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

by Andro Linklater

  Most delegates felt frustrated, but Wilkinson reacted differently. Late in 1786 he asked John Marshall, Humphrey’s cousin, then a member of the Virginia assembly, to persuade the governor, Edmund Randolph, to issue him a passport to visit New Orleans. When Randolph refused, Wilkinson approached the Spanish minister, Gardoqui, again with no success. His purpose became clear in December when he wrote for a third time, now addressing Francisco Cruzat, commandant of the Spanish fort at St. Louis.

  The tone of his message was strikingly different from that of his public speeches. It contained no hint of dislodging Spanish garrisons, but instead offered regrets for the behavior of General George Rogers Clark, who had destroyed three Spanish boats earlier in the year in retaliation for the confiscation of two Kentucky flatboats carrying flour. Clark’s action was “an outrage . . . generally disavowed here,” Wilkinson assured Cruzat, and as evidence of his good intentions he added a warning that “a certain Colonel Green and other desperate adventurers are meditating an attack of the posts of his most Catholic Majesty at Natchez.” Wilkinson concluded by promising that he would “do eveything in our power here to foil this band.” Almost as an afterthought, he added the hope that his warning could be passed on to Don Esteban Miró, governor of Louisiana.

  By the beginning of 1787, while ice still blocked the Ohio River, his intentions were generally known in Kentucky. He advertised for consignments of ham, tobacco, and butter to be carrried down the Mississippi for sale in New Orleans. Spain might not be prepared to open up the river to Kentucky traders, and the United States might be reluctant to intervene, but James Wilkinson was proposing to defy both sides and strike a blow “for the rights of navigation and free trade.” That was authentic frontier behavior, to do what seemed right regardless of what the authorities wanted. When his fifty- foot-long flatboat with its cargo of Kentucky goods floated away from the dock at the Falls of the Ohio in April 1787, Humphrey Marshall recorded that Wilkinson left behind crowds of Kentucky settlers “enraptured with his spirit of free enterprise and liberality, not less than his unbounded patriotism.”

  8

  SPANISH TEMPTATION

  AT THE AGE OF THIRTY, James Wilkinson was no longer the young genius whose boundless enthusiasm won the hearts of susceptible generals. Yet his plans still crucially depended on the impact of his personal appeal. The first test came when he and his twenty-strong crew came within range of the cannon in the Spanish fort of St. Louis. They were clearly breaking the ban imposed in 1783 on all vessels except those flying the Spanish flag. The fort’s commander had the power to confiscate their cargo and their boat, a potential loss of about five thousand dollars, and the two Kentucky flatboats had been seized in these very circumstances the previous year. But the chief danger was to Wilkinson’s dreams. For him, this voyage was only the first step toward making his fortune. What he hoped to gain was “the privilege of furnishing a considerable annual supply of tobacco to the Mexican market which would have secured immense fortunes for me and my friends.”

  Within the bureaucratic structure of Spain’s colonial service, the status of Francisco Cruzat, who commanded the fort and its galleys, could hardly have been lower. It was dictated by the remote location of St. Louis on the uttermost edge of the empire. His immediate superior was Carlos de Grand- Pré, the commander of the Natchez region, comprising modern Alabama and Mississippi, who was himself subject to the orders of Esteban Miró in New Orleans, governor of Louisiana and West Florida. He in turn fell under the supervision of Luis Las Casas, the captain general in Havana, Cuba, who ranked alongside the viceroy of Mexico as one of the two greatest officials north of the equator in the mightiest power west of the Atlantic. Above the captain general existed only the royal council in Madrid, and in particular the minister for the Indies, under the direction of His Catholic Majesty Carlos III.

  The gigantic extent of the Spanish empire, already stretching from Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America to the Great Lakes and Canada in the north, had been swollen still farther by its participation in the war of American independence. Indeed, apart from the United States, no country gained more from the conflict. In 1781 Spanish forces seized British forts along the Gulf Coast and up the Mississippi Valley, and as part of the peace negotiations, Britain ceded to Spain modern Florida and the Gulf Coast— then known as East and West Florida. The border with the United States was ill- defined—in 1782 a Spanish diplomat insisted it ran just west of the Appalachians as far as the Ohio River, “thence round the western shores of Lakes Erie and Huron and thence round Lake Michigan.” The exact details might be open to dispute, but no one doubted that both banks of the Mississippi and the river itself lay under Spanish control. When Wilkinson’s crew poled the flatboat to shore at St. Louis in May 1787, the colossus was at the peak of its power and, in North America alone, claimed an area three times that of the United States.

  Despite his inferior position, Cruzat was also the gatekeeper to this mighty empire. He had decided Wilkinson’s letter deploring the seizure of Spanish vessels was significant enough to send on to Natchez, and thus he was prepared to let its writer land at St. Louis. The good impression created by the letter, however, was nothing compared to the effect of the present Wilkinson brought with him, two Virginia thoroughbred horses. And if the American’s ease and polished manners had the same effect on the lowly commander as they did on his superiors, Cruzat must have been overwhelmed. Certainly he provided Wilkinson with an official passport as far as Natchez, together with an effusive letter of recommendation to its commandant, Grand-Pré. Once inside the empire, Wilkinson’s preparations and personality became irresistible. At Natchez, Grand-Pré was especially grateful for the warning against Thomas Green, who claimed that the settlement was really part of Georgia. When Wilkinson arrived armed with Cruzat’s recommendation, Grand-Pré not only received him warmly but sent him on to New Orleans with an even more supportive document addressed directly to Miró. By the time his cargo reached the dockside there on the last day of June, a cascade of approval ensured that Wilkinson would at least be listened to by the man who controlled the Mississippi.

  He was escorted to Government House by the corporal of the guard and presented to Esteban Miró and his intendant, or chief financial officer, Martín Navarro. Both were men of exceptional quality. Each had risen through the service on merit alone— Miró as a soldier and Navarro as an accountant—and together were engaged in a concerted drive to change Spain’s existing strategy of limiting the movement of goods and people in North America.

  What drove Spanish policy was the need to protect Mexico’s rich silver mines in Zacatecas and the northern province of Nueva Vizcaya. Their output was worth as much as seventeen million dollars a year, according to the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, the largest source of silver in the world and almost half the total value of the empire’s exports. The only purpose of Louisiana, along with Texas and New Mexico, was to provide a barrier against any threat to Mexico from the north. Consequently, entry had been denied to all but approved immigrants, and trade was restricted to what was required by the direction of the captain general in Havana. It cost about five hundred thousand dollars a year to maintain Louisiana, a colony that had fewer than thirty thousand inhabitants, but the silver justified the outlay.

  Until 1783, the only attacks came from marauding Comanches, and the occasional incursion by British smugglers and adventurers, but American in-de pendence and the flood of migrants across the Appalachians changed the equation. Within five years, an estimated fifty thousand settlers had poured into the Ohio Valley and the western lands, and Spain’s near empty colony was no longer a protection but an incitement to land-hungry pioneers.

  Navarro, the older of the two Spaniards and, according to his colleague, “a man of talent, active, disinterested and popular,” took the lead. Not only was he one of the wealthiest merchants in New Orleans, he was the originator of a policy of free trade and relaxed immigration for Louisiana put forward
in a pamphlet as early as 1780. Under “a sovereign whose laws were not opposed to a system of free trade,” he wrote, Louisiana would develop “a numerous population and large commerce [and become] one of the most useful and best established provinces in America.” As the tide of American settlers swept over the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountains, it became increasingly urgent for Louisiana to match them in wealth and population.

  In February 1787, months before Wilkinson’s arrival, Navarro had bluntly repeated his message to Madrid: “The only way to check them [the Americans] is with a proportionate population, and it is not by imposing commercial restrictions that this population is to be acquired, but by granting a prudent expansion and freedom of trade.” For someone as alert as Wilkinson, it would not have been hard to sense the drift of Navarro’s ideas, since it harmonized so closely with his own.

  Nevertheless, the important bond he formed was with his fellow soldier Miró, who had joined the army at the age of sixteen and invariably addressed the American as “brigadier.” The title emphasized their similarities and pleased Wilkinson, who even as a trader never ceased to see himself as a soldier. In subsequent reports, he would address Miró as “my dear friend” and, as he had in writing to Gates, ask to be excused his bluntness on the grounds that he wrote “out of friendship.” It had taken Miró thirty-five years to reach the rank of brigadier, but he would eventually end his career as a field marshal, the highest rank in the Spanish army, having worked his way to the top by unremitting energy and competence. Although the senior as governor, he and Navarro worked as equals. They were in complete harmony about the need to strengthen Louisiana by encouraging immigration and promoting trade.

  In their joint report to Madrid, the two Spaniards recorded their favorable impressions of the American: “He is a young man of about thirty-three years of age, although he looks older; of exceedingly agreeable appearance, married, with three small children. In his manners and address, he shows that he has had a very good education which his uncommon talents have taken advantage of.” In an epoch when years and seniority were synonymous, the mistake about his age evidently arose from his air of authority, and nothing that they learned from him over a long, hot summer shook their confidence in his ability to give a lead to Kentucky opinion.

  After their first meeting, they had other interviews, often with interpreters, occasionally by themselves, since Navarro spoke excellent English and Miró a little. Ostensibly they were discussing Wilkinson’s wish to sell the goods he had brought with him to New Orleans. In the long term, the American made it clear, he wanted to extend the list to include “Negroes, live Stock, tobacco, Flour, Bacon, Lard, Butter, Cheese, tallow, Apples, to the amount of fifty or sixty thousand Dollars.” But once each side discovered the overlap in their interests, their discussions took on a different dimension.

  According to Miró and Navarro, after ten or twelve days Wilkinson announced that he had a “project of great importance to propose,” and having heard what he had in mind, they asked him to write it down. By then, all three must have clearly understood what each wanted. On August 8, Miró signaled their good intentions by granting a permit to “the American Brigadier Don James Wilkinson . . . to direct or cause to be brought into this country by inhabitants of Kentucky one or more launches belonging to him, with cargoes of the productions of that country.” Since only Madrid could authorize an exception to the ban on trade, this meant less than it appeared, but with the governor’s backing it could become reality, giving Wilkinson a monopoly of trade into New Orleans, worth tens of thousands of dollars. In return, Wilkinson delivered on August 21 a 7,500-word report that became known as his “First Memorial.”

  The memorial presented a program for their mutual advantage. Its first part concerned the political future of the western settlers. Wilkinson had come to New Orleans, he said, at the request of “the notables of Kentucky” to discover whether Spain might be interested in opening negotiations “to admit us under its protection as vassals.”

  The key to the loyalty of the Kentuckians, he explained, was access to the Mississippi, “the object on which all their hopes of temporal happiness rest, and without which misery and wretchedness is their certain portion.” To gain it, their present inclination was to ally themselves to Spain, but if that failed, they would turn to Britain for help. To decide the issue, Spain needed to act immediately. Wilkinson recommended that it should begin by “peremptorily and absolutely [refusing] to the Congress the Navigation of the Mississippi” in order to force the settlers to look to “the power which secures them this most precious privilege.”

  This was the heart of what became known as the Spanish Conspiracy: to induce the Kentuckians, by offering the reward of free trade on the Mississippi, to leave the Union and become part of the Spanish empire. As its instigator, Wilkinson promised to employ “all my faculties to compass this desireable event.”

  Although his recommended tactic of shutting the river to American traffic was the reverse of the policy that made him popular in Kentucky, he insisted that “a man of great popularity and political talents will be able to alienate the Western Americans from the United States, destroy the insidious designs of Great Britain and throw [the Kentuckians] into the arms of Spain.” Such a person would need to be rewarded. It would be advisable, therefore, “to offer indulgence to men of real influence” by allowing them to ship goods to New Orleans free of charge.

  Independently of this policy, he also recommended that the Spaniards construct a strong defensive post near the settlement of New Madrid, just below the junction of the Ohio River with the Mississippi. This was needed because in any negotiations between Spain and the United States “the more respectable and independent the military stength of the former, the greater will be the concessions she will receive from the latter.” Once the post was constructed, immigrants should be encouraged to settle below the fort with the inducements of free land, religious toleration, and free trade on the Mississippi. Americans would flood in and “this Province would then rise into immediate Wealth, Strength and National Importance.”

  In his Memoirs Wilkinson denied that he had done anything more than offer empty promises in return for the commercial advantage of importing tobacco and other products to New Orleans. “The idea of alienating Kentucky from the United States, while a prospect of national protection remained, would have been as absurd as the idea of reducing them to the vassallage of Spain,” he declared, knowing that he had advocated both.

  A few years later he certainly urged an associate, Hugh McIlvain, to follow his example. “When you get to Natchez, put on your best bib and tucker,” he advised. Smartly attired, McIlvain should flatter Miró, take an oath of allegiance, and “to his enquires respecting Kentucky, say nothing that is not flattering and favourable to Luisiana.” The purpose was simply to get permission to sell tobacco in New Orleans.

  Yet if his “Memorial” was designed to secure valuable trading rights, it could achieve that end only by being a serious proposition. Both Miró and Navarro were realistic enough to understand that Wilkinson was less committed than he pretended, but they were also shrewd enough to guess that he could be persuaded to perform more than he intended. To secure his loyalty, they were prepared to offer not just financial inducements, but their esteem and respect. To someone as economically careless and emotionally hungry as Wilkinson, that exchange would come to seem like an irresistible bargain.

  The next day, August 22, he signed a formal document “transferring my allegiance from the United States to his Catholic Majesty.” For McIlvain and many other Americans who later made similar declarations when they sought Spanish trading privileges, this amounted to no more than a formula. But Wilkinson went on to defend what he had done in words clearly intended to carry weight with the two men he wanted to impress.

  Echoing Washington’s own dictum, he asserted, “[Self]-interest regulates the passions of Nations, as also those of individuals, and he who attributes a different motive to human
affairs deceives himself or seeks to deceive others: although I sustain this great truth, I will not, however, deny that every man owes something to the land of his birth.” To explain how his interests had come to diverge from those of his country, he reverted to a familiar theme— blaming his behavior on the failings of someone, or in this case some country, he had trusted.

  “Born and educated in America, I embraced its cause in the last revolution, and remained throughout faithful to its interest, until its triumph over its enemies,” he declared. “This occurrence has now . . . left me at liberty, having fought for her happiness, to seek my own. [But] circumstances and the policies of the United States having made it impossible for me to obtain this desired end under its Government, I am resolved to seek it in Spain.”

  Defiantly, he declared that no one could accuse him of having “broken any of the laws of nature or of nations, nor of honor and conscience” in changing his allegiance, but the conclusion of his “Memorial” made his unease explicit: “Gentlemen, I have committed secrets of an important nature, such as would, were they divulged, destroy my Fame and Fortune forever.” Should their plans not work out, he relied on Miró and Navarro “to bury these communications in eternal oblivion.”

  SEEN ACROSS MORE THAN TWO CENTURIES, the Spanish Conspiracy might appear doomed to failure, but Americans living in the years immediately after the Revolution saw it in a different context. To them the ramshackle constitution created by the Articles of Confederation seemed more likely to destroy the Union than hold it together. A bankrupt Congress, dependent on revenue from the states, could do nothing to prevent the different economic interests within the United States from pulling it apart.