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

by Andro Linklater

  The letters to Dearborn and Smith were sent on June 17. Then there was silence. Throughout the summer and fall of 1806, it was as though the commanding general of the U.S. army and Burr’s right-hand man had simply disappeared. In the absence of any communication, neither the federal government nor the conspirators knew what had happened to him. On the Ohio, Aaron Burr and Jonathan Dayton gathered funds, men, and equipment for their next move and wondered why they had not heard from their collaborator. In Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Henry Dearborn debated with increasing anxiety why the army commander was no longer replying to letters or complying with orders. No one knew which way James Wilkinson would jump.

  23

  THE GENERAL AT BAY

  ON OCTOBER 22, 1806, the president summoned a cabinet meeting in the White House to be attended by his senior heads of department, Secretary of State James Madison, Albert Gallatin from Treasury, Henry Dearborn from War, and Gideon Granger, the postmaster general. Three critically important items were on the agenda—the Spanish threat east of the Sabine River, the nature of Aaron Burr’s movements, and the loyalty of General James Wilkinson. The first two matters were quickly dealt with— they agreed that troops should be moved to the most southwesterly city in the United States, Natchitoches, to mount a credible deterrent to Spain, and Burr needed to be “strictly watched” to ensure that he did not put into action any plan that might injure the United States. The third question really tested the best political minds in the nation: “General Wilkinson being expressly declared by Burr to be engaged with him in this design as his Lieutenant or first in command, and suspicion of infidelity in Wilkinson being now become very general, a question is proposed what is proper to be done as to him?”

  Gideon Granger, once Wilkinson’s outspoken supporter, was responsible for raising the question. Three days earlier he had taken a sworn statement from William Eaton, formerly the U.S. consul in Tripoli, who had won a famous victory at Derna in 1805 leading a force that included the Marine Corps against the Barbary pirates in North Africa. Eaton claimed that after his return to the United States, Aaron Burr had approached him and “laid open his project of revolutionizing the western country, separating it from the Union, establishing a monarchy there, of which he was to be the sovereign, New Orleans to be his capital; organizing a force on the Mississippi, and extending conquest to Mexico.” Burr offered to appoint Eaton second- in-command of the army that was to be led by General James Wilkinson.

  The extravagance of the plot invited skepticism, and Eaton, who was seeking compensation from the government for debts he had incurred in North Africa, was not entirely reliable. When he originally brought his story to the attention of the president earlier in the year, Jefferson had dismissed it, saying he had “too much confidence in the integrity and the attachment to the Union of the citizens of [the western] country to admit an apprehension.” The ease with which the cabinet disposed of the Burr question suggests that even at this late date his plans were not their chief concern. The real problem lay with the most powerful man in the Mississippi Valley, and its urgency was contained in the phrase “suspicion of infidelity in Wilkinson being now become very general.”

  The one person in the cabinet who had up to that point consistently refused to entertain any such suspicion was the president himself, and the consequences were starkly obvious. In New Orleans, the Creole population was close to rebellion against Claiborne’s government, and the Spanish ambassador, Carlos Martinez de Casa-Yrujo, had let it be known that both Burr and Dayton had approached him with plans to exploit the unrest and use it to split off the western states from the Union. Everyone in the room must have been aware that the fate of the country now depended on what Wilkinson decided to do.

  If he acted as a loyal commander against Spain, its invasion was easily countered. If he acted as a Spanish agent, the consequences were incalculable. Protected by the army, New Orleans was safe. Left vulnerable, it could fall to assault from the Mississippi or to an internal revolt. Unsupported by Wilkinson, Burr could be contained. Supported by Wilkinson, and the military following he could count on, Burr’s conspiracy became a genuine insurrection. The cabinet agonized over these questions, and Dearborn, at least, could have been forgiven for wanting to say to the president, “You were warned.”

  Yet however they approached it, there was no easy answer to the question “What is proper to be done as to him?” because no one had been able to contact Wilkinson. He was out of reach and out of control. Dearborn had alerted the president to the problem early in September. “Genrl Wilkinson had not left St Louis on 28th July and I cannot account for his delay,” Dearborn reported. “In his letters to me after the rcpt. of his orders, he ingaged at all events to be in Fort Adams by the twenty- fifth of July. I have received no letters from him for several weeks.”

  It took three or four weeks for a letter to come from St. Louis to Washington, and as much as two months from Fort Adams, depending on the level of the Ohio. But clearly Wilkinson had not moved from St. Louis six weeks after Dearborn’s instructions to go to the Sabine “with as little delay as possible.” Not until the end of August, ten weeks after the original order reached him, did the general finally take a boat south to Natchez, news that only reached Dearborn a month later. Meanwhile Claiborne and Mississippi’s acting governor, Cowles Mead, had been ordered to call out the militia, but Colonel Cushing’s refusal to allow any troops to move forward to Natchitoches without direct orders from Wilkinson prevented them from being deployed. From Washington it was difficult to make sense of what was happening. They could only be sure that, as Claiborne put it, “all was not right.”

  The desperation in the White House made itself apparent in an extraordinary order to Navy Secretary Robert Smith to call in two senior captains, Stephen Decatur and Edward Preble, for a secret briefing before leaving for New Orleans. Smith was instructed to give the officers command of all defensive operations in the city, meaning that the army would have to follow their orders. It was vivid evidence of the cabinet’s distrust of the army’s loyalty. Almost at once, however, the explosive consequences began to sink in of requiring Colonel Cushing and his fellow officers to ignore their general and instead take orders from a navy captain whose only force at New Orleans was a fleet of seven small gunships manned by militia sailors. The risk of setting military and naval commands at each other’s throat was deemed too great, and Preble and Decatur’s instructions were canceled at the last minute, thereby confirming the administration’s impotence. The next day and the day after that, Jefferson’s cabinet returned to the Wilkinson question. To deal with Burr, they decided to send John Graham, the Orleans Territory secretary, who happened to be in Washington, to spy on the col onel’s followers. But even after hours of fruitless discussion, no decision was taken about Wilkinson. The president’s policy had left the federal government powerless to prevent the general from exercising his magisterial power in whatever way he chose.

  AARON BURR’S CAMP WAS ALSO CONCERNED about Wilkinson’s intentions. Through the winter of 1806 Burr had exercised his magnetic personality on almost everyone on the east coast who might be able to aid his fortunes. The fund-raising campaign surprisingly included approaches by Burr and Jonathan Dayton, acting as his chief of staff, to the Spanish ambassador, the Marquis de Casa-Yrujo. The scenario that Burr and Dayton presented to him—a separatist movement in the Mississippi Valley backed by a British fleet—had attractions for any Spanish diplomat. Although their plot had elements of fantasy as well, including an armed putsch in Washington with Burr forcibly replacing Jefferson, the power of the Creoles’ independence movement in New Orleans convinced Yrujo of its feasibility. He contributed a much needed three thousand dollars and, in his dispatches to the Spanish foreign minister, Pedro Cevallos, confirmed that Wilkinson was involved and that Burr’s goal was secession rather than an attack on Mexico.

  In late May 1806, Burr finally received a letter from Wilkinson, but one so anodyne that Burr could not later
recall its contents. The absence of any expression of support told its own story. With twenty thousand dollars at stake, Dayton finally lost patience. “It is now well ascertained that you are to be displaced in the next session,” he wrote Wilkinson bluntly. “Jefferson will affect to yield reluctantly to the public sentiment, but yield he will; prepare yourself therefore for it; you know the rest. You are not a man to despair, or even despond, especially when such prospects offer in another quarter. Are you ready? Are your numerous associates ready? Wealth and Glory. Louisiana and Mexico.”

  In July 1806, Burr approached Albert Gallatin, the recognized fixer in Jefferson’s administration, and inquired whether “Wilkinson had resigned or been removed from the office of governor of Louisiana.” The nature of the questions indicated that Burr hoped the answer would be yes, but Gallatin replied with a double negative. In truth, however, Wilkinson’s long silence meant that neither side knew where the general’s shifting loyalties might turn. On the eve of the Burr Conspiracy, the participation of the one person who could make or break it remained a mystery.

  WHETHER EVEN THE GENERAL HIMSELF knew what he would do is questionable. By coincidence, Dearborn’s command to move south arrived just after Wilkinson had drafted orders for Cushing to advance up the Red River to Natchitoches with three companies of infantry to confront the Spanish threat. Immediately he added an urgent postscript giving Cushing sweeping power over all troops west of the Mississippi, and warning him to be ready for war, but to do nothing to provoke it, “as war is not only opposite to the genius and disposition of our country, but also to its substantial interests and happiness.”

  While this suggested the loyal commander, Wilkinson was at the same time urgently making arrangements for the departure of Lieutenant Pike’s second expedition. Ostensibly its purpose was to explore the Red River, but covertly its orders seemed designed to take it to Santa Fe. The character of Pike himself might have been made for such a desperate mission.

  Born into the army, Pike had followed his military father from post to post until he could enlist himself as a fifteen- year- old cadet, just in time to fight at Fallen Timbers. He never received more than a smattering of an education, and he had failed in all the tasks set for his 1805 expedition— discovery of the source of the Mississippi, removal of British traders, and suppression of their illegal fur business. But he had demonstrated a priceless ability to persuade others to accept his leadership whatever the cost. Hauling their boats through snowstorms and freezing, ice- thickened rivers, his twenty men worked until they vomited blood and collapsed with frostbite, so that Pike himself admitted, “[Even] if I had no regard for my own health and constitution, I should have some for these poor fellows, who were killing themselves to obey my orders.”

  The overt purpose of Pike’s new expedition was to return a party of Osage hostages to their village high on the Missouri River, then reach the source of the Arkansas River, before pushing south to the Red River and descending from its source to the Mississippi. Geography suggested another goal. Hundreds of mountainous miles separate the source of the Arkansas from the Red River, but amid the web of waterways that rise from the southern Rockies in Colorado, barely eighty miles lie between the head of the Arkansas and the Rio Bravo or Grande, which flows past Santa Fe and south toward Mexico.

  Private messages exchanged with Wilkinson indicated that Pike expected his party to be made “prisoners of war,” and that Wilkinson would “send to look for him” with a force of three thousand or four thousand men “if Christmas Eve should pass without his return.” Since his instructions to Pike were dated June 24, weeks after Wilkinson was ordered south, the general may well have conceived the expedition as a response to Dearborn’s command. In other words, it seems probable that in the summer of 1806 Burr’s strategy was working, and that as Wilkinson felt himself being pushed out of favor with Jefferson, he was creating an excuse to invade Mexico by way of Santa Fe and the Camino Real.

  In early October, at a point high up on the Arkansas River, Pike detached James Biddle Wilkinson with five boatmen to paddle down the river with a report to his father. It read, “Any number of men who may reasonably be calculated on would find no difficulty in marching by the route we came, with baggage wagons, field artillery, and all the usual appendages of a small army; and if all the route to Santa Fe should be of the same description, in case of war I would pledge my life and what is infinitely dearer, my honor, for the successful march of a reasonable body of troops into the province of New Mexico.”

  WILKINSON FINALLY SAILED from St. Louis on August 22. To his confidant in the Senate, Samuel Smith, he attributed the delay to “the extreme ill health of Mrs W.” The symptoms of her tuberculosis— a hard cough accompanied by bright specks of blood sprayed out from the congested lungs—were made worse by the fetid summer. Accordingly he waited until the worst of the heat was over before gently taking her down the river. Despite the emergency, he then spent a week in Natchez settling Nancy into the familiar surroundings of the Concordia mansion, once Gayoso’s but now the property of Esteban Minor.

  As always with Wilkinson, any change that removed a weight of obligations, even those to his beloved wife, and allowed him to give orders to others transformed his mood. During his slow progress south, a platoon of Spanish troops had occupied a small outpost on U.S. soil called Bayou Pierre. This had become the potential flashpoint that could lead to war. Once Nancy was settled, the general immediately ordered up all the regular troops in the vicinity that could be spared, together with seven hundred militia from Mississippi and Orleans territories, and, as he confidently assured Dearborn on September 27, “With this Force I have no doubts of success in the outset, and think I shall be able to drive our opponents before me and take Nacodoches” several miles to the west of the Sabine River.

  While in Natchez, his optimism tempted him into a dangerous joke about the allegations in the Western World when he encountered the surveyor general of the Mississippi Territory, Isaac Briggs, a sobersided, upright Quaker. “It must appear strange to you, friend Briggs,” he declared during a chance meeting in the mansion of Cowles Mead, acting governor of the territory, “that I, a Spanish officer, am now on my way, to fight the Spaniards, should they not retire.” It was said, Briggs recalled, “with great vivacity” and “a very cheerful air.” But Briggs was not the sort of person to laugh at such matters, even when they had appeared in a rag such as the Western World. Suddenly turning on Wilkinson, he demanded, “ ‘But, General, what about the Spanish money? I have heard that thou receivedst, previous to thy departure from New Orleans, in the spring of 1804, from Spanish officers, about 10,000 dollars, of a late Mexican coinage, in Campeachy bags.’ He answered, still with the same gay and easy air, ‘It is a fact, Sir, I did receive about that sum of a late Mexican coinage, in Campeachy bags, and from Spanish officers, and what then? It was due to me on account of former mercantile contracts.’ ”

  Leaving Natchez and the astonished Briggs behind, the general took a boat up the Red River to Cushing’s headquarters in Natchitoches, where he arrived on September 22. For several electric days, it seemed that the long-awaited conflict was about to begin. The general sent a message to the new governor of Texas, Antonio Cordero, in Nacogdoches, telling him to withdraw his forces from Bayou Pierre and all the territory east of the Sabine because it lay “fully within the limits . . . of the United States,” and Wilkinson was authorized to “sustain the jurisdiction of the United States against any force.” Wilkinson had about twelve hundred men at Natchitoches, and apart from a shortage of mules and tents he had sufficient supplies and intelligence for a successful campaign. Writing to John Adair, his old companion, he promised, “The time looked for by many and wished for by more has now arrived for subverting the Spanish government in Mexico. Be you ready to join me; we will want little more than light-armed troops . . . 5000 men will give us the Rio Bravo, 10,000 Monterey . . . 30,000 men to conquer the whole province of Mexico. We cannot fail of success.” On the
other side, however, Cordero, with more than a thousand soldiers in Nacogdoches under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Simon de Herrera, was in no mood to back down. Yet so adroitly had Wilkinson maneuvered that either peace or war would suit him.

  Some 750 miles to the north east, Aaron Burr was staying with Andrew Jackson in Nashville, Tennessee. The final arrangements for his descent of the Mississippi were put in place, including the provision of four thousand dollars to Jackson to buy boats and supplies. Such largesse was made possible by the financial backing of the hugely wealthy Harman Blennerhassett, whose elegant mansion on an island in the Ohio River served as Burr’s headquarters. Just a month earlier, Blennerhassett had helped Burr pay for the construction of fifteen boats big enough to ferry five hundred men downriver, and for sufficient pork, cornmeal, and whiskey to supply them for a month. About fifty recruits had already come forward, but once hostilities broke out, Jackson, Adair, and Senator John Smith of Ohio had made it clear they were ready to call out thousands of militia-trained volunteers from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio eager for the Mexican adventure. Everyone was poised for the first shots to be fired.

  Then unexpectedly, General Nemecio Salcedo, in overall command of defense on the frontier, intervened. At the end of September, he ordered troops to be withdrawn from east of the Sabine. Immediately tension in the area eased. The new situation apparently caught Wilkinson by surprise. Although he made arrangements to send the militia home and assured Cordero of his wish for a peaceful solution, he also informed Dearborn of his intention to occupy the land up to the Sabine. That this was deliberate provocation was made clear in a letter to Samuel Smith warning that war might still break out, and that the army was unprepared for it. With magnificent disregard for the ten weeks he had wasted in St. Louis, he blamed the lack of readiness for hostilities on Henry Dearborn’s failure to supply enough mules and tents. “You should immediately put a competent character at the Head of the War Department,” he informed the senator, “and prepare to reinforce me with from three to five thousand more [troops].” The president was to be informed, Wilkinson went on, that owing to the shortage of men and equipment “it is my opinion that we are approaching a crisis.”