legion, whose brave example inspired the troops.”

  Nothing Wayne could say, however, would deflect Wilkinson from his campaign to displace his commanding officer. Writing to Brown, he contrived to take the equality of praise in Wayne’s report as a calculated insult, insisting that the right wing had played a more important role and been led by a more dashing commander than the left. He also alleged, falsely, that it had suffered more casualties. Wayne, he declared, knew nothing of what had happened on the right, and his ignorance was typical of his “feeble & improvident” leadership through the entire campaign. “Yet the specious name of Victory & the gloss of misrepresentation, will doubtless gild the Character of our Chief. For my own I am content, conscious as I am, that I have in several instances partially saved my country, and . . . extorted applause from my most bitter enemy, and the most finished scoundrel on Earth.”

  This outburst was followed by more savage attacks in other letters to his Kentucky friends. Writing to Innes, he repeated the allegations of incompetence: “The whole operation presents us a tissue of improvidence, disarray, precipitancy, Error & Ignorance.” Victory was due simply to the inferior numbers and “injudicious Conduct of the enemy.” To underline the message, he wrote Innes again in December describing Wayne as “a liar, a drunkard, a Fool, the associate of the lowest order of Society, & the companion of their vices, of desperate Fortune, my rancorous enemy, a coward, a Hypocrite, and the contempt of every man of sense and virtue.”

  There was something mad about such a tirade—and jealousy at Wayne’s growing reputation undoubtedly gave an edge to the fury. Henry Knox assumed Wilkinson’s enmity arose from lack of self-confidence. Even before Fallen Timbers, Knox had received two letters from Wilkinson demanding a court of inquiry into Wayne’s incompetence, but had chosen not to reply because the complaint “appears to me . . . to be more the effect of nice [sensitive] feelings than any palpable cause.” When Knox finally responded in December, he first sent a private letter asking Wilkinson to give up the quarrel, and assuring him that Wayne had not criticized him, that Charles Scott would not be promoted to command over him, that he was not being investigated as the cause of dissension in the army, and ending, “You must rest assured that your military reputation stands as well as you could desire.” In the formal letter that followed, Wilkinson was promised that if he made his complaint more precise and legal in tone, the president would consider it and decide “what steps he ought to take.” Knox, in short, did not take seriously the cries of Wilkinson’s wounded ego.

  Yet, wise and tolerant though he was, the war secretary missed the almost chesslike shrewdness behind Wilkinson’s paranoid outbursts. The unrelenting belittlement of the Legion and its commander, publicized both in the press and through friends such as Senator John Br
own, had a political context.

  In Congress, opponents of Washington’s Federalist administration, led by James Madison in Philadelphia but orchestrated by Thomas Jefferson in Monticello, had focused on the expense of the Legion—an annual military budget of $155,500 in 1790 had risen to $1,130,000—and were demanding that its size be reduced by two thirds. By diminishing Wayne’s achievement, Wilkinson strengthened the anti-Federalists in their belief that a large standing army was an unjustified extravagance. It also served his personal ambition. Military regulations would not allow a major general to command a force the size of a brigade. Consequently, a reduced army would force Wayne into retirement, leaving Brigadier General James Wilkinson in command.

  With Congress due to debate the size of the army in February 1795, his timing could not have been better. Desperate to keep the quarrel private, Washington’s administration could neither reprimand him for insubordination nor refuse his request for an inquiry into Wayne’s incompetence. Knox’s demand that he present his charges in specific, legal form was an attempt to play for time. But, having acknowledged them formally, Knox also felt obliged to pass on a copy of Wilkinson’s allegations to Wayne. Aided by the flukiest of chances, Knox thereby saved the Legion and came close to exposing Spain’s chief agent in the United States.

  UNTIL KNOX’SLETTER was delivered to Fort Greeneville in January 1795, Wayne had no inkling that his second- in-command was plotting against him. The realization that this “vile invidious man” had been creating divisions in the Legion while pretending to treat his commander with “attention, politeness & delicacy” outraged him. In an incandescent reply to Knox, Wayne angrily dismissed Wilkinson’s charges: “They are as unexpected as they are groundless, and as false as they are base and insidious; and had I not known the real character and disposition of the man, I should have considered the whole as the idle Phantom of a disturbed immagination [sic].” Recalling how “I always indulged the Brigadier, in all that he wished or requested,” the general reached the same conclusion as dozens before and after him and damned Wilkinson for being “as devoid of principle as he is of honor or fortune.”