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

AARON BURR’S CAMP WAS ALSO CONCERNED about Wilkinson’s intentions. Through the winter of 1806 Burr had exercised his magnetic personality on almost everyone on the east coast who might be able to aid his fortunes. The fund-raising campaign surprisingly included approaches by Burr and Jonathan Dayton, acting as his chief of staff, to the Spanish ambassador, the Marquis de Casa-Yrujo. The scenario that Burr and Dayton presented to him—a separatist movement in the Mississippi Valley backed by a British fleet—had attractions for any Spanish diplomat. Although their plot had elements of fantasy as well, including an armed putsch in Washington with Burr forcibly replacing Jefferson, the power of the Creoles’ independence movement in New Orleans convinced Yrujo of its feasibility. He contributed a much needed three thousand dollars and, in his dispatches to the Spanish foreign minister, Pedro Cevallos, confirmed that Wilkinson was involved and that Burr’s goal was secession rather than an attack on Mexico.

In late May 1806, Burr finally received a letter from Wilkinson, but one so anodyne that Burr could not later recall its contents. The absence of any expression of support told its own story. With twenty thousand dollars at stake, Dayton finally lost patience. “It is now well ascertained that you are to be displaced in the next session,” he wrote Wilkinson bluntly. “Jefferson will affect to yield reluctantly to the public sentiment, but yield he will; prepare yourself therefore for it; you know the rest. You are not a man to despair, or even despond, especially when such prospects offer in another quarter. Are you ready? Are your numerous associates ready? Wealth and Glory. Louisiana and Mexico.”

In July 1806, Burr approached Albert Gallatin, the recognized fixer in Jefferson’s administration, and inquired whether “Wilkinson had resigned or been removed from the office of governor of Louisiana.” The nature of the questions indicated that Burr hoped the answer would be yes, but Gallatin replied with a double negative. In truth, however, Wilkinson’s long silence meant that neither side knew where the general’s shifting loyalties might turn. On the eve of the Burr Conspiracy, the participation of the one person who could make or break it remained a mystery.

WHETHER EVEN THE GENERAL HIMSELF knew what he would do is questionable. By coincidence, Dearborn’s command to move south arrived just after Wilkinson had drafted orders for Cushing to advance up the Red River to Natchitoches with three companies of infantry to confront the Spanish threat. Immediately he added an urgent postscript giving Cushing sweeping power over all troops west of the Mississippi, and warning him to be ready for war, but to do nothing to provoke it, “as war is not only opposite to the genius and disposition of our country, but also to its substantial interests and happiness.”

While this suggested the loyal commander, Wilkinson was at the same time urgently making arrangements for the departure of Lieutenant Pike’s second expedition. Ostensibly its purpose was to explore the Red River, but covertly its orders seemed designed to take it to Santa Fe. The character of Pike himself might have been made for such a desperate mission.

Born into the army, Pike had followed his military father from post to post until he could enlist himself as a fifteen- year- old cadet, just in time to fight at Fallen Timbers. He never received more than a smattering of an education, and he had failed in all the tasks set for his 1805 expedition— discovery of the source of the Mississippi, removal of British traders, and suppression of their illegal fur business. But he had demonstrated a priceless ability to persuade others to accept his leadership whatever the cost. Hauling their boats through snowstorms and freezing, ice- thickened rivers, his twenty men worked until they vomited blood and collapsed with frostbite, so that Pike himself admitted, “[Even] if I had no regard for my own health and constitution, I should have some for these poor fellows, who were killing themselves to obey my orders.”

The overt purpose of Pike’s new expedition was to return a party of Osage hostages to their village high on the Missouri River, then reach the source of the Arkansas River, before pushing south to the Red River and descending from its source to the Mississippi. Geography suggested another goal. Hundreds of mountainous miles separate the source of the Arkansas from the Red River, but amid the web of waterways that rise from the southern Rockies in Colorado, barely eighty miles lie between the head of the Arkansas and the Rio Bravo or Grande, which flows past Santa Fe and south toward Mexico.

Private messages exchanged with Wilkinson indicated that Pike expected his party to be made “prisoners of war,” and that Wilkinson would “send to look for him” with a force of three thousand or four thousand men “if Christmas Eve should pass without his return.” Since his instructions to Pike were dated June 24, weeks after Wilkinson was ordered south, the general may well have conceived the expedition as a response to Dearborn’s command. In other words, it seems probable that in the summer of 1806 Burr’s strategy was working, and that as Wilkinson felt himself being pushed out of favor with Jefferson, he was creating an excuse to invade Mexico by way of Santa Fe and the Camino Real.

In early October, at a point high up on the Arkansas River, Pike detached James Biddle Wilkinson with five boatmen to paddle down the river with a report to his father. It read, “Any number of men who may reasonably be calculated on would find no difficulty in marching by the route we came, with baggage wagons, field artillery, and all the usual appendages of a small army; and if all the route to Santa Fe should be of the same description, in case of war I would pledge my life and what is infinitely dearer, my honor, for the successful march of a reasonable body of troops into the province of New Mexico.”

WILKINSON FINALLY SAILED from St. Louis on August 22. To his confidant in the Senate, Samuel Smith, he attributed the delay to “the extreme ill health of Mrs W.” The symptoms of her tuberculosis— a hard cough accompanied by bright specks of blood sprayed out from the congested lungs—were made worse by the fetid summer. Accordingly he waited until the worst of the heat was over before gently taking her down the river. Despite the emergency, he then spent a week in Natchez settling Nancy into the familiar surroundings of the Concordia mansion, once Gayoso’s but now the property of Esteban Minor.

As always with Wilkinson, any change that removed a weight of obligations, even those to his beloved wife, and allowed him to give orders to others transformed his mood. During his slow progress south, a platoon of Spanish troops had occupied a small outpost on U.S. soil called Bayou Pierre. This had become the potential flashpoint that could lead to war. Once Nancy was settled, the general immediately ordered up all the regular troops in the vicinity that could be spared, together with seven hundred militia from Mississippi and Orleans territories, and, as he confidently assured Dearborn on September 27, “With this Force I have no doubts of success in the outset, and think I shall be able to drive our opponents before me and take Nacodoches” several miles to the west of the Sabine River.

While in Natchez, his optimism tempted him into a dangerous joke about the allegations in the Western World when he encountered the surveyor general of the Mississippi Territory, Isaac Briggs, a sobersided, upright Quaker. “It must appear strange to you, friend Briggs,” he declared during a chance meeting in the mansion of Cowles Mead, acting governor of the territory, “that I, a Spanish officer, am now on my way, to fight the Spaniards, should they not retire.” It was said, Briggs recalled, “with great vivacity” and “a very cheerful air.” But Briggs was not the sort of person to laugh at such matters, even when they had appeared in a rag such as the Western World . Suddenly turning on Wilkinson, he demanded, “ ‘But, General, what about the Spanish money? I have heard that thou receivedst, previous to thy departure from New Orleans, in the spring of 1804, from Spanish officers, about 10,000 dollars, of a late Mexican coinage, in Campeachy bags.’ He answered, still with the same gay and easy air, ‘It is a fact, Sir, I did receive about that sum of a late Mexican coinage, in Campeachy bags, and from Spanish officers, and what then? It was due to me on account of former mercantile contracts.’ ”