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

by Andro Linklater

  The more serious accusations Wilkinson had to face were the personal ones of intoxication, swearing, and cowardice. Yet here, too, the court was unlikely to find against him. The general’s record of taking harsh measures against drunkenness was well- known, and no one questioned his assertion that it was “a vice my soul detests and which I have always exerted my authority to eradicate from the army.” That he should instead have been taking laudanum, as Colonel Swift suggested, was a different matter. Not only did Swift testify that “the campaign was in no wise influenced” by its effects, every officer in court had at some time suffered from diarrhea and been forced to make use of the drug’s binding properties. Colonel King’s story about the general’s damning the army must have raised a secret smile among generals often driven to still worse profanities by subordinates who had let them down. As to the imputation of cowardice, four grizzled generals and colonels with more than a century of service among them testified to his courage, and Colonel Jacob Kingsbury recalled that at Fallen Timbers two aides standing next to the general had fallen to enemy fire while Wilkinson “had exposed himself more than necessary” to the bullets.

  The verdict of the court-martial delivered by General Henry Dearborn on March 21, 1815, was not a surprise: “He is hereby honourably acquitted of all and every one of the charges and specifications against him.” On April 15, this was formally approved by the president. But while the court was still in session, a more damning judgment had been brought in, not just on General James Wilkinson but on the entire era that he represented.

  IN DECEMBER 1814, the Treaty of Ghent brought an end to the disastrous war. Before the news arrived, General Andrew Jackson, defending a strong position in front of New Orleans with six thousand militia, routed an attack across open ground by eight thousand seasoned regulars led by General Edward Pakenham on January 8, 1815. His victory was taken by most civilians, and many historians, to be the war’s crowning achievement. For professional soldiers, however, what mattered in military terms was the change that took place in the north.

  During 1814, the experience of war coupled with an intense system of training instituted by General Winfield Scott had brought about a material change in the ability of the troops to withstand the shock of battle. It was first apparent at the battle of Chippewa on July 5, 1814, when the superiority of Scott’s troops in infantry maneuvers and artillery fire won what an exultant General Jacob Brown declared to be “the first victory gained over the enemy on a plain”—that is, without advantage of ground or surprise.

  Two weeks later, Scott’s soldiers, now led by Brown in person, took part in the bloodiest conflict of the war, the confusing, terrifying battle of Lundy’s Lane. There was no victory, but the uncompromising, disciplined gallantry the soldiers showed throughout most of a day when they were forced to fight on two sides, first in the front and then the rear, was, if anything, still more impressive. They matched the firepower and ferocity of British troops honed over fifteen years of war, volley for volley, and charge for charge, until nightfall and exhaustion brought the bloodshed to an indecisive end. No one could doubt the difference compared with the performance in previous engagements from Detroit to Crysler’s Field. As John Fortescue, the foremost authority on the nineteenth- century British army, admitted, “The British were beaten. It was evident that the experience of two campaigns had at last turned the Americans into soldiers who were not to be trifled with.”

  In earlier days, the gains might have been thrown away. Republican ideology demanded that a professional army be reduced to a skeleton, and defense entrusted to the mythical qualities of a citizen army. But at Bladensburg, a shocked Madison had seen with his own eyes the difference between professional soldiers and amateurs. “I could never have believed,” he exclaimed to a friend just before the White House was torched, “that so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force, if I had not witnessed the scenes of this day.”

  The proof that a new era had arrived lay in Congress’s belated willingness to accept that reality and the consequences that flowed from it. Although the peacetime army was reduced, its size of ten thousand men commanded by two major generals, and four brigadier generals, made swift expansion possible. The criterion for selecting officers was whether they were “competent to engage an enemy on the field of battle,” without reference to how they might vote. Under a new secretary of war, William Crawford, funding was provided for a permanent general staff to take responsibility for military organization, for an expanded military academy at West Point to train young officers in their profession, and for improved conditions and a uniform drill for new recruits. Much of their training was to be implemented by Scott, who by the time of his retirement in 1861 had set in motion the evolution of the modern U.S. army.

  The passing of the old guard was signaled by the dismissal of four fifths of the army’s existing officers. Their culling was brutal. A commission headed by General Jacob Brown removed an entire generation who had enlisted during the Revolution or in the first years of independence. Weeks after his appearance at Wilkinson’s trial, Jacob Kingsbury, a veteran from the Revolutionary War, was cut off without a pension, leaving him, as he movingly revealed, “at the advanced age of sixty turned out upon the world, destitute of support, with a large and helpless family, and can expect no relief but from the Government whom I have served faithfully for more than forty years.” To avoid starvation, Thomas Cushing, who had been at Wilkinson’s side at every crucial phase of his career, begged for employment as a justice of the peace.

  There was no place either for General James Wilkinson in this modern age. Like his old friends, he, too, was returned to civilian life without ceremony. But at least the executive felt obligated to find him some federal job—in which “no money is handled,” specified one administration official—that would provide a salary. “I am willing to do the best we can for Wilkinson,” Madison assured Monroe in May 1815, “and hope he will not frustrate our dispositions by insinuations or threats which must be defied.” The War Department even showed itself ready to accept his notoriously unreliable accounts for $3,317 of secret service expenditure, and for a further $7,700 spent on compensation for military damage and other unexpected costs. But nothing the executive offered him could make up for the wound that forcible retirement inflicted on his vanity.

  There was talk of a post with the navy in New York, a place on the boundary commission with Canada, and a job as commissioner of Indian affairs, but he rejected every suggestion, not politely but angrily. “General Wilkinson has broken through all decorum and indulges the most malignant rage in every conversation,” A. J. Dallas, Monroe’s deputy at the War Department, warned Madison. “He will leave Washington next week for active mischief elsewhere.”

  Dallas’s prediction was correct. The general’s finances made it folly to refuse these well-paid appointments, but Wilkinson was determined not to feel under an obligation to the administration that had dismissed him. What he wanted was revenge. He became a vocal member of the Association of Disbanded Officers, campaigning for pensions or lump- sum payoffs from the federal government. He wrote vituperative articles for William Duane’s anti-administration newspaper, Aurora, denouncing Madison for throwing old soldiers to the wolves,, and Monroe for “the disorganization of the army.” In New York, he was guest of honor at a Federalist Tammany Society dinner, where he was toasted as “The Hero of ’76 who sustains the principles of ’76, and who detected and exposed treason in its infancy,” and his speeches in response lambasted Madison’s administration for its vicious betrayal of the servants of the Revolution.

  But he had only one way to demonstrate how badly he had been treated. On October 28, 1815, a discreet announcement appeared in the newspapers: “Mr. Small of Philadelphia, has issued proposals for publishing, in 3 vols. 8vo. a work entitled—Memoirs of my own times, by James Wilkinson, late major-general in the service of the United States.” Three volumes, each of five hundred pages, would tell his and
the nation’s story from Bunker Hill onward.

  His research, like his reconnaissance, was detailed and prodigious. He had been in the habit of retaining all important letters, and making duplicates of his own correspondence, but now he began to badger friends, colleagues, and the clerks at the War Department for copies of letters sent and received. This, the third version of his memoirs, was the first to begin with his birth and early years. The theme of selfless patriotism betrayed by mean-minded politicians was apparent in its opening paragraph. “My youth furnished objections to my unsolicited promotion, and my age has since afforded President Madison a pretext for turning me out of the service,” he wrote with italicized emotion. “And thus it appears that from youth to age I have been a subject of persecution; yet it is my pride and my boast that my life has been devoted to my country.”

  There were no domestic distractions to his writing. In the summer of 1815, Celestine and her Trudeau entourage of sister and servants and slaves set sail for New Orleans. His young wife was pregnant again and anxious to be at home for the birth. Left alone, the general rented a house near Philadelphia, still the nation’s largest city, at the “3 mile Stone near the Red Hart [tavern] on the Road to the City.” Recovered in health, with something like his old ebullient vigor, he transported trunkfuls of documents to his new home and prepared to lash out at every enemy and repay every insult. The news created wide interest. Former governor of Pennsylvania Thomas McKean, a friend of John Adams’s, thought that with his experience “he is better qualified to give a description of the [Revolution] than any other gentleman I know.”

  Visitors to the Red Hart found the general hard at work, one of them leaving a sharp portrait of Wilkinson as author: “A short, (stout) man, round faced, remarkably active, put his hand on his horse’s saddle and sprang into it . . . He was in the midst of his paper, knee- deep, all around him on the floor. He was preparing his memoirs in vindication of himself.”

  For the first time in his life, he was forced to live economically, but as he boasted to Dearborn “most agreeably and independently at $5 a week.” Between assembling his book, he fired off letters to van Rensselaer, either denouncing Armstrong as a “rascal” and his successor, James Monroe, as a “big liar,” or fishing for a job as De Witt Clinton’s military adviser—“You will perceive I am still a temporizing office hunter,” he confessed. In January 1816, he achieved some financial security by persuading Maryland’s legislature to commute the half- pay due to him as a colonel in the Revolutionary War to a lump sum of thirty- five hundred dollars. But his real hopes rested on the book. Not only would it expose Madison’s treachery, but “protect my old age from penury.”

  The publication of the Memoirs in 1817 created an immediate impact. Aurora applauded the attack on the administration—“they unmask imposture in a spirit worthy of Sallust, and with an energy worthy of Tacitus”—and William Duane organized an author’s tour, where the general was guest of honor at a series of political dinners and introduced as “the meritorious persecuted veteran.” Wilkinson claimed that the first printing of fifteen hundred quickly sold out at $12.50 retail, and as a special deal $10 direct from the author. Recklessly he invested the profits in a second printing.

  Its virtues are less immediately obvious to a modern reader. The first volume of what begins as a conventional autobiography abruptly breaks off when he resigned from the army in 1778; it then awkwardly resumes in 1797, shortly after his appointment as commanding general; and the last section is simply a reprint of his 1811 Burr’s Conspiracy exposed and General Wilkinson vindicated. The second volume consists entirely of his defense to the charges assembled by Madison and Eustis in 1812, while the third is his defense to the charges drawn up by Armstrong for his 1815 court-martial. As a result the Memoirs lack continuity and any sense of historical development; the long list of charges and convoluted refutations emphasize the author’s unreliability; and the obsessive, paranoid tone, occasionally reminiscent of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, suggests that some at least was written under the influence of laudanum.

  Yet they contain a mine of information about military and political life Most people telling the story of their life rely on their integrity to make the account credible. Because James Wilkinson’s double life was based on invention, he felt bound to back up assertions with documentary proof. Consequently, much of the Memoirs consists simply of correspondence, depositions, contracts, and army regulations, which together offer an inimitable view of the stage on which he acted. Thus for all their faults, the Memoirs succeed in illustrating Wilkinson’s historical importance in the two arenas for which he deserves to be remembered—opening up the Mississippi to western settlers, and ensuring that a restive army remained subject to civilian control.

  In his preface, he admitted to a small regret, that having devoted so much space to “the illustration of my persecutions . . . I have not been able to touch the last twenty- five years of my service.” Even the brief summary of what had been left out—eight voyages by sea, four descents of the Mississippi, and “I traversed a trackless wilderness four times from the borders of Louisiana to the frontiers of Georgia”— suggested the physical resilience that helped distinguish him among the generals of his time. The omission would, he promised, be made good in future volumes.

  ON THE FRONTISPIECE, the general had printed a couplet from Richard Savage’s play Sir Thomas Overbury that he felt applied to his experience:

  For patriots still must fall for statesmen’s safety,

  And perish by the country they preserve.

  The target, as he made obvious, was “cold, selfish, timid” James Madison, but the statesman for whose safety the patriotic Wilkinson ultimately fell escaped any hint of criticism. Unlike every other authority figure in Wilkinson’s life, Thomas Jefferson was immune to even private attack. Their relationship dominated Wilkinson’s career and clearly went further than was apparent on the surface.

  Occasionally, the general would hint as much. In January 1811, he sent Jefferson a letter denying a rumor that he had boasted, “As to Long Tom— meaning you— he dare say nothing, for I have got him under my thumb,” to which the president replied dismissively, “My consciousness that no man on earth has me under his thumb is evidence enough that you never used the expression.” But Wilkinson returned to the topic. A year later Monroe heard it said that when the general intervened with Morales in 1803 after the withdrawal of American rights to use New Orleans as a depot, he did so at the president’s suggestion. Jefferson’s alleged purpose was not to discourage Morales, but to encourage him in his high- handed action in order to manipulate public opinion in favor of U.S. intervention. This time Jefferson reacted with fury. Which was more likely, he demanded of Monroe, “that I should descend to so unmeaning an act of treason, or that [Wilkinson] in the wreck now threatening him [his court-martial], should wildly lay hold of any plank.”

  Yet Wilkinson was not the only source of such rumors. One evening in January 1797, the adventurer John D. Chisholm, who was making detailed plans on behalf of William Blount to capture West Florida and Louisiana, went to Blount’s Philadelphia house and was shown by his son into the dining room. “Instead of finding him alone as usual,” Chisholm reported, “I found Mr Jefferson and Genl. Wilkinson at Table with him.” What they were talking about, Chisholm could not tell, but he made a guess. “It immediately struck me, but I might be wrong, that [Blount] sent for me in order to open my Plan to these Gentlemen.”

  Chisholm kept his mouth shut and learned nothing more, but it is plausible that the three men were indeed discussing how the Spanish colonies might be taken, and in particular the best way to reach Santa Fe. Later that year Wilkinson sent his personal assistant to Jefferson with a message that ran, “In the Bearer of this Letter— Mr. P. Nolan, you will behold the Mexican traveler, a specimen of whose discoveries I had the honor to submit to you in the Winter 1797.”

  Jefferson was always eager to acquire Spanish te
rritory, not by war but by economic and diplomatic pressure. Often the first point of contact had to be unofficial, and sometimes more probing than could be admitted. This must have been one motive for appointing Wilkinson governor of Louisiana Territory, and for the unofficial permission to send out exploration and spying parties. A similar impulse led him to select Wilkinson to discover whether Captain General Someruelos might be ready to take Cuba out of the Spanish empire. In short, the general’s sinuous morality made him the ideal candidate for the dirty and deniable work that an upright president needed doing without knowing how it was done.

  Naturally enough, Jefferson always remained aloof. “I have ever and carefully restrained myself from the expression of any opinion respecting General Wilkinson, except in the case of Burr’s conspiracy,” he told Monroe. “As to the rest of his life, I have left it to his friends and his enemies, to whom it furnishes matter enough for disputation. I classed myself with neither.” It was a wise way to treat someone whose likes and hatreds were so unpredictable, and operationally necessary. And it was presidential in tone. But considering how much the general had done for him, it lacked warmth.

  For his part, Wilkinson, who never remained faithful to any other superior, was always Jefferson’s man. He gave him the army’s loyalty, Burr’s conspiracy, Louisiana’s border. Long after he had damned every other statesman to perdition, he attempted to win Jefferson’s constantly withheld friendship. And the crux of his life proved to be the moment when he sacrificed a career of treachery to be steadfast not just to his nation but to his president.

  IN JUNE 1817 the general sailed for New Orleans. The Memoirs had not made him rich. The printing costs were high, and his hopes for the sales of a second printing overoptimistic. Scores of copies were sent to the longsuffering van Rensselaer to sell “at any reasonable sacrifice,” and other friends were enlisted to take up remaindered volumes. But he had enough cash—four hundred dollars, to be exact—to pay the deposit on a fourteen-hundred-dollar cotton plantation fifteen miles south of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi. With cotton prices climbing to thirty-five cents a pound and sugar at nine cents a pound, he intended, he announced, to grow both and “with the will of God to make a fortune in five years.” Although the words were addressed to van Rensselaer, the audience most captivated by his dreams was always Wilkinson himself. “Suppose I get you a plantation adjoining me on the Mississippi on a spot as healthy as Albany,” he wrote, “where you may so invest a Capital of $30,000 as to yield you $5,000 the first year, and $10,000 the Third, will you sell, pack up and embark and land at New Orleans where I will meet you and carry you home in a Steam Boat?”