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

“In fact the American peasant, though a brave and hardy man, and expert in the use of the rifle and musket, is naturally the worst soldier in the world as regards obedience and discipline,” a British officer, Charles Murray, commented loftily in the 1790s. “He has been brought up to believe himself equal to the officers who command him, and never forgets that when his three years of enlistment are over, he will again be their equal.”

An officer’s right to command rested ultimately on the Articles of War, which required obedience to the orders of a superior, but in most situations the critical factor was an individual’s leadership ability. The fierceness that Power noted, or at least a capacity to impose one’s will, was a necessity. In battle, as Ebenezer Denny had dramatically described at St. Clair’s rout, and Wayne’s Legion proved at Fallen Timbers, ferocious officers could rely on their men to follow their lead. But in peacetime, when about two thousand men were scattered between forty-one military outposts— an average of roughly fifty men at each—other qualities were needed.

In a well-run garrison, much of what Denny himself called “the noise and bustle of military life” came from officers and noncommissioned officers enforcing an endless schedule of roll calls and fatigue duties at the tops of their voices backed by the beat of a drum. Desertion rates rising to 20 percent annually demonstrated how difficult it was to maintain discipline and a viable army. Nevertheless, more than half of those soldiers who completed their three- year enlistment signed on again, suggesting that their officers did get it mostly right.

For private soldiers, the rewards came to between four and five dollars a month with shelter, food, and two uniforms a year provided free. To young men unable to find more rewarding work, this was certainly an inducement. So, too, was the prospect of adventure, and the opportunity to be on the frontier, where a discharged soldier, or a deserter, could find cheap land, and a skillful marksman could live from hunting and selling furs. But many also enlisted while drunk and, as a later secretary of war admitted, “awoke from their stupor with abhorrence, anxious only to devise means how they are to escape from their dread condition.”

To reduce the chances of desertion, the soldiers were subjected to four muster calls a day, the first at dawn and the last an hour after retreat or nightfall. In between, they were repeatedly drilled, sent on work parties to repair walls or dig entrenchments, and occasionally detached as escorts to guard surveyors or Indian agents operating in dangerous territory. Liquor dulled the monotony, starting with the distribution at daybreak of the daily four- ounce ration of rum or whiskey, and continuing with whatever could be bought from the garrison sutler, who had a store of tobacco, soap, and above all spirits for any soldier with enough credit to pay for them. And, despite repeated calls to garrison commanders to stamp out “drunkenness, desertion and licentiousness,” camp prostitutes, recruited from the washerwomen authorized to be in camp, or from Native Americans, provided the one other comfort that made a soldier’s life tolerable.

IN DEALING WITH CHALLENGES to good discipline, drama was James Wilkinson’s favored style. Arriving in Detroit in June 1797, he declared that the fort “presents a frightful picture to the scientific soldier; ignorance & licentiousness have been fostered, while intelligence and virtue have been persecuted & exiled.” To punish William Mitchell and his girlfriend, Lydia Connor, for selling liquor illegally, he had them marched out of town with bottles hanging from their necks accompanied by the garrison band playing “The Rogues’ March.” A deserter, sentenced to hang on the Fourth of July, was pardoned at the last moment, but ordered to kneel before the flag grasping it with his right hand and, with his left uplifted, “to renew the oath of fidelity” before being ejected from the camp.

Back in his headquarters in Pittsburgh, Wilkinson discovered that a high proportion of men in one company had been arrested for “drunkenness and debauchery.” As punishment, he ordered the entire company to be confined to barracks, with doubled sentries changed every hour and the guardhouse turned out every fifteen minutes day and night so that no one could sleep or rest, and then, to McHenry’s dismay, publicized their shame by getting the Pittsburgh Gazette to run a story naming the guilty and their punishment.

Whether his methods had any effect on military morals is doubtful— as Rudyard Kipling put it, single men in barracks don’t grow into plaster saints— but they reduced the toll of flogging and execution that Wayne had exacted. Private soldiers had additional reason to be grateful when he intervened on their behalf by prohibiting their superiors from using them “as hunters, fishermen, hostlers, Gardeners, fatigue men, scullions, etc. at the expense of the meritorious soldier and to the great injury and disgrace of the service.” At a time when morale was suffering from Congress’s savage cuts, Wilkinson’s passion about good soldiering won him friends and personal loyalty among a widening circle of officers.

ABANDONING ESPIONAGE CREATED its own dangers, above all the risk of exposure by former paymasters. Wilkinson’s prime concern was Carondelet, who had invested so much in the general’s participation in the conspiracy. In his meeting with Power, the general had referred to the possibility that their past connection might be made public and promised that Carondelet “ought not to be apprehensive of his abusing the confidence which [Carondelet] had placed in him.”

The general was far more at risk than the governor, however, and in a somewhat incoherent sentence apparently taken from notes, Power recorded Wilkinson’s explanation why Carondelet, too, should keep silent. When Spain eventually handed over the territory of Natchez, “[the United States] might perhaps name [Wilkinson] Governor of it, and then he would not want opportunities to take more effectual measures to comply with his political projects.” In other words, as governor of Natchez Wilkinson might once more become an agent, so long as his past was kept a secret.

It was, however, a more immediate consideration that kept both Carondelet and Gayoso silent. At any moment, Wilkinson could have enforced the terms of the San Lorenzo treaty. Spain had undertaken to open the Mississippi to trade. In March 1797, James McHenry issued Wilkinson direct instructions to occupy the Spanish forts of Chickasaw Bluffs, Walnut Hills, and Natchez. Captain Isaac Guion was ready at the head of four hundred men. Captured documents showed that Spanish fort commanders were not expected to prevent the passage of American troops. Nevertheless, Guion did not enter Natchez until the last days of December.

There were reasons. At first, Gayoso, as governor of Natchez, insisted on detailed negotiations about how the evacuation should be arranged. Then in the summer he suspended the handover altogether, alleging the threat of a British invasion from Canada that would put Louisiana in peril. Since Wilkinson, like the other secessionists, had been told by Carondelet “that his Catholic Majesty will not carry the above mentioned treaty into execution ,” he might have guessed that these were delaying tactics. Instead, he ordered Guion not to approach any of the Spanish forts without permission. Guion duly halted at Chickasaw Bluffs and waited for permission. When McHenry demanded to know why Guion had not moved, the general deliberately invented evidence to support Gayoso’s fears of a British invasion.

In June 1797, while Wilkinson was in Detroit, he suddenly discovered that a joint British and Indian attack on the fort was so imminent that he had to introduce martial law “for the safety of the troops against a coup.” McHenry uselessly protested that “the danger from the savages or invasion is not very pressing and evident” as Wilkinson loudly annouced that the courts were suspended, and he had taken executive power until the emergency was over.