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

Overconfident about the outcome of George Rogers Clark’s raid, Genêt had been slow to send him the orders and money needed to recruit an armed force. The delay proved fatal. Genêt’s flouting of diplomatic protocol led Washington to demand the ambassador’s recall in December 1793. Deprived of funds, Clark found it difficult to acquire a credible quantity of boats and arms. In February 1794, when he advertised for “volunteers for the reduction of Spanish posts on the Mississippi,” offering to pay them a thousand acres each or a dollar a day, fewer than a hundred men came forward. The expedition finally drifted to a halt fifty miles short of the nearest Spanish fort.

Wilkinson immediately wrote Carondelet in April 1794 claiming credit for Clark’s failure. His lobbying had undermined popular support in Kentucky for the adventure, and he assured the governor that he had receipts showing he had spent no less than $8,640 “to retard, disjoint and defeat the mediated irruption of General Clark in L[ouisian]a.” He was also responsible for the army’s efforts to prevent sympathizers from shipping supplies for Clark’s men down the Ohio River. Together with further payments on his pension now due, he expected to be paid $12,000.

The satisfactory nature of his activities as a Spanish agent contrasted sharply with the frustration of being an American general. By the time this letter was sent, his quarrel with Wayne had spilled into the open and threatened to split the Legion apart.

13

POISONED VICTORY

IN HIS FIERCELY DRIVEN WAY, General Anthony Wayne was not at first aware of what was happening. Only in January 1794 did he realize that his officers had split, as he told Knox, into “two distinct Parties.” The hostility of the newest intake of junior officers alerted him to the situation. On the smallest excuse, he complained, they “offered their Resignations and prepared to depart without further Ceremony, saying they were advised to do so by experienced officers.” Yet even then, he did not suspect his former friend of being at the root of the problem.

The invitation to share Christmas and a bottle of Lachryma Christi with the Wilkinsons had been refused only because, as Wayne tersely explained, he was busy moving his headquarters to Fort Greeneville, a new outpost constructed even farther into Indian territory. Early in the new year the Legion was moved to this gigantic stockade enclosing fifty acres, where the final stages of its training would take place. Supplying an army in such a remote post created incessant problems. Wayne constantly had to drive the victuallers Elliott and Williams to produce fatter cattle and fresher casks of beef, and the War Department to provide more blankets and blue and buff uniforms, and to deliver promptly the silver dollars needed to pay his men their four dollars a month. But he did not at first connect these difficulties with his second-in- command.

Always sensitive to the smallest insult to his vanity, Wilkinson had been infuriated by Wayne’s refusal of the Christmas invitation. During the early months of 1794, Wilkinson periodically declared himself to be close to resignation. “I am unsettled in my purpose whether I shall join the army or not,” he told Innes, and with still more of a flourish told Brown, “I owe so much to my own feelings and to Professional reputation, that I cannot consent to sacrifice the one, or to hazard the other, under the administration of a weak, corrupt minister or a despotic, Vainglorious, ignorant General.” But in truth, as he recognized himself, he could never quit the army “because I know the profession of arms to be my Fort[e], and I verily believe that the Hour may possibly come when my talents into that line might be of important account to our Country.”

Instead, he devoted himself to encouraging the opposition to Wayne until camp gossip took to labeling the two camps using terms such as “such an Officer is in favor of Wayne— and such a one is in favor of Wilkinson.” The depth of Wilkinson’s hatred could be gauged from an article he sent to a Cincinnati newspaper signed “Army Wretched” that damned Wayne for drunkenness, incompetence, wastefulness, and favoritism toward “his pimps and parasites.” Unfortunately for this attempt to stampede public opinion, General Charles Scott visited Wayne’s command headquarters at Fort Greeneville soon afterward and offered a different perspective on the general’s conduct. “During my stay I found him attending with great Sobriety & extream attention to the Duty of army,” Scott reported to Knox, “he paid the most Unwearied attention to the most minute thing possible in person .” When the government published Scott’s testimony in rebuttal, Wilkinson contemptuously dismissed Scott, once his friend and comrade-in-arms, as “a fool, a poltroon and a scoundrel.”

By the spring, Wayne’s supporters had made him aware of Wilkinson’s hostility. Wayne’s suspicions were directed particularly at the failure of the victuallers Elliott and Williams to supply the army with enough food. In Wayne’s view, this was a deliberate attempt to sabotage his preparations for war, and he accused Wilkinson to his face of being “the cause of the fault of the Contractors.” His second- in- command retaliated in his own fashion, as Wayne discovered when a Philadelphia merchant reported that some senators were proposing to impeach the Legion’s commander “at the request of Wilkinson for Pedulation, Speculation, Fraud &c.”

The longer the Legion remained inactive, the more poisonous the conflict became. No army can remain ready for battle—“in the crouch,” to use modern jargon—for long without the aggression beginning to spill over into feuds and quarrels. But for the Legion, the lengthy delay was especially damaging. Even after training was completed, federal negotiators continued their talks with Little Turtle and other Native American leaders in an attempt to arrange a new boundary that would guarantee Indian land rights, but allow settlers to move into the Ohio Valley. In the summer, as though the waiting had undermined their physical health as much as their morale, an epidemic of illness ravaged the troops. “We labor under a universal influenza,” Wilkinson told his friends, “and tertians [fevers], quotidians & intermittents rage beyond anything I have ever seen.”

Yet while there remained a chance of signing a peace treaty with the Six Nations in the north and the western confederation in the northwest, Washington and Knox forbade Wayne to take any aggressive action. Chafing against the restraint, Wayne inched northward, constructing a fort that he named Recovery on the site of St. Clair’s defeat.

Quite suddenly the talks broke down because Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and their allies could not bring themselves to yield up the swath of land in the Northwest Territory demanded by U.S. negotiators. In a historic misjudgment, they insisted on maintaining the Ohio River as the border. On June 30, 1794, more than a thousand Shawnee and other warriors under Blue Jacket launched a surprise attack on Fort Recovery, the site where St. Clair’s army had been annihilated. This time the attack failed, but it put an end to negotiations. Immediately Scott and the Kentucky horsemen were summoned to join the regulars, and on July 28 the Legion of the United States at last marched from Fort Greeneville.

AS THE SECONDMOST SE NIOR OFFICER, Brigadier General James Wilkinson had command of the right wing. It gave him a close-up position from which to criticize Wayne. He duly carped at the decision to leave the biggest cannons behind and, more insistently, at the slowness of the advance— twelve careful miles a day, always surrounded by a swarm of cavalry and riflemen, and halting well before nightfall so that entrenchments and fortifications could be put in place. Instead of following the St. Marys River westward, out into the open prairie where centers of Indian population were situated, Wayne struck due north, still keeping to rough territory so that the army had to force its way through “Thickets almost impervious,” one of his men complained, “thru Marassies [morasses], Defiles & beds of Nettles more than waist high & miles in length.” This unexpected maneuver, made possible by the absence of heavy artillery, wrong-footed the western confederation’s army and put the Legion between Blue Jacket and supplies he expected from the British in Fort Miami, a newly constructed outpost, close to present Toledo, Ohio.