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

by Andro Linklater

  The reality of the van Rensselaer estates in New York, vast, well settled, and productive, outweighed the attractions of swampland in the Mississippi delta. But Wilkinson continued to believe in his rural idyll. His reunion with Celestine had allowed him to meet for the first time his twin daughters, Stephanie and the delightfully named Theofannie, who had been born in January 1816. Having only known sons before, he was enchanted.

  “Blessed with my Celestine and two beloved little daughters, as good and beautiful as angels, with a bare subsistence which I am endeavouring to improve by my labours,” he declared, “I hold myself above the attractions of the world, envy no man’s condition, enjoy tranquillity and happiness without alloy.” Having transported all his archives to New Orleans, he intended to offer the public more reminiscences because he had so far only been able “to glance at one fifth of my public life.” In this new drama, he would devote himself to nothing but farming and writing. “I decline all company, refuse all public appointments, and in my Books, my Pen, my divine little Creole, and our charming little girls, Stephanie and Theofannie, I enjoy more tranquillity and happiness than I have experienced in my variegated life.”

  For a time the role suited him. Even when he fell sick and fever reduced him after three weeks in bed to “a mere skeleton,” he soon bounced back to health, “new flushed, as elastic as [a] Billiard Ball, and with the grace of Heven will not have another maladay of any kind for ten or fifteen years to come.” Evidence of the sixty- two-year- old general’s happiness was the birth of another child, Theodore, in 1819.

  The serpent in his Eden was lack of money. The plantation did not generate profits on the scale he imagined, and his wealthy Trudeau relations may well have contributed to the family’s upkeep as the Biddles had thirty years before. In 1819 Celestine’s sister, Josephine, “the same lively Dame” who had accompanied her to Maryland, married “a Creole of 3 or 400,000$ fortune,” and the struggling Wilkinsons must have been something of an embarrassment. That same year General John Adair brought a civil suit against him in Natchez for false imprisonment during the Burr Conspiracy and was awarded twenty- five hundred dollars in damages, a sum far beyond Wilkinson’s ability to pay. Within twelve months, Congress rescued him from ruin by voting three thousand dollars for his relief, but poverty took the gloss off his rural dream. Then, writing to van Rensselaer in 1821, he revealed a wider dissatisfaction with his surroundings.

  His letter was devoted to the crisis created by Missouri’s insistence in 1820 that it be admitted to the Union as a new slave state. From the old-established slave society of New Orleans, Wilkinson wrote, “You can not find any one of virtue & Intelligence who, viewing negro slavery in the abstract, & to probable results, will not condemn it as a curse. Yet yielding to Habit, indolence and ease, we approve the curse. The Missourians will discover too late that the opponents to the introduction of Slavery among them were their best friends.” As a slave owner himself, this was neither a popular nor an easy line to argue, but he was clear about the risk of the Union’s splitting over the spread of slavery. “[The Union] is the Rock of our political Salvation,” he argued. “The Southerns and Westerns have most to dread from the Catastrophe, yet they are accelerating it by their insatiate desire for limitless domain.”

  Although the argument came strangely from a former Spanish conspirator, it illustrated the critical ingredient he had contributed to the idea of the Union during his lifetime. When Wilkinson swung the army against Burr’s conspiracy, an alien element was introduced into the concept of the United States. At that moment, the strand of thought, advocated most vehemently by Samuel Adams and John Randolph, that pictured a standing army as a threat to a citizens’ republic was turned upside down. Without a standing army, the republic must constantly be at the mercy of adventurers like Rogers Clark, Blount, and Burr. In the last resort, a republican government did not depend only on the will of the people, but also on its ability to enforce their will.

  THE GENERAL’S EXIT from his plantation stage took place in March 1822. His strongest emotional bond to the place was severed by the death of the angelic Theofannie early in the year, leaving Wilkinson distraught. The child was “too good and too perfect for this world,” he wrote in grief, “so God took her.” He still had Stephanie and Theodore, and the son of his first marriage, Joseph Biddle, who had come south to join his father, but Theofannie was his favorite. The old man’s unpopular views on slavery, and the imperative need to earn a fortune, removed most of the attractions that the Magnolia Grove plantation once possessed. They also directed his imagination toward Mexico, where land was as cheap as it had once been in Kentucky, and the newly independent nation had outlawed slavery.

  When he sailed to Veracruz in March 1822, he took with him his gold-braided general’s uniform, a full- length portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, and a commission to recover debts owed to merchants trading with the old Spanish empire, but his most valuable assets were intangible—his military reputation among the Spanish- trained army, his quick intelligence, and the remains of his abundant charm. With supreme self-confidence, he used the brief delay while his vessel was kept waiting outside the harbor, and before he had set foot in the country, to write a proposal for reform of Mexico’s trading policies. Events in Mexico, moreover, made it an opportune moment to offer advice.

  One year earlier, Agustín de Iturbide, a Spanish- trained soldier who had defected to the rebels, established Mexico’s first independent government, bringing an end to eleven years of warfare with both Spanish and rival revolutionary forces. His administration was still taking shape, and the new congress had just voted to make him emperor with the title Agustín I.

  Once arrived in the capital, Mexico City, Wilkinson flourished among the crush of petitioners, lobbyists, and adventurers who had congregated there to take advantage of the region’s first stable government in a decade. Dressed in his general’s uniform, sympathetic to Hispanic manners and customs, and exhibiting the elaborate courtesy that was his trademark, he immediately created a favorable impression. Among the crowds was Stephen F. Austin, seeking confirmation from the new government of the grant of Texas land made to his father under the Spanish empire. With surprise and admiration, he saw Wilkinson gain the confidence of Iturbide’s regency council “to a high degree.” The newcomer was invited to stay with the captain general of the province and had several meetings with Iturbide himself. When Austin sent in his petition, he took the precaution of asking Wilkinson for a letter of recommendation to go with it.

  Emperor Agustín was to disappoint everyone. Dull and reactionary, he lacked the boldness of a real leader despite the powers granted him— “more the Lamb than the Lion, the Spinster than the Soldier,” in Wilkinson’s pungent judgment. Wilkinson’s own preference was for the most enterprising of the emperor’s lieutenants, Antonio Cordero y Bustamante, the future president of Mexico. As governor of Texas in 1806, Cordero had confronted Wilkinson at the height of the Burr Conspiracy, and the experience of having been on opposite sides during those convulsive days created an immediate friendship. Cordero was, according to the general, “literally a Washington in all his great qualities . . . bravest of the brave, judicious, modest to timidity yet daring to Death.”

  With Cordero’s assistance, Wilkinson’s effortless rise to influence seemed destined to continue. He delivered to the emperor a second paper on the settlement of Texas, suggesting that it be divided in half, with the eastern, and more desirable, province being renamed Iturbide. Instead of being settled by Anglo settlers, such as Austin proposed, who were “slothful, ready to vice, insensible to social affection and [to] really permanent social life,” Wilkinson recommended that Iturbide should be “inhabited by cultured Catholic people, dedicated to manufacturing and all kinds of industry.” This was shrewd salesmanship, aimed at an emperor who was revealing himself to be a Catholic hard- liner, anxious to bring back the Inquisition and restore Jesuit supervision of religion. What the general really had in
mind became apparent only at the end of the document, when he suggested that the governor of this Catholic province should be “an official of honor, fidelity, intelligence, adaptability, and political sagacity.” In short, himself.

  Occasionally he reduced his dream to ownership of two hundred thousand acres near Galveston, “divinely situated on the Coast of the Gulph with a good harbour & salubrious climate, with Fish and oysters at the Door and droves of Buffalo & wild horses in thousands on our rear.” But none of it was realistic. Resistance to the emperor’s autocratic rule led to his abdication early in 1823, leaving Wilkinson to start all over again.

  Running short of money, he moved from the center of Mexico City to a house on the outskirts. There he acted as a consultant to a stream of business and political visitors from the United States. “We stopped at the lodgings of our countryman, General W[ilkinson], who received us in the kindest manner,” the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Joel Poinsett, reported. “He has been sometime here, and we sat up to a late hour, listening to his interesting account of the country.” His expertise and his introductions to people in government earned him enough to live quietly while the prospect of his great prize hovered just beyond his reach. Mexico wanted Texas settled, but whether by immigrants from the United States or elsewhere, and whether under central or provincial government control, could not be decided. Nor were the successors to Iturbide’s rule much more secure than the emperor. Meanwhile, as the tone of Poinsett’s letter suggested, the general was in danger of turning into a curiosity on the sidelines rather than a power at the center.

  That summer he played his trump card and presented to the congress of the newly reestablished republic of Mexico his full-length portrait of George Washington, the republican statesman, standing with peaceful hand outstretched, and dressed in civilian black, the garb almost obscuring his military sword. The gesture won Wilkinson great acclaim and a sympathetic hearing for his claims for unpaid debts, for unawarded land, and for a new payment of fifteen thousand dollars, which may have been recompense for himself. But gratitude did not immediately translate into action. Slowly the general was becoming an exile. He said as much in a letter to Thomas Jefferson written in March 1824.

  They had corresponded only once since the unfortunate reference to “Long Tom.” In 1818, Jefferson decided that he had been unfairly criticized in Alexander Wilson’s classic American Ornithology for failing to send the ornithologist on Zebulon Pike’s Red River expedition. Sensitive to the charge of impeding scientific study, Jefferson asked Wilkinson to remind him of the circumstances. From the Magnolia Grove plantation, Wilkinson assured his president that he was not to blame. Pike’s mission was to explore the Red and Arkansas rivers. It was not an expedition suitable for scientists, and it was sent without the president’s specific knowledge.

  Jefferson had not acknowledged this helpful reply, and other letters Wilkinson had written had gone astray. Consequently the general had to invent a reason for getting in touch from Mexico. The way to catch Thomas Jefferson was through his curiosity. Writing in early 1824, Wilkinson sent packets of Mexican seeds— for parsley, lettuces, beans, cantaloupes, avocados, red corn, peas, tomatoes, and chilies. With the last of these came cooking suggestions— they were best “when young mixed with meat for ragout, when ripe, clean out seed, mixed with syrup makes a sweetmeat.” Superficially his letter was in the same vein, the intrepid intelligence officer reporting back matters of interest to his commander, and as usual the truth required some dressing up. He had been intending to leave the country when he “unexpectedly became entangled” in the American claims for compensation, and as a result “I have been detained here in involuntary exile.” Ruefully he admitted being unable to tell whether “I have been duped and deceived more by the Republican or Imperial governments.” But his detention at least made it possible to pass on information about Mexican politics, and about his own efforts to help “the People of the Western hemisphere form a close knit League of National Republicks.”

  Only toward the end of six closely scrawled pages did the guise slip. What he really wanted was some reply to all the messages he had sent Jefferson, some acknowledgment from the father figure who had never entirely failed nor ever quite fulfilled the general’s need for approval, “a letter sent under cover to [the] consul of the United States would certainly reach me here.” In a shaky hand, the aged Thomas Jefferson wrote on the envelope, “Arrived May 21,” but still there was no reply.

  Desperate for a response, Wilkinson wrote again to Jefferson on July 1, now portraying himself on the verge of such success that people would “envy the good fortune I have acquired by patience, perseverance and long suffering.” But his letter ended with the same yearning for the smallest sign of approval: “I shall be detained here still two months, I beg you to write me as a mere spirit of recognition.” This time, however, the words were not even read. The last tenuous link with Thomas Jefferson had been broken.

  DESPITE HIS SHOW OF OPTIMISM, the general’s affairs were no closer to a solution. In September 1824 he told his son Joseph, “I have just made a contract apparently for a claims adjustment.” He expected to be paid and to leave in two or three weeks. But six months later he was still in Mexico City, and now in such dire financial straits that he had to ask Joseph to send him some money. In return, his son could have one hundred thousand acres either in Galveston or farther north in Texas where the general expected to be given land. But without money or influence his dream was no longer really credible. In the summer of 1825, he even had to ask Poinsett, the ambassador, to give him an introduction to the new governor of Texas and Coahuila.

  Age had crept up on the general. He still rode in the morning outside his little villa, but he grew tired easily. There was a constant pain in his stomach, and though he dosed himself regularly with laudanum, the relief was short-lived, and the discomfort longer. The animal energy that had given credibility to James Wilkinson’s fantasies was running out. At a deeper level, he had lost the impetus to keep the show going. Jefferson’s continuing silence removed the one audience he craved. The only person to influence his life more profoundly had been the original model of deceit, his real father, Joseph Wilkinson. The adoration the boy had given him had been transferred from one powerful successor to another, but none had come as close as Jefferson to occupying his father’s place. Now, without a figure of authority to observe and applaud the performance, James Wilkinson may have felt that it was hardly worth going onstage anymore.

  News of his deteriorating health brought Celestine to Mexico City shortly before Christmas. Nothing more could be done for him except to keep the pain at bay with laudanum. On December 28, 1825, at the age of sixty- eight, Major General James Wilkinson, once commander in chief of the U.S. army, and sometimes known as Agent 13, died.

  He would have been gratified to learn that a distinguished congregation, including the future president Cordero y Bustamante and the American ambassador, assembled in the Church of St. Michael in Mexico City for his funeral. Outward appearances were always important. The inward reality was less easy to discern, and for the general it never counted for much. Thus the final disposal of his mortal remains was oddly appropriate.

  In 1872 the cemetery of the Church of St. Michael where Wilkinson was buried was scheduled for development. When the news reached Washington, the Senate decided that the body of such a distinguished soldier deserved a proper resting place. Orders were given to exhume his body for transfer to the National Cemetery in Mexico City. The embassy sent an official party to supervise the ceremony with due honor. When they arrived, however, they discovered the graves had already been dug up and their contents consigned to a common vault. American bones were mixed with Mexican, and it was no longer possible to tell one from the other, friend from enemy, patriot from traitor, general from spy. Whoever was behind the outward appearance once known as James Wilkinson had simply disappeared.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The centripetal process of conc
eption, research, and writing that results in a book incurs many debts to the generosity and knowledge of others. I should like to acknowledge my gratitude to Frank Wilson, former books editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, for initially focusing my attention on the bizarre nature of General James Wilkinson’s double-faced career, and to my friend George Gibson, publishing director of Bloomsbury USA/Walker Books, for his encouraging response to my enthusiasm for the dark convolutions of the general’s character.

  My research has depended heavily on the professional expertise of librarians in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Chicago History Museum, the American Philosophical Society, the United States Military Academy Library at West Point, the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the British Library in London, and the London Library. At one remove, I have also benefited from the resources, both human and online, of the Filson Historical Society, the Maryland Historical Society, the Maryland State Archives, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the State Historical Society of Missouri, and the Texas State Historical Society. The ability to access online original manuscripts and publications from the period is invaluable, and so at two removes, I should like to pay tribute to the many organizations that have digitized their records and made them available to researchers.