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

by Andro Linklater

  With men sweating at the oars, the general’s boat then swept down the Red River, covering more than one hundred and fifty miles in three days. But when they reached the Mississippi, the general demonstrated how little he believed in the melodrama he was creating. Instead of hastening down-river to protect beleaguered New Orleans, he turned upriver to Natchez, where his letter was awaiting Burr, and where the genuine tragedy of Ann Wilkinson’s approaching death was unfolding.

  NANCY’S FAMILY WAS ALL HER LIFE. She needed to have tenderness around her. Until she met James Wilkinson, the affection that nourished her had come from her father and brothers and sisters. While her husband was away, she found it in her children, and to a lesser extent in the military circles surrounding her. What she could not bear was loneliness. But in the last febrile stages of her illness, her elder son, James Biddle, was still lost in the mountains, the younger was living far off in Philadelphia, and her husband was distracted by a military emergency. His brief return must have come as a gift. But an undeniably operatic atmosphere existed in the elegant mansion as Ann lay dying of tuberculosis and her husband sat nearby scribbling messages of increasing wildness to save himself from disgrace.

  A second letter was written to the president on November 12 warning of “a deep, dark and wide-spread conspiracy, embracing the young and the old, the democrat and the federalist, the native and the foreigner, the patriot at ’76 and the exotic of yesterday, the opulent and the needy, the ins and the outs.” Superbly, the general promised to use “indefatigable industry, incessant vigilance and hardy courage” to defend New Orleans, admitting only to a slight trepidation at the thought of the “desperate enthusiasts who would seek my life, and although I may be able to smile at danger in open conflict, I will confess I dread the stroke of the assassin, because it cannot confer an honourable death.” But wrapped in the hyperbole lay the shape of the plan he had conceived. “To give effect to my military arrangements, it is absolutely indispensable New Orleans and its environs should be placed under martial law.” Ten years earlier, he had used the same stratagem in Detroit in response to a supposed threat of British invasion. The experience had shown that martial law had the double merit of creating a state of panic and giving him total control.

  Two more letters went to Freeman with further orders for improving the defense of the city, and the assurance that “I have made up my mind to perish in the storm, in defence of the government and integrity of the union, and every officer I have the honour to command will do the same.” On the same day he wrote William Claiborne with instructions to act urgently in repairing New Orleans’s defenses, but to “demonstrate no hurry” because “you are surrounded by disaffection where you least suspect it.” That letter was no sooner sealed than he began another to Samuel Smith, insisting that Claiborne be dismissed for failing to prepare adequate defenses; then, having asserted that the “Integrity of the Union is menaced by the impious ambition of a desperate Band,” he demanded that his salary should be increased— “Shall I be suffered to starve or to exhaust the last Cent of my private purse, or abandon every thing like respectability in office?”

  Finally, the ever reliable Walter Burling was sent all the way to Mexico City with a message for José de Iturrigaray, viceroy of Mexico, explaining the heroic efforts Wilkinson had already made to protect Spain’s possessions against Burr, his immediate intention to “spring like Leonidas into the breach defending it, or perish in the attempt,” and his pressing need to be repaid for the expenses he had incurred—eighty-five thousand pesos spent “in shattering the plans and destroying the union and harmony among the bandits being enrolled along the Ohio, and thirty-six thousand in the dispatch of supplies and counter-revolutionists—which sums I trust will be reimbursed to the bearer.”

  Aside from the calculated need to squeeze a profit from the emergency, this was not the language of a cold-blooded plotter, as his enemies later alleged. With his wife dying in an upstairs bedroom, James Wilkinson was performing his different roles as patriot, as spy, as military hero, with the desperate intensity of a man on the edge of breakdown. Failure to convince his audience would kill off his characters as surely as tuberculosis was killing his wife and condemn him to cope with intolerable reality.

  Invited to the Concordia mansion on about November 15, Isaac Briggs was struck by the change in the general’s demeanor since September. “I confess I approached him with caution,” Briggs recounted. “His wife lay at this time, in the same house, apparently at the point of death. The General met me in a mood the reverse of that described in the former conversation: then, all was gaiety; now, every thing in his manner was throughout, solemn, impressive and pregnant with alarm. He took me aside, and immediately put the question: ‘Can you go to the seat of government of the United States?’ ”

  The recruitment of Briggs to act as messenger to Jefferson, not only carrying his dispatches, but testifying to his patriotism with a Quaker’s unshakable integrity, was essential to Wilkinson’s plans. Briggs’s initial skepticism, even after being told of the conspiracy, only added to his usefulness. “How dost thou know these things?” he demanded. “May all this not be a deception?” To satisfy his doubts, Wilkinson had to produce Burr’s and Dayton’s letters, to point to the connection between the Western World stories and Dayton’s blackmailing suggestion that he was about to be dismissed, and to pave the way for the conclusion that Briggs reached after a night’s sleep. “I could not resist the inference,” the Quaker wrote, “that did Colonel Burr aim to secure the cooperation of General Wilkinson, the use of such means perfectly accorded with the opinion I had acquired of [Burr’s] character—to impose on [Wilkinson] the conviction on the one hand that his reputation with his country was destroyed beyond his power to redeem it; and on the other to hold up to his view such allurements as were well calculated to fascinate his ambition.”

  Convinced that Jefferson had to be informed of what was really happening, Briggs set off for Washington on November 18 with the general’s dispatches and copies of Burr’s and Dayton’s letters. Any hope of rescuing Wilkinson’s reputation rested with him. Elsewhere in the south, Burr and Dayton had already shredded it beyond repair. Cowles Mead, acting governor of Mississippi, was so convinced of Wilkinson’s complicity that he refused the general’s request to call out the militia for fear they would be used in the plot and instead told William Claiborne in New Orleans, “It is here believed that General Wilkinson is the soul of the conspiracy.” Andrew Jackson, himself uncomfortably close to Burr, followed up with a second warning to Claiborne sent on November 12: “Be upon the alert; keep a watchful eye upon our General and beware of an attack, as well from our own country as Spain. I fear there is something rotten in the State of Denmark.” Theater was already blurring with reality when the general arrived in New Orleans on November 25 ready to take the stage in the greatest role of his life, not as Hamlet, but something closer to Julius Caesar.

  25

  THE GENERAL REDEEMED

  ON THE VERY DAY that James Wilkinson entered New Orleans, a weary Lieutenant Thomas Smith stepped into President Jefferson’s study in the White House and removed his slippers. When he had unpicked the soles, he handed over the general’s two letters for the president, and his message to the secretary of war. Smith left no account of his record journey—almost fourteen hundred miles covered in thirty- three days— or of the president’s response to this first indication of Wilkinson’s loyalty. But Smith’s fatigue must have been as extreme as the president’s relief.

  During the weeks without news, and the continuing doubts about how the general might use the troops under his command, the administration had remained paralyzed. Dearborn had guessed that Wilkinson would try to make war on Spain. Urgent messages had been sent south instructing him to keep the peace, and ordering Captain Thomas Swaine, commander of the eastern defenses on the Mobile River, not to leave his post to attack the Spanish, whatever Wilkinson might command. But until the creased pages were removed from t
heir wrapping, and Jefferson began to read Wilkinson’s looped handwriting, no one knew what had actually happened.

  However alarming the references to the “deep and dark conspiracy” and the “eight or ten thousand men” who were to rendezvous in New Orleans, the discovery that the army’s commander in chief was loyal and planned to defend the city outweighed every other consideration. The difference it made to Jefferson’s administration was immediately evident when the cabinet met the following day. For the first time, decisive action could be taken to frustrate Burr’s plans. As the president explained to Congress, “Two days after the receipt of General Wilkinson’s information . . . orders were despatched to every intersecting point on the Ohio and Mississippi, from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, for the employment of such force either of the regulars or of the militia, and of such proceedings also of the civil authorities, as might enable them to seize on all the boats and stores provided for the enterprise, to arrest the persons concerned, and to suppress effectually the further progress of the enterprise.”

  The first action against Burr was taken by Governor Edward Tiffin of Ohio, based on information that the cabinet’s confidential agent, John Graham, had gained from men recruited by Blennerhassett. Shortly before the president’s proclamation arrived, Ohio militia raided Blennerhassett’s island home. They were just too late to capture its owner, who had left hours earlier with his friend Colonel Comfort Tyler. In their absence, the soldiers seized about a dozen boats and two hundred barrels of provisions, as well as destroying Blennerhassett’s library and beautiful furniture. In late December, Blennerhassett, Tyler, and a force numbering no more than eighty men joined up with Burr, who had acquired two more large boats from Andrew Jackson. By the end of the year, their small convoy was sailing down the Mississippi just ahead of the news of Jefferson’s proclamation that was spreading southward like a tide.

  AHEAD OF THEM IN NEW ORLEANS, James Wilkinson was working feverishly to repair the city’s defenses. A force of fewer than eight hundred troops had been set to rebuilding the ruined walls of Fort St. Louis, and constructing new barriers across strategic roads and canals into the city. Governor William Claiborne ordered the tiny fleet of four gunboats and two bomb ketches to be put under Wilkinson’s command, and an urgent meeting was convened with leading merchants to ask them for money and men to equip the vessels for action. The first indication that Wilkinson had something more extreme in mind came on December 6, just before this meeting, when he wrote Claiborne, “Under circumstances so imperious, extraordinary measures must be resorted to, and the ordinary forms of our civil institutions must, for a short period, yield to the strong arm of military law . . . I most earnestly entreat you to proclaim martial law over this city, its ports and precincts.”

  During the long months of uncertainty about Wilkinson’s loyalty, Claiborne had received no communication from Washington. Both Jackson and Mead, had, however, counseled him not to trust the general. In a message announcing his intention to defend Natchez at all costs, Mead told the governor, “Burr may come—and he is no doubt desperate . . . Should he pass us, your fate will depend on the General, not on the Colonel. If I stop Burr, this may hold the General in his allegiance to the United States. But if Burr passes this Territory with two thousand men, I have no doubt but the General will be your worst enemy.” Forced to choose between losing the city to Burr or to Wilkinson, Claiborne temporized. On December 7, he refused Wilkinson’s demand for martial law, but only on the technical grounds that it suspended the citizen’s right of habeas corpus, a power that resided solely with the legislature, which was not in session.

  Two days later, New Orleans’s merchants met and volunteered to supply crews and money for the navy. With their agreement, Claiborne simultaneously put an embargo on ships leaving the port during the emergency. This measure halted all trade, and if sustained long would drive the merchants and the city into bankruptcy, but for a few weeks it was acceptable because everyone shared the burden. To the merchants’ consternation, Wilkinson dismissed their offer as inadequate. In the expectation of a naval attack from the Gulf of Mexico backed by British frigates, he demanded the use of New Orleans’s sailors for a minimum of six months. When this was refused, he told Claiborne that he would round up the seamen forcibly, pressing them into service as the British navy did.

  By now the governor was deeply alarmed. “I submit it to your cool reflection,” he replied, “whether at this time I could be justifiable in compelling men by force to enter the service. Many good-disposed citizens do not appear to think the danger considerable, and there are others who (perhaps from wicked intentions) endeavor to turn our preparations into ridicule.”

  Wilkinson, however, was unrelenting. The argument he used for attacking civil liberties has become familiar. “We have reached an extremity in our public affairs,” he brusquely informed Claiborne, “which will not only justify, but which imperiously demands, the partial and momentary dispensation of the ordinary course of our civil institutions, to preserve the sanctuary of public liberty from total dilapidation.”

  The general estimated Burr’s forces at between seven and twelve thousand men, but it was not just this outside threat he had to confront. In New Orleans, Burr sympathizers could be found in the resentful Creole population, and among the shadowy but influential membership of the Mexico Association. Privately, Wilkinson assured Samuel Smith that three quarters of the population were unreliable. Consequently the sweeping powers of martial law and impressment were essential because “unless I am authorized to repress the seditious and arrest the disaffected, and to call the resources of the place into active operation, the defects of my force may expose me to be overwhelmed by numbers; and the cause and the place will be lost.” With increasing feebleness, Claiborne still held out, insisting that the judiciary alone had the power to enforce the law, “nor can any acts of mine arrest or suspend their powers.”

  By mid-December, however, his protests had become irrelevant. Sensing the governor’s weakness, Wilkinson simply bypassed the constitutional safeguards and carried out what amounted to a military coup in the city. On December 14 a series of arbitrary arrests began. First, the courier Erick Bollman was seized on suspicion of treason by Wilkinson’s soldiers, then Swartwout and his traveling companion, Peter Ogden. Bollman was hustled onto a gunboat and shipped out of the city, while Swartwout, as he later told a friend, “was taken from prison in the night under a guard of soldiers and hurried through swamps and marshes to an unfrequented place in the woods . . . and threatened by the officer if [I] attempted to escape, death would be the consequence.” According to Swartwout, they did shoot when he tried to get away, but their muskets misfired. Later he and Ogden were both chained up on a bomb ketch moored in the river.

  The arrests, coming on top of the rumors of Burr’s approaching army, created panic in the city. A judge, James Workman, issued writs of habeas corpus for the release of all three men, but Wilkinson immediately rearrested them, declaring that he took full responsibility for “the two traitors who were the subjects of the writs.” He promised to continue to arrest “all those against whom I have positive proof of being accomplices in the machinations against the state.” Angrily Workman told Claiborne that by law his next step should be to call on the sheriff to have the general arrested, but in such dangerous circumstances he was prepared to let the governor intervene. When Claiborne refused to act, Workman resigned. As an early historian of Louisiana put it, “This was acknowledging the fact that Wilkinson was supreme dictator, and that henceforth his will was to be the law.”

  Most of this was motivated by his need to act the superpatriot. But another factor was at work. Nancy Wilkinson lay dying.

  Carried downriver from Natchez in December, she was lodged in the house of the Creole millionaire Bernard de Marigny. Shortly before she died on February 23, her son James returned from his epic journey down the Arkansas River so that she was not alone at her death. “Oh god how heavy have been my afflictions,” Wi
lkinson confided to Jonathan Williams, and it would be strange if the awful waiting for her end, and the eventual grief, did not contribute to his savagery. Always a convivial drinker, the general seems now to have begun drinking to dull his senses, to the tragedy in his private life and, perhaps, to the monstrous edifice he was creating in public. In an unsigned letter to the Aurora newspaper, edited by the sympathetic William Duane, he portrayed himself isolated in the midst of “acknowledged traitors and masked confederates.” This was, he wrote, a different Wilkinson, “unmoved and indefatigable . . . no more jocose, volatile or convivial. He seemed wrought in thought and silence! and was to be found only with the troops, at the works, or in his office.”

  Early in January, John Adair, his friend for more than fifteen years, arrived in the city. Whatever his expectations of Wilkinson—it was said that Adair still hoped to arrange the handover of the city to Burr— Adair was too ill to do anything but send word that he wanted to see the general. The same afternoon, a detachment of 120 troops under the command of Wilkinson’s trusted aide Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Kingsbury surrounded his hotel. Adair was dragged from his room and taken to military headquarters, where he was held until he could be put on a ship bound for Washington alongside Swartwout, Bollman, and Ogden. Adair’s arrest was followed by that of Workman, on the grounds that the judge was “strongly suspected for being connected with Burr,” and that of the editor of the Orleans Gazette, James Bradford, and a financier, Lewis Kerr, who was accused of plotting “to plunder the bank.”

  All mail addressed to Burr and his associates was intercepted and opened, and travel outside the city was restricted to those with military permits. The streets were patrolled by detachments of armed soldiers with the power to apprehend anyone the general wanted to detain. Such was his authority, he had only to issue a warrant. The list of his suspects lengthened rapidly until by February it extended to printers, legislators, traders, lawyers, and “the Bar in general.”