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

by Andro Linklater

  Once alerted to his subordinate’s true character, however, Wayne quickly came up with what seemed to him evidence of treachery. On October 12, 1794, a deserter named Robert Newman was discovered on a boat preparing to descend the Ohio River on his way to Fort Washington. Under questioning, Newman claimed to have been employed by Wilkinson and James Hawkins, a Kentucky land speculator, to deliver information about Wayne’s campaign to the British. For good measure, he added that Wilkinson and Hawkins were planning to persuade Kentucky and the Northwest Territory to secede and join Canada in a northern version of the Spanish Conspiracy.

  Newman’s story caused disbelief and consternation. The lieutenant governor of Canada thought it must have been concocted for “a sinister purpose,” perhaps to justify an attack on Fort Miami, while Wilkinson, guilty of selling out elsewhere, was furious at the imputation he would have done so to the British—“a base and vile calumny.” Investigations by Philip Nolan suggested that Newman’s information was invented and paid for by Wayne himself, and the general admitted that the supposed spy’s “answers are rather mysterious, negative & equivocal.” Nevertheless, Wayne felt justified in warning Knox, as he graphically put it, “There is ‘something rotten in the State of Denmark’ & which ought to be guarded against.”

  Perhaps typical of Wayne’s impetuous nature, he got the direction of Wilkinson’s treachery wrong by 180 degrees, but the precautions he took were unexpectedly effective and came within a hairbreadth of trapping his enemy. In addition to a general alert for foreign agents, he specifically ordered Captain John Pierce, commandant of Fort Washington, to arrest James Hawkins as a foreign agent should he set foot in Cincinnati and warned Major Thomas Doyle, in command of Fort Massac near the mouth of the Ohio, to investigate thoroughly any suspicious boats coming upriver. The timing could not have been worse for Wilkinson. In October, his activities as a secret agent were about to yield him a fortune.

  Whereas Miró had understood Wilkinson’s instinct for intrigue and accepted that it would always be used to further his own interests, Carondelet, who had never met him, betrayed a touching faith in his truthfulness. Wilkinson must sensed this in his letters because, having presented a demand for twelve thousand dollars in April 1794 for his success in foiling Clark’s expedition, he wrote again in June with a project that would incur still greater expense for Carondelet. Resurrecting the bribery suggestion he had unsuccessfully presented to Miró, Wilkinson explained that the long- term safety of Louisiana depended on persuading Kentucky to secede, and this could be achieved by purchasing the loyalty of the state’s “notables” for only two hundred thousand dollars. He promised to give his advice on how the money should be spent, and if funds could be provided, he would bring his friends Harry Innes and Benjamin Sebastian to confer with Carondelet. Finally, he had a list of sixteeen officers in the U.S. army whose commitment to Spain could also be bought.

  “Do not believe me avaricious,” he assured the governor earnestly, “as the sensation never found place in my bosom. Constant in my attachments, ardent in my affections, and an enthusiast in the cause I espoused, my character is the reverse.”

  The reply that Carondelet sent on August 6 could hardly have been more satisfactory. Indeed, the extravagant governor and avaricious general might have been made for each other. Only the suggestion of military bribes was turned down. The twelve thousand dollars Wilkinson had requested would be paid without delay. Once authorization of the two hundred thousand dollars had been received, Wilkinson would be expected to advise on its expenditure. Meanwhile, Innes and Sebastian would receive Spanish pensions, and a conference with them would be arranged in New Madrid. As a sign of his personal gratitude, the governor had recommended to Madrid that the general’s pension be increased to four thousand dollars a year.

  TWO DANGEROUS EVENTS PENETRATE a spy’s cocoon of secrecy, the transmission of information and the receipt of payment. For Wilkinson, the problem of getting his hands on Carondelet’s munificent reward without arousing suspicion required particular care. In a letter to the governor written just before Fallen Timbers, he had recommended that the money be entrusted to two messengers. Captain Joseph Collins, a reliable but unimaginative officer from his staff, would travel to New Orleans posing as a trader in flour, and he was to be accompanied by Henry Owens, a quick-witted but unsuccessful Kentucky settler. Both understood the money to be payment for Wilkinson’s tobacco sales and, since it was in silver dollars, it needed to be shipped in utmost secrecy. When they arrived in New Orleans, Carondelet divided the twelve thousand dollars between them and sent each north by a different route.

  On August 6, while the Legion was still struggling through the morasses and stinging nettles, Owens left New Orleans heading up the Mississippi with $6,000 in coins packed into three barrels of sugar in the hold of a Spanish galley. Two weeks later, on the very day that Fallen Timbers was fought, Collins took passage in a ship sailing for Charleston, carrying $6,333, a sum sufficient to pay all the expenses allegedly incurred by Wilkinson in checkmating the expedition planned by George Rogers Clark. The knowledge that this gigantic windfall was on its way and had somehow to be smuggled past watchful eyes and wagging tongues that might alert Wayne no doubt contributed to the stress that marked Wilkinson’s increasingly strident attacks on the commander.

  By October, Owens had reached the Spanish fort of New Madrid. The most difficult part of the transfer, taking the money up the Ohio and past U.S. strongpoints such as Fort Massac, now began. New Madrid’s commander, Tomás Portell, and François Langlois, a militia officer in charge of galleys on the river, discussed with Owens the best way to escape detection. Langlois proposed that Owens travel openly as a trader with a new crew recruited in the settlement, but was overruled by the other two, who preferred secrecy. Accordingly in November, Langlois took a nervous Owens and his three precious casks in a Spanish boat to the mouth of the Ohio, where they transferred to a small canoe manned by six Spanish sailors. At the last moment, Langlois thought it too dangerous to allow so much money to be transported in an open boat and took the barrels back, but Owens, who stood to make about $600 from the delivery, insisted on taking the dollars in the canoe before winter came and ice blocked the river.

  This very public quarrel destroyed any semblance of secrecy. Within days, Wilkinson’s courier was dead, murdered by one of the paddlers in his canoe, a Spaniard named Vexerano, for the silver dollars inside the barrels. The crime was soon known on the Spanish side because one of the paddlers hurried back to New Madrid to alert Portell, but four others including Vexerano continued up the Ohio before splitting the cash and scattering into the Kentucky countryside. Unable to speak English, and in possession of large sums of money, they immediately aroused suspicions in the closely knit rural communities they traveled through.

  For Wilkinson, waiting in Fort Washington for the money, Owens’s murder was the worst possible outcome. Not only was he deprived of cash he needed to pay his debts, but somewhere at large were four criminals who could provide tangible evidence that he was being paid by Spain. In December, three of the boatmen were arrested in Kentucky and brought before the federal judge in Frankfort. Fortunately this happened to be Harry Innes, who was almost as deep in the conspiracy as his client. He immediately informed Wilkinson that the three men were under arrest and had them shipped in irons to Fort Washington in Cincinnati.

  Yet with Captain Pierce, the fort’s commander, on the lookout for foreign agents, Wilkinson could not afford to keep the three Spaniards there. On the grounds that Spain had jurisdiction over them, he ordered them to be taken down to the fort at New Madrid on December 29, escorted by Lieutenant Aaron Gregg and a Kentucky lawyer, Charles Smith. But the boat got no farther than Fort Massac, where Major Doyle, equally suspicious of strange movements on the river, had lookouts posted. The boat was spotted as it tried to slip past under cover of night, and at musket point it was ordered to shore, where those on board were brought in for questioning. Smith produced a written o
rder from Wilkinson giving them free passage, but Doyle decided that because the three prisoners had committed their crime on U.S. soil, they could proceed no farther until he had questioned them himself.

  Had anyone in Fort Massac spoken Spanish, Wilkinson’s career would have been ended. Doyle was Wayne’s man, and the murderers’ evidence would have given the general incontrovertible information linking his enemy to Spain. But for the second time, luck went Wilkinson’s way. The fort was manned by monoglot English speakers, and Doyle had to send to New Madrid for an interpreter.

  In January 1795, Thomas Power, a bilingual Irishman who acted as Carondelet’s confidential messenger, arrived from New Madrid to translate. Intimately aware of the sensitive information the prisoners possessed, Power carefully censored any reference to Owens’s mission from the answers they gave to Doyle’s questions. Although unaware of the prize he held, Doyle remained sufficiently suspicious to send them downriver to Louisville for trial. Still acting as interpreter, Power went with them and again doctored their replies to court officials there because, as he later admitted, “it was the wish of the Spanish officers to have the men delivered to them rather than tried in the territory of the United States, and such a wish arose from a fear of divulging the secret of Owens’ mission.” By this time the prisoners knew their lines, and all denied being concerned in the murder. Frustrated, the Louisville court at length remanded the prisoners to their starting point, Judge Innes in Frankfort.

  An increasingly anxious Wilkinson let his old friend know that, to buy the prisoners’ silence, he was ready “to pay the three two hundred dollars if they should not be compensated by the Spanish government.” But Innes found a cheaper solution. In the weeks since he’d first questioned them no new evidence had come forward, and in March he discreetly concluded that the lack of witnesses made a trial impossible, and that the prisoners should be set free on condition they left Kentucky at once. In June 1795 the unfortunate Major Doyle was summoned upriver to Fort Washington, where he paid the price for his initiative by being put under arrest for disobeying Wilkinson’s orders to let the men through. At about the same time, Vexerano was arrested in New Madrid, and his execution in New Orleans later that year removed the last threat to Wilkinson of exposure by Owens’s murderers.

  Nevertheless, suspicion still hung round him—the angry Doyle blamed “a base and ambitious faction” for his arrest—and Wilkinson’s money had gone missing. Most damagingly as it turned out, the distraction had prevented him from feeding anti-Wayne propaganda either to the press or to Congress during the debates on the future size of the army. Although the House voted to reduce its numbers and, as a result, to abolish the post of major general, popular opinion was swinging in favor of the Legion and its commander as the effects of Fallen Timbers made themselves felt.

  At the end of 1794, the Legion had marched into the Indiana prairie, the breadbasket of many of the nations that made up the western confederation, and not only destroyed most of their farmland, but erected the looming edifice of Fort Wayne. Before the winter was over, hunger drove the confederation’s sachems and war leaders to begin negotiating a peace agreement. Whatever the ideological argument about the merits of a regular army and a militia, it was becoming obvious that, as Cornelius Sedam, a straight-talking New Jersey soldier, put it, “by many Genl. Wayne has been Sen-sured . . . [but] Saying here and Saying there has no Effect. He has Done the Business and that Settles the Dispute.” On March 3 the Senate agreed, and its vote guaranteed the Legion’s existence for another three years. Nailing Wilkinson’s ambition into its coffin, the Senate also voted to make its commander a major general.

  15

  DEATH OF A RIVAL

  CONFIRMED IN HIS POST and convinced of Wilkinson’s treachery, Major General Anthony Wayne made it his mission to deny his fellow general any part in the army’s business. Wilkinson, he told Knox, was “a vile assassin,” “the worst of all bad men,” who intended to break up the United States with the help of the British in Canada and of secessionists in Kentucky. So far as the major general was concerned, his subordinate “had no command in the army, and if he had any modesty he would resign.”

  Thus, while negotiations with the western confederation continued at Wayne’s headquarters in Fort Greeneville, Wilkinson was effectively sidelined in Fort Washington. He missed the steadily increasing pressure that was brought to bear by the Legion’s powerful presence in the Indians’ heartland. He had no part in the negotiations with Blue Jacket, Little Turtle, and other leaders of the western confederation. Finally, on August 3, 1795, he was absent when they assembled at the fort and accepted a new boundary that opened up the first prairies to settlement, including most of western Ohio and much of Indiana. In keeping with Knox’s vision of coexistence, a binding guarantee was also given in the Treaty of Greeneville that “the United States will protect all the said Indian tribes in the quiet enjoyment of their lands against all citizens of the United States.”

  That same year, Wayne’s decision not to attack Fort Miami was vindicated when diplomatic negotiations in London resulted in the Jay’s Treaty and Britain’s peaceful withdrawal from all forts on U.S. territory. Quite suddenly, the northern frontier was opened up. Wayne’s triumph completed the humiliation of his subordinate.

  Knox, who probably understood Wilkinson as well as any American, had resigned at the beginning of the year. The last two messages Wilkinson sent the former secretary of war concerned Wayne and perfectly reflected the split between his private feelings and public behavior. In reply to Knox’s formal letter offering a court of inquiry, Wilkinson formally promised on January 1, 1795, to drop all public complaint against Wayne—“My Lips are now Sealed, my Pen is dismissed from depicting well founded grievances”— but on January 2 he sent an answer to the secretary’s private letter in which he repeated all his denunciations.

  Knox could accept such contradictions, but not his successor, the bald, Puritan disciplinarian Timothy Pickering. Caught between a military rock and a political hard place, Wilkinson found himself unable to plot openly against Wayne. Fearing that a head-on confrontation might bring the risk of his expulsion from the army, he abandoned his call for an inquiry.

  IN FORT WASHINGTON, he and Nancy still kept up their lavish displays of hospitality, to the admiration of the Kentucky Gazette. They still ran their carriage through the muddy streets of rapidly growing Cincinnati, despite the presence of hogs scavenging among the refuse and despite the seasonal flooding of the lower part of town. They now had three children being educated in Philadelphia and had to find money for the necessary clothes, shoes, and tutors.

  Economic stability had eluded Wilkinson all his life, but the prospect of Carondelet’s dollars had briefly seemed to bring it within his grasp. In the fall of 1794, he had begun buying land again, this time from John Cleves Symmes, whose million acres lay on the northwest side of the Ohio River. Away from the stranglehold of lawsuits and chicanery that was killing Kentucky’s land market, Ohio property was rising in value so fast that in 1795 the Pittsburgh Gazette reported, “Land that two or three years ago was sold for ten shillings [$1.50] per acre, will now bring upwards of three pounds [$9].”

  It should have provided the sort of profitable investment in land that Wilkinson had sought ever since he first came west. But by the sort of bad luck that seemed to dog the general’s real estate deals, a surveyor’s error meant that the valuable acres he had bought from Symmes turned out to belong to the U.S. government and were not for sale. Since he had paid with borrowed money and Symmes had run out of funds, Wilkinson again found himself facing creditors, but this time without land he could sell.

  In April 1795, a lifeline arrived in the shape of Captain Joseph Collins, who came downriver from Pittsburgh, thereby escaping Major Doyle’s eagle eye. Yet here, too, it seemed that fortune was against Wilkinson. In a message to Gayoso, Wilkinson revealed that Collins had somehow contrived to lose $2,500 in a land speculation that went sour. Since Wilkinson conti
nued to trust Collins as a messenger, he was probably lying slightly and this was actually money owed on the Symmes deal. Nevertheless, once travel expenses, incidental debts, and Collins’s fee as a courier had been paid, Wilkinson was left with just $1,740 instead of the $6,333 he had expected. Altogether, less than one seventh of the money that he had been promised by Carondelet the year before had actually arrived in his hands.

  “If my very damned and unparalleled crosses and misfortunes, did not uncash me, I would be with you in flour,” he replied regretfully when an old friend, John Adair, invited him to join a trading expedition to New Orleans that summer. He still hoped to recoup some of the stolen money— “this sum is not lost, but is not within my control”— but even when it was eventually paid, other demands would be made upon it. He was still being sued for $3,000 by his former partner Peyton Short, and Harry Innes continued to demand money to pay off bonds he had underwritten. Small wonder that Wilkinson should have scrabbled so desperately to retain his dual role as general and spy.

  HECTORDE CARONDELET had many reasons for treating the general generously, and all were conneected to the fragile defense of Louisiana. Its protection depended heavily on alliances made with the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek nations, which lived along its borders. With a stiffening of Spanish regulars and militia operating from forts along the Mississippi, the threat of Indian war parties provided a deterrent to the sort of expeditions that bellicose settlers often talked of sending down the river to attack New Orleans. But the awesome power exhibited at Fallen Timbers by the Legion of the United States was on a different scale. Against such an army Caron-delet had no defense.