In June, shortly before leaving Philadelphia, General Wayne was summoned to see the new secretary of war, James McHenry, who passed on the administration’s own intelligence about Wilkinson’s activities. Much was tainted, coming as it did from Federalist opponents, or personal enemies such as Humphrey Marshall. In the latest round of their contest, he had been debarred from his Senate seat in January 1796 while charges of “gross fraud” and “perjury” brought on evidence supplied by Wilkinson’s friends were investigated. Nevertheless, Wayne saw enough to realize that Wilkinson was a Spanish rather than a British “pensioner,” and the name of Thomas Power figured so prominently there could be no doubt that he was the general’s link with New Orleans.
Hurrying back west, Wayne arrived in mid-July and immediately relieved Wilkinson of his command, putting him again in seclusion at Fort Washington. At the same time he sent Pike an urgent order to arrest Power whenever he appeared, with particular instructions to search for hidden documents. Days later, Wayne received specific warning from a Kentucky merchant, Elisha Winters, that Power would be coming upriver with “a royal chest” containing money and dispatches for Wilkinson. Mad Anthony had every reason to believe that the trap was about to close on his enemy.
On August 8, 1796, Lieutenant John Steele on river patrol halfway between Massac and Louisville stopped a large boat rowed by ten oarsmen. Boarding it, he discovered Thomas Power in the cabin with a cargo of barrels of sugar, coffee, and rum destined, according to Power’s documents, for sale in Louisville. Power protested vigorously that he was a legitimate merchant flying the Spanish flag, and that a diplomatic incident would be created if Steele damaged his cargo. Later the steersman on the boat recollected, “Had Steel [sic] looked into a bucket on the top of the boat, containing old tobacco, he would have found papers enough to hang Wilkinson himself.” However, the lieutenant was not the most enterprising officer in the army— after twenty years’ service he still retained the same rank as when he enlisted. Although suspicious because Power was not a regular merchant, he merely examined the barrels without opening them, then waved the Irishman on.
In a breathless account of the incident to Carondelet, Power admitted that he had used up a fortnight’s rum ration as a reward to keep the oarsmen rowing at full speed in case Steele changed his mind and came after them, “because, had I fallen into his hands for a second time, I was lost.” In Louisville, Power lodged the barrels of cash with a friend, then bought a horse to gallop to Cincinnati, where he gave Wilkinson the news that he had again escaped disaster by the skin of his teeth. The dollars were eventually taken to Frankfort, where all but $640 that Power kept for himself was put into Nolan’s safekeeping. In November, much of it seems to have been laundered through a bond for $4,000 drawn on Harry Innes. By then Wilkinson had taken the battle against Wayne to Philadelphia.
THE KNOWLEDGE THAT HE WAS once more in funds had an immediate effect on Wilkinson’s outlook. In a long letter sent to Carondelet in September, he briskly outlined the ambitious program he intended to follow in the nation’s capital: “My views at Philadelphia are to keep down the military establishment, to disgrace my commander, and to secure myself the commandant of the army; should you advise such action otherwise, I will throw up my commission and return to Kentucky: on this point write me particularly by Power.” There was not the slightest chance that the baron would do anything but encourage his prize asset in his ruthless ambition to take command of the U.S. army.
In the same letter, Wilkinson also described the basic strategy he would adopt to account for the money received from Spain: “If I am questioned by Washington on my arrival at Philadelphia, I will avow a mercantile connection with New Orleans since [1788] and in which I still remain interested.” In effect whatever cash Carondelet sent would appear as profits on tobacco sold, or as insurance payouts for goods that had been ruined. “I will deny receiving a dollar by Power and I will add that a balance is still due me. To circumstantiate this assertion I will cause the faithful Philip Nolan now with me to make an account in form with a letter of advice dated at New Orleans last autumn.” Throughout the years ahead, Wilkinson would always follow this strategy to explain away the one incontrovertible proof of his relationship with Spain.
Rich once more and secure in his cover story, General James Wilkinson left Cincinnati in October with Nancy and their youngest son, James Biddle, and was rowed up the Ohio in the army’s comfortable keelboat. At Pittsburgh, he met Andrew Ellicott, the commissioner appointed to survey the southern boundary of the United States under the terms of the San Lorenzo treaty, as he was traveling downstream with a large party of soldiers and scientists. Generously, Wilkinson handed over the boat for Ellicott’s use.
An upright Quaker dedicated to astronomy, Ellicott was the antithesis of the volatile, spendthrift general. His reputation for painstaking, meticulous accuracy was unmatched. Computing his position by celestial observation, he had established the state borders of Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, and the District of Columbia and laid out the future federal capital on the banks of the Potomac River. Yet this serious man was immediately seduced by Wilkinson’s kindness and ease of manner. Ahead of Ellicott lay an epic journey around the borders of the United States that would last almost four years, but throughout that time, during which he stumbled upon the general’s terrible secret, Ellicott never ceased to regard him as a friend.
At Pittsburgh, Nancy received the devastating news that fourteen-year-old John, their eldest son, had died of a fever. “I am proud of my little Sons,” she had once written, “they are allowed to be very handsome & that I think the Smallest of there Perfections.” But the eldest was her favorite, the one who most took after her, who “reads prettily” and “has an amazing turn to writing” and, like her, always wanted to be back in Philadelphia, away from the frontier. The loss could only have caused her utmost grief. It may well have contributed to Wilkinson’s strangely downbeat message to Gayoso in November, ostensibly about the direction of Spanish policy but ending on an unmistakably low note: “Involved as I am in uncertainty, it is impossible to act with energy or even propriety.”
If sadness had sapped his buoyant spirits, it did not alter his determination to bring down General Wayne. Demanding a court of inquiry, Wilkinson added one new charge to the old ones of negligence in the Fallen Timbers campaign. He now wanted Wayne to explain why he had hired Newman to smear him as a British spy. Although the accusations were petty, and Wayne was supported by both Washington and McHenry, Wilkinson’s supporters in Congress, led by John Brown in the Senate and in the House by Jonathan Dayton, the Speaker, had enough political weight to force the War Department to cave in and authorize a court of inquiry into Wayne’s behavior. In one of his last messages to McHenry, Wayne wrote bluntly, “The fact is my presence with the army is very inconvenient to the nefarious machinations of the Enemies of Government & may eventually prevent them from dissolving the Union.”
He should have been beyond reach of his enemies. Aggressive, harsh, and insensitive he might be, but General Anthony Wayne had “done the Business.” When he moved his headquarters to the recently evacuated British fort at Detroit on the Michigan peninsula in August, it marked the beginning of a new epoch in the expansion of the United States that emerged directly from the campaign he led in 1794. The northern frontier had been opened. The U.S. Public Lands Survey was moving through Ohio, transforming the territory into property that could be owned with clear title, unlike the chaos in Kentucky. Ahead lay the prairies.
The greatest test of George Washington’s inclusive vision for his country would come when these mighty grasslands were occupied. Critically it depended upon the existence of General Wayne’s victorious army. Neither settler nor Indian could have ignored that overwhelming force. Had it remained in existence, it might have made possible a coherent, organized westward expansion that did not sweep aside the rights of Native American owners. That at least was the president’s dream.
Instead Wa
yne faced a double-edged onslaught, politically on the size of the Legion, and judicially on his generalship. The stress produced an exacerbated attack of the stabbing pains in his stomach that became so severe he was often unable to leave his army cot. As winter closed in, Wayne moved eastward, planning to take his headquarters back to Pittsburgh. In December he arrived at Presqu’isle, a harbor on Lake Erie, and there the stomach ulcer, if that is what it was, finally burst. His subordinates watched helplessly as he writhed in excruciating agony. “How long he can continue to suffer such torture is hard to say,” wrote one on December 14, 1796, having seen his general convulsed all day by uncontrollable pain. But at two o’clock the following morning, death at last relieved Major General Anthony Wayne from all his torments.
FOR WASHINGTON AND MCHENRY, the loss of Wayne was a blow in itself, but the timing made it worse. The army could not wait long for a new chief: orders had to be given, courts-martial appointed, detachments moved, officers transferred, the chain of command kept taut. To promote anyone other than the politically popular second- in- command during the last weeks before John Adams became president, when the existing administration was not so much a lame duck as a dead duck, would have been impossible. Whatever the executive’s suspicions about Wilkinson’s connections with Spain, he was the only possible candidate. Consequently, the highest post in the army devolved automatically onto James Wilkinson and was tacitly approved by President George Washington in February 1797.
In his last message to Congress as president, Washington made a final appeal on behalf of his Indian policy when he asked congressmen to exempt the cavalry from their bill to reduce the size of the army. “It is generally agreed that some cavalry, either militia or regular, are necessary,” he pointed out, “and . . . the latter will be less expensive and more useful in maintaining the peace between the frontier settlers and the Indians.” Three days later, on March 3, Congress ignored Washington’s plea, cut the army by one third, and, by abolishing the rank of major general, confirmed that the brigadier general should be its “commander- in-chief.”
In November 1796, General James Wilkinson had urged his Spanish handler, Baron Hector de Carondelet, to “point out with precision the object to be pursued, and, if attainable, you shall find my activity and exertions equal to your most sanguine expectations.” Barely three months later, on March 4, 1797, he attended President John Adams’s inauguration as a guest of honor, and commander in chief of the U.S. army.
16
THE NEW COMMANDER IN CHIEF
LESS THAN TEN YEARS had passed since James Wilkinson, land speculator and free trader, first traveled to New Orleans and declared that self-interest justified his transfer of loyalties to His Catholic Majesty. As a colonel, he found that the need for a spy’s income reinforced his original decision. And so long as Anthony Wayne, the friend turned hated rival, was his superior, jealousy pointed him in the same direction. But as Brigadier General James Wilkinson, commander in chief of the U.S. army, it was less clear where his interests lay.
Wilkinson did not lie when he declared that his strength lay in military matters. His tactical sense was obvious in a brilliant analysis of the army’s disposition that he drew up for Alexander Hamilton in 1798, and unlike Wayne, he had an insatiable hunger, matched only by Washington’s, for the software of war—maps and intelligence about the territory in which he might need to fight. His theatrical temperament gave him an instinctive understanding of the mysterious effect that display and smartness have upon soldiers’ morale. When applied to a peacetime army, starved of funds, lacking any obvious enemy, and usually split up into small, isolated garrisons, it was an invaluable insight. In place of anything more substantial, Wilkinson offered what he had in abundance, energy, personal warmth, and a sense of style, especially in his flamboyant, self- romanticizing portrayal of a general, to which most of his officers responded positively.
It was not a large stage on which he played— across the Atlantic, the French had thirteen armies totaling around eight hundred thousand men under arms, and Wilkinson’s entire force was equivalent to about half a brigade in one of them. Knowing his ambition, his Spanish handlers could not believe that he would be satisfied with so small a part. Hector de Carondelet was genuinely bewildered when Wilkinson dispatched a formal notification to New Orleans in May 1797 that U.S. troops were being prepared to take over Spanish forts on the east bank of the Mississippi in accordance with the San Lorenzo treaty. Thomas Power was sent north to find out whether the general was still tempted by the wider horizons that Spain and the defection of Kentucky could provide.
“You will endeavour to discover, with your natural penetration, the General’s dispositions,” Carondelet wrote. “I doubt that a person of his character would prefer, through vanity, the advantage of commanding the army of the Atlantic states, to that of being the founder, the liberator in fine, the Washington of the Western states. His part is as brilliant as it is easy; all eyes are drawn toward him; he possesses the confidence of his fellow-citizens and of the Kentucky volunteers; at the slightest movement the people will name him the General of the new republic; his reputation will raise an army for him, and Spain, as well as France, will furnish him the means for paying for it.” In a separate letter sent by Philip Nolan to Wilkinson himself, Carondelet reminded him of the land in Illinois that was to be his and promised that his pay would be doubled and he could “depend upon an annual bounty of four thousand dollars which shall be delivered to you at your order and to the person you may indicate.”
Nevertheless, Wilkinson’s state of mind might have been guessed from the manner in which Power was treated. There was no invitation to enjoy the freedom of “ingress and egress” to American forts. The general was inspecting the northerly fort of Mackinac when Power arrived in Detroit, but he immediately ordered the notorious Spanish courier confined to barracks until his return.
When they did meet in September, Power noted that “General Wilkinson received me very coolly.” Undeterred, Power outlined an unlikely plot that began with Wilkinson seizing Fort Massac and calling for Kentucky’s independence, at which point Spain and France would send him the artillery, weapons, and money needed to establish the new independent republic of the Mississippi. This was the ultimate goal of the Spanish Conspiracy, which had, as Power rightly stated, always been Wilkinson’s idea. If he did not like the scenario, he might at least suggest some alternative. Instead, Power reported, the general summarily dismissed Carondelet’s thinking as deluded—“chimerical” was his actual word—because the Treaty of San Lorenzo had given the western settlers all that they required.
In his account of their conversation, Power quoted him as saying, “The fermentation which had existed for four years was now subsided, &c.; that Spain had nothing else to do but to give complete effect to the treaty which had overturned all his plans, and rendered useless the work of more than ten years. And . . . he had, as he said, destroyed his cyphers and all his correspondence with our government, and that his duty and his honour did not permit him to continue it.”
Quite clearly, as commander in chief Wilkinson had decided to give up his double life. He wanted no more communication with New Orleans, Power said, because he feared that “the secret of his connections with our government had been divulged through want of prudence on our part.” Having brought his career as a spy to a close, the general ordered Power to be escorted off U.S. territory by Captain Shaumburgh and taken to the nearest Spanish fort.
The messenger resented not just this offhand treatment, but that he had been so totally misled. Before their meeting, he had assured Carondelet of Wilkinson’s adherence to the conspiracy—“the ambitions and politics of this General are a certain guaranty to me that he will support our plans”—and having spoken to Sebastian, Power had been convinced that “the principal characters of the place are united to us by ambition and interest.” Although Power attempted a feeble defense, suggesting that “the influence of General Wilkinson in Kentucky has be
come very limited,” it was undeniable that without his support the conspiracy was over. “If [my mission] has not had a more happy issue,” Power pleaded, “it ought not be attributed in any manner to indiscretion, or other deficiency, on my part, since it is evident that it sprung from a cause which no human penetration could foresee.”
In fact the cause could easily have been predicted. Self-interest guided everything Wilkinson did. Once he had what he wanted, nothing would be allowed to jeopardize his enjoyment of it. Promotion had deprived Spain of its most useful spy.
Wilkinson’s altered outlook was apparent in other, less obvious ways. In freezing winter temperatures, the new commander in chief had immediately undertaken a whirlwind tour of inspection, west to Fort Wayne and south to Fort Washington, then north along the line of forts that Wayne and he had built. The tide of settlement promoted by Wayne’s Greeneville Treaty had already moved farther west, and Wilkinson recommended closing all these posts and sending their garrisons south to strengthen the force being assembled in Fort Washington to take over the Spanish forts. Its command he assigned to one of his favorite young officers, Captain Isaac Guion. In the early summer of 1797, when Power had hoped to meet him, the general hurried north again, to Detroit, then beyond to the farthermost post of all, Michilimackinac, usually contracted to Mackinac, on the northern shores of the Michigan peninsula. In this respect at least, James Wilkinson showed his desire to be a model commander in chief.
IN MARCH 1797, at the time of Wilkinson’s appointment, the secretary of war, James McHenry, gave direction to Wilkinson’s galvanizing energy. In a lengthy memorandum, akin to that prepared by Anthony Wayne a year earlier, McHenry laid down the priorities that the general was to observe— saving money, maintaining discipline, and keeping peace with the Indians. One typical passage on economizing required him to order garrison commanders to have damaged weapons repaired within the fort, but in doing so “it is not deemed expedient to incur any expense.” But the officebound, regulation- minded McHenry had no conception of what it took to maintain order and morale among young soldiers marooned for months within their wooden stockades. Even Thomas Power had a better idea after ten days confined to the barracks in Fort Detroit.
An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson Page 21