It should have been a safe prediction—either the Spanish would react or Zebulon Pike would be captured. What the commander in chief did not expect was the arrival on the evening of October 8 of a twenty- three- year-old New Yorker named Samuel Swartwout.
Wilkinson and Cushing were seated together when the young man was shown in. He claimed to have come as a volunteer, ready to serve against the Spaniards, and he had with him a letter of recommendation from Jonathan Dayton to the general. But when Cushing stepped out of the room for a moment, Swartwout drew from his coat pocket a package that he slipped furtively into Wilkinson’s hand. It contained, he said, a message from Aaron Burr. Immediately Wilkinson asked where Burr was. Swart-wout replied that he was still in Philadelphia, or had been when he left. But Wilkinson’s lack of contact with Burr had forced the young man to spend more than two months searching for him, first turning upriver toward St. Louis before learning that the general was in the south. The news was outof-date. Burr might be anywhere. The general waited until Swartwout had left the room before taking the package to his “private chamber” and opening it in secret.
The letter was written partly in plain English and partly in the symbol-substitution cipher that Burr and Wilkinson often used when the writer was uncertain whether the recipient had access to Entick’s spelling dictionary. According to Wilkinson’s later testimony, he did not succeed in deciphering the entire message that evening, but he could read enough to know that he faced a devastating threat to his career.
The letter was dated July 29 and began with news of what Burr had achieved up to that date: “Yours postmarked 13th May is received. I have obtained funds, and have actually commenced the enterprise. Detachments from different points under different pretences will rendezvous on the Ohio, 1st November— everything internal and external favors views—protection of England is secured. T- [Commodore Thomas Truxton] is gone to Jamaica to arrange with the admiral on that station, and will meet at the Mississippi— England—Navy of the United States are ready to join, and final orders are given to my friends and followers—it will be a host of choice spirits.”
So far there was no direct mention of the general’s involvement. The next sentence must have chilled his blood, however. “Wilkinson shall be second to Burr only— Wilkinson shall dictate the rank and promotion of his officers.” Then came organizational details pointing to their close collaboration: “Burr will proceed westward 1st August, never to return: with him go his daughter . . . Send forthwith an intelligent and confidential friend with whom Burr may confer . . . Send a list of all persons known to Wilkinson west of the mountains, who could be useful, with a note delineating their characters . . . send me four or five of the commissions of your officers [blank forms to be filled in] . . . orders to the contractor [have been] given to forward six months’ provisions to points Wilkinson may name . . . the project is brought to the point so long desired: Burr guarantees the result with his life and honor—the lives, the honor and fortunes of hundreds, the best blood of our country.”
Finally and worst of all were the plans for the conspiracy’s immediate implementation: “Burr’s plan of operations is to move rapidly from the falls [of the Ohio] on the 15th of November, with the first five hundred or one thousand men, in light boats now constructing for that purpose—to be at Natchez between the 5th and 15th of December—then to meet Wilkinson— then to determine whether it will be expedient in the first instance to seize on or pass by Baton Rouge. On receipt of this, send Burr an answer—draw on Burr for all expenses, &c. The people of the country to which we are going are prepared to receive us—their agents now with Burr say that if we will protect their religion, and will not subject them to a foreign power, that in three weeks all will be settled. The gods invite to glory and fortune— it remains to be seen whether we deserve the boon.”
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HIS COUNTRY’S SAVIOR
THE TIMING MADE THE LETTER TOXIC. Had war with Spain broken out in September, Burr’s project would have been welcome and legitimate. Equally, had Burr held off until Pike was captured, national outrage against Spain would have seen his attack on Veracruz as patriotic assistance to Wilkinson’s efforts to liberate the prisoners. But, as it was, the United States and Spain were at peace, and the general had diverted nearly all American troops in the south, regular and militia, hundreds of miles from New Orleans, leaving the city virtually defenseless, with a population hostile to the United States, at the very moment when Burr was apparently shipping a thousand armed men down the Mississippi.
Whatever thoughts possessed the general’s mind, one impulse must have been to destroy the letter with its evidence of his complicity. But in the dark hours of the night he would have realized that other copies were in circulation, and that the truthful Swartwout, described by Burr as “a man of inviolable honor and perfect discretion . . . capable of relating facts with fidelity,” was able to tie him closer to Burr than any letter.
In the package was a second letter from Dayton. This was the one written in July crudely threatening that he would be dismissed in the next Congress—“Jefferson will affect to yield reluctantly to the public sentiment, but yield he will.” To Wilkinson, so deeply wounded by the president’s compliance with the order to leave St. Louis, this scenario must have seemed all too plausible.
By early next morning, he had still not decided what course to follow. He found Cushing striding up and down on the gallery before his office and called him aside for consultation. To his second-in-command, the general revealed only that the letter referred to some “illicit design” that Burr had in mind. The loyal Cushing never doubted that Wilkinson’s connection with Burr was innocent, and that their plans were concerted only in the context of war breaking out. Together they decided to pump Swartwout for more information, keeping him in camp so that he could not take information back to Burr.
According to Wilkinson, he affected a friendly air with Swartwout, expressing admiration when he heard of plans to recruit no fewer than seven thousand men for the Mexican expedition, and to finance it with silver taken from the New Orleans banks. The general explained that “although I could not join the expedition, [the border dispute] might prevent my opposing it.” Swartwout said that he was due to meet Burr on November 20 and invited Wilkinson to write the colonel with his response.
Most of what the young man had to say would have been familiar to the general from his discussions with Burr. The numbers involved would have surprised him, however, as would the highly significant information— mistaken, as it turned out—that Commodore Truxton, Burr’s adviser on naval matters, had enlisted the help of the British navy. Every plot aimed at New Orleans had always assumed that its fall would be guaranteed by the arrival of two or three frigates at the mouth of the Mississippi. Yet even knowing this apparently crucial fact, Wilkinson still hesitated. For ten days, he remained in Natchitoches considering how the military should react.
Even in his Memoirs, written to show his unswerving patriotism, he could not help revealing the attractions of accepting that the conspiracy was too far advanced to be stopped and simply launching an attack across the Sabine River: “If I had faultered [sic] in duty at that critical moment; if I had been inclined to close with the splendid offers of Colonel Burr, I should have struck the Spaniards, which my orders would have fully justified, and Burr would then have reached New Orleans, without opposition; and I could have deliberated on the part I should take, with entire safety.” It was a possibility he considered in detail, working out that he could wait to see whether Burr succeeded in taking New Orleans, “and without hazarding blame on either side, I should have been left at liberty to take advantage of events and choose my part.”
As late as October 17, Wilkinson wrote to Dearborn suggesting that a hundred picked men could seize the Spanish headquarters at Nacogdoches. Although he stressed that the purpose would only be to negotiate its return in exchange for a truce in the area, any kind of conflict with Spain, whatever the excuse, would
obviously have given a vital impetus to Burr’s conspiracy and have blurred his own association with it.
During those days, Wilkinson held the fate of the United States in his hands. Had fighting with Spain broken out on the Sabine River, Andrew Jackson made it clear he would have led the Tennessee militia to seize the Floridas, and John Adair was undeniably prepared to take Kentuckians into Mexico. In the confusion, New Orleans would have given itself up to Burr. What the final outcome might have been is impossible to say, but the radical Republican John Randolph was clearly correct when he later declared to Congress, “The agency of the Army was the whole pivot on which that plot turned.”
While he still wrestled with the problem, Wilkinson did write Burr, as Swartwout had asked, and sent the letter to Natchez to await the colonel’s arrival. What he said was never known. He might have explained that the border situation made it impossible to help or mentioned the possibility of a surprise assault across the Sabine or merely asked for more information.
Certainly he did not declare the conspiracy to be an act of treason; otherwise, when asked about the letter later, Wilkinson would have said so. All he offered by way of explanation was that when he returned to Natchez, “I recovered [the letter] and destroyed it.”
For most of the time, it is clear that the general and his second- in-command leaned toward war. But two obstacles stood in the way. The more obvious was the risk. Command of three thousand trained soldiers, however meanly paid, gave Wilkinson control of the largest single source of power within the republic, and he was desperate not to lose the prize. But psychology may have counted for more. In court, William Eaton declared on oath that when Burr told him Wilkinson was to be his lieutenant, “I replied, ‘Wilkinson will be a lieutenant to no man in existence.’ ” That was an unchanging truth. In the end, Wilkinson always destroyed any friendship that threatened his self- esteem.
Given his emotional volatility, the anger and anxiety produced by Burr’s letter may have contributed to Wilkinson’s indecision. Briggs, who saw him three weeks later, remarked that he seemed a changed man from the sunny figure he had encountered in September.
In the end, Wilkinson decided to play for time. On October 18, Swart-wout was sent away from camp so that he could not observe what was happening. Then Wilkinson composed two documents for the president that contained the first authentic news of the Burr Conspiracy. In a personal letter, dated October 21, he wrote of his discovery that “a numerous and powerful association, extending from New York through the Western states to the territories bordering on the Mississippi, has been formed with the design to levy and rendezvous eight or ten thousand men in New Orleans . . . I have no doubt the revolt of this Territory will be made an auxiliary step to the main design of attacking Mexico, to give it a New Master in place of the promised liberty.” To frustrate this plot, the general proposed to make “the best compromise with Salcedo in my power, and throw myself with my little Band into New Orleans to be ready to defend that Capital against usurpation and violence.”
Yet, as he himself admitted, “I have never, in my whole life, found myself under such circumstances of perplexity and embarrassment as at present.” To give himself room for maneuver, he pretended to believe that Jefferson might still give approval to Burr’s scheme in the event of war. “It is my desire,” he wrote, “to avert a great public calamity, and not to mar a salutary design.” On the back of the letter, he scribbled an alternative scenario: “Should Spain be disposed to war seriously with us, might not some plan be adopted to correct the destination of the associates, and by a suitable appeal to their patriotism, engage them in the service of their country?” Then he made out a copy of the ciphered letter together with a hasty translation, omitting or doctoring the more compromising details.
On October 22, these papers, together with a note to Dearborn telling him that he would advance to the Sabine River immediately to negotiate the withdrawal of both armies from the disputed border, were given to Lieutenant Thomas Smith with strict instructions that they were to be seen by no one but the president. Resourcefully the lieutenant sewed them into the souls of his slippers and set off for Washington.
On October 23, Wilkinson sent a cryptic message to the senior officer in New Orleans, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Freeman, telling him of a “threat too highly confidential to be whispered,” but which required the city’s ineffective defenses to be put in order immediately. On the same day, the general and Cushing set out on a forced march with a company of soldiers to the Sabine River, sixty miles away. Once there, Wilkinson dispatched a trusted officer, Captain Walter Burling, to contact Governor Cordero in Nacogdoches, proposing that each army withdrew from the disputed area, “without yielding a Pretension, ceding a right, or interferring with the discussion which belongs to our superiors.” In practice, this would entail the Spanish remaining behind the Sabine River, while the Americans retreated east of the Arroyo Hondo, the deep stream that Spain claimed as its frontier. The result would create a buffer territory, about fifty miles wide east to west, and stretching north from the Gulf of Mexico to the thirty-first parallel, the line specified by the Treaty of San Lorenzo as the border between the two nations.
Cordero, sensing the weakness behind the proposal, wanted to reject it, but Colonel Herrera had his orders from Salcedo and quickly accepted. On November 6, an agreement was signed by both sides, creating the Neutral Ground, which would for almost twenty years serve as a buffer dividing the two powers in the west. Devoid of government, it gradually became peopled by citizens of every country— the very embodiment of the border society—and its eventual collapse into lawlessness exemplified the built-in weakness of such communities.
With the border problem temporarily solved, the general immediately rode hard back to Natchitoches, covering the sixty miles in a day, and leaving Cushing to bring back the troops. At Natchitoches, he found a copy of the original Burr letter, delivered in his absence by another courier, Erick Bollman. Also waiting for him was a mysterious message sent by James Lowry Donaldson, one of Louisiana’s land commissioners, “that a plan to revolutionise the western country has been formed, matured, and is ready to explode— that Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Orleans, and Indiana, are combined, to declare themselves independent on the 15th November.”
The mystery lay less in the message than in its alleged effect on Wilkinson It was “decisive on my conduct,” he declared in his Memoirs, as though even then he had half hoped not to have to commit himself. “I had not formed a decided opinion, of the nature and objects of Burr’s enterprise before the receipt of Mr Donaldson’s letter. I then first perceived [the enterprise] was wholly unauthorised by the government—highly criminal in the design,— most alarming in its extent; and I had no longer any difficulty as to the course of conduct, my duty and the interests of the nation required me to pursue.”
Donaldson’s letter, however, said nothing of the kind. It stressed Donaldson’s belief that the story was so like “a second Spanish Conspiracy” it could only be a trick—“a stratagem set on foot by the patrons of the Western World.” But it carried a different meaning for Wilkinson. The letter demonstrated the changed emphasis of Burr’s conspiracy— New Orleans was to be seized, not as a jumping- off point for Mexico, but to bring about the secession of the western states. It was indeed a second Spanish Conspiracy, and as the creator of the first one, Wilkinson would be inescapably tied into it. No matter what he and the army did on the frontier, he would be seen as participating in an attempt to separate the western states from the Union.
Even to Thomas Jefferson, desperate though he was to believe the best of his general, the diversion of troops looked deliberate. Writing to warn Claiborne in December of Burr’s coming attack, he explained, “Genrl. Wilkenson [sic] is believed to be kept at bay on the west side of the Misisipi [sic] by a Spanish force under advice from Yrujo who has been duped by Burr to believe he means only the capture of N Orleans and the separation of the western country.” The president was read
y to see Wilkinson as a victim, but others might not be so kind. As Chief Justice John Marshall would repeatedly explain in his court, the law treated an attempt to wage war on a country at peace with the United States as a misdemeanor, but war against a province governed by the United States was treason.
This was why Wilkinson could no longer afford to stand back. He had to oppose Burr outright. And the equivocal letter sent to the colonel to await his arrival in Natchez had to be destroyed instantly.
The choice had been forced on him, but the decision to portray himself as the savior of the nation, and the histrionic manner in which he played the role, was Wilkinson’s entirely. “The plot thickens,” he wrote in a message to Cushing, urging him to bring all available troops to New Orleans, “yet all but those concerned sleep profoundly! My God! what a situation has our Country reached. Let us save it if we can . . . hurry, hurry after me and if necessary let us be buried together in the place we shall defend.” Apart from a single company, the entire garrison of Natchitoches, under the command of Major Moses Porter, was ordered to New Orleans, with fresh orders to Freeman to repair the city’s defenses urgently, but “manifest no hurry or emotion for you are surrounded by secret agents, yet use every exertion in your power.”
An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson Page 32