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

by Andro Linklater

  The transfer of New Orleans from Spain’s fragile possession to France’s immense power was not an outcome that the United States could accept. “There is on the globe one single port, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy,” Jefferson instructed his minister to France, Robert Livingston. “It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce, and contain more than half of our inhabitants.” In February 1803 James Monroe was sent to join Livingston with the goal of purchasing the city from France.

  Still kept out of the loop, General Wilkinson could reply only in the vaguest terms to officers who pestered him for information. “If Mr Monroe succeeds all will be well,” he told one young favorite, Captain Jacob Kingsbury, “but if he should fail, we shall have noise, bustle & Bloodshed. Keep your sword with a good Edge & be quiet.”

  As Livingston and Monroe’s negotations with François Barbé- Marbois, Napoléon’s minister of finance, dragged on through the spring, Dearborn sent the army’s senior general to negotiate more Indian treaties, this time with Creek communities, to release land for the benefit of Georgia settlers. In 1802 and 1803, Wilkinson reckoned he covered more than sixteen thousand miles by land and sea in pursuit of unmartial duties. He took the opportunity to explore “every critical pass, every direct route & every devious way between the Mexican Gulph & the Tennessee river” so that American forces would have the opportunity to seize not just New Orleans but the Floridas as well. But his knowledge was never called upon.

  In July 1803 a near- desperate Wilkinson was back in Fort Adams. In an anguished letter to Dearborn, he complained that although he had enough troops to seize the city at any time, he could make no detailed plans because he was still being kept in the dark about the government’s intentions. “If anything professional is to be done which may imply trust & hazard—I hope you may confide the execution to me,” he declared, “or give an order to someone to knock me on the head.”

  Writing to Alexander Hamilton, Wilkinson revealed his growing impatience: “I have extended my capacities for utility but not my sphere of action & in the present moment my destination is extremely precarious. To divorce my sword is to rend a strong ligament of my affections & to wear it without active service is becoming disreputable.” His use of this allusive, overelaborate language, enabling him to hint at possibilities rather than reveal intentions, was a sure sign that he was looking for more rewarding opportunities than those allowed by Dearborn.

  Given Ellicott’s warning, Dearborn’s desire to restrain his general’s room for maneuver was understandable, but it seriously underestimated his capacity for usefulness as well as resentment and intrigue. Hamilton, who understood him well, advised that where Wilkinson was concerned “to act towards him so as to convince him that he is not trusted . . . is the most effectual way that can be adopted to make him unfaithful.” In his memoirs, the general not only quoted that advice, but capitalized the words to give them extra emphasis.

  Not until July 1803 did the news finally arrive in Washington of Livingston and Monroe’s agreement to purchase not just New Orleans but the entire vulnerable province of Louisiana that Miró, Carondelet, and Gayoso had struggled so hard to keep out of American hands. What precipitated the deal was the decimation of Leclerc’s army in Saint Domingue by disease and warfare. Once the dream of an American empire had gone, Napoléon abruptly cut his losses and, to finance his planned invasion of Britain, accepted Monroe and Livingston’s offer of fifteen million dollars for the 885,000 square miles of territory.

  At once, Jefferson’s administration set about finding a suitable commissioner to take charge of the massive new province it had acquired. Unfortunately the ideal candidate, General Thomas Sumter of South Carolina, refused to leave the Senate, then the Marquis de Lafayette declined, as did James Monroe. Rumors that Spain was protesting the validity of the sale, and that France was having second thoughts, made any long delay dangerous.

  In October, with time running out for the handover in December, Jefferson reluctantly selected as civil commissioner twenty- nine- year-old William C. Claiborne, governor of Mississippi Territory, and, as his military counterpart, forty-six- year-old Brigadier General James Wilkinson. Dearborn’s opinion was not recorded, but Wilkinson’s length of service was strictly limited. The moment the last fort in Louisiana was handed over, his power as commissioner would end.

  NOTHING IN THE GENERAL’S BEHAVIOR could have aroused any doubt about his loyalty. Within weeks of receiving his orders and a copy of the Paris agreement, he had embarked a force of 450 regulars and 100 militia with all their equipment on a fleet of seventeen flatboats and two baggage barges at Fort Adams. To ensure a smooth handover, he privately visited New Orleans to make the necessary arrangements beforehand with Pierre de Laussat, the designated French governor of Louisiana. On December 10, after Claiborne had joined him from Natchez, Wilkinson sailed down to New Orleans and a week later pitched camp on the outskirts of the city.

  There Wilkinson issued a grandiloquent but necessary reminder to the soldiers of the delicate nature of their mission, and the need for toleration of foreign customs: “We behold a polished people (strangers to our manners, our laws and our language) cast into our arms. Be it our pride and our glory to receive them into the great family of our happy country with cordial embraces.” On December 20, the two commissioners marched at the head of the U.S. troops along the levees on the riverfront, and into the huge central square, the Place d’Armes, in front of the City Hall of New Orleans.

  In a bittersweet mood Laussat, who had received the keys of New Orleans from the Spanish only three weeks before, noted in his journal, “The day was beautiful and the temperature as balmy as a day in May. Lovely ladies and city dandies graced all the balconies on the Place d’Armes. The Spanish officers could be distinguished in the crowd by their plumage . . . The American troops appeared and, with drums beating, marched by platoons, and placed themselves on the river side of the square. Facing them, on the other side were the [French] militia.”

  To his chagrin, Laussat now had to repeat the earlier ceremony in which he had formally received Louisiana from Spain’s two commissioners, the ancient Manuel de Salcedo—“an impotent old man in his dotage,” the forty- two-year- old Laussat noted—and the aristocratic Marqués de Casa Calvo, “a violent man who hated the French.” But this time Laussat had to give away a third of a continent. In the conference chamber, he greeted the two commissioners. Claiborne, Laussat wrote, was “tall and erect with an American complexion,” while Wilkinson was “short, also erect, of handsome though pompous mien.” Having proclaimed that he was “transferring the country to the United States,” Laussat presented the general with the keys to the city, tied with a tricolor ribbon; then all three signed the documents that officially conveyed ownership of Louisiana to the United States. Finally they went out on the balcony, where “the French colors were lowered and the American flag was raised,” and a salvo of cannon fire signaled that the United States had almost doubled in size.

  Exactly six weeks later, Brigadier General James Wilkinson, commanding general of the U.S. army, and his country’s military commissioner for the province of Louisiana, had a private interview in New Orleans with the visiting Spanish governor of West Florida, Don Vizente Folch. He suggested that he should be paid twenty thousand dollars, the arrears on his pension as a Spanish agent. In return he promised to pass on information vital to Spain, including Jefferson’s plans regarding Spanish America. “I know,” he boasted, “what is concealed in the President’s heart.”

  20

  AGENT 13 REBORN

  NEW ORLEANS WAS WHERE JAMES WILKINSON had first transferred his loyalties to Spain. Two years later, it was where he had returned to negotiate his transition from trader to Spanish agent. But despite the precedents, it could hardly have been imagined that he would behave there in the same way three times in a ro
w. So much had changed since the 1780s. Even before the purchase of Louisiana, the balance of power in North America had clearly shifted from Spain to the United States. The Spanish Conspiracy was a distant memory. Most important, Wilkinson himself was in command of the U.S. army, the great prize for which he had cut off his original connection with Spain.

  Nor did his public behavior suggest any secret agenda. Seen through the jaundiced eyes of Pierre de Laussat, he appeared as a loud buffoon. In a report to Paris, the French commissioner compared the performance of both Wilkinson and Claiborne unfavorably to his own suave efficiency and rated them below even the disorganized but self-possessed Spaniards:

  “It was hardly possible that the Government of the United States should have a worse beginning, and that it should have sent two men more deficient in the proper requisites to conciliate the hearts of the Louisianians. The first, with estimable qualities as a private man, has little intellect, a good deal of awkwardness, and is extremely [inadequate to] the position in which he has been placed. The second, who has been long known here in the most unfavorable manner, is a rattle- headed fellow, full of odd fantasies. He is frequently drunk, and has committed a hundred inconsistent and impertinent acts. Neither the one nor the other understands one word of French, or Spanish. They have, on all occasions, and without the slightest circumspection, shocked the habits, the prejudices and the natural dispositions of the inhabitants of this country.”

  The sort of incident Laussat had in mind occurred at a public ball on January 22, 1804, attended by American and French officers as well as New Orleans high society. Wilkinson noticed among the dancers in a quadrille a French official who had just returned from Saint Domingue and so should have been in quarantine for yellow fever. He plunged into the dancers and marched him off the floor. The French officers began to protest. Wilkinson jumped up on a bench and, with Claiborne standing loyally beside him, delivered a bombastic lecture on social responsibility in bad French and his own elaborate English. The French began to jeer, and their response provoked the general to launch into “Hail, Columbia,” the national anthem of the time, accompanied by Claiborne and members of their staffs. When this failed to silence the protests, Wilkinson inexplicably, unless to annoy the French, who had spent ten years at war with the British, decided to sing “God Save the King,” to which the French responded stridently with “La Marseillaise” amid a mounting storm of shouts and whistling. At that point, with scuffles breaking out and pandemonium descending, Wilkinson and Claiborne prudently abandoned the war of songs and withdrew.

  None of this suggested the anonymity and self-control expected of a secret agent, but Wilkinson’s bluster was always a good disguise to his shrewdness. Despite the explosive mixture of nationalities in the city, the confusion arising from three different governments holding power in as many weeks, and the presence of armed soldiers from three separate armies, New Orleans avoided disorder. “The Prefect of France and the Spanish troops are still in town, and the magazines and storehouses still in their possession,” Wilkinson complained to Dearborn almost three months after the transfer of power, “while we are obliged to pay rent for our own accommodation.” Despite provocations from Spanish militia “which a state of war alone would justify,” as one of Wilkinson’s officers put it, the army’s presence kept the peace until April, when both Spanish and French forces sailed for home.

  In his arrogance, Laussat failed to see that at least part of the credit for this orderly transition was due to Wilkinson’s shrewd disposition of his troops across the city, and his very public tours of inspection to ensure their good behavior. The punishments inflicted after he discovered the guard in Fort St. Louis dead drunk on the very first night ensured that the offense was never repeated, or at least not found out, while he was there. “I apprehend no Danger,” the general wrote dramatically to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn after a night on patrol with his men in the streets, “but the horrors of a sinister attempt make it my duty to prevent one.” French residents complained of heavy-handed policing, but not of laxness.

  Wilkinson’s very public commitment makes the decision to betray his country again still more mysterious. Had it been his intention to sabotage the American takeover, an incident could easily have been allowed to blow up. French resentment remained especially fierce, and as Claiborne reported, they “seem determined to sour the Inhabitants as much as possible with the American government.” Yet the general clearly did everything he could to prevent such an explosion from taking place.

  One immediate motive in approaching the Spanish again was, as always, financial. His salary as general was now $225 a month, and on top of that he received generous expenses, and a special allowance of $8 a day while negotiating Indian treaties. Wilkinson estimated that altogether he received something close to $4,000 a year from the army. But tighter regulations and constant travel clearly reduced the scope for payoffs from contractors, and he had received nothing from the Spaniards since the notorious $9,640 had arrived covered in sugar and coffee. Meanwhile, he had one son at Princeton— Ensign James Biddle Wilkinson having followed his father into the army—and a wife whose nervousness grew more pronounced the longer he was away from home, and whose demands he could not deny.

  Psychology must also have played its part. For two years Wilkinson had been sidelined by Henry Dearborn, behavior guaranteed to wound his vanity and trigger a vicious urge to retaliate. Furthermore, he was in his late forties, a midlife point when unsatisfied men are prone to dreams of sudden transformation from routine to excitement. Finally there was Mexico. Ever since Philip Nolan’s first report of the road to Santa Fe, it had occupied his mind, and the key to his serpentine activities lay in the extraordinary, meteoric career of the young Irishman.

  BORN IN BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND, in 1771 and destined to be buried in Texas before his thirty-first birthday, Nolan had at the age of twenty exchanged the imaginative bookkeeping practiced in Wilkinson’s Lexington store and in his shipping agency in New Orleans for the more daring life of a horse trader, rounding up wild mustangs in Texas and Chihuahua for sale in Louisiana and Natchez. Such activities required a passport from the governor of each region. Wilkinson, Nolan’s mentor, persuaded Miró to grant him his first permit to import horses for the Louisiana militia, but Nolan’s happy relish for adventure made it easy for him to procure these valuable documents—“He is,” said Carondelet, “a charming young man whom I regard very highly,” and the governors of Texas and New Mexico agreed. Nor was his appeal limited to European Americans.

  After his goods and money were stolen on his first expedition in Texas, Nolan lived for two years with the notoriously aggressive Comanche and “acquired a perfect knowledge” of the sign language they used to communicate with other tribes in the Southwest. Even Daniel Clark Jr., notoriously cold and calculating in his judgments, was seduced by Nolan’s careless courage and joyful spirits, assuring Thomas Jefferson that he was someone “whom Nature seems to have formed for Enterprizes of which the rest of Mankind are incapable.” Only Gayoso, after an initial friendship, suddenly realized that his repeated trips into Spanish territory might serve another purpose and issued an urgent warning to his fellow governors that Nolan was “popular and enterprising” but at the same time “a dangerous man and a sacrilegious hypocrite.”

  Yet the Irishman never deviated from his loyalty to the general, whom he called “the friend and protector of my youth.” Just before leaving on his first horse-trading expedition to Texas, he promised Wilkinson, “I am wholly yours until I do the business of the season,” and just before his last trip he told a friend, “Whatever discoveries I can make shall be carefully preserved for General Wilkinson.” By 1797, his information about the trail to Santa Fe and Mexico had begun to excite his mentor’s volatile imagination.

  This was the background to Nolan’s calculated friendship with the trusting Ellicott. The horse trader shared his intelligence about Spanish intentions and troop numbers and received in return private
instruction in the art of navigation from the United States’ foremost mapmaker. “I have instruments to enable me to make a more correct map than the one you saw,” Nolan told Wilkinson before his next trip to Texas. “Ellicott assisted me in acquiring a more perfect knowledge of astronomy and [telescopes]; and Gayoso himself has made me a present of a portable sextant.”

  That promise of a more accurate map of the trail to Santa Fe suggests the direction of Wilkinson’s thoughts. As a soldier, he valued nothing so much as reliable information about ground that might become strategically important. In 1801 Nolan was killed by a Spanish patrol in Texas to prevent him from exploring further, but his maps had planted the seeds of another ambition. The general’s dream of a Mississippi republic might be over, but the idea of another, richer empire farther west was taking root.

  THERE WAS NOTHING IMPULSIVE about his decision to approach Vizente Folch, governor of West Florida. Wilkinson already knew him as Miró’s nephew, and another encounter in 1803 while working on the Indian frontier had convinced him that he could trust Folch. Their meeting in New Orleans in February 1804 was carefully minuted in Folch’s report to his immediate senior, the captain general in Havana, Marqués Salvador de Some-ruelos. Having extracted a pledge that their conversation should be kept utterly secret, Wilkinson had made “various reflections” on the strategy Spain should pursue following the Louisiana Purchase. Folch was wary, suspecting that this might be an attempt to extract information on Spanish intentions, and so asked Wilkinson to write out his ideas.

  The suggestion was accepted, but then Wilkinson raised a matter that caused him “considerable embarrassment”— his salary of two thousand dollars a year as a Spanish agent had not been paid for ten years. He would soon travel north to report to Thomas Jefferson. While in Washington, he would discover not only the administration’s plans for Louisiana but, as Jefferson’s friend, the president’s innermost thoughts. Before he left New Orleans, Wilkinson suggested, Spain should pay him the twenty thousand dollars he was owed, “for the services which I shall render and more particularly to indemnify me for the eventual loss of the office which I hold and which probably it will seem necessary for me to abandon in case of hostilities.” In return he would commit his reflections to paper and report back after his meetings in Washington.