That Folch should have taken seriously the request for such a gigantic sum says much for the value of the general’s past services. Nevertheless, the governor explained, he could not personally pay so much—at this, Wilkinson apparently lowered his price to just ten thousand dollars—but Casa Calvo, the aristocrat who hated the French, was still in town, and he had one hundred thousand dollars from Mexico. On learning this, Wilkinson suddenly became extremely difficult, forbidding Folch to approach Casa Calvo because the aristocrat’s secretary, Andrés Arnesto, represented a security risk. “I am a lost man,” he declared with operatic intensity, “if the secretary should learn what I propose.”
Even through the measured language of Folch’s report, it is clear that Wilkinson wanted a personal interview with the man holding the money. His maneuvering succeeded, and the following Sunday Wilkinson met Casa Calvo face- to-face and succeeded in wringing from him the promise of an immediate payment of twelve thousand dollars. During the interview, the general not only found it convenient to use Arnesto as an interpreter but praised him lavishly for his “wisdom and probity.”
“Reflections,” the paper Wilkinson wrote for Folch and Casa Calvo, was the third strategy document he had prepared for Spain’s colonial authorities and, like its predecessors, demonstrated why he deserved the confidence they placed in him. With great clarity, he delineated the consequences of the Louisiana Purchase, that the irresistible drive of settlement would now sweep westward across the Mississippi, unless Spain could stop it. In the long term, the most effective way was to divert the torrent southward by granting the United States the economically important Floridas in exchange for Louisiana. To sweeten the deal, Spain should offer to repay the fifteen- million-dollar price of the purchase and any other expenses the United States might have incurred, otherwise Mexico stood in danger of being overrun by “an army of adventurers similar to the ancient Goths and Vandals.”
In the short term, he suggested two tactical moves, one of which directly betrayed one of the president’s most vital secrets, the proposed exploration of a route to the Pacific by an expedition under Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, which was due to depart from St. Louis later that year. Since any weakness would encourage the westward expansion of the United States, Wilkinson urged the Spanish authorities to “detach a sufficient body of chasseurs to intercept Captain Lewis and his party . . . and force them to retire or take them prisoners.” Second, and perhaps more surprisingly since it affected his own burgeoning plans, he recommended that Spain should “drive back every illegal usurpation toward the region of Texas” and prevent any exploration of the Red and Arkansas rivers; otherwise “they will very quickly explore the right path which will lead them to the capital of Santa Fe.” Finally, the governors of Texas and Florida should fortify their frontiers to prevent American incursions.
As a general survey, Wilkinson’s “Reflections” offered a realistic assessment of the unpromising situation facing Spain. The territorial exchange was not an impossible scenario: the Floridas were what Jefferson had originally instructed his negotiators to acquire. They contained good harbors and the mouths of the Mobile, Tombigbee, and Apalachicola rivers, all important routes for western producers aiming to transport flour and tobacco to the outside world. Many influential figures believed that in economic terms the Floridas made a more immediately useful addition to the United States than the empty desert of Louisiana, whose open spaces would only encourage settlers to scatter across an area too large to govern.
His advice on frontiers certainly convinced the Council of the Indies to recommend later that year the establishment of an inviolable boundary between Texas and Louisiana stretching north from the Gulf Coast along the Arroyo Hondo River, today the Calcasieu River. Folch himself rigidly turned down every American request to descend the three great rivers flowing through the Floridas.
But the greatest immediate value of Wilkinson’s paper lay in the intelligence about Lewis and Clark, which by any standard represented high-grade information. Publicly Jefferson had characterized Lewis and Clark’s expedition as no more than the kind of “literary pursuit which [Spain] is in the habit of permitting within its own dominions.” Nevertheless, their proposed route following the upper reaches of the Missouri would take them through territory still claimed by Spain. Furthermore, in a secret message to Congress in January 1803, Jefferson had revealed that the expedition’s real purpose was to “explore the whole line, even to the Western ocean,” thus establishing a claim to the entire region.
Recognizing the importance of Wilkinson’s information, Casa Calvo immediately instructed Antonio Cordero y Bustamante, the energetic acting governor of Texas, to take steps to counter this “daring undertaking” and to make every effort to “divert and even to destroy such expeditions.” As a result, at least three attempts by an armed patrol of two hundred men sent out under Captain Pedro Vial were made to kill or capture Lewis and Clark’s party. Had they succeeded, the history of western exploration would have been delayed for a generation, with far-reaching consequences including the unopposed expansion of British settlement throughout Oregon.
With the added prospect of Wilkinson’s report on the president’s thinking, Casa Calvo and Folch agreed it was worth paying him twelve thousand dollars. As a bonus, they also gave Wilkinson a permit to export sixteen hundred barrels of flour annually to Havana, a source of profit with the potential to make good some of the shortfall on his original demand.
For the first time, Wilkinson received the full amount of his reward for treachery without having to pay intermediaries or risk the murder of messengers. And unlike in previous betrayals, on this occasion he intended to replicate his success by betraying Spain’s secrets to the United States.
IN THE UNITED STATES nothing was known of his return to active work as a Spanish agent, but doubts about his loyalty were never far from the surface. Apart from his initial report on the peaceful state of the city, Wilkinson had gone silent in New Orleans, ignoring Dearborn’s increasingly frantic demands for information. “You have taken no notice of any of my letters,” the secretary of war wrote in February, “[at a time] when information had been highly important relative to any Military operations.” When Wilkinson did reply, it was to cast doubts on Claiborne’s capacity, declaring that the province would be better run by “a Military executive Magistrate.” Alerted by Daniel Clark to rising anti-American feeling in the city, and apparently fearing some sort of military coup, Jefferson asked Dearborn in February to intervene: “It is so important that Wilkenson’s [sic] maneuvers should be understood. He is turning on us the batteries of our friends in aid of his own . . . he should be brought away as soon as possible, or I should not wonder if some disturbance be produced to keep him there.”
On March 4, all of Louisiana was officially handed over to the United States, and in those outlying forts and towns that had not yet registered the original transfer from Spain to France, the flags of all three nations were flown within a single day. On that day the general’s term of office as military commissioner officially ended, and Dearborn wasted no time in ordering his return to Washington. By then rumors were beginning to spread through New Orleans about Wilkinson’s sudden purchases of sugar. Suspecting another Spanish payment, Clark persuaded an equally dubious Morales to let him examine the Louisiana books, but, as he reported back to Claiborne, found nothing—the twelve thousand dollars appeared only in the Mexico accounts. Wilkinson’s assertion that an old tobacco deal had at last paid off strained credulity, but there seemed no other explanation.
When the general sailed for Washington in April 1804, he took with him the mirror image of “Reflections,” a twenty-two- page strategy document prepared for American eyes, accompanied by eighteen hand-drawn maps of the country between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande— the very territory he suggested that Spain should fortify against U.S. expansion. He also transported a large cargo of sugar purchased with part of the payment for “Reflections,” a
nd the assurance that once more his Spanish handlers would not refer to him by name, only by his old nom d’espionnage, Agent 13.
WITHIN WEEKS OF HIS RETURN to Washington, Wilkinson had developed a relationship with Jefferson close enough to suggest he did have an inkling of what the president concealed in his heart. If so, part of the secret concerned Jefferson’s continuing apprehension of the dangers of a standing army, and his wish for greater control over it.
To meet Jefferson’s needs, Wilkinson drew up a new set of Articles of War on his return from New Orleans that dramatically increased the president’s power in matters of military discipline. The most contentious change concerned the individual soldier’s allegiance. Under the old Articles of War, composed in 1776, a soldier swore “to be true to the United States of America” and was forbidden to utter “traitorous and disrespectful words against the authority of the United States in Congress assembled.” The Constitution had designated the president as commander in chief, but so far as the army was concerned, the chain of command stopped at the senior general. The president had to exert control through him over the military, the most potent instrument of executive authority.
Wilkinson proposed to alter the Articles so that each officer and soldier swore to “observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the officers appointed over me,” and it would become an offense to utter “traitorous and disrespectful words against the President” or other government officers. The suggested change made the military structure constitutional, but it also shifted the primary loyalty of a soldier from his country to his government.
The change seemed to give dangerous power to the executive, and opposition to the new Articles immediately became entangled in the continuing saga of Colonel Thomas Butler’s uncropped pigtail, which had, by 1804, become the focal point of resentment against Wilkinson among forcibly retired officers of the once Federalist army. The issue created an unholy alliance between the Federalist stronghold of New England and the frontiersmen of Tennessee, where the colonel was stationed with the Second Regiment. Acting together, they mustered enough support in the Senate to approve a petition against the order for short hair and to throw out the new Articles of War. Until the twin issues of the pigtail and the Articles were resolved, Jefferson could not ignore the importance of the general’s support for the Constitution and the Republican administration.
Beyond his political usefulness, Wilkinson had another more immediate claim on the president’s attention. The general’s unparalleled knowledge of the west met one of the abiding passions in Jefferson’s life. From his childhood, when his father, Peter Jefferson, founded the Loyal Land Company to buy territory beyond the Appalachians, through the purchase of Louisiana and the creation of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the western lands occupied a strikingly important place in Jefferson’s imagination. In the winter of 1783–84, as a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, he had specified how they should be purchased from the Native Americans, how they should be surveyed and sold to eastern settlers, and how their structure of government should be created. The west was the canvas on which Jefferson envisioned a new republican society being drawn. His desire for information about the region was insatiable.
When James Wilkinson arrived in Washington with his sketch maps and direct information of the area, the president had already sent two ambassadors, James Monroe and John Armstrong, to Madrid to negotiate the exact dividing line between the Louisiana Purchase and Mexico. Since Louisiana had originally been discovered and settled by the French, this resolved itself into a question of how much land their colonists had explored in the eighteenth century. Jefferson believed that French exploration had taken them several hundred miles west of the Mississippi, justifying a border along the Sabine River. Encouraged by Wilkinson’s “Reflections,” however, Spain insisted that the boundary ran almost eighty miles east of the Sabine River. Their own detailed maps showed the line following the Arroyo Hondo, then extending northward until it crossed the Red River close to Natchitoches. Lack of knowledge about the geography of the area handicapped the American response. Wilkinson’s advice was consequently as welcome in Washington as it had been in New Orleans.
His maps no longer exist, but his information about the Red River can be deduced from the report he sent Dearborn in July. A mixture of fact and fiction, some of which came from Philip Nolan, and some from French maps procured in New Orleans, it revealed for the first time to non–Native Americans that this mighty feeder of the lower Mississippi had “its source in the East side of a height, the top of which presents an open plain, so extensive as to require the Indians four days in crossing it.” This was the high, flat tableland that straddles the New Mexico/Texas border called the Llano Estacado.
The next section, however, led Jefferson astray. “West of this high plain,” Wilkinson went on, “my informants report certain waters (which run to the Southward) probably those of the Rio Bravo, and beyond these they report a ridge of high mountains extending North and South.” What made this misleading was that it compressed the actual geography, narrowing the distances involved. The Pecos River was confused with the Rio Bravo (alternatively named the Rio Grande), and the Sangre de Cristo mountains merged with the Rockies farther to the west.
By an extraordinary coincidence, the arrival of the distinguished German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in Washington that summer made it possible to compare Wilkinson’s information and sketches with the first authoritative map of the region. While in Mexico City, Humboldt had been given the rare privilege of examining the government’s closely guarded charts and atlases and, from them, had produced his magisterial Chart of the Kingdom of New Spain, covering Texas and New Mexico.
When he appeared in Washington in June 1804, Jefferson questioned Humboldt closely, then invited Wilkinson to dinner so that he and the German could compare information. Unfortunately, a fever required Wilkinson to be bled so heavily the day before that he was unable to leave his bed. By way of apology, the next day he sent Jefferson two souvenirs of the Southwest, a buffalo hide with an Osage drawing of a horned toad, and the leaves and fruit of a cotton tree.
His absence hardly mattered because at the president’s urging Humboldt later met Wilkinson in person and let him borrow his precious chart. For Jefferson, the information it contained was intoxicating. What it showed was indeed that the Red River rose in the high plateau, as Wilkinson had described; that the narrow ridge of the Rockies lay a little farther west; and that on the other side of the ridge the land sloped down to California and the Pacific Ocean. In other words, it appeared that the Red River would take an explorer almost to the watershed between the Mississippi basin and the Pacific, with a clear run down to the ocean on the other side.
That Humboldt’s chart should have confirmed the information from Nolan so closely makes it probable they had both studied the same Spanish maps, the Irishman presumably having had access to copies in the offices of the governors who found him so delightful. Alternatively, Humboldt may have incorporated data from Wilkinson’s inaccurate sketches into the map shown to the president. Whatever the explanation, the coincidence confirmed Wilkinson in Jefferson’s estimation as an utterly reliable source of information about the west.
The discovery that the Red River offered a clear route toward the Pacific prompted the president to immediate action. He commissioned the Scottish scientists William Dunbar and George Hunter to make a preliminary study of its lowest reaches and, in the fall of 1804, began to organize a much larger expedition led by Thomas Freeman, Wilkinson’s old ally against Ellicott, to explore the river to its source. This was to be the southern counterpart to Lewis and Clark’s northern exploration of the upper Missouri, and Congress was asked to set aside five thousand dollars to fund it. The Red River expedition was born out of Jefferson’s passion, but was made possible by Wilkinson’s information. Shortly afterward the president gave tangible proof of the value he attached to the general’s unsurpassed k
nowledge of the west.
In November, Jefferson announced to Congress that the Louisiana Purchase was to be split into two, the southern portion being known as the Orleans Territory, and the rest to be called the Louisiana Territory. Before the end of 1804, William Claiborne, already governor of New Orleans, had his power extended to cover all the southern part of the Purchase. At the same time, the president appointed as governor of the Louisiana Territory, General James Wilkinson.
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BURR’S AMBITION
WHAT PREOCCUPIED THE THOUGHTS of every westward- looking American were signs of the imminent collapse of the Spanish empire. As Spain was squeezed harder between Napoléon’s army and Britain’s navy, the fantastic three- hundred-year- old machinery of its colonial administration began to seize up. The fleets carrying silver from Peru and Mexico still sailed twice a year to Cádiz, but soldiers went unpaid for longer, local officials were left unsupervised, and Madrid’s slackening grip was sharply evident in Casa Calvo’s unilateral decision to divert twelve thousand dollars of Mexico’s revenue to Wilkinson without Spain’s direct permission. In similar circumstances in 1787 Miró had not felt able to do more than make the American a loan, while Carondelet’s payments were possible only because they were in line with the existing policy of the royal council. The empire’s shuddering edifice positively invited outsiders to think of what might replace it.
An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson Page 27
