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

by Andro Linklater

  From Pensacola, Vizente Folch sent Someruelos a message that although Wilkinson had been “sincerely attached” to the Spanish cause and remained a personal friend, he was not to be trusted. The captain general replied in similar tone, observing that “His Majesty had some relations [with] No. 13” in the past, but Folch was to be wary of him now. These anxieties about Wilkinson’s intentions were only increased by news from Norfolk, the first port at which he called, that at the end of a magnificent banquet given in his honor, he had proposed a toast to “the New World governed by itself and independent of the Old.”

  Unfortunately for Wilkinson’s ambition to regain public confidence, Someruelos remained loyal to the Spanish royal family and, angered by the “New World” speech, refused to see him. Next, the general tried to visit Folch in Pensacola, but was again frustrated, this time by the governor’s pressing need to be in Baton Rouge. When Wilkinson eventually arrived in New Orleans in April, his public diplomatic mission appeared to have failed. Nevertheless, his public support for the revolutionaries whose aims, he confessed to Dearborn, “excite in my Breast the Strangest Solicitude to participate in the glorious Atchievement” did have some effect.

  Encouraged by the general’s remarks and the nearby presence of U.S. troops, a force of American rebels seized Baton Rouge and proclaimed “the free and independent” republic of West Florida. Although swiftly annexed by the United States, this fragment of West Florida was the first district within the Spanish empire to achieve its independence—six months before Venezuela’s more famous declaration— and could claim to be the precursor of the liberationist avalanche that would sweep Spanish rule away.

  THE GENERAL WAS RECEIVED with surprising warmth on his return to New Orleans. Many turned out to cheer, and the merchant community who had come to hate Daniel Clark gave a dinner in his honor. But the popularity of a satirical pamphlet depicting him as “the Grand Pensioner” showed that the past was not entirely forgotten.

  “Sweet was the song sung on Monday evening,” the pamphlet, The Pensioner’s Mirror, declared, “when it was announced by a herald from headquarters, that his Serene Highness, the Grand Pensioner de Godoy, was approaching the city and that he was to make his triumphal entry yesterday . . . When his serene highness entered the city, the bells they rung, The pensioner is come, um, um, um, and the drums re-echoed the joyful tidings. How grand the spectacle! What terror did it carry to the hearts of traitors!”

  The barbs of a pamphlet might be ignored. Wilkinson’s immediate concern was the situation of the two thousand troops sent to New Orleans in December. Taken from garrisons primarily on the Atlantic coast, and containing a high proportion of hastily trained recruits, both officers and soldiers, they had arrived in a city already overflowing with French refugees fleeing the anti-Napoleonic backlash in Cuba. Some had been billeted in the city, the remainder had been housed in tents and temporary wooden barracks across the river. For young men, the pleasures of New Orleans were ruinous, as Wilkinson put it, to “health, morals and discipline,” and their largely untried, politically correct officers could not cope. By March 24, barely a month after their arrival, almost a quarter of the total force were on the sick list, others were not fit to bear arms, and desertion rates were soaring. When the general at last appeared on April 19, close to a third of his command were unfit for duty.

  Within three days, he announced his intention to move the troops away from the city as soon as arrangements could be made, and that meanwhile mosquito nets were to be provided for all the tents. On May 12, three weeks after his arrival, he sent a long, angry letter to William Eustis, secretary of war in James Madison’s new administration: “You will observe, Sir, we have an army without a general staff; and an hospital without surgeon, purveyor, matron, or nurse . . . The troops are without bunks or births to repose on, or musquitoe nets to protect them against that pestiferous insect with which this country abounds.”

  This crossed with a message from Eustis sent on April 29 in response to the sickness figures, urging Wilkinson to get the men out of New Orleans. “It will be desirable,” he declared, “that [they] should be transported either to the high ground in the rear of Fort Adams or in the rear of Natchez.” Since the first troops left the city only in early June, six weeks after Wilkinson discovered the situation, it is probable, although he denied it, that Wilkinson received this message before the men moved and deliberately ignored it.

  The ostensible reason was that New Orleans wisdom insisted that in summer the heat and “effluvia” from the water made river journeys dangerously unhealthy, and a voyage upriver to Natchez would take at least a month. But it was also clear that Wilkinson wanted to teach Eustis, the sixth secretary of war he had dealt with, who was master in their relationship. As he informed his court-martial, “peremptory, unqualified orders, at a thousand miles distance, evince an excess of temerity, which no military man will justify.”

  The general was also distracted by the sort of intoxication that overtakes a fifty-two- year- old man when he falls in love with a twenty- two-year- old girl. Since Celestine Laveau Trudeau was the daughter of Louisiana’s surveyor general, and one of the city’s leading citizens, the courtship could not be rushed.

  The place he chose for a new camp was Terre aux Boeufs, seven miles downriver from New Orleans where a defense could be mounted against a naval force coming up the Mississippi. Although three feet below the level of the river on the other side of the levee, Wilkinson assured Eustis that “it was perfectly dry” and in a later description made it sound idyllic with cattle grazing in lush clover fields and “a charming shade along the front . . furnished by a grove of majestic live oak trees.”

  Once the ground had been cleared by a work party under the indefatigable Major Zebulon Pike, a tented encampment was set up for a force that had by then reached about 2,300 men. As the troops arrived, the sickness rate fell rapidly from its May peak of 600 with 53 further losses from death and desertion, to 442 at the end of June and only 13 other losses.

  Unfortunately for General Wilkinson’s calculated defiance, and tragically for the well-being of his men, the rain that had held off for most of June began to fall again. The river that had shrunk until it was half a mile from the camp began to rise until it lapped the levee only fifty-five yards away. Above and below Terre aux Boeufs, it broke through the embankments until the lower ground became lakes and swamps. Trodden down by hundreds of men, the clover fields turned to mud. Within the tents the men lay in pools of water until in mid- July the boats were broken up to make wooden floors. The latrines, long, makeshift ditches known as sinks, which had been dug at the back of the camp, overflowed, and raw sewage spread over the ground, contaminating water supplies, spreading disease, and attracting clouds of flies. The coffins of those that died could not be buried more than a few inches below the surface, and the corpses soon putrefied in the heat.

  On July 16, Captain John Bentley of the military police inspected the camp and gave Wilkinson a devastating report on what he found: “The whole camp abounds with filth and nastiness of almost every kind . . . The kitchens are generally in a very bad state; in some instances holes have been dug to form them, which have become the receptacle of all manner of filth, and on the left of the dragoons, it is not uncommon to see men in the day time, easing themselves within a few yards of the kitchens! I beg leave to suggest the propriety of procuring necessary tubs for the use of the sick, who are not able to go to the sinks. The sewers have become the receptacle of stinking meat, refuse of vegetables, old clothes, and every species of filth. It is necessary that a number of new sinks should be dug, in place of those covered, and those that ought to be covered. You will be assailed with a very unpleasant smell, in walking down the levee, from the front to the flank guard . . . The burying ground requires immediate attention; the lids of many of the coffins are but very little, if any, below the surface, and covered with but a few inches of earth; the stench arising from the burying ground is sensibly observed on t
he left of the dragoons.”

  Missing from Bentley’s report was anything about the food being prepared in the filthy kitchens, and that caused more complaints from soldiers than the filth. No one disputed that the flour was “generally mouldy, lumpy and sour” and infested with mealie bugs and worms, and that the bread was no better. The salted meat, usually pork, turned out to be a rusty brown color when it was ladled out of the barrel and often covered in mold, while the fresh meat, taken from cattle slaughtered close to the camp, was stringy and, on two occasions, proved so inedible that the provisioning officers took the salt meat instead.

  Selfish and greedy though he was, Wilkinson responded quickly to Bentley’s findings. He transferred his headquarters from New Orleans to be onsite and ordered new drains to be dug, and shading to be constructed for the guard posts and on the paths between the tents. He also overrode the existing food contract, ordering a hundred barrels of fresh flour, and regular supplies of fresh chickens for the sick.

  These measures, however, brought a compromising response from the food supplier, James Morrison: “You know whether the contract is profitable depends on the commander-in- chief . . . Be as serviceable to me as you can, where you are, keeping the public in view, and it may be in my power to be in some way serviceable to you . . . Should a part [of the flour] become unfit for use, I have directed [my agents] to purchase and mix with sweet flour so as to make it palatable. Don’t I pray you order an examination unless in the last resort.”

  On top of this witches’ brew of cheeseparing, military mismanagement, and bad weather came the intervention of William Eustis. In an apoplectic response to Wilkinson’s move downriver, the secretary of war issued a direct order “immediately to embark all the troops . . . and proceed to the high ground in the rear of Fort Adams and Natchez.” The months at Terre aux Boeufs saw 145 losses from death and desertion. In an operation that eventually saw the force lose more than 1,100 men, approximately 750 of them died or deserted after the move ordered by Eustis. At his court- martial, Wilkinson insisted, probably correctly, that had the men been left where they were, with the river level falling, the ground drying, and the food improving, it would have cost fewer lives. But he had gambled on the weather before, and lost.

  The navy, manned by militia sailors, had been ordered to provide all twenty-four of its gunboats to carry the army, but only supplied four. The military boats in Natchez that were supposed to supplement them turned out to be rotten and unseaworthy. Accordingly the troops were crammed onto the few boats that could be hired in New Orleans and, with agonizing slowness, were rowed upstream in the sultry summer heat. One regiment as well as the sickest on board were left behind in New Orleans, and another hundred invalids were put ashore at the army post at Pointe Coupee. Not until mid-October did the first boats reach Fort Washington behind Fort Adams, and the remainder were landed at Natchez near the end of the month. More than two hundred men had succumbed on the boats, but weakened by disease and recurrent fevers, including malaria, another five hundred died after they reached dry land.

  Inevitably, the officer in charge of such a catastrophe would face a public inquiry. On December 19, 1809, before any conclusion was reached, President Madison suspended General James Wilkinson from command of the U.S. army pending the outcome of a congressional investigation.

  28

  MADISON’S ACCUSATIONS

  ICONFESS, THE STRENGTH of my mind was shaken,” James Wilkinson admitted when he learned of President James Madison’s decision. For the first time in his career, the general had no allies in government. He faced an unfriendly Congress, and an administration that was downright hostile. Yet he soon recovered his mental alertness, thanks to a sense of “conscious rectitude, an implicit reliance on my Creator, an invincible flow of animal spirits, and a firmness of resolution which had supported me under almost every vicissitude of human life.” Of these, the flow of animal spirits, meaning his remorseless, bounding energy, counted for most. That was apparent in early 1810, once command had formally been handed over to Brigadier Wade Hampton in Natchez. Instead of heading straight for Washington, Wilkinson first turned south for New Orleans and the embrace of Celestine Trudeau.

  They were married on March 5. The ceremony took place in the chapel of the fashionable Ursuline nuns who, the groom must have been uneasily aware, had been enthusiastic supporters of Aaron Burr’s. The honeymoon was brief, but indubitably passionate since Celestine bore him a daughter nine months later. Yet not even a young bride could keep him away from the battle to save his career. Less than a week after they were married, he sailed for Washington, and he and his wife would not see each other again for more than two years.

  The long delay in bringing him to face a court was largely deliberate, a device adopted by Madison and Eustis to force him out of the army, but the process was also slowed by the long list of offenses that required investigation. During the disastrous summer of 1809, Daniel Clark’s Proofs of the Corruption of General Wilkinson and His Connexion with Aaron Burr had been published, containing every document that Clark and Power could unearth in New Orleans that pointed to the general’s guilt. Although the Spanish records escaped them, the impact was more powerful than their piecemeal presentation the previous year. Accordingly Congress appointed two committees to investigate the separate issues of the general’s role as a Spanish agent, and his responsibility for the army’s loss of life.

  Both eventually reported in February 1811. Within military circles, the more potentially damaging was the inquiry into the debacle at Terre aux Boeufs. To his frustration, the general was not allowed to appear personally, and witnesses who testified to filthy conditions and poor food were not cross- examined. The imputation that Wilkinson alone was to blame was thus left unchallenged except by one balky member of the committee, William Crawford of Pennsylvania. Convinced that other factors must be involved since almost three quarters of the deaths had occurred after leaving the camp, Crawford voted against recommending action against the general. Presented with a confused report, Congress decided simply to ignore it. The second committee under Ezekiel Bacon made no recommendation but passed directly to the executive the voluminous and familiar evidence that Daniel Clark had assembled about the general’s connections to Spain.

  Unlike their predecessors, neither President Madison nor Secretary of War Eustis had any intention of rescuing the general. For ten weeks, he was left in limbo, apart from an informal suggestion that he should return to New Orleans to be with Celestine “and wait there the farther pleasure of the House of Representatives, without the resumption of my command.” The general indignantly refused, declaring that “sooner than consent to such a degradation, I would bare my bosom to the fire of a platoon.” Eventually, eighteen months after his suspension, public pressure from both his friends and enemies to have him brought to trial at last forced the secretary of war to agree to a meeting on May 14, 1811.

  “Mr. Eustis received me with great cordiality,” Wilkinson recorded, “and pressed my hand, until it almost ached.” With the same apparent friendliness, Eustis explained smoothly that “the President felt for my situation very sensibly, and felt every disposition to do me justice; that on the score of the Burr business, I stood perfectly acquitted, and in relation to the Spanish business, he was also satisfied.” Nevertheless, Eustis continued, the awkward problem created by Ellicott’s information about his spying still remained. Eustis hoped that the general might agree it needed to be cleared up, “but that this was a mere suggestion, which he offered to my consideration.” Turning to Terre aux Boeufs, Eustis acknowledged the president’s wish for a third inquiry, this time under military auspices, in order “to satisfy the public mind, vindicate your character, and justify your conduct.” It should take place, the secretary recommended, in New Orleans, far away from Washington.

  As a master of military maneuvering, Wilkinson had no difficulty in perceiving the opportunities and pitfalls in this proposal. Without hesitation, he accepted the sugge
sted inquiry and insisted that its scope should be as wide as possible. Although Celestine’s absence caused “the keenest pangs which crossed my bosom,” he also stipulated that it should take place on the Atlantic coast close to the center of power rather than in her home city. Madison agreed to these conditions, and on June 1, 1811, Wilkinson was ordered to stand trial at a court- martial, accused of aiding the Burr conspiracy, accepting a pension from the Spanish government, and being responsible for the disaster at Terre aux Boeufs.

  By the time he entered the courthouse in Fredericktown, Maryland, the general faced an astonishing list of eight different charges, subdivided into twenty-five specific offenses. Chronologically they covered events from 1787 through 1809, and in seriousness from the waste of public money to disobedience to orders, which was punishable by death. In defiance of natural justice, they ignored the statute of limitations, ignored the double- jeopardy prohibition against being tried twice for the same alleged offense, and admitted hearsay evidence. Wilkinson made no objection and even encouraged the government to spread its net wide. This should have made Madison and Eustis pause for thought.

  In May 1811, Wilkinson completed his first memoirs, entitled Burr’s Conspiracy exposed and General Wilkinson vindicated against the slanders of his enemies. The book was in many ways a rehearsal of the case he would make at his court- martial. In it he painted a picture of himself as a former friend of Burr’s, taken by surprise when the conspiracy became clear, but motivated at all times by upright, unshakable patriotism, and unjustly criticized by malignant enemies. From the opening paragraphs where he described himself as “persecuted to the verge of destruction, without a dawn of relief, his humble fortune ruined and his domestic happiness blasted, for his fidelity to his country,” he adopted a tone of wounded innocence that was too contrived to be wholly believable. But as always, the posturing deflected attention from his cleverness.