Andro Linklater - An Artist in Treason - The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson

In his early days on the frontier, however, Wilkinson’s charm was literally as bankable as cash. Half a century later, William Leavy, whose father arrived in Lexington in 1785, could still remember Wilkinson’s “wonderful address” in dealing with awkward financial affairs. “A friend living in the neighborhood of Lexington had loaned Wilkinson money,” Leavy recorded, “which, on making a special call at his house to ask its return—he was so graciously received by him— having him to dine, &c.— that in place of urging its return he was before he left the house induced to increase the loan.”

Frontier life also required a rugged determination that Philadelphia society rarely demanded. In Wilkinson’s first winter, the cold was so intense that the Ohio River became blocked by slabs of ice as early as November, trapping a boatload of goods destined for the Lexington store, and the snow lay so deep it took the train of pack horses sent to rescue the cargo seven days to reach the river. Wilkinson boasted that he spent so many days on horseback exploring the wilderness that he knew it “better than any Christian in America.” He used to lead a mule loaded with goods to sell, and bacon and biscuit for his food to save the expense of “damn’d Tavern Keepers,” but wherever he went, his eyes were always open for good land to buy, both for himself and for his eastern backers. In July 1784, he signed a contract with John Lewis, a Philadelphia financier, to find and acquire eleven thousand acres, in return for which Lewis promised to give Wilkinson half of all the land he located.

The return on real estate was slow, however, and the store paid the bills. In his first year of business, bags of salt, essential for curing pork and preserving other food, were added to the goods for sale, and in July Wilkinson set up a partnership with Lewis to trade with Shawnee townships, giving cloth in exchange for beaver pelts and other furs. Probably the Lexington store also sold seeds and medicines, because writing to another military acquaintance, General Charles Scott, Wilkinson lamented the difficulty of getting vegetables suitable for the Atlantic coast to grow in Kentucky. “Be sure you bring a double stock of great variety,” he advised Scott, “and try to make out more with Turnips and Potatoes— get a snug little assortment of medicine; don’t forget Blistering Plaister, a plenty of Salts, Tart- Bark [for malaria], Laudinum [for pain relief].” In 1786, Wilkinson also built a tobacco warehouse, and in Virginia’s tobacco economy, this was equivalent to setting up a bank, because the receipts he issued at three dollars per hundredweight of leaf could be exchanged as legal tender. Within three years, he had become a leading figure in Kentucky’s growing community.

His letters to friends in the east made no mention of political difficulties and became prolonged invitations to come and settle. “Our country is now a continued Flower Bed,” he told Charles Scott in 1785, “and the whole aire breathes the richest fragrance . . . The Indians are peaceable, and [the price of] corn and Bacon is on the fall.”

In September 1784, Nancy and the two boys succumbed to his entreaties and left Philadelphia for life on the frontier. Unlike her husband, Nancy hated the harshness of the wilderness. Even three years later, she still bitterly missed her family and the conversation and comforts of city life. “It is impossible for me to describe the torture my mind endures,” she wrote to her father, “not [being] blessed with the Sight of a relation this ten months, & Surrounded by People that has been brought up so differently from myself, that when Sick & Low spirited, there Company only disgusts— O what would I not give to be blessed with a sensible agreeable woman for a Neighbour that had been brought up tenderly as I have myself.”

Quick- witted, gentle, and funny, she had the qualities of a city girl rather than the hard endurance needed by a frontier wife. The affectionate messages to her that Wilkinson’s friends always included in their letters show how much she was liked, and according to rumor, Lexington’s inhabitants much preferred her to her self- promoting husband. But for Nancy, Wilkinson was the only thing that made Kentucky bearable. With months of her arrival in Kentucky she was pregnant once more, and when he was away, she confessed to her father, “I feel so Stupid I Can scarce hear my Children when they speak to me; my Jimmys [ sic ] Presence would soon make me well.” However, soon it was not only business and land- hunting that drew him from her side. Wilkinson had become involved in Kentucky politics.

ALTHOUGH THE MYTH of frontier life promised an escape from government and the constraints of the law, the reality made it impossible to avoid either. The first guide to Kentucky life, John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucké , published in 1784, illustrated why. The myth was catered to in the appendix. This contained the story of Daniel Boone, the archetype of the frontier hero, who enjoyed danger and solitude, and who climbed to “the summit of a commanding ridge” simply for the pleasure of viewing “the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below [stretching to] the famous river Ohio that rolled in silent dignity, marking the western boundary of Kentucke with inconceivable grandeur.” Speaking the language of the romantics, Boone concluded, “No populous city, with all the varieties of commerce and stately structures, could afford so much pleasure to my mind, as the beauties of nature I found here.”

Filson’s main text, however, amounted to an advertisement for Kentucky real estate. He described a fabulous land where a hundred bushels of corn per acre could be grown without the need for irrigation or fertilizer, along with sugar, coffee, cherries, and cucumbers, where the existing settlers were “polite, humane, hospitable and complaisant,” where scores more arrived every day so that “the country will be exceedingly populous in a short time,” and where property could be bought simply and safely because Kentucké belonged to the state of Virginia and was “governed by her wholesome laws, which are virtuously executed, and with excellent decorum.”

Yet the failure of Virginia’s government to operate either virtuously or decorously was precisely what infuriated Kentucky settlers. The most serious failing was the absence of protection against Indian attacks, principally by the Shawnees, who claimed hunting rights and saw their game increasingly frightened off by European settlers. Located two or three weeks away across the Allegheny Mountains, the Virginia legislature could not call out the militia in time, and left to their own defenses, more than one third of the two hundred pioneers round Lexington had been killed in a single Shawnee attack in 1782.

Less dangerous, but more toxic to the hopes of new settlers, was the confusion over land titles. To convert the wilderness into rapturous property, the land had to be surveyed, then the claim had to be registered and title to the property patented, both in Richmond. Even without counterclaims, a minimum of ten months was required. And Virginia’s decision to mortgage much of Kentucky to fund its wartime expenditure made counterclaims inevitable.

The state printed paper money with a face value of more than sixty million dollars during the war, much of it backed by land in the west. By 1783, wealthy speculators in the east owned huge quantities of treasury bills and certificates, bought cheaply when their value dropped to one tenth of a cent in the dollar, that entitled them to ownership of up to one third of all Kentucky. Poorer settlers who came west to claim their land in person discovered that they were debarred from the best ground, or that farms they were working really belonged to a stranger far away in Richmond or Philadelphia. In 1785, the traveler Michael Austin passed more than seven hundred pioneers on the Wilderness Road heading for Filson’s dream country. “And when arrivd at this Heaven in idea,” he warned, “what do they find? a goodly land I will allow, but to them forbidden Land.”