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

by Andro Linklater

  IN JANUARY 1813, on the shaky grounds that the Spanish- held remnant of West Florida was part of the Louisiana Purchase, Congress authorized its seizure. In effect, this meant capturing Mobile, the capital. With maps drawn years earlier by Andrew Ellicott, and notes and sketches from his personal observations, Wilkinson had the intelligence to plan his attack with care. Supplies were concentrated upstream at Fort Stoddert on the Mobile River, a squadron of gunboats was readied for an attack from the sea, and in late March the general divided the twelve hundred men he had available into an overland detachment under Colonel John Bowyer and a seaborne force under his personal command.

  His preparation was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Andrew Jackson at the head of three thousand Tennessee volunteers, ready to undertake the invasion of the Floridas he must have discussed with Aaron Burr. On this occasion, John Armstrong frustrated the plan by ordering Jackson to disband the volunteers. Rather than obey this command, Jackson earned himself a devoted following and his imperishable nickname of Old Hickory by marching them back to Nashville intact. Their absence left Wilkinson free to achieve his goal with his original force.

  Although on a miniature scale, his pincer movement with four hundred land troops under Colonel Bowyer coming down the Mobile River and a seaborne force of eight hundred coming ashore from gunboats was almost perfectly executed. Its only flaw occurred when the oarsmen rowing Wilkinson across Lake Pontchartrain equalized the boat, leaving the fifty-six-year-old general, his staff, and boatmen clinging to the upturned hull for several hours until rescued by passing fishermen. Before dawn on April 12, Bowyer’s troops deployed opposite Fort Charlotte, and at daylight troops from the second and third regiments landed from gunboats in the bay. As Wilkinson’s report boasted, the sleepy garrison realized they were surrounded only when they were awoken by the sound of bugles blowing outside.

  Later that morning Wilkinson sent the Spanish commander, Cayetano Perez, a diplomatic message saying that they came “not as the enemies of Spain, but on the order of the President to relieve the garrison which you command from the occupancy of a post within the legitimate limits of [the United] States.” On April 15, Perez and his garrison surrendered and were shipped along the coast by American gunboats to Pensacola, where Wilkinson’s old friend Vizente Folch was waiting to receive them. The very ease of it detracted from Wilkinson’s achievement. But what might have happened had things gone wrong was illustrated eighteen months later when a garrison of barely a hundred soldiers in the wooden fort that Bowyer had constructed was able to hold off a seaborne assault by a squadron of four British warships with more than a thousand men on board and drive one of their frigates ashore. As it was, Wilkinson’s bloodless operation secured the entire coastal region as far east as the Perdido River, the present border between Alabama and Florida, and represented the only territorial gains that the United States made in the entire war.

  On May 19, Wilkinson returned to New Orleans a hero, and waiting for him was a reward— his promotion, after twenty- one years as a brigadier, to major general. The secretary of war had in fact already recommended the higher rank before news of Mobile’s capture reached Washington. But Armstrong had in mind a still greater prize, as he was replacing General Henry Dearborn in command of the Ninth War District, comprising the Canadian border from Lake Erie to the Atlantic— the area of operations where the war could be won or lost. Accordingly the new major general was ordered to report immediately to the capital, and accompanying the official message, John Armstrong sent a flattering personal letter reminding Wilkinson of their participation in the great victory of 1777. “Why should you remain in your land of cypress,” the secretary wrote, “when patriotism and ambition equally invite you to one where grows the laurel? . . . Come to the north and come quickly. If our cards be well played we may renew the scenes of Saratoga.”

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  THE LAST BATTLE

  IN THE DE CADES THAT HAD PASSED since the victory at Saratoga, Armstrong had grown bald, Wilkinson gray-haired. Neither had the vigor of their youth, but Armstrong, who had never exercised independent command, still ached to do so. On the other hand, the effervescent Wilky, who had inspired Gates and kept a chaotic headquarters in order, seemed to have grown tired at last. Psychologically he had been whipped by Madison and Eustis, and physically a fever he had contracted at Terre aux Boeufs had left its mark. The three doctors who examined him at the time all agreed that the illness was serious, one reporting that he had suffered “violent paroxysms.” To reduce the fever, Wilkinson had been bled five times. He also had to use laudanum heavily.

  Composed of drops of morphine mixed with sweet wine, laudanum was widely prescribed not only to provide relief from pain but as an antidote to fevers, insomnia, and loose bowels. But Wilkinson first took it after Saratoga specifically to relieve stress. Although the general liked to refer to his “iron constitution,” at times of tension he was almost invariably afflicted by diarrhea, and even today laudanum is prescribed as its antidote. He used the drug periodically throughout his career, but after Terre aux Boeufs, when all his doctors commented on his extreme anxiety, his consumption became habitual. With this change came an increasingly clear pattern of lassitude and depression alternating with high energy and application.

  Replying to Armstrong, Wilkinson attempted his familiar, upbeat style: “I receive the order with pleasure and shall obey it with alacrity because it may furnish a more favorable opportunity than I can find elsewhere to testify to the world my readiness to offer my best faculties and to lay down my life if necessary for the honor and independence of our country.” But physically he conveyed a different message.

  Celestine, “my divine little Creole,” as he complacently described her to his middle- aged friends, was pregnant, making his reluctance to move north understandable. When he did so on June 10, he took with him both Celestine and her sister, traveling first to Mobile, where his son James Biddle was stationed, then across country to Milledgeville, Georgia. The large party, slowed by Celestine’s condition and the general’s desire for comfort, took a month to bounce along the federal road.

  In Georgia’s capital, he learned of the first American success in the north when General William Harrison and Commander Oliver Perry seized control of Detroit and Lake Erie in the west, and Dearborn captured the British strongpoint Fort George in the center between Lakes Erie and Ontario. But for Wilkinson the triumph was shrouded by news of the heroic death of his protégé and ideal son, General Zebulon Pike, killed while leading his troops in a seaborne assault on York, subsequently renamed Toronto, the capital of Upper Canada. Sorrowfully Wilkinson wrote to his contemporary Morgan Lewis, once New York’s governor, now a major general, lamenting Pike’s courageous impetuosity. It was contrary to the lesson taught by Napoléon, that “a general officer does not expose his person but in the last resort,” Wilkinson told Lewis. “Subordinates execute, while chiefs command; to mingle in the conflict is to abandon the power of direction.”

  On August 3, almost six weeks after Armstrong told him to come north, Major General James Wilkinson met the secretary of war and learned that he was to be given the supreme command on the Canadian frontier. It offered the opportunity to win undying glory by leading his nation’s army to victory and driving the British out of North America. This was the ultimate reward any soldier could hope for, an accolade for years of service to his country. And for Wilkinson in particular, it offered the chance of redemption for a life soiled with accusations of iniquity.

  Almost immediately, however, Wilkinson sensed a coolness in the secretary’s manner. Its origin lay in the letter Wilkinson had sent to Lewis through the War Department. Armstrong had read its contents and decided that its commonsense advice about generals remaining above the fray was that of a coward. As he expostulated to the astonished Wilkinson, it “struck at the very foundation of military character and service and . . . was calculated to bring shame and dishonour upon the American arms.” The suspicion of Wilkinso
n’s cowardice, once formed, proved almost impossible to shift. Whatever the supreme commander suggested thereafter appeared to Armstrong to arise from his reluctance to expose himself to danger.

  On July 23 the secretary of war had formulated a new strategy for the invasion of Canada. In place of the original, failed idea of invading at three widely separated points, he proposed to concentrate forces at Sackets Harbor, a natural haven at the east end of Lake Ontario, close to the entrance to the St. Lawrence River, and opposite the major British supply base at Kingston in Canada. He would then leave it up to Wilkinson to choose whether to capture Kingston or to sail straight down the St. Lawrence and seize Montreal. Armstrong’s proposal made no reference to the practicalities of command structure, supply lines, equipment, weather, or enemy strength. It assumed that the naval squadron under Commodore Isaac Chauncey had established control of Lake Ontario. It concluded that circumstances offered a unique opportunity that had to be grasped at once to end the war before Christmas.

  Realistically, Wilkinson asked for more details about his own command, in particular about his relationship to Hampton, senior as a major general but junior for the proposed invasion. He also questioned the assumption that Chauncey had control of the lake. Aware that disheartened troops needed to be built up in morale, training, and experience after the first disastrous year of war, Wilkinson suggested that the campaign should begin with a series of small operations to exploit General Harrison’s success at the west end of Lake Ontario, where British defenses were weakest. Still unconscious of Armstrong’s doubts about his courage, he concluded, “These suggestions spring from my desire to hazard as little as possible in the outset, and to secure infallibly whatever may be attempted, with the intention to increase our own confidence, to diminish that of the enemy, and to popularise the war.”

  Convinced that the general lacked nerve, Armstrong brushed away this cautious strategy and the rationale of rebuilding skills and morale. The choice, he explained, was simply between taking Kingston or going straight down the St. Lawrence. Either plan would leave the U.S. army in control of the river and force the enemy “to fight his way to Quebec, to perish in the attempt, or to lay down his arms.” At that moment, Wilkinson may have guessed that he was being handed a poisoned chalice. The problem did not lie in Armstrong’s strategy of cutting the St. Lawrence, the vital artery linking Lower Canada in the east to Upper Canada in the west, but in his failure to appreciate the means needed to achieve that end.

  From Eustis, Armstrong had inherited a crippling range of organizational failings created by the lack of staff officers, inefficient supply arrangements, and a chaotic system of recruitment that was further handicapped by the refusal of Massachusetts and Connecticut to muster their militia for the war. As a result, barely thirteen thousand soldiers of the twenty-five thousand on the muster list were available for service. Of those the great majority were new recruits with barely a year’s training, and the acerbic Winfield Scott judged their officers to be “imbeciles and ignoramuses.” Promotion through seniority resulted in Wilkinson’s being surrounded by a generation of brigadiers and colonels as gray-haired as himself who lacked the vigor and abrasive drive to make an inefficient organization produce wagons, weapons, and reinforcements.

  Armstrong’s attention to these systemic weaknesses was spasmodic and ineffective. Of most immediate concern to Wilkinson, Armstrong not only failed to clear up the confusion of Hampton’s role, but allowed General Lewis, Wilkinson’s second-in- command, to go on leave for a month just before the operation began and appointed as his quartermaster general Robert Swartwout, brother of Burr’s lieutenant, who would only take the post part-time. The project that aroused the secretary of war’s real enthusiasm was planning the assault on Kingston.

  In August, General Wilkinson traveled up the Hudson River and across country to Sackets Harbor, and on the twenty-fifth he held a council of war to decide which of Armstrong’s two plans of attack should be adopted. The council was attended by Morgan Lewis, Swartwout, and the most dynamic officer in Wilkinson’s army, Jacob Brown, whose religion and aggressive leadership won him the nickname the Fighting Quaker. The fifth member of the council, Commodore Isaac Chauncey, was, next to Wilkinson himself, the most important.

  Since the attack on Kingston would require the army to be shipped across the open waters of Lake Ontario, Chauncey’s squadron of eight vessels had to establish complete dominance over the British. They had shown their superiority each time the two fleets had met, but the British vessels were still at large. However, the decision was unexpectedly simplified when Swartwout announced that only twenty- five boats were available to carry Wilkinson’s soldiers to Kingston instead of the three hundred that were needed. Unanimously, the council decided the army should march down the banks of the St. Lawrence to attack Montreal, leaving Chauncey’s fleet with the task of guarding its entrance against British warships. Once the target was chosen, Wilkinson sent orders to Hampton on Lake Champlain to be ready to move against Montreal from the south.

  For the first time since his appointment, the general’s spirits soared. “All things go well here,” he assured Armstrong the following day. Within a short time, he expected Chauncey to defeat the British, his men to become healthy, and Hampton to communicate with him: “I hope he does not mean to take the stud [start sulking]. But if so, we can do without him, and he should be sent home.”

  Nothing was quite as simple as Wilkinson in his burst of optimism imagined. Almost half his forces, thirty-five hundred men, were located at Fort George, near Niagara at the west end of the lake. Despite all efforts, Chauncey proved unable to trap the British squadron. One in three of the troops at Sackets Harbor remained sick. Transportation was crippled by a lack of boats and horses. The summer was coming to an end. And Hampton had unmistakably taken the stud, not only refusing to reply to Wilkinson’s messages, but complaining to Armstrong that his “command instead of being a separate one has sunk within that of a district.” To mollify him, Armstrong secretly promised that he intended to take personal command of the operation, then assured Wilkinson that Hampton and his four thousand troops would cooperate “cordially and vigorously.”

  None of these concerns affected Wilkinson’s mood. He hired a spy to report on British positions in Kingston. He ordered the construction of a dozen large keelboats capable of carrying sixty men each. He was in command with people around him to execute his orders, and as always the sensation restored his confidence. In that rejuvenated state of mind, he decided to go in person to Fort George to hurry the transportation of the troops there back to Sackets Harbor. It entailed a journey of about 130 miles in an open boat, but the incompetence of the Fort George commander, Brigadier General John Boyd, described by Winfield Scott as “vacillating and imbecile beyond all endurance,” made Wilkinson’s presence necessary.

  As the fall approached, time had become vital. Without the supreme commander’s personal intervention, Boyd would certainly fail to bring his soldiers east before the weather broke. Armstrong’s intention to visit Sackets Harbor at the end of the month might also have made escape attractive. “Two heads on the same shoulder,” Wilkinson commented, “make a monster.”

  The voyage turned out to be a disaster. For six days he was exposed to sun, rain, and wind. By the time he arrived at Fort George, he was shivering with fever. For the next ten days he was confined to his bed, forced to dictate orders while suffering “much depression of head and stomach.” On September 16 he told Armstrong, “I have escaped my pallet and with a giddy head and trembling hand will scrawl you a few lines,” and most of what followed was devoted to listing the complex problem of transporting several thousand soldiers from one end of the lake to the other. The next day, his health was better, and he returned to his original idea of beginning the campaign with small- scale operations in the west. The British he noted had barely sixteen hundred combatant soldiers opposite him, and, he told Armstrong, he was tempted to have “a sweep at them.” Peremptor
ily Armstrong replied, “Let not the great objects of the campaign be hazarded,” and ordered him to return to Sackets Harbor as quickly as possible.

  In the little ice age of the early nineteenth century, the onset of fall and winter came early. By late September, the weather was rapidly deteriorating, and for days contrary winds delayed the fleet of transports that Wilkinson had finally assembled. Not until early October was he able to sail back into the secluded waters of Sackets Harbor. There he found that he had been comprehensively second-guessed by Armstrong. Sweeping aside the council of war’s plans to move directly down the St. Lawrence against Montreal, the secretary of war had substituted his own project for attacking Kingston. The terse entry in Armstrong’s journal for October 4 told its own story: “General Wilkinson arrived this day in Sackett’s Harbor from Fort George. He immediately visited the Secretary of War in the company of Generals Lewis and Brown, and in the presence of these officers remonstrated freely and warmly against making an attack on Kingston.”

  Wilkinson’s fury at having the council of war’s choice overturned had no more effect than his detailed argument that the lack of transport, the certainty of casualties, and the worsening weather made it impossible to assault both Kingston and Montreal. Armstrong was immovable. He had personally developed a detailed plan for capturing Kingston and insisted on its being carried out. A healthy Wilkinson would have fought back. Before Eustis broke his confidence, he had run rings round secretaries of war. Now, weakened by his illness in Fort George, he collapsed, physically and emotionally, and took to his bed.

  While he lay there, the first autumn storms arrived, ten days of unremitting wind. Fearful that winter snows would soon follow, leaving too little time to reach Montreal, Wilkinson agreed on October 19 that his army should attack Kingston. Forty-eight hours later, with maddening perversity, Armstrong decided that Kingston should be canceled because the weather was too severe and the risks too high, and its failure “would extinguish every hope of grasping the other, the safer, the greater object.”