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

by Andro Linklater

  THE ONE SALIENT FEATURE of the conspiracy was the position of power occupied by the general. To Burr and Dayton, it was obvious that whatever they might plan depended on Wilkinson’s co-operation. Everything hung on that. Not only had he been given the supreme military and political authority in the territory bordering Mexico, but within the army he possessed a dominating, personal influence. Its extent was made apparent when the long chronicle of Colonel Thomas Butler’s pigtail reached its final chapter.

  Summoned to a second court-martial in New Orleans in July 1805, Butler was found guilty of “disobedience of orders” and “mutinous conduct” and was sentenced to suspension from his command of the Second Regiment for one year without pay. The city itself, however, had a more terminal punishment for his insubordination. On September 7, the colonel died of the yellow fever that repeatedly plagued New Orleans. His death triggered a final outburst of fury against Wilkinson, but also left vacant the command of the Second Regiment. The appointment of Butler’s successor started a turf war between the commanding general and the secretary of war that determined where power lay within the army.

  By right of seniority, Butler’s successor should have been Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Cushing, adjutant general and Wilkinson’s close friend. But before the appointment could be made, Dearborn warned the general, “No measures should be taken in the consequence of the death of Colonel Butler in regard to promotions until you receive further information from this department.” The department’s preferred candidate for command of the Second Regiment was Colonel Samuel Hammond, a militia officer well-known to Dearborn as Wilkinson’s sworn enemy. The choice was deliberate. In Dearborn’s jaundiced view, the bloodbath of Federalist officers had produced a paradoxical result. Their places had been taken not by Republicans but by Wilkinson supporters.

  The commander of the First Regiment, Colonel Thomas Hunt, was Wilkinson’s friend, as was Major Andrew Nicoli, next in line to become adjutant general. The superintendent of West Point military academy, Colonel Jonathan Williams, was a convivial companion whose enthusiasm for good living and military music once led the general to send him a mock-serious warning: “For your own amusment puff every Cheek at your will—let the Hills resound & the vallies sing— but give no occasion for those who listen with invidious pleasure, to fasten upon us the foul imputation of Ariostocratic Pomp & parade at the public expence.” With Cushing in command of the Second Regiment, Wilkinson’s allies would be everywhere.

  Among senior officers below the rank of colonel, a high proportion put their names to a remarkable memorial just eighteen months later attesting to the qualities of Wilkinson’s character: “Generous, benevolent, and humane— his heart, his hand, and his purse, are ever open, and ready to succour distress, and relieve misfortune—hardy, enterprising, daring and brave, he encounters obstacles with alacrity, and is most exalted when pressed by difficulties . . With him for a leader, we shall neither fear dangers, nor foresee difficulties— but shall march to battle, with the assurance of victory.”

  Alarmed by the extent of Wilkinson’s following within the army, Dearborn needed to put Hammond in a position of power where he could create a rival source of patronage within the army. But as each of Dearborn’s predecessors, going back to Henry Knox, had discovered, it was difficult to defeat the general in a head-on confrontation. Because Hammond was not a regular officer, giving him command of the Second Regiment threatened to block a long chain of potential promotions that allowed each rank down to mere lieutenants to count on moving up to the vacancy immediately above them. Such a move, protested Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, was “striking at the very root of ambition & stifling in the bud every noble sentiment.” Similar denunciations of Dearborn’s flouting of military convention streamed in from other outraged officers. When Wilkinson’s allies in the Senate, led by Samuel Smith, discovered that Hammond had once actively supported the subversive French minister Genêt, the excuse was enough to have his appointment overturned. Cushing duly took command of the Second Regiment, and a shuffling of promotions restored harmony to the army.

  The result left Dearborn’s attempt to limit Wilkinson’s power in ruins. All three colonels—Hunt and Cushing in command of the infantry regiments, and Henry Burbeck, commander of the artillery—opposed Dearborn’s political interference and gave the Senate “great credit” for overturning Hammond’s appointment. The result was unmistakable. With the Burr Conspiracy beginning to take shape, Wilkinson’s sympathizers held every key post in the army. He had a clear-cut plan for seizing Texas, New Mexico, and possibly silver-rich Chihuahua. The one necessary condition for action was the outbreak of war, and the worsening dispute over the borders of Louisiana seemed certain to provide what he wanted.

  22

  BETRAYER BETRAYED

  ON JULY 3, 1805, some hours after breakfast, General James Wilkinson’s convoy arrived at the St. Louis levee. He should have been there two days earlier, but had to make a detour to St. Genevieve so that a judge could administer the oath of office that the governor had forgotten to take in Washington; in the only public apology of his life, Wilkinson confessed to Jefferson that the omission “excites the sharpest self-reproach and exposes me to severe reprehension.” From the levee, a troop of cavalry escorted him as he rode on horseback up the slope to the central square, where he was greeted by a ragged volley of shots fired by 100 armed Indians, then by a sharper salute from the 240 soldiers drawn up for his inspection. This was followed by speeches of welcome in French, the language of the long- established Creole inhabitants, and in English, the language of the newcomers.

  The next day, on the Fourth of July, he and his officers sat down to dinner at a three- hundred-foot-long table decorated with eighteen gilded pyramids, seventeen representing the number of states, each inscribed, “Prudence, Morality, Wisdom, Law,” and the eighteenth decorated in gold letters reading, “United States— Glory & Power—Sic Semper Omnia [So everything should be forever],” on one face and on the other, “James Wilkinson—Protection.” Inspired by music from the military band and the “courteous and affable manners and fascinating charms” of the ladies of St. Louis, the festivity continued through the night and “did not cease,” the National Intelligencer confided in its inimitable style, “till the gentle Aurora with lighted taper in her rosy fingers conducted each angelic form to her downy pillow.” Almost from the moment the revelers awoke, relations between governor and citizens went downhill.

  The reception reflected St. Louis’s pride in its sophistication. The city was more than forty years old and boasted around two hundred houses, the majority built of stone, and a population that included prosperous citizens such as Auguste Chouteau, aspiring new arrivals such as Timothy Kibby, and almost one thousand other inhabitants, largely French Canadian, Native American, and mixed race, with a scattering of British and Spanish. The economy depended on the fur trade and mining—iron, lead, and salt— but as in all frontier communities the central concern was land, the fundamental source of wealth in a preindustrial economy. At the heart of that concern were two questions: Who owned it? How could they prove it?

  The answers affected everyone living within the Louisiana Purchase, both around St. Louis and in the Orleans Territory. They fostered popular resentment against the United States, soured the reputations of the two governors, Claiborne and Wilkinson, and powerfully influenced the development of the Burr Conspiracy.

  The problem began with the confusion caused by the rapid transfer of sovereignty between Spain, France, and the United States. The difficulty of harmonizing three different kinds of property law was compounded by systematic tampering with the land registry files. “There has been Leaves cut out of the Books and others pasted in with Large Plats of Surveys on them,” Silas Bent, the American-appointed surveyor general of the Louisiana Territory, reported in 1806. “The dates have been evidently altered in a large proportion of the certificates. Plats have been altered from smaller to Larger. Names erased and others incerted and strik
ing difference in collour of the ink etc.”

  To clear up the confusion, Congress appointed a board of land commissioners to examine the legal title of all property owners within the Louisiana Purchase. Their investigation sparked fury among the Creole inhabitants. The standard demanded was that of United States law, meaning there had to be documentary evidence of the original grant, a surveyor’s plat of the property, and registration of it in a land office. Any disputes would be decided in court by the American adversarial system rather than the French and Spanish legal process that depended on a consensual pursuit of facts. According to Amos Stoddard, the temporary governor who first had to confront the problem, nineteen out of twenty existing French and Spanish owners were likely to lose their property under this process.

  From the safety of Washington, Wilkinson had repeatedly urged Stoddard “to conciliate the people,” by which he meant the Creoles, but all five of the military officers who administered Louisiana Territory supported the newcomers who wanted the land. Most claims were still working their way through the courts, but already properties were being transferred from French to American owners. Now the explosive issue was Wilkinson’s responsibility.

  From his first day in office, when he chose to avoid a settlers’ welcoming banquet in favor of lunch with Auguste Chouteau, Wilkinson showed a consistent bias in favor of the Creoles. Although justified in terms of democratic justice— when Louisiana became the Missouri Territory in 1812, the legislature would quickly vote to restore much of the Creoles’ land— this was a dangerous policy. It not only made enemies among Anglo-American settlers, but turned the military administrators against him. Two in particular, Major James Bruff, whose banquet Wilkinson spurned, and Colonel Samuel Hammond, were landowners as well, and each was to become a dangerous enemy. Both were retired professional soldiers, now in the militia, and as their military and civilian superior General Wilkinson loftily dismissed their opposition. Hammond he termed “a hackneyed scoundrel,” and Bruff nothing more than “a damned cunning fellow.”

  For someone so subtle in playing off one individual against another, Wilkinson’s confrontation with the Anglo-American settlers seemed almost willful. Edward Hempstead, a leading St. Louis citizen, expressed a widely shared feeling when he wrote of the governor, “From a rank Federalist to a suspected Republican, he became a bigot and is now a petty tyrant.” Yet there was method in his quarreling. Many of the actions that aroused antagonism among the newcomers—his hostility to the judges, and his refusal to pardon Hammond’s nephew for murdering a Kickapoo man, for example— conciliated Creole and Native American feelings Since these people constituted a majority in the territory, his policy was more democratic than tyrannical. Unpopular though he was with the Anglo-Americans, Wilkinson’s stance helped reconcile a diffuse, frontier population to U.S. government.

  In New Orleans by contrast, Governor Claiborne imposed the land laws and legal system of the United States without regard to the feelings of the majority Creole population and was faced with near rebellion. As Jefferson himself acknowledged, they were driven to this extreme by “the call on them by the land commissioners for their deeds” and by “the administration of justice in our forms, principles & language.” Whatever private reservations he might have about the roughshod tactics of the governor of Louisiana Territory, in public Jefferson unequivocally approved of his policy. “Not a single fact has appeared,” he told Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland in May 1806, “which occasions me doubt that I could have made a fitter appointment than Genl. Wilkenson [sic].”

  IT WAS PRECISELY THE HOSTILITY of the French inhabitants toward their new rulers that Colonel Aaron Burr hoped to exploit when he was rowed into New Orleans in June 1805. He arrived, as he told his daughter, Theodosia, on “an elegant barge, [with] sails, colors, ten oars, [and] a sergeant and ten able, faithful hands.” Burr boasted that it had been supplied by the army’s commanding general, although it actually belonged to Captain Daniel Bissell and was carrying officers to Colonel Butler’s court-martial. More impressive than the boat, however, was the letter that Burr carried with him from James Wilkinson to his former agent Daniel Clark Jr. Written at Fort Massac and couched in typically misty terms, it recommended the former vice president as someone “whose worth you know well how to estimate. If the persecutions of a great and honourable man can give title to generous attentions, he has claims to all your civilities and your services. You cannot oblige me more than by such conduct, and I pledge my life to you it will not be misapplied. To him I refer you for many things improper to a letter, and which he will not say to any other.”

  The “improper” phrase would come back to haunt Wilkinson when it was assumed to refer to his complicity in Burr’s plans. But in a letter liable to fall into the wrong hands, the general might have wanted to keep other sensitive topics secret—his wish to see Burr replace Claiborne as governor of Orleans Territory, and, as it turned out, Burr’s intention of involving Daniel Clark himself in his schemes. Clark always dismissed this last option. He vigorously denied any ties to Burr and made much of the fact that he saw the colonel only once during his twelve days in New Orleans. Clark’s actions, however, belied his protestations.

  As he had anticipated, Burr found his hints of secession rapturously welcomed by the alienated French community in New Orleans. Their anger at Claiborne’s governorship had boiled over the previous fall, and two spokesmen, sent to Washington to protest against the destruction of their democratic rights, predicted widespread revolt unless his policies softened. Burr’s Veracruz venture also drew support from an informal network of traders calling themselves the Mexico Association, who hoped to back a coup d’état there, and from a group of Ursuline nuns hoping for the restoration of Catholic rule. Nevertheless, the high point of Burr’s short visit to New Orleans was a magnificent dinner given in his honor by the French merchants who dominated the city.

  When he started to return north in late June, heading initially for a second consultation with Andrew Jackson, the support of New Orleans and its wealthy inhabitants must have become a factor in his plans. The exact nature of those plans were still a mystery, but in September 1805 a curious letter sent by Clark to Wilkinson shed some light on them.

  Ostensibly Clark’s message was a warning about the “many absurd and evil reports circulated here . . . respecting our ex- Vice-President . . . The tale is a horrid one, if well told. Kentucky, Tennessee, the state of Ohio, with part of Georgia and part of Carolina, are to be bribed with plunder of the Spanish countries west of us to separate from the Union; this is but a part of the business.” The writer’s tone was amused and disbelieving. One wild rumor struck him as particularly incredible: “You are spoken of as his right hand man.” Like every public figure of his time, however, Clark appreciated the likelihood of his mail being opened, and his message carried an inner private meaning.

  In the winter of 1805, after sending this letter, Clark made the first of two trading voyages to Veracruz, during which he made extensive notes of the military forces in the area, and, according to John Graham, secretary at the time of the Orleans Territory, who saw his report, “particularly of the garrison-towns between Vera Cruz and Mexico [City].” At a time when war with Spain seemed imminent, Graham was intrigued and later testified that he made “several inquiries of Mr. Clark concerning Mexico; he was of opinion it might be invaded with every prospect of success. I asked him, whether, if the United States should undertake the invasion he would bear a part; he evidenced an unwillingness to have any thing to do with an expedition carried on by the government; but expressed himself willing to join in such an enterprize undertaken and carried on by individuals.”

  Clark’s motives for aligning himself with Burr’s schemes were both personal and political. He had just been frustrated by Governor Claiborne in his attempt to be appointed the Orleans Territory representative to Congress, but he was also infuriated by the treatment of the Creoles. “I have encouraged, and will continue to encourage, the ou
tcry and opposition to [U.S.] measures,” he promised Wilkinson in 1804, and the strength of his feelings was widely known. “He has often said that the Union could not last,” Claiborne reported, “and that, had he children, he would impress early on their minds the expediency of a separation between the Atlantic and Western States.”

  These evident sympathies for the goals that Burr had in mind give a different meaning to the letter Clark sent Wilkinson. Rather than a general warning, his real intention was to share in coded form Burr’s latest thinking. The plan that Clark described looked very like the old Spanish Conspiracy that was so familiar to them both. Thus the critical sentence about Wilkinson being “spoken of as his right hand man” had a double significance.

  On September 11, about the time when this letter was sent, Aaron Burr himself came in person to St. Louis for another meeting with the man who appeared more and more clearly to be the linchpin of all his plans. The priorities of James Wilkinson were not what he expected.

  ON HIS JOURNEY NORTH, Burr had held extensive consultations with two militia generals, Andrew Jackson in Tennessee and John Adair in Kentucky. Although the details of their conversations remained private, their shape was clear. Both generals publicly stated that once war was declared with Spain, they would lead the militia and thousands of volunteers to seize the Floridas and “Mexico,” an ambiguous label that referred sometimes just to Texas, but sometimes included the Floridas, and occasionally all the Spanish border provinces including the silver state of Chihuahua. It was a prospect they both eagerly looked forward to.