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

There Wilkinson issued a grandiloquent but necessary reminder to the soldiers of the delicate nature of their mission, and the need for toleration of foreign customs: “We behold a polished people (strangers to our manners, our laws and our language) cast into our arms. Be it our pride and our glory to receive them into the great family of our happy country with cordial embraces.” On December 20, the two commissioners marched at the head of the U.S. troops along the levees on the riverfront, and into the huge central square, the Place d’Armes, in front of the City Hall of New Orleans.

In a bittersweet mood Laussat, who had received the keys of New Orleans from the Spanish only three weeks before, noted in his journal, “The day was beautiful and the temperature as balmy as a day in May. Lovely ladies and city dandies graced all the balconies on the Place d’Armes. The Spanish officers could be distinguished in the crowd by their plumage . . . The American troops appeared and, with drums beating, marched by platoons, and placed themselves on the river side of the square. Facing them, on the other side were the [French] militia.”

To his chagrin, Laussat now had to repeat the earlier ceremony in which he had formally received Louisiana from Spain’s two commissioners, the ancient Manuel de Salcedo—“an impotent old man in his dotage,” the forty- two-year- old Laussat noted—and the aristocratic Marqués de Casa Calvo, “a violent man who hated the French.” But this time Laussat had to give away a third of a continent. In the conference chamber, he greeted the two commissioners. Claiborne, Laussat wrote, was “tall and erect with an American complexion,” while Wilkinson was “short, also erect, of handsome though pompous mien.” Having proclaimed that he was “transferring the country to the United States,” Laussat presented the general with the keys to the city, tied with a tricolor ribbon; then all three signed the documents that officially conveyed ownership of Louisiana to the United States. Finally they went out on the balcony, where “the French colors were lowered and the American flag was raised,” and a salvo of cannon fire signaled that the United States had almost doubled in size.

Exactly six weeks later, Brigadier General James Wilkinson, commanding general of the U.S. army, and his country’s military commissioner for the province of Louisiana, had a private interview in New Orleans with the visiting Spanish governor of West Florida, Don Vizente Folch. He suggested that he should be paid twenty thousand dollars, the arrears on his pension as a Spanish agent. In return he promised to pass on information vital to Spain, including Jefferson’s plans regarding Spanish America. “I know,” he boasted, “what is concealed in the President’s heart.”

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AGENT 13 REBORN

NEW ORLEANS WAS WHERE JAMES WILKINSON had first transferred his loyalties to Spain. Two years later, it was where he had returned to negotiate his transition from trader to Spanish agent. But despite the precedents, it could hardly have been imagined that he would behave there in the same way three times in a row. So much had changed since the 1780s. Even before the purchase of Louisiana, the balance of power in North America had clearly shifted from Spain to the United States. The Spanish Conspiracy was a distant memory. Most important, Wilkinson himself was in command of the U.S. army, the great prize for which he had cut off his original connection with Spain.

Nor did his public behavior suggest any secret agenda. Seen through the jaundiced eyes of Pierre de Laussat, he appeared as a loud buffoon. In a report to Paris, the French commissioner compared the performance of both Wilkinson and Claiborne unfavorably to his own suave efficiency and rated them below even the disorganized but self-possessed Spaniards:

“It was hardly possible that the Government of the United States should have a worse beginning, and that it should have sent two men more deficient in the proper requisites to conciliate the hearts of the Louisianians. The first, with estimable qualities as a private man, has little intellect, a good deal of awkwardness, and is extremely [inadequate to] the position in which he has been placed. The second, who has been long known here in the most unfavorable manner, is a rattle- headed fellow, full of odd fantasies. He is frequently drunk, and has committed a hundred inconsistent and impertinent acts. Neither the one nor the other understands one word of French, or Spanish. They have, on all occasions, and without the slightest circumspection, shocked the habits, the prejudices and the natural dispositions of the inhabitants of this country.”

The sort of incident Laussat had in mind occurred at a public ball on January 22, 1804, attended by American and French officers as well as New Orleans high society. Wilkinson noticed among the dancers in a quadrille a French official who had just returned from Saint Domingue and so should have been in quarantine for yellow fever. He plunged into the dancers and marched him off the floor. The French officers began to protest. Wilkinson jumped up on a bench and, with Claiborne standing loyally beside him, delivered a bombastic lecture on social responsibility in bad French and his own elaborate English. The French began to jeer, and their response provoked the general to launch into “Hail, Columbia,” the national anthem of the time, accompanied by Claiborne and members of their staffs. When this failed to silence the protests, Wilkinson inexplicably, unless to annoy the French, who had spent ten years at war with the British, decided to sing “God Save the King,” to which the French responded stridently with “La Marseillaise” amid a mounting storm of shouts and whistling. At that point, with scuffles breaking out and pandemonium descending, Wilkinson and Claiborne prudently abandoned the war of songs and withdrew.

None of this suggested the anonymity and self-control expected of a secret agent, but Wilkinson’s bluster was always a good disguise to his shrewdness. Despite the explosive mixture of nationalities in the city, the confusion arising from three different governments holding power in as many weeks, and the presence of armed soldiers from three separate armies, New Orleans avoided disorder. “The Prefect of France and the Spanish troops are still in town, and the magazines and storehouses still in their possession,” Wilkinson complained to Dearborn almost three months after the transfer of power, “while we are obliged to pay rent for our own accommodation.” Despite provocations from Spanish militia “which a state of war alone would justify,” as one of Wilkinson’s officers put it, the army’s presence kept the peace until April, when both Spanish and French forces sailed for home.

In his arrogance, Laussat failed to see that at least part of the credit for this orderly transition was due to Wilkinson’s shrewd disposition of his troops across the city, and his very public tours of inspection to ensure their good behavior. The punishments inflicted after he discovered the guard in Fort St. Louis dead drunk on the very first night ensured that the offense was never repeated, or at least not found out, while he was there. “I apprehend no Danger,” the general wrote dramatically to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn after a night on patrol with his men in the streets, “but the horrors of a sinister attempt make it my duty to prevent one.” French residents complained of heavy-handed policing, but not of laxness.

Wilkinson’s very public commitment makes the decision to betray his country again still more mysterious. Had it been his intention to sabotage the American takeover, an incident could easily have been allowed to blow up. French resentment remained especially fierce, and as Claiborne reported, they “seem determined to sour the Inhabitants as much as possible with the American government.” Yet the general clearly did everything he could to prevent such an explosion from taking place.