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

POLITICALLY, CUSHING EXPECTED THE ARMY “to go to the right about,” meaning it would turn to face in the opposite direction from in the Adams administration. Thomas Jefferson put it more diplomatically, explaining, “The Army is undergoing a chaste reformation.” But Cushing’s version was more accurate. When the commanding general arrived in Washington, he found the beginnings of a bloodbath, ostensibly designed to save five hundred thousand dollars a year.

The army’s authorized strength was 5,438 men. Even before he was appointed, the new secretary of war, Henry Dearborn, intended to cut this by one third. The Military Peace Establishment Bill, which he began preparing the day after Jefferson’s election, set the new level at 3,300 men distributed among three regiments— two of infantry and one of artillery. It required at least one in three of the 269 serving officiers to be dismissed, and the immediate question was, who should be weeded out? On February 23, Jefferson asked Wilkinson to transfer Captain Meriwether Lewis, paymaster of the First Infantry Regiment, to the presidential staff because he needed someone “possessing a knoledge [ sic ] of the Western country, of the army & it’s [ sic ] situation [who] might sometimes aid us with informations of interest, which we may not otherwise possess.”

Today, it is Lewis’s knowledge of the “Western country” that receives most attention, but his familiarity with “the army and its situation,” and specifically its officers, was Jefferson’s first priority. By July 1801, Lewis had listed every officer and rated each according to his professional abilities and his political affiliation. The military category was divided into “1st Class,” “Respectable,” and “Unfit,” while the political had labels that ranged from “Republican” through “Apathy” and “no known affiliation” to “Opposed to the Administration” and “Most violently opposed to the administration and still active in its vilification.”

Within twelve months, Lewis’s list had been used to purge the largely Federalist officer corps. More than half left the army, some forced into resignation, but most simply dismissed. Angry Federalists accused the administration of politicizing the military, and Dearborn himself virtually admitted it was retaliation for Hamilton’s attempt to pack the army in 1799. “We have been much more liberal towards [the Federalists] than they would be towards us,” he told the congressman Joseph Vamum, “and in future I think we ought to give them measure for measure.” Military efficiency was not ignored— of forty-four officers deemed unfit, thirty-eight were dismissed, Republicans and Federalists alike— but in the end the army had a more distinctly Republican tinge than the raw numbers suggest, because the ax fell most heavily on the senior, strongly Federalist officers, especially those on the general staff. Many of Wilkinson’s favorites were culled, among them Captain Bartholomew Shaumburgh, deemed to be “opposed to the administration,” and Major Isaac Guion, “violently opposed.” According to Federalist congressman James Bayard, the commanding general should have been among them because the slimmer army no longer required even a brigadier general in command.

Had Jefferson and Dearborn really wanted to save money, they might have been tempted. It was soon apparent that the cuts would reduce military spending by less than expected— in the end by forty thousand dollars rather than half a million dollars— and Wilkinson’s salary was now more than twenty- five hundred dollars a year, with almost half as much again in expenses. Many Republicans also believed him to be too closely associated with Hamilton and the Federalists. Against the commanding general’s name, however, no mark appeared. Possibly Lewis felt it would have been presumptuous, but more plausibly he had been told that none was needed. The president had a specific role for the general to play in the new Republican army. Wilkinson’s survival depended on his acquiescence.

ONE OF THE FIRST to become aware of the general’s closeness to the new administration was Andrew Ellicott. Since his return to Philadelphia in the dying days of John Adams’s government, he had been pleading to be paid eight thousand dollars in unclaimed salary for his years in the wilderness. Despairing of the Federalists, he wrote as a friend and fellow member of the American Philosophical Society to Thomas Jefferson, asking for his help. Instead of a reply from the president, he received one in March 1801 from Wilkinson, oozing friendliness, and offering him one of the best- paid jobs in the federal government: “What do you think of the surveyorgeneral’s office in the N.Western Territory—you could fill it and I am sure it is not filled now.”

The surveyor general was responsible for organizing the Public Lands Survey, the great government enterprise that would eventually measure out one million square miles of land between the Appalachians and the Pacific Ocean, transforming wilderness into property and capital. It paid two thousand dollars a year with another five hundred dollars for his clerk, a suitable post for Ellicott’s son Andy. Desperate for the financial security it represented, but appalled by the implicit condition of silence that came with it, the astronomer replied in a tortured letter to his crooked would-be benefactor, begging for time to make up his mind and wailing at the unfairness that forced him to sell his scientific books and instruments so that he could feed his family. “I now find that I am inevitably ruined and know not for what,” he exclaimed. “I never betrayed the interests of my country, I never used a farthing of money that was not my own, I never lost a single observation by absence of inattention, and never when out on public business was caught in bed by the sun.”

After five weeks’ wrestling with temptation, Ellicott finally turned the offer down and, in June 1801, wrote Jefferson a complete account of what he knew of the general’s Spanish connections. It began with a specific warning about Wilkinson’s activities that Ellicott had received from President Washington; it included testimony from Thomas Power and Daniel Clark; and it ended with the final detail of Captain Tomás Portell’s recollection that the $9,640 “was not on account of any mercantile transactions, but of the pension allowed the General by the Spanish government.” The letter ended, as Ellicott recalled, with the blunt warning that “General W. was not a man to be trusted; and if continued in employ, would one day or other disgrace and involve the government in his schemes.”

Neither then nor in the future did President Jefferson ever acknowledge receipt of this letter. On a later occasion before Congress, he even denied its existence. Yet he clearly not only received Ellicott’s warning, but almost certainly passed it on to the man most directly concerned, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn. The following year, when a disgruntled Wilkinson toyed with the idea of leaving the army and taking the job of surveyor general himself, Dearborn deemed him unsuitable, scrawling across his letter of application, “Such a situation would enable him to associate with Spanish agents without suspicion.”

It is impossible not to find Jefferson’s prolonged dealings with Brigadier General James Wilkinson equivocal and troubling. Knowing his past as a spy, the president still trusted him as commander in chief. More than that, he added civil and diplomatic posts to the general’s military command until at a crucial moment Wilkinson single- handedly possessed enough power to decide the fate of the nation. The general once described Jefferson as “a fool” to his Spanish handler, and the risk taken by the president was an undeniable folly that could have destroyed the still-unformed nation. Yet, it was also a cold calculation. In exchange for trusting Wilkinson, the president expected to gain what he considered to be the priceless return of a compliant army.