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

14

THE BATTLE FOR COMMAND

VICTORY SHOULD HAVE DRAINED the poison from the Legion. In a generous report on the battle to Knox, General Wayne praised the entire force for the “spirit & promptitude” with which it obeyed orders. Having commended all his troops, he singled out a few “whose rank and situation placed their conduct in a very conspicuous point of view, and which I observe with pleasure, and the most lively gratitude. Among whom I beg leave to mention Brigadier General Wilkinson and Colonel Hamtramck, the commandants of the right and left wings of the Legion, whose brave example inspired the troops.”

Nothing Wayne could say, however, would deflect Wilkinson from his campaign to displace his commanding officer. Writing to Brown, he contrived to take the equality of praise in Wayne’s report as a calculated insult, insisting that the right wing had played a more important role and been led by a more dashing commander than the left. He also alleged, falsely, that it had suffered more casualties. Wayne, he declared, knew nothing of what had happened on the right, and his ignorance was typical of his “feeble & improvident” leadership through the entire campaign. “Yet the specious name of Victory & the gloss of misrepresentation, will doubtless gild the Character of our Chief. For my own I am content, conscious as I am, that I have in several instances partially saved my country, and . . . extorted applause from my most bitter enemy, and the most finished scoundrel on Earth.”

This outburst was followed by more savage attacks in other letters to his Kentucky friends. Writing to Innes, he repeated the allegations of incompetence: “The whole operation presents us a tissue of improvidence, disarray, precipitancy, Error & Ignorance.” Victory was due simply to the inferior numbers and “injudicious Conduct of the enemy.” To underline the message, he wrote Innes again in December describing Wayne as “a liar, a drunkard, a Fool, the associate of the lowest order of Society, & the companion of their vices, of desperate Fortune, my rancorous enemy, a coward, a Hypocrite, and the contempt of every man of sense and virtue.”

There was something mad about such a tirade—and jealousy at Wayne’s growing reputation undoubtedly gave an edge to the fury. Henry Knox assumed Wilkinson’s enmity arose from lack of self-confidence. Even before Fallen Timbers, Knox had received two letters from Wilkinson demanding a court of inquiry into Wayne’s incompetence, but had chosen not to reply because the complaint “appears to me . . . to be more the effect of nice [sensitive] feelings than any palpable cause.” When Knox finally responded in December, he first sent a private letter asking Wilkinson to give up the quarrel, and assuring him that Wayne had not criticized him, that Charles Scott would not be promoted to command over him, that he was not being investigated as the cause of dissension in the army, and ending, “You must rest assured that your military reputation stands as well as you could desire.” In the formal letter that followed, Wilkinson was promised that if he made his complaint more precise and legal in tone, the president would consider it and decide “what steps he ought to take.” Knox, in short, did not take seriously the cries of Wilkinson’s wounded ego.

Yet, wise and tolerant though he was, the war secretary missed the almost chesslike shrewdness behind Wilkinson’s paranoid outbursts. The unrelenting belittlement of the Legion and its commander, publicized both in the press and through friends such as Senator John Brown, had a political context.

In Congress, opponents of Washington’s Federalist administration, led by James Madison in Philadelphia but orchestrated by Thomas Jefferson in Monticello, had focused on the expense of the Legion—an annual military budget of $155,500 in 1790 had risen to $1,130,000—and were demanding that its size be reduced by two thirds. By diminishing Wayne’s achievement, Wilkinson strengthened the anti-Federalists in their belief that a large standing army was an unjustified extravagance. It also served his personal ambition. Military regulations would not allow a major general to command a force the size of a brigade. Consequently, a reduced army would force Wayne into retirement, leaving Brigadier General James Wilkinson in command.

With Congress due to debate the size of the army in February 1795, his timing could not have been better. Desperate to keep the quarrel private, Washington’s administration could neither reprimand him for insubordination nor refuse his request for an inquiry into Wayne’s incompetence. Knox’s demand that he present his charges in specific, legal form was an attempt to play for time. But, having acknowledged them formally, Knox also felt obliged to pass on a copy of Wilkinson’s allegations to Wayne. Aided by the flukiest of chances, Knox thereby saved the Legion and came close to exposing Spain’s chief agent in the United States.

UNTIL KNOX’SLETTER was delivered to Fort Greeneville in January 1795, Wayne had no inkling that his second- in-command was plotting against him. The realization that this “vile invidious man” had been creating divisions in the Legion while pretending to treat his commander with “attention, politeness & delicacy” outraged him. In an incandescent reply to Knox, Wayne angrily dismissed Wilkinson’s charges: “They are as unexpected as they are groundless, and as false as they are base and insidious; and had I not known the real character and disposition of the man, I should have considered the whole as the idle Phantom of a disturbed immagination [ sic ].” Recalling how “I always indulged the Brigadier, in all that he wished or requested,” the general reached the same conclusion as dozens before and after him and damned Wilkinson for being “as devoid of principle as he is of honor or fortune.”

Once alerted to his subordinate’s true character, however, Wayne quickly came up with what seemed to him evidence of treachery. On October 12, 1794, a deserter named Robert Newman was discovered on a boat preparing to descend the Ohio River on his way to Fort Washington. Under questioning, Newman claimed to have been employed by Wilkinson and James Hawkins, a Kentucky land speculator, to deliver information about Wayne’s campaign to the British. For good measure, he added that Wilkinson and Hawkins were planning to persuade Kentucky and the Northwest Territory to secede and join Canada in a northern version of the Spanish Conspiracy.

Newman’s story caused disbelief and consternation. The lieutenant governor of Canada thought it must have been concocted for “a sinister purpose,” perhaps to justify an attack on Fort Miami, while Wilkinson, guilty of selling out elsewhere, was furious at the imputation he would have done so to the British—“a base and vile calumny.” Investigations by Philip Nolan suggested that Newman’s information was invented and paid for by Wayne himself, and the general admitted that the supposed spy’s “answers are rather mysterious, negative & equivocal.” Nevertheless, Wayne felt justified in warning Knox, as he graphically put it, “There is ‘something rotten in the State of Denmark’ & which ought to be guarded against.”

Perhaps typical of Wayne’s impetuous nature, he got the direction of Wilkinson’s treachery wrong by 180 degrees, but the precautions he took were unexpectedly effective and came within a hairbreadth of trapping his enemy. In addition to a general alert for foreign agents, he specifically ordered Captain John Pierce, commandant of Fort Washington, to arrest James Hawkins as a foreign agent should he set foot in Cincinnati and warned Major Thomas Doyle, in command of Fort Massac near the mouth of the Ohio, to investigate thoroughly any suspicious boats coming upriver. The timing could not have been worse for Wilkinson. In October, his activities as a secret agent were about to yield him a fortune.