SO LONG AS Major General Anthony Wayne remained out of view, Brigadier General James Wilkinson could live with the humiliation of seeing command of the Legion exercised by a man he despised. In character, behavior, and outlook, Wayne was his antithesis. Despite a reputation as a philanderer, Mad Anthony lacked charm. While his second-in- command went to great lengths to be liked, Wayne was largely indifferent to what men thought of him. Confronted by an angry Canadian farmer or hostile Kentucky representatives, Wilkinson backed off, but Wayne rode roughshod over those in his way.
Professionally, however, they were at one in their belief that the army needed more training and discipline. In a curiously self- righteous judgment, Wilkinson assured his superiors in November 1792 that the officers of the First American Regiment “had contracted Ideas of speculation incompatible with the principles of [a] Soldier of Honor; some were pedlars, some drunkards, almost all fools.” Wayne agreed that the task facing them was “to make an army from the rawest heterogeneity of materials, that were ever collected together.” The force that they would create, he told Wilkinson, must “produce a conviction not only to the Indians but to the World that the United States of America are not to be insulted with impunity.”
For almost a year, Wilkinson was able to exercise a nearly independent command from Fort Washington while Wayne was occupied with training his new recruits at Fort Fayette. The arrangement allowed Wilkinson to devote himself without interruption to his twin careers as general and as spy. In his military role, he flogged drunkards, kept the chain of forts under his command supplied and defended, and set himself to map and acquire intelligence about the territory north of the Ohio Valley where war could be expected. Seen from New Orleans, however, nothing compared to the value of his secret activities. Indeed when the convulsive effects of the French Revolution came rolling across the Atlantic like a tsunami, it seemed to the governor of Louisiana that he alone could protect Spain’s North American empire against this unexpected threat.
It began with the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, an event that provoked his brother monarch, Charles IV of Spain, to declare war on republican France. Consequently, when the headstrong, short- tempered Ed-mond Charles Genêt arrived in the United States as France’s ambassador in March that year, he came determined to attack Spanish interests in the west.
Within months of Citizen Genêt’s arrival, his Spanish counterpart, Josef de Jaudenes, sent Carondelet the alarming news that Genêt “is engaged in secretly seducing and recruiting by every means that presents itself all the Frenchmen, and others as well, to form an expedition against Louisiana.” Genêt’s fellow countrymen in New Orleans responded with nightly performances of the “Marseillaise” in the theater until Carondelet banned the tune, and more than one hundred French residents signed a petition asking for their government to intervene in Louisiana. Meanwhile, George Rogers Clark promised to lead a force that Genêt named “the French Revolutionary Legions on the Mississippi” and do for France what Wilkinson planned for Spain, give her control of the Mississippi basin by seizing New Orleans. “The possession of New Orleans will secure to France the whole Fur, Tobacco and Flour trade of this western world,” Clark predicted.
In alarm, Carondelet demanded that Gayoso should “send as soon as possible a canoe to New Madrid with a letter for General W[ilkinson] asking him to advise us properly . . . of whatever maybe concocted, either in Kentucky or in Cumberland [modern Alabama and middle Tennessee] contrary to the interests of Spain.”
Carondelet’s plea arrived at a convenient moment for Wilkinson— several Kentucky creditors, among them Humphrey Marshall and Peyton Short, were pressing for payment on old debts. It was apparent from his reply to Carondelet’s plea that Wilkinson saw the chance of an unexpected windfall. He conjured up a nightmare variant of the original Spanish Conspiracy— Kentucky might still detach itself from the United States, but this time as an ally of France. In graphic terms, he warned Carondelet of the dangers of “the projected attack against Louisiana by the people of Kentucky at the instigation of the French minister.” Having played on the governor’s all too susceptible fears, Wilkinson characteristically offered to remove them. An informant had already been recruited from Clark’s inner circle, and Wilkinson promised that no expense would be spared in persuading Kentucky’s leading citizens to turn against the adventure. Finally he could also guarantee that the army would prevent any supplies from being shipped down the Ohio to Clark’s French Legions.
The value of Wilkinson to Carondelet was made starkly clear in a secret warning that the governor sent to the royal council that October. To defend the forts on the Mississippi between St. Louis and Vicksburg, a distance of five hundred miles, the governor could muster only ninety regular troops and two hundred militia. Should Clark’s forces reach Natchez, he predicted, “It is evident that all Louisiana will fall into their hands with the greatest rapidity and ease.” From his point of view, everything depended on Agent 13.
In this symbiotic relationship, Wilkinson’s spendthrift habits made Caron-delet equally essential to him. His need for more money was underlined by the return of Nancy from Philadelphia in May 1793 after a ten-month absence.
The boys, including eight- year-old Joseph, the youngest, had been left behind in Philadelphia. None of his letters suggests that Wilkinson missed them, but his writing is full of references to what Nancy’s absence meant to him. It was, he said, “Hell on earth” without her. He urged the Biddles to “hurry her back.” Extravagantly, he declared to his commanding officer that he was “panting, sighing, dying for her embrace,” and he demanded that Wayne either arrange for her to be sent down the Ohio or “give me plenty of Indian fighting.” Although it was a convention, amounting to a military joke, that lovelorn warriors were supposed to drown their sorrows in blood, everything suggests that Wilkinson’s words came as close to sincerity as was possible for him.
Extravagance was the most obvious sign of his affection. As an officer, he rode everywhere on horseback, but even on the frontier he always had a horse- drawn carriage for Nancy. In Kentucky the vehicle was remembered as a coach with four matched black horses; in Cincinnati it was drawn by no more than a pair, but it was “the only carriage in the place.” He named a major street in Frankfort after her. At a time when Virginia law treated real estate as belonging to the husband alone, he bought land in her name as well as his. Her popularity with his fellow soldiers from privates through General Wayne— she was said to be the one person who could persuade him to show mercy to a soldier condemned to death by court-martial— and beyond him to Henry Knox, clearly caused Wilkinson pride rather than jealousy because he never ceased to involve her in the army’s social events, and that despite the obvious fact that most people preferred her to him. The disparity appeared in anecdotes, and more lastingly in the compliments paid by Thomas Chapman, an English traveler, in his Journal of a Journey through the United States. Of Wilkinson, he could offer little more than a wooden tribute, not altogether believable, to his “unimpeached integrity, unexampled liberality & Hospitality,” but what really moved the Englishman was “the good sence, Affable deportment & elegant manners of the General’s amiable Wife, who surpasses any Lady I have met with in the course of my Travels through the United States.”
They were too intimately attached, and she was too sensitive, for Nancy not to have had some idea of the Spanish connection, but it is doubtful that she understood its full complexity. To his dying day, he would publicly insist that every payment from New Orleans was a profit or insurance payment on his tobacco trade, and even to himself he never seemed to acknowledge what was involved. Yet Nancy’s need for little luxuries such as sugar and coffee, and his desire to see her in an elegant carriage, and their joint pleasure in parties and liberal hospitality, were inseparable from his need for Carondelet’s dollars.
NANCY’S ARRIVAL AT Fort Washington was followed barely a month later by the distinctly less welcome appearance of Wayne and a long convoy of bo
ats carrying the Legion, now more than eleven hundred strong. The decision to ship his men down the Ohio was prompted by Wayne’s conviction that they were being corrupted by their proximity to the taverns and brothels of Pittsburgh—“that Gomorrah,” as he called it. A hint of the commander’s state of mind emerged when he landed at Cincinnati and, to Wilkinson’s relief, discovered it to be “filled with ardent poison & Caitiff wretches to dispose of it . . . a man possessed of the least tincture of morality must wish his stay here as short as possible.” The army was moved to a site between the river and a swamp that Wayne named Hobson’s Choice, implying that no alternative place could be found.
But Wayne faced more problems than creating an encampment in rough country. The most serious was the information from Philadelphia that a lack of recruits would limit the size of the Legion to three thousand men, and that to make up the numbers fifteen hundred Kentucky volunteers would have to be taken on. The least of his anxieties seemed to be the conduct of his second- in- command, which, Wayne assured Knox, “bespeaks the officer & merits my highest approbation.” Knox, however, was more cautious and felt it necessary to issue a thinly veiled warning to Wilkinson in May 1793: “I am persuaded your good sense as well as inclination will lead you to unite cordially with General Wayne, and promote a spirit of harmony throughout the whole corps.”
The general’s arrival did indeed bring to the surface the jealousy and bitterness Wilkinson felt at being passed over for command. Through the summer, each of Wayne’s many failings was passed on to the formidable array of political contacts that Wilkinson still maintained in Philadelphia. The most prominent was his brother- in- law, Clement Biddle, the president’s lawyer, who had always received a heavy correspondence from Wilkinson detailing the difficulties he encountered with quarreling officers and inadequate equipment.
The Biddle influence was reinforced by Knox’s liking for Nancy Wilkinson, who, until her return to the Ohio in May 1793, served as a two- way channel of communication between her husband and the War Department. “I have often expressed to her and to Colonel Biddle,” Knox assured Wilkinson that spring, “the pleasure your conduct gave to the President of the United States.” And to reinforce the coziness, the president himself was the recipient of gifts from Wilkinson, such as two kegs of fish taken from the Miami River on the uttermost limits of the United States and presented in the modest hope that “the novelty of the thing may render it acceptable.” Washington accepted the fish, politely agreeing that they were “truly a Novelty here,” but a second gift, sent in April 1793, pleased him more. This was a map drawn by Wilkinson of the country north of the Ohio where war with the Indians could be expected. It was, the president assured him, “the best description extant of the country to which it relates” and “affords me the greatest satisfaction.”
By contrast Wayne’s reputation in Philadelphia was corroded by reports of his “petulant” behavior toward his officers, and his authoritarian regime amounting to what one subordinate called “abject servitude.” Some of the complaints stemmed from the commander’s natural abrasiveness—“There is no calculating on anything but insult and oppression [from him],” one subordinate complained. But Wayne’s behavior clearly became more extreme as the pressure of molding his new army mounted. In November 1793, the general lost all self- control when Major Thomas Cushing complained about an inefficient captain on Wayne’s staff.
Instead of investigating the complaint, Wayne placed the major under arrest and charged a junior officer, Captain Isaac Guion, with unmilitary conduct for daring to offer evidence to substantiate Cushing’s original complaint. When Colonel John Hamtramck, the solid, unexcitable commander of the First Sub- Legion, explained that Wayne’s staff officer really had failed to carry out general orders, Wayne issued him an official reprimand for his “disrespectful” intervention. “There is no doubt about it,” Hamtramck concluded, “the old man really is mad.”
Like others slighted by Wayne, the three officers turned to the convivial Wilkinson for sympathy, and he supported them because he, too, felt disparaged by the autocratic Wayne. “My General treats me with great civility, and with much professed Friendship,” he told Harry Innes in October, “yet I am an O, for he conceals his intentions from me, never asks my opinion, & when sense of Duty forces me to give it, he acts against it.”
To retaliate, Wilkinson instigated a string of pinprick complaints about unsatisfactory supplies at Fort Washington of gunpowder, uniforms, food, and disciplinary power, all of which required Knox to send Wayne irritating reminders ordering him to inquire “into the nature and degree of the Confusion of Stores and Clothing complained of by Brigadier General Wilkinson,” and to remedy instantly “complaints relative to the pay department in the district of Brigadier General Wilkinson.” Even on the question of discipline, Wilkinson found cause for criticism. “Your remarks of the disproportionate punishments of death, or one hundred lashes, are just,” Knox agreed, “and the suggestions of hard labour, seem to promise better success, and I shall communicate the same to Major-general Wayne.”
With growing conviction, Wilkinson believed he could persuade Knox to replace Wayne as commander. When Wayne demanded more troops, Wilkinson sent Philadelphia his plan for a lightning strike into the heart of Indian territory with an army half the Legion’s size. When Wayne declared that he required two hundred cavalry to protect each supply train to the forts, Wilkinson let the War Department know that he had needed only one hundred militia. When Wayne had to order the Kentucky cavalry to come under his direct command, Wilkinson was quick to remind Knox how those same horsemen volunteered to serve under him.
To Wayne himself, however, Wilkinson remained loyal and friendly. “Ever anxious for action & ready for duty,” he wrote Wayne from Fort Jefferson, “you have only to order & the execution will follow, with promptitude & Energy.” As Christmas 1793 approached, a festive invitation was sent to the Legion’s commander: “Mrs. W. ventures to hope your Excellency may find it convenient & consistent to take dinner with Her on the 25th inst. with your suite, & any eight or ten gentlemen of your cantonment you may think proper should attend you; she begs leave to assure you the Dinner shall be a Christian one, in commemoration of the Day, and in Honor of Her Guest, and on my part I will promise a welcome from the Heart, a warm fire, and a big- bellied Bottle of the veritable Lachrymae Christi. We pray you answer.”
LACHRYMA CHRISTI, a sweet, succulent Mediterranean wine, did not come cheap in the land of raw, moonshine whiskey. That the near-bankrupt Wilkinson could afford it on a general’s salary of $104 a month pointed to his successful role as Agent 13. He already had four thousand dollars from Carondelet, but the sudden collapse of the French threat to Louisiana promised still more.
Overconfident about the outcome of George Rogers Clark’s raid, Genêt had been slow to send him the orders and money needed to recruit an armed force. The delay proved fatal. Genêt’s flouting of diplomatic protocol led Washington to demand the ambassador’s recall in December 1793. Deprived of funds, Clark found it difficult to acquire a credible quantity of boats and arms. In February 1794, when he advertised for “volunteers for the reduction of Spanish posts on the Mississippi,” offering to pay them a thousand acres each or a dollar a day, fewer than a hundred men came forward. The expedition finally drifted to a halt fifty miles short of the nearest Spanish fort.
Wilkinson immediately wrote Carondelet in April 1794 claiming credit for Clark’s failure. His lobbying had undermined popular support in Kentucky for the adventure, and he assured the governor that he had receipts showing he had spent no less than $8,640 “to retard, disjoint and defeat the mediated irruption of General Clark in L[ouisian]a.” He was also responsible for the army’s efforts to prevent sympathizers from shipping supplies for Clark’s men down the Ohio River. Together with further payments on his pension now due, he expected to be paid $12,000.
The satisfactory nature of his activities as a Spanish agent contrasted sharply with the frustration of
being an American general. By the time this letter was sent, his quarrel with Wayne had spilled into the open and threatened to split the Legion apart.
13
POISONED VICTORY
IN HIS FIERCELY DRIVEN WAY, General Anthony Wayne was not at first aware of what was happening. Only in January 1794 did he realize that his officers had split, as he told Knox, into “two distinct Parties.” The hostility of the newest intake of junior officers alerted him to the situation. On the smallest excuse, he complained, they “offered their Resignations and prepared to depart without further Ceremony, saying they were advised to do so by experienced officers.” Yet even then, he did not suspect his former friend of being at the root of the problem.
The invitation to share Christmas and a bottle of Lachryma Christi with the Wilkinsons had been refused only because, as Wayne tersely explained, he was busy moving his headquarters to Fort Greeneville, a new outpost constructed even farther into Indian territory. Early in the new year the Legion was moved to this gigantic stockade enclosing fifty acres, where the final stages of its training would take place. Supplying an army in such a remote post created incessant problems. Wayne constantly had to drive the victuallers Elliott and Williams to produce fatter cattle and fresher casks of beef, and the War Department to provide more blankets and blue and buff uniforms, and to deliver promptly the silver dollars needed to pay his men their four dollars a month. But he did not at first connect these difficulties with his second-in- command.
An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson Page 17