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

by Andro Linklater

  Adopting the excuse originally prepared for Washington, he explained away the money from New Orleans as payment for tobacco sales or insurance losses. He reminded the president of a conversation at his inauguration when, as a patriot, Wilkinson had sworn he would employ any means in defense of the United States against British attack. He ended with the superb declaration “It is the invisibility of my enemies only which I fear; for while I dare the open assault, I dread the secret stab.”

  Adams habitually relied more on his solitary judgment than the advice of his colleagues— a permanent cause of dissension in his administration— and on this occasion, too, he dismissed the doubts of leading members of his cabinet. In his reply he told the general that he had heard many such allegations, especially that Wilkinson was an officer in the Spanish army— “scarcely any man arrives from [the Mississippi] who does not bring the report along with him,” Adams asserted—but that he believed them to be motivated by malice and jealousy. “I esteem your talents, I respect your services and feel an attachment to your person,” he wrote in February 1798. “What measures you may think fit to take to silence the villainous rumours and clamours of your connections with Spain and France I know not; but no violent or military ones will do any good. I shall give no countenance to any imputations unless accusations should come & then you will have room to justify yourself. But I assure you I do not expect that any charge will be seriously made.”

  It was an extraordinary endorsement. Effectively it nullified both Ellicott’s warning and any other that might be made to the Adams administration. Yet in reality the president had little room for maneuver. The federal government was still too new to be sure of its power. The previous summer, Senator William Blount of Tennessee had been discovered plotting with the British to seize New Orleans and the Mississippi Valley, but despite the near unanimous vote of his fellow senators that he was guilty of “a high misdemeanour inconsistent with public trust and duty,” he had simply returned to Tennessee and the U.S. government proved powerless to bring him to trial. Any attempt to remove the efficient, popular Wilkinson might also fail and thereby risk causing a mutiny. Speculating some years later on how the head of the army could be removed in such a situation, Adams posed the question that must have occurred to him in 1797: “How is the subordination of the military to the civil power to be supported?”

  WITH ADAMS’S LETTER IN HIS FILES, Wilkinson became virtually impregnable to a Federalist ambush. He reveled in his new security. In October 1797, he had moved the army’s headquarters to Pittsburgh, conveniently located between the western states and the federal government. Although Pittsburgh was no Philadelphia, what had been a frontier settlement when Wilkinson first descended the Ohio was now “a thriving town containing about 200 houses, fifty of which are brick and Fram’d, & the remainder Log.” On the army’s budget, he transformed a large frame house on the east side of town into an imposing dwelling fit for a commander in chief. “The surrounding grounds were handsomely laid out, planted, and ornamented by General Wilkinson,” an English traveler noted in 1807, “and considering the smallness of the field he had to work on, [they] show much taste and are an ornament to the eastern and principal approach to the town.”

  The setting was comfortable enough to satisfy the demanding Nancy, and Wilkinson’s credit had so improved that in July he could tell the army paymaster “that provisions will always be made at Headquarters under whatever events to honor Mrs Wilkinson’s drafts at sight.” A draft was in effect a check: one payable at sight, rather than a month or year later, as good as cash, and an unmistakable sign of wealth. “I prefer this plan,” he assured Samuel Hodgdon, now in charge of military finances, with the confidence of a man whose chaotic accounts were temporarily in order, “because it enables her to appropriate [money] to her expenditure with precision.”

  To reach this satisfactory position, it seems clear that Wilkinson had begun to replace his pay as a spy by taking rake-offs from contractors who wanted to open trading stores in Indian territory or close to military barracks. One of the first was the Canadian company of Leith, Shepherd & Duff, which paid a fee in 1797 for the privilege of operating among the Chippewa near Detroit, but the practice soon became so habitual that the general thought nothing of writing to a food company hoping to land an army contract “to apprise you of my ready disposition to enter into your Service & of my determination to do it well for you.”

  Cushioned by these extracurricular payments and by the use of army resources, such as the military wagons that carried their furniture and wine from the East Coast, the entire family could live together in comfort for the first time since James Wilkinson left to make a fortune in Kentucky. “Your dear Sister and our Sons are near me in good health,” he wrote his brother-in-law Owen Biddle in December 1797. “My Ann unusually hearty. We are comfortably fixed and I suppose shall spend the winter here.”

  Yet security was impossible for a double agent as deeply involved as Wilkinson. Almost as he wrote, Gayoso received word from Madrid that Captain Isaac Guion’s force could at last be allowed into Natchez. An astounded Ellicott described to Pickering how, immediately after Guion’s arrival, the captain burst into a meeting of the American planters’ committee that administered Natchez, demanding to know “by what authority they met, that it was improper, and by G-d he would dissolve them the next day— he knew better than to be made a cypher of and by G-d he would rule the district with a rod of iron . . . after a debate of some length, he took his leave very politely saying ‘you may all kiss my a*se.’ ”

  Ellicott may have been right to blame Guion’s behavior on drink, but the captain was acting on orders. Behind his rudeness to Americans lay the general’s fear of giving offense to Spaniards. Once Gayoso was ready to evacuate the forts along the Mississippi, the commander in chief of the U.S. army lost his insurance policy against betrayal. Even if Gayoso kept silent, Wilkinson could be sure that the citizens of Natchez would not.

  In the spring of 1798, he sent an urgent coded message to Gayoso, newly promoted to be govenor of Louisiana in place of the openhanded Carondelet: “Observed everywhere, I dare not communicate with you, nor should you try to do so with me; Marshall has attacked my honor and fidelity. You should not trust the western people, because some are traitors. Fortify your frontiers well. While I remain as at present all is safe. Have buried my cipher, but I will recover it. You have many spies in your country. Do not mention me nor write my name, I implore you in the name of God and our friendship.”

  The key phrase was “I will recover it.” The hint that he might return to spying was thrown in to give Gayoso a renewed interest in keeping his secret. Everything that Wilkinson did over the next three years was conditioned by the need to persuade the Spanish authorities that as an agent he was a sleeper rather than retired.

  17

  ELLICOTT’ S DISCOVERY

  IN AUGUST 1798, Brigadier General Wilkinson himself took four hundred men in a convoy of thirty boats down the muddy current of the Mississippi. They floated past Natchez, to the last curve in the river before it cut through the thirty-first parallel. At a point where the ground rose to a small hill above the east bank, known locally as Loftus Heights, the general ordered several acres of canebrake and prickly thorn to be cleared for the construction of a fort. In honor of his unexpected benefactor, he named it Fort Adams. A year earlier, Fort Massac, five hundred miles to the north, had marked the extent of U.S. power. Now New Orleans lay tantalizingly close.

  That dramatic change owed nothing to the efforts of the U.S. army under its commander in chief, but much to Andrew Ellicott’s success in guiding American loyalties toward independence in the face of Gayoso’s refusal to implement the treaty. When he saw the Spanish troops begin to evacuate the Natchez fort in February 1798, Ellicott wrote in understandable triumph to his wife, Sally, “My Love,—I have at length worried the Spaniards out.” By the time Wilkinson made his late arrival, Winthrop Sargent, former secretary of the Northwest Territory,
had been installed as governor of Natchez, and Ellicott was deep in the wilderness east of the Mississippi cutting a trail through the matted undergrowth along the line of the thirty-first parallel with a team of American and Spanish astronomers, surveyors, and axmen.

  In October, the general visited the two boundary commissioners, Ellicott and Spain’s Esteban Minor, in their camp. His motives caused deep suspicion on both sides. Ostensibly the purpose was to join Sargent and Ellicott in a conference to choose who should be involved in the government of the future Mississippi Territory. The discussions were dominated by Wilkinson, partly because Sargent was ill, but mostly because Ellicott felt himself to be under an obligation to the general.

  In steamy heat and attacked by clouds of gnats and mosquitoes, the scientist’s unyielding determination to make exact astronomical measurements had driven the leading surveyor, Thomas Freeman, and the head of the military detachment, Lieutenant John McLary, to outright mutiny. As the U.S. boundary commissioner, Ellicott had the authority to suspend Freeman, but to deal with McLary, a military appointee, he needed Wilkinson’s intervention. Before the meeting at the camp, Ellicott asked the general for help and received a heartwarming reply: “My friend, you are warranted in drawing upon my confidence and my friendship at your discretion . . . Your refractory subaltern shall be relieved and his successor shall be taught how to respect a national Minister.”

  As he later admitted, Ellicott had already begun to discount the importance of the information he had sent Pickering, and it was certainly outweighed by the value of such prompt assistance. At the meeting, he supported Wilkinson in the appointment of judges and other federal officials. He also gladly promised to comply with the general’s private request for sketch maps of the terrain that would show “the interesting Roads, and practicable points of approach from below with such remarks on the face of the country as may assist a military man in his conceptions and intelligence of the theatre before him.” Then, freed of his two troublemakers, Ellicott returned to his scientific odyssey through the unmapped wilderness.

  At the very end of October, Wilkinson spent several days in discussions at Loftus Heights with Daniel Clark Jr., who had traveled up from New Orleans to see him. On Ellicott’s recommendation, Clark had been appointed U.S. consul in New Orleans. When the evacuation of Natchez took place, Clark formally applied to become a citizen of the United States. Less formally, he developed a plan with his uncle for his future country to seize New Orleans by force without further delay. They feared that the power of the gigantic French armies terrorizing Europe would be used to force its frail ally to hand over New Orleans and all Louisiana. Clark’s journey to see Wilkinson was undertaken to persuade him join in a preemptive strike before the formidable French took control.

  Wilkinson pretended to be enthusiastic about the plan for seizing New Orleans but claimed that the government’s policy of avoiding war with Spain prevented him from taking any action. “I would to heaven I could procure an order for the operation you wish,” he assured Clark senior in a letter from Fort Adams. “I would hazard my fame and fortune without much hesitation to precipitate an event which is to happen.” In reality, he could not afford to risk Gayoso’s enmity, and there was never the slightest chance that he would undertake any action against Spanish forces.

  Suspicious about Wilkinson’s real motives, Clark may have asked whether the general was still being paid by Gayoso, because it is equally clear that Wilkinson informed Clark, truthfully, that since the western settlers had achieved their goal with the opening of the Mississippi, the Spanish Conspiracy was at an end. From Fort Adams, Clark wrote his uncle that he believed this “assurance that the disgraceful connexion should be broken off.”

  On November 4, the young man left the fort having failed to achieve his object. The meeting might have been utterly inconsequential, except that out of it grew a campaign to expose Wilkinson that proved so damaging, his past as a paid agent of Spain came in the end to haunt him like Banquo’s ghost.

  THE FIRST STEP WAS TAKEN, inadvertently, by the guileless Andrew Ellicott. On November 8, Ellicott reached Darling’s Creek, a tributary of the Pearl River, and was preparing a map of the area that Wilkinson had requested. Then, as he put it in his journal, “by a very extraordinary accident, a letter from the Governor General [Gayoso] on its way to a confidential officer in the Spanish service [Power] fell into my hands for a few hours.” In fact what he had was Power’s copy of the letter. Ellicott’s refusal to explain how it came into his hands suggests it was stolen and had to be returned before the loss was discovered. Only Clark could have engineered the theft of the letter, and its swift conveyance to Ellicott. His motives can be deduced from its contents.

  Gayoso’s letter was written in response to the news of Wilkinson’s visit to the commissioners’ camp. This, the governor suggested, had to be seen in relation to the Spanish Conspiracy, and the fears of those involved that their participation might be exposed by publication of their letters. “I wonder you could not see the design of General Wilkinson’s visit to Mr Ellicott’s and Mr Minor’s camp,” Gayoso explained to Power. “It was to fall upon some measures to obtain his papers. They are all safe and never will be made use of against him if he conducts himself with propriety. In fact the originals are at the court [in Madrid], the copies only are here.”

  To Clark, the most important item was the evidence of blackmail— it explained Wilkinson’s refusal to participate in his projected attack on New Orleans— but the implications were different for Ellicott. He saw in the letter “unequivocal proof” of the conspiracy, and as he later explained, this document more than any other evidence convinced him that Wilkinson must have been involved in a plot “calculated to injure the United States.” He promptly sent Pickering another long and deeply ciphered dispatch with this fresh indication of the general’s treachery. Yet even then, he felt compelled to discover whether there might not be some other, more innocent explanation.

  With the folly of the truly innocent, he wrote Wilkinson on December 16, 1798, “I have seen a letter of Mr. Power’s, in his own hand writing, dated the 23d ultimo, in which your name is mentioned in a manner, that astonished me; I dare not commit any part of it to paper, but if I should ever have the pleasure of another interview with you, I will communicate the substance of it under the injunction of secresy. If the design of it, has been to injure you in my opinion, it has failed in its effect, for in the most material point I am confident it is false.”

  However friendly the tone of the Quaker’s letter, the general could not afford to let someone with Ellicott’s moral authority possess such damning knowledge. Since denial was impossible, Wilkinson set about destroying Ellicott’s reputation. From friends in Natchez, the astronomer learned that Wilkinson and Thomas Freeman had become companions and were intent on smearing his name. The least harmful allegation they circulated was that he had been in the pay of Spain, but what almost broke Ellicott’s heart was the story that he and his son, Andy, a surveyor on the boundary-marking team, had, as Freeman put it, “a beastly, criminal, and disgraceful intercourse” with their washerwoman, Betsy. “It was said, and generally believed,” Freeman declared, “that that extraordinary trio, father, son, and washerwoman, slept in the same bed, at the same time—I did not see, but I believed it. I was even pressed myself by the old sinner, Ellicott, to take part of his bed with his washerwoman and himself, for the night.”

  A more wounding charge could hardly have been made against someone with Ellicott’s grave, Quaker background, undeviating scientific integrity, and utter devotion to his wife, Sally, who bore him thirteen children and all her life moved him to such endearments as “My darling,” “My love,” and “Dearest of all earthly beings.”

  The episode showed how dangerous it was to be a threat, however inadvertent, to Wilkinson. It also demonstrated how armored against exposure the general had become. In his next message, Pickering sharply reprimanded Ellicott for passing on malicious allegations and
refused to hear any more. Consequently the boundary commissioner said nothing about his encounter some months later with Captain Tomás Portell, the former commandant of New Madrid. Having supervised the packing of $9,640 into sugar and coffee barrels for Wilkinson, Portell was able to give the shaken commissioner firsthand testimony that the money was earned by spying, and not, as the general insisted, by trade.

  Another year passed before Andrew Ellicott returned from the wilderness. By the time he reached his home in Philadelphia, he was a changed man, physically run-down, as he admitted, and psychologically scarred. But he was no less determined to see General Wilkinson uncovered as a Spanish spy.

  18

  THE FEDERALIST FAVORITE

  BY THE END OF 1798, it seemed that no one, whether Federalist or Republican, American or Spaniard, wanted to hear anything bad against Wilkinson. Even the French were prepared to think well of him as they began to exert pressure on Spain to hand over Louisiana. In Paris, Joseph de Pontalba, former citizen of New Orleans and self- appointed expert on the Spanish colony, recommended the general’s immediate recruitment. “Four times from 1786 to 1792, preparations were made in Kentucky and Cumberland to attack Louisiana,” Pontalba recklessly declared in his memorandum to Napoléon, “and every time this same individual caused them to fail through his influence over his countrymen. I make these facts known to show that France must not neglect to enlist this individual in her service.”

  Had Napoléon’s plans to land an army of forty thousand troops in Louisiana been realized, Wilkinson might have received such an approach. But the threat of French hostilities produced for him an offer that flattered his vanity beyond anything that Napoléon might have offered.