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

by Andro Linklater

  “There is strict discipline observed in the army,” he told Carondelet. “The soldiers are almost all youths from 16 to 26 years of age; they go through some military [drill] with sufficient precision. With respect to the officers, from the lowest to the highest (excepting very few) they are deficient of those qualities which adorn a good officer except fierceness, and are overwhelmed in ignorance and in the most base vice.”

  Spanish officers cultivated the manners of the higher classes because the military hierarchy faithfully reflected the gradations of an aristocratic society. No such pattern existed for U.S. officers— Colonel John Hamtramck was the son of a Quebec barber and wigmaker, for example, and the family of Colonel David Strong were Connecticut farmers. No military academy existed to give officers a grounding in their trade— training came from being attached to a company as a cadet; and there was little continuity of service to build a military tradition because fluctuations in the size of the army forced so many officers to leave the service—more than 60 percent of those commissioned in the 1780s had gone by 1795. Finally, American officers had to cope with the particular challenge of maintaining a command structure in an increasingly egalitarian society. This contradiction fascinated British observers.

  “In fact the American peasant, though a brave and hardy man, and expert in the use of the rifle and musket, is naturally the worst soldier in the world as regards obedience and discipline,” a British officer, Charles Murray, commented loftily in the 1790s. “He has been brought up to believe himself equal to the officers who command him, and never forgets that when his three years of enlistment are over, he will again be their equal.”

  An officer’s right to command rested ultimately on the Articles of War, which required obedience to the orders of a superior, but in most situations the critical factor was an individual’s leadership ability. The fierceness that Power noted, or at least a capacity to impose one’s will, was a necessity. In battle, as Ebenezer Denny had dramatically described at St. Clair’s rout, and Wayne’s Legion proved at Fallen Timbers, ferocious officers could rely on their men to follow their lead. But in peacetime, when about two thousand men were scattered between forty-one military outposts— an average of roughly fifty men at each—other qualities were needed.

  In a well-run garrison, much of what Denny himself called “the noise and bustle of military life” came from officers and noncommissioned officers enforcing an endless schedule of roll calls and fatigue duties at the tops of their voices backed by the beat of a drum. Desertion rates rising to 20 percent annually demonstrated how difficult it was to maintain discipline and a viable army. Nevertheless, more than half of those soldiers who completed their three- year enlistment signed on again, suggesting that their officers did get it mostly right.

  For private soldiers, the rewards came to between four and five dollars a month with shelter, food, and two uniforms a year provided free. To young men unable to find more rewarding work, this was certainly an inducement. So, too, was the prospect of adventure, and the opportunity to be on the frontier, where a discharged soldier, or a deserter, could find cheap land, and a skillful marksman could live from hunting and selling furs. But many also enlisted while drunk and, as a later secretary of war admitted, “awoke from their stupor with abhorrence, anxious only to devise means how they are to escape from their dread condition.”

  To reduce the chances of desertion, the soldiers were subjected to four muster calls a day, the first at dawn and the last an hour after retreat or nightfall. In between, they were repeatedly drilled, sent on work parties to repair walls or dig entrenchments, and occasionally detached as escorts to guard surveyors or Indian agents operating in dangerous territory. Liquor dulled the monotony, starting with the distribution at daybreak of the daily four- ounce ration of rum or whiskey, and continuing with whatever could be bought from the garrison sutler, who had a store of tobacco, soap, and above all spirits for any soldier with enough credit to pay for them. And, despite repeated calls to garrison commanders to stamp out “drunkenness, desertion and licentiousness,” camp prostitutes, recruited from the washerwomen authorized to be in camp, or from Native Americans, provided the one other comfort that made a soldier’s life tolerable.

  IN DEALING WITH CHALLENGES to good discipline, drama was James Wilkinson’s favored style. Arriving in Detroit in June 1797, he declared that the fort “presents a frightful picture to the scientific soldier; ignorance & licentiousness have been fostered, while intelligence and virtue have been persecuted & exiled.” To punish William Mitchell and his girlfriend, Lydia Connor, for selling liquor illegally, he had them marched out of town with bottles hanging from their necks accompanied by the garrison band playing “The Rogues’ March.” A deserter, sentenced to hang on the Fourth of July, was pardoned at the last moment, but ordered to kneel before the flag grasping it with his right hand and, with his left uplifted, “to renew the oath of fidelity” before being ejected from the camp.

  Back in his headquarters in Pittsburgh, Wilkinson discovered that a high proportion of men in one company had been arrested for “drunkenness and debauchery.” As punishment, he ordered the entire company to be confined to barracks, with doubled sentries changed every hour and the guardhouse turned out every fifteen minutes day and night so that no one could sleep or rest, and then, to McHenry’s dismay, publicized their shame by getting the Pittsburgh Gazette to run a story naming the guilty and their punishment.

  Whether his methods had any effect on military morals is doubtful— as Rudyard Kipling put it, single men in barracks don’t grow into plaster saints— but they reduced the toll of flogging and execution that Wayne had exacted. Private soldiers had additional reason to be grateful when he intervened on their behalf by prohibiting their superiors from using them “as hunters, fishermen, hostlers, Gardeners, fatigue men, scullions, etc. at the expense of the meritorious soldier and to the great injury and disgrace of the service.” At a time when morale was suffering from Congress’s savage cuts, Wilkinson’s passion about good soldiering won him friends and personal loyalty among a widening circle of officers.

  ABANDONING ESPIONAGE CREATED its own dangers, above all the risk of exposure by former paymasters. Wilkinson’s prime concern was Carondelet, who had invested so much in the general’s participation in the conspiracy. In his meeting with Power, the general had referred to the possibility that their past connection might be made public and promised that Carondelet “ought not to be apprehensive of his abusing the confidence which [Carondelet] had placed in him.”

  The general was far more at risk than the governor, however, and in a somewhat incoherent sentence apparently taken from notes, Power recorded Wilkinson’s explanation why Carondelet, too, should keep silent. When Spain eventually handed over the territory of Natchez, “[the United States] might perhaps name [Wilkinson] Governor of it, and then he would not want opportunities to take more effectual measures to comply with his political projects.” In other words, as governor of Natchez Wilkinson might once more become an agent, so long as his past was kept a secret.

  It was, however, a more immediate consideration that kept both Carondelet and Gayoso silent. At any moment, Wilkinson could have enforced the terms of the San Lorenzo treaty. Spain had undertaken to open the Mississippi to trade. In March 1797, James McHenry issued Wilkinson direct instructions to occupy the Spanish forts of Chickasaw Bluffs, Walnut Hills, and Natchez. Captain Isaac Guion was ready at the head of four hundred men. Captured documents showed that Spanish fort commanders were not expected to prevent the passage of American troops. Nevertheless, Guion did not enter Natchez until the last days of December.

  There were reasons. At first, Gayoso, as governor of Natchez, insisted on detailed negotiations about how the evacuation should be arranged. Then in the summer he suspended the handover altogether, alleging the threat of a British invasion from Canada that would put Louisiana in peril. Since Wilkinson, like the other secessionists, had been told by Carondelet “that his Catholic Maj
esty will not carry the above mentioned treaty into execution,” he might have guessed that these were delaying tactics. Instead, he ordered Guion not to approach any of the Spanish forts without permission. Guion duly halted at Chickasaw Bluffs and waited for permission. When McHenry demanded to know why Guion had not moved, the general deliberately invented evidence to support Gayoso’s fears of a British invasion.

  In June 1797, while Wilkinson was in Detroit, he suddenly discovered that a joint British and Indian attack on the fort was so imminent that he had to introduce martial law “for the safety of the troops against a coup.” McHenry uselessly protested that “the danger from the savages or invasion is not very pressing and evident” as Wilkinson loudly annouced that the courts were suspended, and he had taken executive power until the emergency was over.

  Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, who knew Wilkinson from the campaign against Wayne, was convinced that no threat existed. In August 1797 he warned Winthrop Sargent, secretary of the Northwest Territory, “that there is too much ground to think that we have internal enemies disposed to favor the view of the French and Spanish— perhaps to detach the whole western country from the United States.” In case Sargent could not guess whom this pointed to, Pickering added, “Such a conspiracy must have conspicuous men for leaders, and such demands the closest observation.”

  The presence of Andrew Ellicott in Natchez all this time made Wilkinson’s failure to move still more inexplicable. Given responsibility for running the southern boundary of the United States, Ellicott had simply ignored all attempts to stop him on the river. To Gayoso’s irritation, he had landed at Natchez in February 1797, marched his bodyguard up the bluff above the river, and planted his tent with the Union flag within sight of the fort. An angry demand that he haul down the Stars and Stripes “met with a positive refusal,” Ellicott later recalled, “and the flag wore out upon its staff.”

  Amid the swirling confusion of loyalties and motives, Ellicott’s resolution was as solid as his science. Using his expertise as an astronomer, he made celestial observations that established beyond doubt that Natchez lay half a degree north of the thirty-first parallel marking the frontier agreed to by the San Lorenzo treaty. The town was American and the Spanish had no legal right to remain there, or in any of the other forts farther north.

  Long before the fabric of his flag had unraveled, Ellicott discovered just how weak Gayoso’s position really was. To defend all of Louisiania and the entire length of the Mississippi, Spain had two regiments of regular soldiers, and between Illinois and Mobile there were no more than 5,440 militia, insignificant beside the 80,000 citizen-soldiers ready “to march at a moment’s notice” that the U.S. president was authorized to raise under the 1794 Militia Act. Behind the vast panoply of Spanish imperial power lurked a reality as puny as the Wizard of Oz.

  Much of this information came from the magnetic, twenty- six-year- old Philip Nolan, who joined Ellicott on his way down the Mississippi. Characteristic of the dazzling effect Nolan had on all who met him was that Ellicott should have believed he was “strongly attached to the interest and welfare of our country,” while the young man was in fact the bearer of a letter from Wilkinson to Gayoso that read, “Nolan . . . is a child of my own raising, true to his profession, and firm in his attachments to Spain. I consider him a powerful instrument in our hand should occasion offer. I will answer for his conduct.”

  Despite the melodrama in Detroit, the pressure to move troops south continued to grow during the summer and fall of 1797. Knowing the frailty of the Spanish defenses and their intention to ignore the treaty, Ellicott begged both Wilkinson and Guion to send forces downriver to secure control of Natchez. In their absence, the town and surrounding district threatened to break up in disorder as competing factions struggled to take over. Despite his lack of official status, Ellicott steered the volatile inhabitants away from violence and, in July, underlined Spain’s weakness by persuading the most influential planters to set up a de facto government on behalf of the United States that took over administration of the district.

  In September, Wilkinson blandly told Ellicott, “You have a warm place in my affections . . . and I regret the obstacles you have experienced to the execution of your commission.” But, far from promising support, Wilkinson warned that in the opinion of influential senators Ellicott had “been too stern and peremptory” with the Spanish. The official army position, as Guion informed Ellicott from Chickasaw Bluffs, was that no troops would be moved farther south without direct orders from the general or permission from Gayoso. The general’s attitude was made abundantly clear that summer when he withdrew three companies from a regiment in Tennessee under the command of a fire-eating martinet, Colonel Thomas Butler, who was aggressively protecting farmers against the threat of Indian and Spanish attack.

  In exasperation, McHenry tried to counter the effect of the general’s tactics. He wrote directly to Butler, suggesting that he should keep all his men in Tennessee, then to Guion insisting that he move on to Natchez, and finally to Wilkinson demanding that he tell Guion not to let himself be distracted by “any frivolous pretences which may be presented to him on his passage.” McHenry’s attempt to bypass a general’s orders provoked a blistering response. Wilkinson accused McHenry of unwarranted interference by issuing orders “to my subordinates immediately under my eye,” by breaking “the chain of dependence that exists from the ranks to the chief in immediate command,” and by taking action that “could be construed into a want of confidence in my command.” Wrong-footed, McHenry offered an apology, but Wilkinson refused to be mollified. The bullying tone of his letters showed who held the upper hand.

  WILKINSON NEVER DOUBTED his hold over the army. What he feared was the sort of political ambush he had mounted against Wayne. Several members of Adams’s Federalist administration, including Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, regarded him with suspicion, not only for his Spanish connection, but as “a Jacobin” and a Republican. In Congress, Humphrey Marshall had finally proved his right to be admitted as Kentucky’s junior senator and was thirsting for vengeance. These enemies knew where the general was most vulnerable, and Wilkinson had good cause to fear the leakiness of Spanish security, especially the confidence placed by Carondelet and Gayoso in the thin- skinned Thomas Power.

  Infuriated by the way the general had treated him, Power had in fact approached Daniel Clark Jr., a well- known New Orleans merchant, in October 1797 with damaging information. The Clark family and Wilkinson went back a long way. Clark’s Irish-born uncle, also Daniel, acted as Wilkinson’s New Orleans agent in his first trading scheme in 1787, and both uncle and nephew had represented him in the city until Nolan came south in 1791. In the New Orleans commercial community, the Clarks were recognized as among the city’s most secretive and successful merchants, and in 1795 when the uncle retired to live in Natchez, Daniel Clark Jr. took over the business—and its secrets.

  Although a Spanish citizen, Clark had already decided to switch loyalties from Spain to the United States when Power contacted him and was lobbying Ellicott to be made American consul in New Orleans. After consulting his uncle, Clark decided to demonstrate his newfound loyalty to the United States by bringing Power with him to tell Ellicott about the general’s behavior.

  In a dispatch sent to Pickering on November 14, 1797, Ellicott described how Power had traveled upriver to confer with members of the conspiracy and with “Gen. Wilkinson at Cincinnati . . . The first object of these plotters is to detach the States of Kentucky and Tenesee [sic] from the union and place them under the protection of Spain.” Ellicott told Pickering about the payments to the conspirators and the use of the pocket dictionary as a key to their cipher. His dispatch also carried the outline of another, larger plan, presumably taken from the general’s own speculations, about the expedition he would lead into Mexico once the Mississippi republic was established, and the “new empire” he intended to carve out there.

  This information should have destroye
d Wilkinson’s career. That it had the opposite effect of strengthening his position was due to the general’s brilliant countermove. With the cool calculation that contrasted so surprisingly with his histrionic behavior, Wilkinson forged a personal link with the unlikeliest of allies, President John Adams.

  His means was Little Turtle. Discovering a sudden enthusiasm for Native American ways, Wilkinson sent the Miami chief in late December to meet the president so that he could plead for what was essentially Washington’s old inclusive policy toward the Indians. “Could I be made instrumental in any way to ameliorate the condition of these people,” the general wrote in an accompanying letter, “and to lay the foundation of their permanent prosperity, it would be more acceptable to me than the most distinguished triumph of arms.”

  Adams was delighted both by the chief and by the general’s desire to see what was still Federalist policy carried out in the Northwest Territory. “He is certainly a remarkable man,” the president told Wilkinson. “We shall endeavor to make him happy here and contented after his return. I thank you for introducing him to me and for the infomation you have given me concerning him.”

  Wilkinson’s real purpose, however, appeared in the letter that he gave the chief to present to Adams. In it, the commander in chief personally informed the president about the rumors that he was being paid by Spain. “I most sincerely wish an inquiry into my conduct military and political. I know, sir, that a sinister connection with Spain is slanderously imputed to me . . . but conscious of my innocence I court inquiry to obtain an opportunity of vindication, which I have amply in my power.”