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

ON APRIL 30, 1801, the commanding general demonstrated in a small but unmistakable way his intention to comply with the wishes of the Republican president. He issued a general order requiring every man under his command to cut off the queue or pigtail of long hair worn by all eighteenth-century soldiers. As a fashion, it had come in during the early eighteenth century when shoulder- length wigs were discarded, but in civilian life it was rapidly disappearing, partly on hygienic grounds, and, after the French Revolution spread a taste for simplicity, partly because it seemed old-fashioned. For a conservative institution like the army, that was its value. The queue served as a reminder of its past.

Washington wore it to his dying day, as did all the officers in the heroic days of the Revolution. Indeed, the difficulty in making it look smart helped to distinguish a good soldier. To achieve the best result, it was essential to add tallow grease as the hair was braided and to powder the finished queue liberally with flour. The result might be what the general order called “a filthy and insalubrious ornament,” but it served as the outward and visible sign of the army’s difference from the civilian population. Wilkinson’s order consequently caused deep anguish, especially to tradition-minded, predominantly Federalist officers.

“I was determined not to [cut my hair], provided a less sacrifice to my feelings would have sufficed,” Captain Russell Bissell of Connecticut confessed to his father. “I wrote my Resignation, & showed it, but . . . the Col[onel]. was not impowered to accept . . . I was obliged to submit to the act that I despised, and if ever you see me you will find that I have been closely cropped.” Others did resign over the issue, but the adamant refusal of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Butler, a cantankerous, dyed- in- the-wool traditionalist, to deprive himself of what he regarded as “the greatest ornament of a soldier” demonstrated how deep resistance ran.

It was useless for Wilkinson to explain that pigtails were as out-of- date as knee breeches, and that short hair was “recommended by the ablest generals of the day,” meaning the crop-haired Napoléon Bonaparte. Despite being twice court-martialed, Butler refused to accept that the general had the authority to order a haircut. Gradually Butler’s queue became the rallying point for conservatives opposed to Jefferson’s reforms. Bystanders such as Andrew Jackson condemned Wilkinson’s order as “despotic,” others called him a “detestable persecutor,” and, most woundingly, “a time-serving, superannuated coxcomb, the fawning flatterer of Adams and Jefferson, a perfect Vicar of Bray”— a reference to the eighteenth-century satire on an English clergyman whose political sympathies changed from Whig to Tory and back according to the views of each new monarch on the throne.

The fury that the mere cutting of a pigtail aroused explains why Thomas Jefferson needed Wilkinson. Had the general thrown his weight against the Republican reforms of the army, the Federalist backlash, inside its ranks and among former officers, would have had a leader, and as Adams had recognized earlier, a disaffected army could create a constitutional crisis with unpredictable consequences. Wilkinson’s switch of allegiance was therefore crucial, as the barrage of attacks on him made clear. According to the Federalist senator and former soldier William North, the general was the only senior officer “friendly to the politics of the now reigning party.” Without him, the ten-year-old federal government, so easily defied by lawbreakers such as William Blount, might not be able to impose its will on a determined army.

The lesson of France was fresh in the mind of every Republican: on November 9, 1799, the French military, led by General Napoléon Bonaparte, had overthrown the legitimate government, the Directory, despite the country’s constitution having been approved by more than a million voters. Even with Wilkinson’s support, Elbridge Gerry still felt bound to warn the president in May 1801 that forts and arsenals should be “placed under the protection of faithful officers and corps,” meaning Republicans, to prevent “their seizure or destruction . . . by a desperate faction.”

While Wilkinson was expected to hold the existing army in check, Jefferson and Dearborn instituted the decisive reform that was to shape its future by creating a military academy at West Point. Although set up specifically to train artillery and engineer officers, it, too, was expected to tilt the army away from its old Federalist roots. One of its first cadets, Joseph Swift, later a commandant of the academy himself, remembered being interviewed by Jefferson, who asked, “ ‘To which of the political creeds do you adhere?’ My reply was that as yet I had done no political act, but that my family were Federalists. Mr Jefferson rejoined, ‘There are many men of high talent and integrity in that party, but it is not the rising party.’ ” The hint, repeated by Dearborn, convinced Swift to keep his opinions to himself. In the long term, however, West Point performed its function, not by fostering Republicanism but by encouraging a professional ethic that displaced political loyalties.

By making Jefferson’s “chaste reformation” possible, Wilkinson lost popularity, but preserved an important constitutional principle. He had acquiesced in the axing of some of his closest military friends— only Major Thomas Cushing, marked down as “violently opposed to the administration,” survived—and thereby incurred the hatred of Federalists. But on a larger canvas, what mattered was that he had defended the fundamental basis of any democracy’s relationship with the army, that the military must always be at the service of the civil power. Jefferson’s appreciation of that important service provides the best explanation for his subsequent dealings with the general.

WITHIN THE WAR DEPARTMENT, however, Wilkinson continued to be regarded with suspicion. During the Saratoga campaign, Henry Dearborn was one of those who regarded Wilkinson as a turncoat for betraying Benedict Arnold and, more openly than any other secretary of war, set out to restrict Wilkinson’s capacity for doing mischief. Administratively, functions concerning pay and equipment once performed by military officers, who might be beholden to the commanding general, were transferred to civilian staff answerable to the war secretary. The general’s direct command over operational duties now had to be mediated through three colonels appointed to command the three regiments that constituted the fighting forces of the army. West Point was put under the direct control of the war secretary. Above all, the whole thrust of Jefferson’s famous program of “frugal government” hobbled any scope for maneuver by leaving troops perpetually short of uniforms, ammunition, and transport. As though to underline the weakness of the commander in chief, Dearborn’s directives ensured that from the summer of 1801 Wilkinson spent most of the next eighteen months away from headquarters in Pittsburgh where his family lived. Instead, he was required to supervise the construction of a road linking Lakes Erie and Ontario on the northern frontier, then to negotiate a series of land treaties with Choctaw and Cherokee Indians so that settlers could move into western Tennessee and the Mississippi Territory.

Depressed by his lack of prospects, Wilkinson attempted unsuccessfully to secure the governorship of the Mississippi Territory following Winthrop Sargent’s dismissal. When Jefferson refused on the grounds that a general could not be a chief executive—“no military man should be so placed as to have no civil superior”—he then applied to be made surveyor general, only to be frozen out by Dearborn’s bleak mistrust.