Wilkinson learned of this latest twist as he was organizing the embarkation of troops for Kingston and, as he admitted, “in my feeble condition,” could hardly do justice to his emotions. In the end, he felt capable only of demanding from the secretary of war a final, clear order “to direct the operations of my army particularly against Montreal.” He must have known that the operation, harassed by British troops, overlooked by British fortifications, lacking supplies, plans, and intelligence, and at the mercy of the approaching winter, had only a slim chance of success.
Gales out of the northwest made it perilous even to round the cape guarding Sackets Harbor to reach the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Boats were wrecked, soldiers drowned, ammunition lost, and rations ruined. November had come before the fleet of about three hundred vessels at last assembled in the river. By then disease and the diversion of men to other projects had reduced a projected army of more than twelve thousand by a third. Any hope of surprise had been blown away by the long delays caused by the storm. Chauncey proved unable to prevent British gunboats from following them into the St. Lawrence, and British troops allocated to the defense of Kingston were hurried along the riverbank to reinforce the strongpoint at Prescott, halfway to their target, and to harass Wilkinson’s army as it moved toward Montreal.
Yet with a strong column of about twenty- five hundred men including cavalry under Brown’s vigorous command on the north bank, artillery and almost four thousand soldiers on the boats, and another smaller force led by Swartwout on the south bank, Wilkinson’s force was greater than anything the British could put up in opposition. Once Hampton’s regulars and a promised fifteen hundred New York militia were added, their dominance would become overwhelming. The capture of Montreal was not impossible.
The one essential ingredient was forceful leadership. The general’s first test, passing by the fortified town of Prescott that overlooked the river, was successfully negotiated on November 5. Wilkinson had the powder and ammunition transferred from the boats into wagons, then, leaving only skeleton crews aboard, he ordered the fleet to drift down on the current at dead of night and led them himself in an open gig. The moon appearing through a gap in the clouds revealed some vessels to the sentries, but despite a rattle of fire the boats came through with only one casualty. Ahead lay an eight-mile rapid known as the Longue Saut, and beyond that thirty miles of open river to their target.
But the general’s once galvanizing energy was only feebly apparent. For much of the time he veered between two extremes, prostrated in his bunk with a fever that might have been flu or malaria, alternating with periods when, according to the testimony of his fellow general, Morgan Lewis, he “seemed to be in high spirits, which I considered to be assumed to inspire confidence.” To many, however, and in particular to Colonel William King, a messenger from General Hampton, his unpredictable behavior suggested that he was drunk.
King based his suspicions on an encounter with Wilkinson on November 6, the day after passing Prescott, on board the general’s boat. He brought bad news from Hampton and approached Lewis first to ask “whether the old gentleman would be found in a good humour.” General Lewis, who was himself frequently laid low with stomach pains and dysentery, restricted himself to the cold reply that “he might perhaps find the general a little petulant from his indisposition.”
But Wilkinson’s reaction went beyond petulance. When King revealed that three weeks earlier Hampton at the head of twenty- six hundred infantry, cavalry, and artillery regulars had let himself be driven back from the river Chateaugay by a numerically inferior force of sixteen hundred Canadian militia and volunteers, Wilkinson exploded, “Damn such an army! A man might as well be in hell as command it.” Angrily he gave King an order for Hampton to rendezvous with him outside Montreal without fail, and to carry enough supplies for both their armies.
There were other reports of erratic behavior. Colonel Joseph G. Swift, a talented engineer, acknowledged that “under the influence of laudanaum the general became very merry and sang and repeated stories,” but insisted “the only evil of which was that it was not of the dignified deportment to be expected from the commander in chief.” Nevertheless, added to the shouting match with Armstrong at Sackets Harbor, the rumors of intoxication undermined confidence. In retrospect, however, the frustration of seeing the last faint chances of success being relentlessly chipped away must have done more damage to his temper than any drug. Armstrong had also fallen sick at the end of October and formally handed over command of the Montreal operation to Wilkinson. If the expedition failed, there could be no doubt where the blame would fall.
UNTIL NOVEMBER 10, Wilkinson kept a flickering hope of success alive. On land and water British forces maintained a harassing pursuit of the army. Despite his sickness, Wilkinson continued to be sufficiently energetic to keep them at bay. On two occasions, enemy schooners and galleys that had slipped past Chauncey’s uncertain defenses were rapidly turned back by fire from a battery of heavy guns Wilkinson ordered to be unshipped and placed on the bank. On the north side of the river, Brown could always be relied on to outflank and drive off any would- be ambushers. As they approached the rapids of the Longue Saut, however, the boats threatened to race ahead of the marching soldiers, and to slow them down Wilkinson ordered them to anchor early. Overcome by a return of his fever, he took to his bed and gave command to Lewis. Meanwhile Jacob Brown went ahead to explore the land alongside the rapids, leaving John Boyd in command on the north side of the river. The delay also allowed a British pursuing force of about fifteen hundred regulars and militia under Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Morrison to catch up.
Late in the afternoon of that gray, overcast day, Boyd launched a series of ill-organized and uncoordinated attacks against Morrison’s strongly held defensive position on the perimeter of some open ground known as Crysler’s Field. By nightfall, 321 of Boyd’s 3,000-strong force had been killed or wounded, and the survivors were forced to retreat to the river.
Subdued and sullen, Wilkinson’s men boarded the boats, and the next day the long line of vessels hurtled down the rapids. Waiting at the foot of the Longue Saut was another messenger from Wade Hampton. He had one final blow to deliver. Instead of marching toward Montreal as ordered, Hampton had turned back to Lake Champlain, where he intended to go into winter quarters. On November 16 Wilkinson submitted this news to a council of senior officers. Unanimously they agreed that “the attack on Montreal should be suspended for the present season.”
THERE COULD BE NO COMING BACK. He had been given the chance of winning the war and had failed. From Albany, Secretary of War John Armstrong wrote that he found it “quite incredible” that Wilkinson should have been defeated by an inferior force, adding, shamelessly, that if only Wilkinson had taken Kingston, “the upper province [of Canada] was won.” Desperately the general replied by laying the blame on Hampton’s refusal to obey orders and demanded he be arrested for his “outrage of every principle of subordination and discipline.” But it was a useless appeal. Hampton had already resigned, and Wilkinson’s tainted reputation was against him. A man already charged with responsibility for Terre aux Boeufs, participation in the Burr Conspiracy, and being a Spanish pensioner could hardly expect the public to believe he had nothing to do with the failure of the Montreal expedition.
Through the winter, his army shivered and sickened in makeshift huts constructed in the forest by French Mills, now Fort Covington, just south of the St. Lawrence. Inexplicably Hampton had furloughed all his officers before resigning himself. The confusion that ensued cut off supplies of food and medicine coming from Albany. Pneumonia, dysentery, and typhus spread until, as Wilkinson himself admitted, “The mortality spread so deep a gloom over our camps, that funeral dirges were countermanded.” On his own responsibility, the general rented buildings to accommodate 450 patients in the settlement of Malone, ten miles to the south where he had his headquarters. But a steady stream of deserters testified to the demoralization of his army. On January 27, 1814, a
n official tally of the force at French Mills showed that of the 8,143 men who had left Sackets Harbor, only 4,777 remained ready for duty.
Nevertheless, in a final bid to escape the impending wreck of his career, the general searched for a last- ditch victory. Unable to ride because of his illness, he had himself towed in a sled “on which a box is placed to receive my bed” to Plattsburgh to discuss a winter offensive with General George Izard, who had been drafted to replace Hampton. From there Wilkinson went on to Albany to suggest to New York governor Daniel Tompkins an attack on Prescott, using the combined forces at French Mills and Plattsburgh, bulked up with New York militia. Tompkins, who had been warned by John Armstrong to expect a sick old man on the edge of resignation, was surprised by the veteran’s unabated forcefulness. “He threatens to make a dash soon,” he told Armstrong after the meeting. “I have great confidence in your penetration upon most subjects, but I fear you have not formed a correct judgment of the General’s talents and qualifications. He is wonderfully tenacious of his authority and is very indifferent about his old carcass, and vapours too much.”
Determined to prevent the general from exercising command again, Armstrong immediately ordered General Jacob Brown to take two thousand men from French Mills back to Sackets Harbor and withdrew the rest to Plattsburgh. Wilkinson protested that this order “blasted all my hopes, subjected the public to millions of expense, [and] sacrificed thrice the number of men Prescott would have cost.” As he had done throughout his career, he responded by demanding a public inquiry, then, without waiting for Armstrong’s reply, fixed on another, less ambitious target. This was a strongpoint called La Colle Mill, situated thirty miles farther down the Champlain Valley, whose capture would open the road to Montreal.
On March 29, a force of 3,999 men accompanied by eleven guns marched north from Plattsburgh. For the last time in his career, the general issued a stirring order—“Every officer and every man [must] return victorious or not at all, for with double the force of the enemy, this army must not give ground”—but for the first time in his career, he neglected intelligence. Without maps, his inexperienced scouts became lost, and the heaviest of his artillery, the eighteen-pounders, sank axle-deep in slushy mud.
Not until late on March 30 did the first men reach the target, an imposing, stone- built mill with stone walls on either side offering protection to the six hundred defenders. From about 150 yards, the attackers fired their muskets, and when they proved ineffective, the lighter guns, twelve-pounders, were brought up. Once it became clear that their shot could do no more than chip the stone walls, the conflict descended into stalemate until at dusk Wilkinson ordered his men to withdraw. Two days later, the last of his force dragged the guns back into camp. Even before the expedition had left Plattsburgh, orders had been sent from Washington relieving him of his command pending a court- martial. Thus the military career of Major General James Wilkinson ended with a whimper on April Fools’ Day.
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THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD
THE COURT- MARTIAL ORDERED for the general’s failure on the Canadian frontier was the third military tribunal he had faced. On top of that, he had already been subjected to four congressional investigations into allegations of misdeeds, and two more unofficial trawls through his past by Luther Martin and Daniel Clark. Despite the wealth of allegations against him, he had not yet been found guilty, and it was said of him with increasing frequency that he had never won a battle but never lost an inquiry. The sheer number of probes testified to his public reputation among contemporaries, and from the perspective of two hundred years it is tempting to regard them as rough justice, a way of getting even for the undoubted lies he told to conceal his actions as a Spanish agent.
Yet with the hindsight of history, what seems overwhelmingly obvious is that the wrong accusations were leveled against him. Even the one charge of which he was certainly guilty, covert treachery to the United States, was less damaging than his overt and repeated betrayal of the army. Yet no court could try him for acquiescence in its political neutering and financial strangulation because the instigators were Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.
Thus when John Armstrong drew up the list of charges for Wilkinson’s third court-martial, they ranged from his failure to ensure the army’s swift departure from Fort George and Sackets Harbor through the fiasco at La Colle Mill, and for good measure included drunkenness, conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, publicly disparaging the army, and cowardice. Those, however, were not the crimes with which he should have been charged. The war itself, the ultimate prosecutor and judge of military misdoings, revealed where he was truly culpable. The humiliations of 1812 and 1813 would not end until a properly funded, professionally trained army took the place of the starved constabulary that Jefferson and Madison had espoused. Wilkinson should have been tried for colluding with his political masters.
The first attempt to organize a court- martial a month after his suspension from duty collapsed when he protested that of the five officers available to try him, only three were generals. “General Wilkinson declines being tried by a court of the smallest legal number unless wholly composed of General officers,” Armstrong regretfully explained to the president, “and the court not being so composed was dissolved.” It left Wilkinson, as he assured his friend Solomon van Rensselaer, “quite at ease, a man at large, and a Maj. Gen. without a command.” Leaving Albany, he and van Rensselaer made a poignant visit to the hillsides of Saratoga, where Wilkinson had first tasted real military glory. From there he traveled by steamboat down the Hudson to New York City, where another friend, General Morgan Lewis, in charge of the city’s defenses, welcomed him. In June, he at last rejoined the divine Celestine in Frederick, Maryland, but no one could suppose that Wilkinson would be at ease until his trial took place.
During the summer, he and Celestine suffered the loss of their seven-month-old girl, Marie, who had been born in November 1813 while the general was in the north. For Wilkinson, it was in a sense a double tragedy, because the girl had taken the place of James Biddle, killed two months earlier on September 17 in Florida on active service. Yet the general’s grief was soon dissipated by the larger shock of a British fleet sailing into Chesapeake Bay.
As early as July 17, 1814, Wilkinson was convinced that British threats of retaliation for the burning of the Parliament House in York were more than mere words and had raged that Armstrong’s “malignant spirit” prevented him from taking any action to defend the capital. The secretary of war himself firmly denied that Washington was in danger, although he had seen the ships sail into the Patuxent River. “They certainly do not come here!” he insisted. “What the devil will they do here? No! No! Baltimore’s the place.” On August 17, while General William H. Winder in command of six thousand militia still debated whether to throw up defenses on the Bladensburg road leading into the city, and Armstrong remained incapable of recommending any action, Wilkinson pleaded with the secretary of state, James Monroe, to be allowed to intervene: “Could my arrest be suspended and my sword restored for a short period, I would take command of the militia and save the city or forfeit my life.”
There was no reply. On August 24, in less than three hours, General Robert Ross’s column of forty-five hundred British regulars scattered Winder’s force from the vital Bladensburg bridge, which had been left unfortified and intact. By nightfall, flames were rising from the Capitol. In the aftermath of the catastrophe, Armstrong at last resigned, leaving James Monroe to run the War and State departments in tandem.
In such circumstances, the task of finding enough generals for Wilkinson’s court-martial hardly ranked as a priority. It was not until November, after the general had sent Madison a personal letter begging for his trial to begin, that a date was set. The place selected was Utica, New York, uncomfortable and cold in winter, but convenient for the senior officers of the Ninth Military District, who would have to attend. On January 3, 1815, General Henry Dearborn op
ened the proceedings of a court-martial made up of six other generals and six colonels and prepared to listen to one of the most experienced and skillful military lawyers conduct his own defense. Everyone in the court knew the general, most had served with him, and some, such as General Morgan Lewis, were his friends. The man on trial was the incarnation of a military ethos discredited by the war, but since each of his judges had subscribed to the same compromised values, they were not likely to find him guilty.
At the outset, Wilkinson disposed of the danger presented by the special judge advocate appointed by Monroe to prosecute him, Martin Van Buren. Arguing that a civilian could have no standing in a military court, Wilkinson had the brilliant advocate thrown out, thus ensuring that he would not fall victim to unexpected legal booby traps. On the military charges, his defense was a straightforward claim that the handicaps imposed on the commander of the Montreal expedition by the weather, the secretary of war, and a treacherous colleague made success impossible. The official correspondence supported him, and Wilkinson had no difficulty in showing that the deficiencies of the supply system, patchily supervised by General Swart-wout among his other duties as an infantry brigadier, could not be blamed on the commander. And although the action at La Colle Mill undoubtedly could be, Wilkinson diminished its significance by suggesting his force was conducting an armed reconnaissance and simply turned back having discovered the enemy’s strength.
An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson Page 40