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

She had arrived from Pittsburgh just a few months earlier, and her reluctance to return to a frontier society could be guessed from a line in one of Wilkinson’s letters to Sargent begging him to write her with some words “commendatory of the climate and society [of Natchez].” Coached by her popular, outgoing husband, she had brought with her suitable gifts to offer southern society, including “a few cranberries, a northern berry valuable for its rarity in this quarter and its fine aromatic flavor when properly prepared,” for Gayoso’s American wife, Margaret.

During those months an unmistakable intimacy grew up between the two families, despite the barbed relations between the husbands. The Wilkinsons rented Gayoso’s exquisite estate of Concordia, perched high above the Mississippi, and they planned for their children to exchange visits. Gayoso might exert some discreet blackmail on Wilkinson, and Wilkinson might complain of his landlord, “The Mingo asks too much for his dirty acres,” but when Nancy pleaded to be allowed to accompany her husband back to Pennsylvania, Wilkinson had no hesitation in enlisting Gayoso’s help: “Would you take the trouble to point out the dangers and the incommodations of the voyage? It would have great weight with my Ann, and will oblige me, but the thing must appear like a suggestion of your own— you perceive I treat you with the intimacy and unreserve of a Brother.”

Aside from the habitual distaste for honesty, his tendency to enlist others in dealing with his wife does suggest a tenderness toward her that no one else evoked. It even softened his feelings toward Ellicott. As he was about to sail from New Orleans, he wrote the boundary commissioner, “I left Mrs. Wilkinson with our friend Walker at Concord House, in tolerable health but deep affliction. My own solicitude exceeds anything I have before experienced on Her account and my absence will be shortened by every means in my power. I shall find pleasure in reporting your progress to the President, and rendering you any service in my power.”

THESUMMERIN PHILADELPHIA sealed an unlikely friendship with Hamilton, based personally on a shared excess of physical energy, and professionally on a desire to reform the army. Since neither wanted to see French ideas of liberty and equality undermining its discipline, Wilkinson was drawn into the Federalist strategy of weeding out any officer who was a Republican sympathizer and, in the words of a critic, “has had the audacity to mount the French cockade.” This threatened to make the New Army an overtly political animal—“We were very attentive to the importance of appointing friends of the Govern[ment] to military stations,” Hamilton assured McHenry.

It was exactly what Republicans had warned would happen once a standing army was permitted— professional soldiers would be loyal to the government and could be used to intimidate its opponents. Their fears had been reinforced by the restrictions on public criticism of the government brought in under the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. When the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures, under the covert prompting of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, resolved that the acts were unconstitutional, it drew from Hamilton, the army’s operational commander, a reaction that was the stuff of Republican nightmares. The resolves, he told Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts on February 12, 1799, were evidence of “a regular conspiracy to overturn the government,” and armed force was the proper response: “when a clever force has been collected let them be drawn towards Virginia, for which there is an obvious pretext— and then let measures be taken to act upon the laws, and put Virginia to the test of resistance.”

Even John Adams declared, “This man is stark mad,” when he learned of Hamilton’s proposal. But significantly, he responded to the riots led by Captain John Fries that broke out in western Pennsylvania over taxes in March 1799 by sending in the army. Although barely remembered compared to the more notorious Whiskey Rebellion by the same people, Fries’s revolt had much greater consequences for the military.

Hamilton insisted that overwhelming force had to be employed because “whenever the Government appears in arms it ought to appear like a Hercules and inspire respect by a display of strength.” Accordingly five companies of professionals accompanied by artillery were ordered to join the militia. But the reports of armed soldiers searching Pennsylvania homes and tearing women and screaming children from their beds quickly triggered a wave of anger against the government. Scores of petitions flooded into Congress against standing armies and the alien and sedition laws. In his newspaper, Aurora , the influential editor William Duane warned ominously that “[people] may see from this what they have to expect from a military force under the orders of the administration.”

Detained in the south by his concerns over Nancy, Wilkinson missed the popular fury, but once in Philadelphia he associated himself closely with Hamilton’s increasingly beleaguered command. That August, in response to the major general’s request, he produced within ten days a long, detailed report for the future disposition of the army. Stressing the importance of defending the nation at its borders, he also recommended closing down forts in the interior and transferring their garrisons to ports and defensive positions on the frontier, especially in the south, where they could repel any attack from the French. Hamilton was delighted. He passed the report to Washington, praising it as “intelligent and interesting,” and wrote to Adams with a new plea for Wilkinson’s promotion on the grounds that he was “brave, enterprising, active and diligent, warmly animated by the spirit of his profession and devoted to it.”

Washington, however, gave the report a cool reception. Voicing his military opinion in September for virtually the last time before his death, he returned to the strategy that had served him so well— not committing troops too early, keeping the main force in reserve, being ready to counterattack at speed. It followed that the bulk of the army should be located in the north, “from where it could descend the [Mississippi] like lightening, with all its munitions and equipments; which could be accumulated with ease, and without noise, at the upper Posts, and make the surprise more complete.” Distilled into those vivid words was the military wisdom learned in the war that won independence, the fighting on the back foot against superior numbers, the dazzling ripostes at Trenton and Princeton, and the final victory over an enemy that had never been allowed to land a decisive blow. Nevertheless, he said, he offered his wisdom “more for consideration than decision.”

The strategic argument was never resolved. Three months later Washington was dead, war with France was averted by Adams’s diplomacy, and Wilkinson was back in Fort Adams. He left Hamilton a farewell message just before he sailed from Baltimore in November: “I cannot more safely consign my own Interest than to the delicacies and the sensibilities of your own bosom . . . 20 years a Brigadier, a patient one too. I pant for promotion.” But Hamilton could no longer help. Incensed by the Federalists’ use of troops, the Democratic- Republicans in Congress had made, as Jefferson declared in December, “the disbanding of the army” a priority. Adams, too, wanted to clip Hamilton’s wings. In the spring of 1800, Congress voted to abolish the New Army and the provisional and volunteer forces that had been so enthusiastically endorsed a year earlier. The reduction made major generals redundant and left a brigadier general in command of the old army once more.