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

Two more letters went to Freeman with further orders for improving the defense of the city, and the assurance that “I have made up my mind to perish in the storm, in defence of the government and integrity of the union, and every officer I have the honour to command will do the same.” On the same day he wrote William Claiborne with instructions to act urgently in repairing New Orleans’s defenses, but to “demonstrate no hurry” because “you are surrounded by disaffection where you least suspect it.” That letter was no sooner sealed than he began another to Samuel Smith, insisting that Claiborne be dismissed for failing to prepare adequate defenses; then, having asserted that the “Integrity of the Union is menaced by the impious ambition of a desperate Band,” he demanded that his salary should be increased— “Shall I be suffered to starve or to exhaust the last Cent of my private purse, or abandon every thing like respectability in office?”

Finally, the ever reliable Walter Burling was sent all the way to Mexico City with a message for José de Iturrigaray, viceroy of Mexico, explaining the heroic efforts Wilkinson had already made to protect Spain’s possessions against Burr, his immediate intention to “spring like Leonidas into the breach defending it, or perish in the attempt,” and his pressing need to be repaid for the expenses he had incurred—eighty-five thousand pesos spent “in shattering the plans and destroying the union and harmony among the bandits being enrolled along the Ohio, and thirty-six thousand in the dispatch of supplies and counter-revolutionists—which sums I trust will be reimbursed to the bearer.”

Aside from the calculated need to squeeze a profit from the emergency, this was not the language of a cold-blooded plotter, as his enemies later alleged. With his wife dying in an upstairs bedroom, James Wilkinson was performing his different roles as patriot, as spy, as military hero, with the desperate intensity of a man on the edge of breakdown. Failure to convince his audience would kill off his characters as surely as tuberculosis was killing his wife and condemn him to cope with intolerable reality.

Invited to the Concordia mansion on about November 15, Isaac Briggs was struck by the change in the general’s demeanor since September. “I confess I approached him with caution,” Briggs recounted. “His wife lay at this time, in the same house, apparently at the point of death. The General met me in a mood the reverse of that described in the former conversation: then, all was gaiety; now, every thing in his manner was throughout, solemn, impressive and pregnant with alarm. He took me aside, and immediately put the question: ‘Can you go to the seat of government of the United States?’ ”

The recruitment of Briggs to act as messenger to Jefferson, not only carrying his dispatches, but testifying to his patriotism with a Quaker’s unshakable integrity, was essential to Wilkinson’s plans. Briggs’s initial skepticism, even after being told of the conspiracy, only added to his usefulness. “How dost thou know these things?” he demanded. “May all this not be a deception?” To satisfy his doubts, Wilkinson had to produce Burr’s and Dayton’s letters, to point to the connection between the Western World stories and Dayton’s blackmailing suggestion that he was about to be dismissed, and to pave the way for the conclusion that Briggs reached after a night’s sleep. “I could not resist the inference,” the Quaker wrote, “that did Colonel Burr aim to secure the cooperation of General Wilkinson, the use of such means perfectly accorded with the opinion I had acquired of [Burr’s] character—to impose on [Wilkinson] the conviction on the one hand that his reputation with his country was destroyed beyond his power to redeem it; and on the other to hold up to his view such allurements as were well calculated to fascinate his ambition.”

Convinced that Jefferson had to be informed of what was really happening, Briggs set off for Washington on November 18 with the general’s dispatches and copies of Burr’s and Dayton’s letters. Any hope of rescuing Wilkinson’s reputation rested with him. Elsewhere in the south, Burr and Dayton had already shredded it beyond repair. Cowles Mead, acting governor of Mississippi, was so convinced of Wilkinson’s complicity that he refused the general’s request to call out the militia for fear they would be used in the plot and instead told William Claiborne in New Orleans, “It is here believed that General Wilkinson is the soul of the conspiracy.” Andrew Jackson, himself uncomfortably close to Burr, followed up with a second warning to Claiborne sent on November 12: “Be upon the alert; keep a watchful eye upon our General and beware of an attack, as well from our own country as Spain. I fear there is something rotten in the State of Denmark.” Theater was already blurring with reality when the general arrived in New Orleans on November 25 ready to take the stage in the greatest role of his life, not as Hamlet, but something closer to Julius Caesar.

25

THE GENERAL REDEEMED

ON THE VERY DAY that James Wilkinson entered New Orleans, a weary Lieutenant Thomas Smith stepped into President Jefferson’s study in the White House and removed his slippers. When he had unpicked the soles, he handed over the general’s two letters for the president, and his message to the secretary of war. Smith left no account of his record journey—almost fourteen hundred miles covered in thirty- three days— or of the president’s response to this first indication of Wilkinson’s loyalty. But Smith’s fatigue must have been as extreme as the president’s relief.

During the weeks without news, and the continuing doubts about how the general might use the troops under his command, the administration had remained paralyzed. Dearborn had guessed that Wilkinson would try to make war on Spain. Urgent messages had been sent south instructing him to keep the peace, and ordering Captain Thomas Swaine, commander of the eastern defenses on the Mobile River, not to leave his post to attack the Spanish, whatever Wilkinson might command. But until the creased pages were removed from their wrapping, and Jefferson began to read Wilkinson’s looped handwriting, no one knew what had actually happened.

However alarming the references to the “deep and dark conspiracy” and the “eight or ten thousand men” who were to rendezvous in New Orleans, the discovery that the army’s commander in chief was loyal and planned to defend the city outweighed every other consideration. The difference it made to Jefferson’s administration was immediately evident when the cabinet met the following day. For the first time, decisive action could be taken to frustrate Burr’s plans. As the president explained to Congress, “Two days after the receipt of General Wilkinson’s information . . . orders were despatched to every intersecting point on the Ohio and Mississippi, from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, for the employment of such force either of the regulars or of the militia, and of such proceedings also of the civil authorities, as might enable them to seize on all the boats and stores provided for the enterprise, to arrest the persons concerned, and to suppress effectually the further progress of the enterprise.”

The first action against Burr was taken by Governor Edward Tiffin of Ohio, based on information that the cabinet’s confidential agent, John Graham, had gained from men recruited by Blennerhassett. Shortly before the president’s proclamation arrived, Ohio militia raided Blennerhassett’s island home. They were just too late to capture its owner, who had left hours earlier with his friend Colonel Comfort Tyler. In their absence, the soldiers seized about a dozen boats and two hundred barrels of provisions, as well as destroying Blennerhassett’s library and beautiful furniture. In late December, Blennerhassett, Tyler, and a force numbering no more than eighty men joined up with Burr, who had acquired two more large boats from Andrew Jackson. By the end of the year, their small convoy was sailing down the Mississippi just ahead of the news of Jefferson’s proclamation that was spreading southward like a tide.