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

by Andro Linklater

  In his attempt to indict Wilkinson for treachery, Randolph had termed him “a rogue,” an insult that festered until, on Christmas Eve 1807, the general challenged Randolph to a duel for a comment “injurious to my reputation.” His challenge was swept aside contemptuously. “In you, sir,” Randolph replied, “I recognize no right to hold me accountable for my public or private opinion of your character . . . I cannot descend to your level.” Frustrated, Wilkinson responded by plastering Washington with posters that boldy proclaimed, “In Justice to my Character, I denounce John Randolph, Member of Congress, to the world, as a prevaricating, base, calumniating scoundrel.”

  This imaginative retaliation tarnished Randolph’s standing in the eyes of the Virginians who had elected him. But it also secured his inveterate hatred. Members of the Tenth Congress had more pressing issues to consider. They had reconvened early at the president’s urgent request to consider how best to respond to the unprovoked attack in June by the British warship Leopard on the USS Chesapeake after the latter refused to allow a British search party on board to look for possible deserters. Without waiting for Congress, Jefferson had authorized additional spending to strengthen defenses, which, he admitted later, “were illy provided with some necessary articles,” but his decision created a host of questions about defense, the Constitution, and the budget. Yet all this took second place after the posters appeared.

  What made Wilkinson’s accusation truly dangerous was that, for entirely different reasons, he had also made enemies of Thomas Power and Daniel Clark. To clear his name after the trial, he had published Power’s declaration that Wilkinson had not spied for Spain, and the Irishman, who had thought his certificate was only for Jefferson’s eyes, was mortified to be publicly revealed as a fool. Still more serious was Wilkinson’s indiscreet remark in November at an Annapolis party that Clark was so short of money one of his bills of exchange had been offered for payment at a third of its face value. Unfortunately this was overheard by wealthy Richard Caton of Baltimore, whose sixteen- year- old daughter, Louisa, was being wooed by Clark. The girl was promptly banned from seeing Clark again and sent abroad to Britain, where she eventually married Francis George Godolphin D’Arcy D’Arcy-Osborne, the seventh duke of Leeds. Socially it was an improvement on a New Orleans merchant who was short of money and already married, but Clark’s heart was broken. “The affair is forever ended,” he wrote sadly, and as Wilkinson acknowledged, a man who “had always been my professed friend and obsequious servant, as his correspondence will testify, was suddenly converted into a remorseless enemy.”

  The result of his enmity became clear on the last day of 1807, when Randolph told his astonished colleagues in Congress that he intended to call for an inquiry to discover whether General Wilkinson “while in the service of the United States had corruptly received money from the government of Spain.” To substantiate his demand, he produced three documents given him by Clark— a note from Baron Carondelet in January 1796 referring to the payment to Wilkinson of $9,640; Wilkinson’s to Gayoso in September 1796 with its “let my name be never mentioned” demand for greater secrecy; and Thomas Power’s characterically effusive but damning explanation of why he had lied (or as he preferred to put it, descended to “tergiversation, captious logic and sophistical evasion”) on behalf of the general. The false certificate clearing Wilkinson was necessary, Power explained, because “I [was] a secret agent of the Spanish government and General Wilkinson was a pensioner of the said government,” and it was the agent’s duty to provide the general with cover.

  Under pressure to explain his own involvement, Clark produced a hurried document that traced his long commercial connection with the general, and the firsthand knowledge he possessed of the general’s treachery. In growing excitement, Congress suspended discussion in January 1808 of the Embargo Act banning the export of United States goods to Europe and argued instead about the propriety of investigating General James Wilkinson. “Is it because this man assisted in the capture of General Burgoyne, the first step in securing the existence of our nation,” James Sloan of New Jersey angrily demanded, “and has now arrested an infernal band— a host of traitors— is it for these things that he is now charged?”

  It was soon clear the general was not the only target. Kentucky’s John Rowan said that if the inquiry recommended Wilkinson’s removal and the president did not comply, Congresss “should try, not General Wilkinson, but the President of the United States.” From the Senate, Republican John Pope of Kentucky judged that “the object of [Randolph’s attack] is to injure the administration.” But the weight of Clark’s evidence overwhelmed personal and party considerations. On January 13, 1808, a large majority voted to set up an inquiry into reports that General Wilkinson had “corruptly received money from the Government of Spain.” They had, however, been preempted.

  In response to Randolph’s opening assault, Wilkinson had demanded a court of inquiry, as he had twice before, in Washington’s and Adams’s administrations. This time it was granted. Like Pope, Jefferson understood the attack on Wilkinson to be an assault on his increasingly unpopular administration. He did not intend to abandon his general.

  On January 2, the president announced that a three- man military board would investigate the general’s conduct. Since its membership consisted of three colonels whose careers could be made or broken by the general, and two of whom, Cushing and Jonathan Williams, the superintendent of West Point, were his close friends, it was widely criticized as inadequate. It sat for five months, with Wilkinson attending most of its hearings so that he could cross- examine witnesses and present testimony that vindicated his behavior. Many of the two thousand pages in his Memoirs were taken directly from his voluminous defense.

  Daniel Clark refused to appear before the board, but in April, shortly before it was due to report, he presented Congress with more material from Power’s archives, this time relating to the agent’s two visits to Wilkinson, just before and after General Wayne’s death. Among the documents were Power’s letters to Carondelet and Gayoso telling in breathless prose of his narrow escape when Lieutenant Steele boarded his boat with the general’s dollars hidden in coffee barrels. To these allegations, Wilkinson offered the familiar defense that the money was payment for commercial transactions, and that far from favoring Spain, he had sent troops south to push them out of Natchez.

  The effervescent Power, a self- confessed liar, could be swatted aside by the sheer weight of the general’s declaration, but the weighty testimony of Andrew Ellicott, the precise Quaker astronomer, presented a more formidable challenge. On January 20, Jefferson had bowed to Congress’s demand that he provide all the documents relevant to their inquiry. Determined to release as little as possible, the president warned Congress that fire had destroyed everything in the War Office prior to 1800, that other papers might have been lost or misfiled, and that one letter sent by Ellicott to the War Department in November 1798 had at his request to be kept secret, although its author might reveal its contents. Apart from that, Jefferson declared, with astonishing lack of candor, Clark’s evidence “is the first direct testimony ever made known to me charging General Wilkinson with the corrupt receipt of money.”

  When one of Clark’s investigators approached Ellicott a few days later, he heard a different story. “To my knowledge,” Ellicott declared, “the present administration has been minutely informed of the conduct of General Wilkinson; and why he has been supported, and patronized, after this information, is to me an inexplicable paradox.” He duly provided Clark with an affidavit to be given to the board of inquiry that repeated the substance of the letter he had sent Jefferson in the first months of his administration. It detailed all the evidence he had received, from President Washington’s warning against Wilkinson in 1796 to the information from Tomás Portell, obtained in November 1799, that the $9,640 was the general’s “pension” from Spain. “I questioned [Portell] frequently whether this money was not on account of some mercantile transaction,” E
llicott testified, “he declared it was not.”

  Had this testimony been given in person, it might well have swayed the board. But, unwilling to risk exposing Jefferson’s cover- up, Ellicott refused to apear in person, and without his presence and transparent honesty to support its allegations, his affidavit lost much of its force.

  Nevertheless, Wilkinson went to extraordinary lengths to counter Ellicott’s evidence, beginning with the jocular aside that when he wrote his affidavit, “the celebrated astronomer must have been under the influence of the moon.” With growing indignation, he declared Ellicott to be a self-appointed spy, then whipping himself to a fury claimed, “This witness in his fondness for the marvellous, his propensity for defamation, and his sympathy for Mr Clark, has perjured himself, over and over again.” Finally in an uppercase frenzy of alliteration, he denounced “the pretended SPY, THE PERJURED, PROFLIGATE ELLICOTT [for] labouring to assassinate my humble, hard-earned reputation.”

  It is almost possible to sense the general’s lobster-eyed delight in this demolition of Ellicott, the one witness who had no secrets to hide and no animosity to conceal. The others, including Clark, were easily exposed as hostile liars whose evidence counted for nothing beside the numerous testimonials to the general’s loyalty and patriotism bestowed on him by three presidents, two secretaries of war, and others both great and good. Wilkinson’s vigorous counterattack was unexpectedly helped by the rapid erosion of Clark’s popularity in New Orleans, where, Claiborne reported, “His deposition against General Wilkinson has given rise to much severe animadversion on Mr Clark’s general character.”

  It was hardly surprising that on June 28 the board of inquiry should have reported, “There is no evidence of Brigadier-general James Wilkinson, having, at any time, received a pension from the Spanish government, or of his having received money from the government of Spain, or any of its officers or agents, for corrupt purposes; and the court has no hesitation in saying, that, as far as his conduct has been developed by this enquiry, he appears to have discharged the duties of his station with honor to himself and fidelity to his country.”

  ALTHOUGH NOT A RINGING ENDORSEMENT, the verdict left the commanding general once more in full control of the army. And for the first time in Jefferson’s administration, its numbers were increasing. The dominance of Britain’s navy at sea and its aggressive inspection of neutral vessels suspected of trading strategic goods with Napoléon’s empire exposed the flaws in Jefferson’s minimalist defense policy. Responding to the perceived threat of British attack from Canada or the Gulf of Mexico, the president reversed the policy of the previous seven years. In February, he asked Congress for funding to pay for the recruitment of six thousand more regulars, and twenty-four thousand volunteers.

  This represented a historic shift by the great advocate of militia as the nation’s primary defense. The type of troops to be raised, artillery, riflemen, and light dragoons as well as infantry, explained why the change had to be made. To train a large number of citizen- soldiers in these skills was prohibitively expensive compared with the cost of producing a small corps of full- time specialists. In April, Congress dispensed with the volunteers and committed nearly all the resources to the recruitment of eight new regiments of regulars. Slapping down the last few holdouts who still echoed Samuel Adams’s warnings against standing armies, South Carolina’s John Taylor declared, “If I could believe that there was the least danger to the liberties of 800,000 or one million of freemen by the forces now to be raised, I should think very little of my country.”

  Nevertheless, no one could deny that the first use of the new force was directed at Americans. In an attempt to force Britain into negotiations, the Embargo Act banned all trade with her. Faced by bankruptcy, many merchants from New Orleans to Boston chose to find a way round the embargo by smuggling flour, cotton, and tobacco through Canada or Spanish Florida. Customs officials who tried to interfere were beaten up or otherwise intimidated, while local militia often preferred to ignore smugglers, who were liable to be their own neighbors.

  As always in military matters, the president relied on his newly vindicated general to implement his political goals. In August 1808, Jefferson ordered Wilkinson to send newly trained recruits north to reinforce federal officials on the Canadian border. “The armed resistance to the embargo laws on the Canada line,” the president explained, “[convinced] us at an early period that the new ‘regular’ recruits of the northern States should be rendezvoused there.” The use of militia troops would have been, he acknowledged, “expensive, troublesome and less efficacious.” Wilkinson promptly deployed three companies along the New York section of the border and ordered existing garrisons in smuggling ports to take extreme measures against smugglers. From Boston, artillery captain Joseph Swift eagerly reported back, “There would be no difficulty in planting a battery that would ensure an obedience to the law.”

  DESPITE HIS BEST EFFORTS, Jefferson could not prevent the United States from becoming embroiled in the cataclysm of Napoléon’s attempt to dominate Europe. At sea, American ships were attacked by French privateers and boarded and often confiscated by the British navy. On land, the government was shaken by the nationalist earthquake that altered Latin American history—the uprising of the Spanish people on May 2 against France’s military occupation. Once content to rule Spain through a puppet government under its king, Ferdinand VII, Napoléon now instituted direct rule, placing his own brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne. From Chile to Florida, the legitimacy of this new Madrid government was immediately questioned. The dormant liberationist movement begun in 1806 by Francisco de Miranda in Venezuela revived and would, in the years ahead, spread across the continent.

  The first American response to the new situation came from Wilkinson. On October 6 he wrote an alchoholic, rambling, but typically guileful memorandum on future policy in Latin America from his temporary headquarters in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Although addressed to Dearborn, its audience was clearly the president.

  Wilkinson appealed first to Jefferson’s well-known prejudices against the corrupting influence of European sophistication—“it multiplies our wants, depresses our tastes, infects our manners and corrupts our principles.” He looked forward to “the Liberation of the American Continent from the Shackles of European Government, and the Nations of the West forming a distinct community united by common protection, defence and happiness.” This community he called “United America.” The only threat to its independence, he argued, came from the intervention of British power in the area, and he singled out the captain general of Cuba, Someruelos— “extremely feminine in his exterior and feeble in his intellect”—as particularly susceptible to British influence.

  As always, Wilkinson’s compelling description of a problem was followed by a solution that could be provided only by someone with his particular talents: “I know more of Spanish America, am better known by name and military character—impressive to despotic governments— than any other American.” Bringing Someruelos into the U.S. camp was a task that would enable him to regain public confidence “by a display of zeal, integrity, devotion, perseverance and successful exertion. I would give my life for such an opportunity.”

  Reluctant to become involved, Jefferson preferred a policy of strict neutrality. “The patriots of Spain have no warmer friends than the Administration of the United States,” he declared, “but it is our duty to say nothing for or against either [side].” Nevertheless, in a final, very public manifestation of confidence in his commanding general, he gave Wilkinson permission to approach Someruelos.

  After eight years of compromising collaboration, the president and the general remained as mutually dependent as ever. Despite the dire effect on its fighting ability, Wilkinson turned a blind eye to the Republicans’ relentless political screening of new officers in the enlarged army. The Federalist Boston Gazette complained that “beardless boys who belch beer and democracy” were promoted above non- Republican officers with experience,
and fifty years later General Winfield Scott remembered, “Many of the appointments were positively bad, and a majority of the remainder indifferent. Party spirit of that day knew no bounds, and of course was blind to policy. Federalists were almost entirely excluded from selection, though great numbers were eager for the field.”

  For his part, Jefferson responded to Wilkinson’s desperate appeal for help with his legal costs—“for half or even a third of the sum, my necessities being extreme”—by allowing the money to be paid in the form of recompense for extra rations the general must have bought during his time in New Orleans. The president also overlooked the fifty barrels of flour that the general took for sale in Cuba in breach of the Embargo Act. Nevertheless in February 1809, when Wilkinson was still on the high seas to Havana, the president also approved the appointment of two new brigadiers, Wade Hampton and Peter Gansevoort, both staunch Republicans. In the very last days of his administration, Jefferson was making sure that the general would never again have a monopoly of influence within the army.

  WHEN WILKINSON SAILED FROM ANNAPOLIS on January 24, 1809, he was ostensibly making for New Orleans. Seven weeks earlier, responding to reports of British military preparations for an attack on the city, Dearborn had ordered him to assemble “as large a proportion of our regular troops at New Orleans and its vicinity as circumstances will permit.” Although intended for the defense of the city, the presence of two thousand troops concentrated so close to Baton Rouge and West Florida, also constituted a diplomatic move and was, in Spanish eyes, seen as encouragement to potential rebels in the colonies. Consequently Wilkinson’s mission to Havana caused a flurry of concerned messages along the borderland that was the commander in chief’s natural home.