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

Rich once more and secure in his cover story, General James Wilkinson left Cincinnati in October with Nancy and their youngest son, James Biddle, and was rowed up the Ohio in the army’s comfortable keelboat. At Pittsburgh, he met Andrew Ellicott, the commissioner appointed to survey the southern boundary of the United States under the terms of the San Lorenzo treaty, as he was traveling downstream with a large party of soldiers and scientists. Generously, Wilkinson handed over the boat for Ellicott’s use.

An upright Quaker dedicated to astronomy, Ellicott was the antithesis of the volatile, spendthrift general. His reputation for painstaking, meticulous accuracy was unmatched. Computing his position by celestial observation, he had established the state borders of Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, and the District of Columbia and laid out the future federal capital on the banks of the Potomac River. Yet this serious man was immediately seduced by Wilkinson’s kindness and ease of manner. Ahead of Ellicott lay an epic journey around the borders of the United States that would last almost four years, but throughout that time, during which he stumbled upon the general’s terrible secret, Ellicott never ceased to regard him as a friend.

At Pittsburgh, Nancy received the devastating news that fourteen-year-old John, their eldest son, had died of a fever. “I am proud of my little Sons,” she had once written, “they are allowed to be very handsome & that I think the Smallest of there Perfections.” But the eldest was her favorite, the one who most took after her, who “reads prettily” and “has an amazing turn to writing” and, like her, always wanted to be back in Philadelphia, away from the frontier. The loss could only have caused her utmost grief. It may well have contributed to Wilkinson’s strangely downbeat message to Gayoso in November, ostensibly about the direction of Spanish policy but ending on an unmistakably low note: “Involved as I am in uncertainty, it is impossible to act with energy or even propriety.”

If sadness had sapped his buoyant spirits, it did not alter his determination to bring down General Wayne. Demanding a court of inquiry, Wilkinson added one new charge to the old ones of negligence in the Fallen Timbers campaign. He now wanted Wayne to explain why he had hired Newman to smear him as a British spy. Although the accusations were petty, and Wayne was supported by both Washington and McHenry, Wilkinson’s supporters in Congress, led by John Brown in the Senate and in the House by Jonathan Dayton, the Speaker, had enough political weight to force the War Department to cave in and authorize a court of inquiry into Wayne’s behavior. In one of his last messages to McHenry, Wayne wrote bluntly, “The fact is my presence with the army is very inconvenient to the nefarious machinations of the Enemies of Government & may eventually prevent them from dissolving the Union.”

He should have been beyond reach of his enemies. Aggressive, harsh, and insensitive he might be, but General Anthony Wayne had “done the Business.” When he moved his headquarters to the recently evacuated British fort at Detroit on the Michigan peninsula in August, it marked the beginning of a new epoch in the expansion of the United States that emerged directly from the campaign he led in 1794. The northern frontier had been opened. The U.S. Public Lands Survey was moving through Ohio, transforming the territory into property that could be owned with clear title, unlike the chaos in Kentucky. Ahead lay the prairies.

The greatest test of George Washington’s inclusive vision for his country would come when these mighty grasslands were occupied. Critically it depended upon the existence of General Wayne’s victorious army. Neither settler nor Indian could have ignored that overwhelming force. Had it remained in existence, it might have made possible a coherent, organized westward expansion that did not sweep aside the rights of Native American owners. That at least was the president’s dream.

Instead Wayne faced a double-edged onslaught, politically on the size of the Legion, and judicially on his generalship. The stress produced an exacerbated attack of the stabbing pains in his stomach that became so severe he was often unable to leave his army cot. As winter closed in, Wayne moved eastward, planning to take his headquarters back to Pittsburgh. In December he arrived at Presqu’isle, a harbor on Lake Erie, and there the stomach ulcer, if that is what it was, finally burst. His subordinates watched helplessly as he writhed in excruciating agony. “How long he can continue to suffer such torture is hard to say,” wrote one on December 14, 1796, having seen his general convulsed all day by uncontrollable pain. But at two o’clock the following morning, death at last relieved Major General Anthony Wayne from all his torments.

FOR WASHINGTON AND MCHENRY, the loss of Wayne was a blow in itself, but the timing made it worse. The army could not wait long for a new chief: orders had to be given, courts-martial appointed, detachments moved, officers transferred, the chain of command kept taut. To promote anyone other than the politically popular second- in- command during the last weeks before John Adams became president, when the existing administration was not so much a lame duck as a dead duck, would have been impossible. Whatever the executive’s suspicions about Wilkinson’s connections with Spain, he was the only possible candidate. Consequently, the highest post in the army devolved automatically onto James Wilkinson and was tacitly approved by President George Washington in February 1797.

In his last message to Congress as president, Washington made a final appeal on behalf of his Indian policy when he asked congressmen to exempt the cavalry from their bill to reduce the size of the army. “It is generally agreed that some cavalry, either militia or regular, are necessary,” he pointed out, “and . . . the latter will be less expensive and more useful in maintaining the peace between the frontier settlers and the Indians.” Three days later, on March 3, Congress ignored Washington’s plea, cut the army by one third, and, by abolishing the rank of major general, confirmed that the brigadier general should be its “commander- in-chief.”

In November 1796, General James Wilkinson had urged his Spanish handler, Baron Hector de Carondelet, to “point out with precision the object to be pursued, and, if attainable, you shall find my activity and exertions equal to your most sanguine expectations.” Barely three months later, on March 4, 1797, he attended President John Adams’s inauguration as a guest of honor, and commander in chief of the U.S. army.

16

THE NEW COMMANDER IN CHIEF

LESS THAN TEN YEARS had passed since James Wilkinson, land speculator and free trader, first traveled to New Orleans and declared that self-interest justified his transfer of loyalties to His Catholic Majesty. As a colonel, he found that the need for a spy’s income reinforced his original decision. And so long as Anthony Wayne, the friend turned hated rival, was his superior, jealousy pointed him in the same direction. But as Brigadier General James Wilkinson, commander in chief of the U.S. army, it was less clear where his interests lay.

Wilkinson did not lie when he declared that his strength lay in military matters. His tactical sense was obvious in a brilliant analysis of the army’s disposition that he drew up for Alexander Hamilton in 1798, and unlike Wayne, he had an insatiable hunger, matched only by Washington’s, for the software of war—maps and intelligence about the territory in which he might need to fight. His theatrical temperament gave him an instinctive understanding of the mysterious effect that display and smartness have upon soldiers’ morale. When applied to a peacetime army, starved of funds, lacking any obvious enemy, and usually split up into small, isolated garrisons, it was an invaluable insight. In place of anything more substantial, Wilkinson offered what he had in abundance, energy, personal warmth, and a sense of style, especially in his flamboyant, self- romanticizing portrayal of a general, to which most of his officers responded positively.