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

by Andro Linklater

  Contained within the turgid pages was a formidable defense of his conduct based on a vast range of obsessively hoarded documents, an astonishing network of contacts, and an exhaustive ability to research information. Its strength was demonstrated by the impact on two brilliant lawyers, Roger B. Taney, a future Supreme Court chief justice, and John H. Thomas. Each had thought the general complicit in the conspiracy, but became so convinced of his innocence that they volunteered to defend him without fee. Thus when his court- martial began on September 4, 1811, before eleven army officers selected by a hostile administration and under the direction of a Republican loyalist, Brigadier Peter Gansevoort, the defendant had already secured one important victory.

  GENERAL JAMES WILKINSON ARRIVED in the courtroom dressed in the gaudy gold-braided uniform he had devised for himself, with his sword strapped to his waist. When Gansevoort reminded him that as a prisoner he must surrender his weapon, the general unbuckled the sword and handed it over with the tragic observation that it was the first time he had been deprived of “the untarnished companion of my thigh for forty years.”

  The first days of the hearings were concerned with the charges related to the Spanish pension and the Burr Conspiracy. Under Taney’s direction, the defense had little difficulty in disposing of the familiar evidence of the general’s dealings with Spanish officials in New Orleans. The charge sheet began with the earliest connection with Spain in 1787, but because Wilkinson was still a civilian at that date, it had to be dropped. The allegation, based on Daniel Clark’s Proofs, that “two mule loads of silver” had been sent to him in 1789 by the Spanish government, was shot down when Joseph Ballinger, who actually brought the money, testified that he delivered it to tobacco farmers in Lincoln County, Kentucky, who “were there to receive their money for tobacco which Wilkinson had purchased of them.”

  Clark himself did not appear and was in his absence discredited as a vindictive liar. Power’s winsome character was said to be of “shocking depravity,” the sober Ellicott was again presented as a lunatic perjurer, while Isaac Briggs was persuaded to admit that when Wilkinson had described himself as “a Spanish officer,” the general had spoken “with a very cheerful air.” The one new item was a balance sheet dated January 1796, supposedly drawn up by Philip Nolan, that showed conclusively that every cent of money Wilkinson received from Esteban Miró was a payment owed from two sources—the belated sale in 1791 of 235 hogsheads of tobacco that had been wrongly condemned the previous year, and insurance on the loss of the Speedwell’s cargo. That this precious document was a forgery by Nolan did not detract from its value, since Nolan was long dead, like Miró and any others who might have questioned its authenticity.

  More persuasive even than the fake balance sheet was the long array of documents attesting to the confidence that the nation’s founding fathers had placed in the general’s abilities and loyalties. Since Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and those in their administrations knew of the allegations against Wilkinson, the jury had to choose between two possible explanations: either the giants who had helped bring the United States into existence deemed the allegations to be frivolous, or they had deliberately shut their eyes to what he was doing. The first option was undoubtedly preferable.

  The final fifteen specific charges concerned Terre aux Boeufs. Displaying a masterful command of the detail of military organization, Wilkinson concentrated on the culture of penny- pinching, begun by Dearborn and continued by Eustis, that left the army underequipped in such necessities as hospitals and mosquito nets. For the entire year of 1809, Eustis had allocated just $250,000 to pay for the wages, accommodation, transportation, medical care, and equipment of two thousand men sent to defend New Orleans. Unless directly authorized by Washington, no expenditure above fifty dollars was allowed, and the “military agent,” a civilian appointed by the War Department to buy supplies, was forbidden to pay for anything “except for articles actually received or for services performed.” This meant, Wilkinson carefully explained to the colonels and majors who made up the jury, that a civilian clerk could countermand any order given by a colonel or a major involving extra expense regardless of its military importance. The structure, designed for peacetime routine, made it impossible for a commander to respond to an emergency.

  On the most serious charge of refusing to obey Eustis’s order to move upriver to Fort Adams, Wilkinson simply showed that the move downriver was in obedience to Dearborn’s earlier order to defend New Orleans. By the time he had presented weighty testimonials to his wisdom in choosing the site, to his efforts in caring for the sick, to the exceptional severity of the weather, and to the relatively small number of deaths while at Terre aux Boeufs, the prosecution’s case was in tatters. Then the general demanded the right to make a personal statement that occupied six more days. Disheartened, the judge advocate general started to stay away from court until ordered to return by the president.

  On Christmas Day, the jury returned its verdict. It could not be publicly announced until scrutinized by the president, but onlookers were able to guess its import from the way the jurors “very politely waited upon General Wilkinson” when the court was adjourned. About seven hundred pages of transcripts and conclusions were sent to President Madison, who spent almost six weeks plowing through what must have been uncomfortable reading. The government was savagely criticized, for failing to realize Wilkinson was a civilian when he first went to New Orleans, and for presenting evidence “much of which is unessential as to matter, and incorrect as to form, and inadmissible in judicial proceedings.” On every count, the general was found not guilty, and the court concluded, “From a comparison of all the testimony, General Wilkinson appears to have performed his various and complicated duties with zeal and fidelity, and merits the approbation of his country.”

  The court-martial’s judgment was not perverse. Wilkinson had transformed the case against him into a trial of the fundamental relationship between the army and the federal government since independence. In the range of testimonies that he brought to bear upon his conduct, from junior officers to heroes of the past such as George Washington, Henry Knox, and Anthony Wayne, the general provided a detailed picture of the political pressures that shaped the army during that period. In finding him not guilty, the jury implicitly placed the blame for the toleration of his ambivalent loyalties, and for the tragedy of Terre aux Boeufs, squarely upon the shoulders of his civilian masters.

  For the president and his secretary of war, the verdict represented the utter failure of their two-year campaign to rid themselves of the general. On February 14, 1812, Madison commented grudgingly that although “there are instances in the Court, as well as in the conduct of the Officer on trial, which are evidently and justly objectionable, his acquittal of the several charges exhibited agst. him is approved, and his sword is accordingly ordered to be restored.”

  AT ONE MOMENT DURING THE TRIAL, Thomas Power was challenged about the vindictive tone of his evidence and exclaimed emotionally that in the duplicitous world where Wilkinson operated, there was no choice, it was “stab or be stabbed.” Although Wilkinson pretended to be shocked by “the malice of his heart,” Power’s outburst was a fair assessment of the feral conditions in which the general operated. For more than five years, ever since Burr’s conspiracy had put a blade to Wilkinson’s throat by requiring him to collaborate or be revealed as a traitor, he had been knifing friends and enemies alike to keep his career alive. Now he alone remained standing surrounded by the corpses of his adversaries. Even James Madison and William Eustis, pursuing him with the full force of executive power and more enmity than Jefferson had brought to his vendetta against Burr, had been laid low. Having survived, the general might have felt a sense of triumph.

  His military career, however, remained in the hands of the president and the secretary of war. Consequently Wilkinson’s first reaction was not to gloat but to send Madison a cringing letter to explain that his diatribes in court against “Corruption & Power” were
not directed at the executive, as everyone thought, but at Burr, Clark, and the House of Representatives Going further, he proposed to amend any books that he had written, and the court-martial record if necessary, “to vary or expunge any rank Epithet or acrimonious expression which in an Agony of Mind may have escaped my Pen.” And he hoped that this would be acceptable because “the impending Crisis of our public Affairs requires harmony, concord & co-operation among the public Servants.”

  For the first time in his career, his self- abasement was not an act. The long, bruising encounter with Madison and Eustis had brought the general close to bankruptcy, and something like depression replaced his customary ebullience. In a lengthy, rambling letter sent to Jefferson before his court-martial, he confessed to an unprecedented lack of confidence brought on by “the pressure of my persecution, the desolation of my fortunes, the abandonment of those who owed me support.” To his dying day, he hated Madison for bringing him so low. But “the impending crisis” offered an opportunity that no professional soldier could ignore. By February 1812, it was certain that, for reasons that were not entirely clear, the country was sliding toward war with Britain.

  THE ORIGINAL CAUSE AROSE from the British policy of stopping and searching neutral vessels on the high seas to ensure that they were not carrying strategic goods to France, or any other country under Napoléon’s control. From the start of the Napoleonic wars, the United States had gradually taken the lion’s share of world trade as Britain and France imposed ever stricter blockades on each other’s shipping. Worth $43 million in 1792, the value of American cargoes rose inexorably to $138 million in 1807. American vessels not only carried American wheat, tobacco, and cotton to Europe, but West Indies sugar as well. As neutrals in the conflict, they also shipped British manufactured pottery, textiles, and brass lamps to Napoléon-dominated Europe, and French brandy to Britain. Consequently, the British blockade, and to a lesser extent the French blockade operated by privateers, fell most heavily on ships flying the stars and stripes.

  Yet there was an anomaly. Outrages that most hurt the merchant communities in New York and New England triggered the most violent anger in the south and west. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Henry Clay of Kentucky, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, the young leaders of the Republican War Hawks, suffered no direct economic harm from the capture of a Boston ship, but took it as an incitement to war. By contrast, the Massachusetts legislature, representing shippers, merchants, insurers, and bankers who had lost fortunes to the British, petitioned Congress to negotiate a peaceful solution.

  In November 1811, the House Committee on Foreign Relations reported on all the complaints against Britain, including the help given to Native Americans resisting American expansion in the west. Two months later, Congress, under the dominance of the War Hawks, voted to increase the army first to ten thousand, then twenty- five thousand regulars, and to create a volunteer force of fifty thousand from the militia of each state. A New England Federalist such as Rufus King might object, “I regard this war as a war of party not of country,” and New York congressman Morris Miller might declare, “We will give you millions for defense but not a cent for the conquest of Canada,” but Congress went ahead anyway to authorize a budget of eleven million dollars for the first year of the conflict. As a nineteenth- century historian succinctly observed, “The war may be said to have been a measure of the South and West to take care of the interests of the North, much against the will of the latter.”

  Behind the anomaly lay a shift in attitudes about the nature of the United States that James Wilkinson would have understood better than most. It had first made itself felt during the Burr Conspiracy. The western settlers, whose loyalties once swung with the touch of a feather, now felt themselves to be the center of the nation. Colonel Morgan had boasted to Burr that the capital would one day move from Washington to Pittsburgh, while others predicted it could end as far west as Cincinnati or even St. Louis. In Congress, John Randolph, who represented the voters and values of Virginia, mocked their ambitions, saying “he could almost fancy that he saw the Capitol in motion towards the falls of Ohio—after a short sojourn taking its flight to the Mississippi.” But his mockery demonstrated an inability to appreciate the west’s new, expansionist patriotism.

  Beyond the Appalachians, the borderless mind-set of the original pioneers had disappeared. In 1787, when Tennessee was still a territory, John Sevier had been ready to pledge the loyalties of its settlers to His Catholic Majesty, and in 1797 Tennessee’s first senator, William Blunt, was prepared to ally himself with Britain to further his plans. But in 1811, when Tennessee congressman Felix Grundy welcomed the prospect of war, he did so because it would benefit the United States. “I therefore feel anxious,” he said, “not only to add the Floridas to the South, but the Canadas to the North of this empire.” This was the new voice of the Mississippi Valley. In place of coexistence, it nourished the dream that one nation would overfill the continent.

  In New England, the old Atlantic loyalty to an idea of American liberty, rather than an American nation, remained strong enough to allow opponents of the war to talk of secession, much as the settlers used to do in the Mississippi Valley. In 1809, their opinions encouraged Canada’s governor general, Sir James Craig, to send the agent John Henry “to discover how far they would look to England for assistance, or be disposed to enter into a connection with us.” The answer was not far, and a discouraged Henry soon gave up, before selling his secret to Madison for fifty thousand dollars. His efforts hardly amounted to a British conspiracy, but then Henry lacked the energy and inventiveness of James Wilkinson.

  NEWLY CLEARED, THE GENERAL WAS DESPERATE to take advantage of the opportunities available in the larger army that Congress voted for in January 1812. Two old adversaries, Henry Dearborn and Wade Hampton, had already been promoted above him to major general, and he could not afford to be left without an active command. Yet Madison needed him at least as urgently. Three presidents had learned to handle the difficult, treacherous, but pliable general so that he carried out the contradictory duties they assigned him. In March 1812, politics forced Madison to follow their example.

  On March 2, Republican Party chiefs informed Madison that he risked losing the party’s nomination for president at the next election unless he showed a clear commitment to war. A week later, the president published Henry’s papers to demonstrate British aggression and, on April 1, proposed a sixty- day embargo on ships leaving port, a recognized preparation for war. On April 10, James Wilkinson was ordered to take command of the defenses of New Orleans.

  Appointed to the same position three years earlier, he had brusquely defied Eustis. This time in half a dozen letters, he meekly asked Eustis to specify exactly the powers he could exercise, and the precise goals the executive wished him to achieve. When a hostile paymaster’s office blocked his claim for almost seven thousand dollars in expenses, he presented his case directly to the secretary of war rather than trying to fiddle the money through secret service funding. A chastened Wilkinson arrived in New Orleans in July to discover that his country had declared war on Britain on June 18.

  He found the three regiments of infantry under his command woefully unprepared for hostilities. Senior officers had been detailed for service on the Canadian frontier, leaving gaps in command; so many soldiers were absent that most units were understrength; artillery had been neglected until it was incapable of firing; and long years of penury had caused “a frightful destitution of means in every branch of the service except the hospital.” Overall, he concluded, “Imbecility and disorder prevailed throughout.” In the past Wilkinson would have blamed his predecessor, in this case Wade Hampton, for such dismal conditions. Hampton’s incompetence was never in doubt—William Duane, later Andrew Jackson’s treasury secretary, once exclaimed, “I would not trust a corporal’s guard nor the defense of a hen-roost to him”—but Hampton was Eustis’s man. Now Wilkinson only referred to his own efforts to restore order.

  The s
ame downbeat, almost diffident tone persisted throughout his correspondence with the secretary. A rumor of Eustis’s displeasure brought an instant, anxious response. “It has been hinted to me that I may be recalled from this quarter,” he wrote in December. “I do not credit the report, yet I think it proper to express the hope that it may not be the case, because it would expose me to great expense and would separate me from my family, and because my constitution would not bear a northern clime.”

  In truth, Eustis was more at risk. Before the first shot was fired, he had promised a quick and overwhelming victory. “We can take the Canadas without soldiers,” he declared with blind optimism, “we have only to send officers into the province and the people . . . will rally round our standard.”

  When the three- pronged invasion that was to conquer Canada took place, the reality of twelve years of pinched funding and political neutering became painfully apparent. In August 1812, General William Hull humiliatingly surrendered Detroit without a fight; in October, General Stephen van Rensselaer was defeated at Queenston Heights above Niagara; and from his base in Albany, General Henry Dearborn, handicapped by ill health, found it impossible even to reach the frontier. On January 13, 1813, faced by a rising storm of criticism, Eustis chose to resign.

  In the discussions to choose his successor, Wilkinson’s name was suggested, offering a hint of the glittering prospects that might have come his way in other circumstances. John Adams thought that on merit he should have been chosen, but, recognizing how deeply Wilkinson was distrusted, added, “His vanity and the collision of Factions have rendered his appointment improper and impossible.” Instead, the president appointed John Armstrong, who had been a junior officer on General Gates’s staff at Saratoga.

  In his training regime and his efforts to restore morale, however, Wilkinson’s showing as a general already compared favorably to anything in the north. And he was about to execute a textbook military operation to enlarge the territory of the United States.