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

AHEAD OF THEM IN NEW ORLEANS, James Wilkinson was working feverishly to repair the city’s defenses. A force of fewer than eight hundred troops had been set to rebuilding the ruined walls of Fort St. Louis, and constructing new barriers across strategic roads and canals into the city. Governor William Claiborne ordered the tiny fleet of four gunboats and two bomb ketches to be put under Wilkinson’s command, and an urgent meeting was convened with leading merchants to ask them for money and men to equip the vessels for action. The first indication that Wilkinson had something more extreme in mind came on December 6, just before this meeting, when he wrote Claiborne, “Under circumstances so imperious, extraordinary measures must be resorted to, and the ordinary forms of our civil institutions must, for a short period, yield to the strong arm of military law . . . I most earnestly entreat you to proclaim martial law over this city, its ports and precincts.”

During the long months of uncertainty about Wilkinson’s loyalty, Claiborne had received no communication from Washington. Both Jackson and Mead, had, however, counseled him not to trust the general. In a message announcing his intention to defend Natchez at all costs, Mead told the governor, “Burr may come—and he is no doubt desperate . . . Should he pass us, your fate will depend on the General, not on the Colonel. If I stop Burr, this may hold the General in his allegiance to the United States. But if Burr passes this Territory with two thousand men, I have no doubt but the General will be your worst enemy.” Forced to choose between losing the city to Burr or to Wilkinson, Claiborne temporized. On December 7, he refused Wilkinson’s demand for martial law, but only on the technical grounds that it suspended the citizen’s right of habeas corpus, a power that resided solely with the legislature, which was not in session.

Two days later, New Orleans’s merchants met and volunteered to supply crews and money for the navy. With their agreement, Claiborne simultaneously put an embargo on ships leaving the port during the emergency. This measure halted all trade, and if sustained long would drive the merchants and the city into bankruptcy, but for a few weeks it was acceptable because everyone shared the burden. To the merchants’ consternation, Wilkinson dismissed their offer as inadequate. In the expectation of a naval attack from the Gulf of Mexico backed by British frigates, he demanded the use of New Orleans’s sailors for a minimum of six months. When this was refused, he told Claiborne that he would round up the seamen forcibly, pressing them into service as the British navy did.

By now the governor was deeply alarmed. “I submit it to your cool reflection,” he replied, “whether at this time I could be justifiable in compelling men by force to enter the service. Many good-disposed citizens do not appear to think the danger considerable, and there are others who (perhaps from wicked intentions) endeavor to turn our preparations into ridicule.”

Wilkinson, however, was unrelenting. The argument he used for attacking civil liberties has become familiar. “We have reached an extremity in our public affairs,” he brusquely informed Claiborne, “which will not only justify, but which imperiously demands, the partial and momentary dispensation of the ordinary course of our civil institutions, to preserve the sanctuary of public liberty from total dilapidation.”

The general estimated Burr’s forces at between seven and twelve thousand men, but it was not just this outside threat he had to confront. In New Orleans, Burr sympathizers could be found in the resentful Creole population, and among the shadowy but influential membership of the Mexico Association. Privately, Wilkinson assured Samuel Smith that three quarters of the population were unreliable. Consequently the sweeping powers of martial law and impressment were essential because “unless I am authorized to repress the seditious and arrest the disaffected, and to call the resources of the place into active operation, the defects of my force may expose me to be overwhelmed by numbers; and the cause and the place will be lost.” With increasing feebleness, Claiborne still held out, insisting that the judiciary alone had the power to enforce the law, “nor can any acts of mine arrest or suspend their powers.”

By mid-December, however, his protests had become irrelevant. Sensing the governor’s weakness, Wilkinson simply bypassed the constitutional safeguards and carried out what amounted to a military coup in the city. On December 14 a series of arbitrary arrests began. First, the courier Erick Bollman was seized on suspicion of treason by Wilkinson’s soldiers, then Swartwout and his traveling companion, Peter Ogden. Bollman was hustled onto a gunboat and shipped out of the city, while Swartwout, as he later told a friend, “was taken from prison in the night under a guard of soldiers and hurried through swamps and marshes to an unfrequented place in the woods . . . and threatened by the officer if [I] attempted to escape, death would be the consequence.” According to Swartwout, they did shoot when he tried to get away, but their muskets misfired. Later he and Ogden were both chained up on a bomb ketch moored in the river.

The arrests, coming on top of the rumors of Burr’s approaching army, created panic in the city. A judge, James Workman, issued writs of habeas corpus for the release of all three men, but Wilkinson immediately rearrested them, declaring that he took full responsibility for “the two traitors who were the subjects of the writs.” He promised to continue to arrest “all those against whom I have positive proof of being accomplices in the machinations against the state.” Angrily Workman told Claiborne that by law his next step should be to call on the sheriff to have the general arrested, but in such dangerous circumstances he was prepared to let the governor intervene. When Claiborne refused to act, Workman resigned. As an early historian of Louisiana put it, “This was acknowledging the fact that Wilkinson was supreme dictator, and that henceforth his will was to be the law.”

Most of this was motivated by his need to act the superpatriot. But another factor was at work. Nancy Wilkinson lay dying.

Carried downriver from Natchez in December, she was lodged in the house of the Creole millionaire Bernard de Marigny. Shortly before she died on February 23, her son James returned from his epic journey down the Arkansas River so that she was not alone at her death. “Oh god how heavy have been my afflictions,” Wilkinson confided to Jonathan Williams, and it would be strange if the awful waiting for her end, and the eventual grief, did not contribute to his savagery. Always a convivial drinker, the general seems now to have begun drinking to dull his senses, to the tragedy in his private life and, perhaps, to the monstrous edifice he was creating in public. In an unsigned letter to the Aurora newspaper, edited by the sympathetic William Duane, he portrayed himself isolated in the midst of “acknowledged traitors and masked confederates.” This was, he wrote, a different Wilkinson, “unmoved and indefatigable . . . no more jocose, volatile or convivial. He seemed wrought in thought and silence! and was to be found only with the troops, at the works, or in his office.”

Early in January, John Adair, his friend for more than fifteen years, arrived in the city. Whatever his expectations of Wilkinson—it was said that Adair still hoped to arrange the handover of the city to Burr— Adair was too ill to do anything but send word that he wanted to see the general. The same afternoon, a detachment of 120 troops under the command of Wilkinson’s trusted aide Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Kingsbury surrounded his hotel. Adair was dragged from his room and taken to military headquarters, where he was held until he could be put on a ship bound for Washington alongside Swartwout, Bollman, and Ogden. Adair’s arrest was followed by that of Workman, on the grounds that the judge was “strongly suspected for being connected with Burr,” and that of the editor of the Orleans Gazette , James Bradford, and a financier, Lewis Kerr, who was accused of plotting “to plunder the bank.”