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

All mail addressed to Burr and his associates was intercepted and opened, and travel outside the city was restricted to those with military permits. The streets were patrolled by detachments of armed soldiers with the power to apprehend anyone the general wanted to detain. Such was his authority, he had only to issue a warrant. The list of his suspects lengthened rapidly until by February it extended to printers, legislators, traders, lawyers, and “the Bar in general.”

ON JANUARY 10, 1807, Burr with his small band of followers landed at Vicksburg and, for the first time, learned that the president had ordered his arrest. Wilkinson, who might have enabled the conspiracy to succeed, had made its failure inevitable. In despair, Burr surrendered to Cowles Mead, Mississippi’s acting governor.

The disparity between the eighty men who came ashore with him and the “eight to twelve thousand” that Wilkinson talked of later caused the general to be ridiculed. There were, however, signs of the support that Burr commanded in the south, even after Jefferson’s proclamation was known.

Only thirty or forty of the Natchez militia responded to the muster call to defend the city, and when Burr was indicted before a grand jury in Washington, Mississippi, its members not only denounced Burr’s arrest as a triumph for “the enemies of our glorious Constitution” but immediately found him “not guilty of any crime or misdemeanor against the United States.” Jefferson and Dearborn believed that a grand jury in New Orleans would have brought in similar verdicts had his supporters been arraigned there.

Once set free, Burr bade an emotional farewell to his men on February 13 and disappeared into the wilderness. The failure to capture him in Mississippi despite Wilkinson’s offer of a five- hundred-dollar reward, and the deployment of a snatch squad of officers in civilian clothes, meant that the potential threat continued. So, too, did Wilkinson’s hard- line policy despite the release of some of his prisoners, including Bradford. Reconvened in January, the legislature protested angrily against the general’s destruction of civil liberties, forcing Claiborne to offer a partial apology on his behalf. “I believe the General is actuated by a sincere disposition to serve the best interest of his country,” he declared, “but his zeal, I fear, has carried him too far.” By then, however, it was apparent that the general’s methods were endorsed by President Jefferson and his administration.

TWO DAYS AFTER DEARBORN learned of Wilkinson’s loyalty from Lieutenant Smith, he gave the general blanket powers to “dispose of the troops in such manner, as will most effectually intercept and prevent any unlawful enterprize.” In addition Dearborn ordered, “Any person or persons who may be found in or about your camp or post, with evident intention of sounding either officer or soldier, with a view to an unlawful expedition, should be arrested.”

Any lingering doubts about his past associations—Dearborn commented, “Your name has been very frequently mentioned with Burr, Dayton and others”—evaporated with the arrival of the upright Isaac Briggs.

As the Quaker recounted, “After a most arduous journey, in the midst of a severe winter, of more than 1200 miles, 600 of it through wilderness, on the first day of the year, 1807, I arrived in Washington city, and waited on the President with my despatches. Immediately on his opening them, he exclaimed with earnestness, ‘Is Wilkinson sound in this business?’ I replied very promptly, ‘There is not the slightest doubt of it.’ ”

From that moment, Jefferson showed himself ready to support whatever Wilkinson did, regardless of the cost to the principles of individual liberty and the rule of law. In reply to the letters that Briggs delivered, including copies of those from Burr and Dayton, Jefferson urged the general on January 3, 1807, to “act on the possibility that the resources of our enemies may be greater and deeper than we are yet informed.” A month later, answering a flood of letters from Wilkinson detailing his measures to protect New Orleans, Jefferson wrote approvingly, “We were pleased to see that without waiting for [the orders sent in November] you adopted nearly the same plan yourself and acted on it with promptitude.”

By then Bollman and Swartwout, the first of the prisoners to be arbitrarily arrested and deported, had arrived in the capital, yet the president still insisted that the threat of attack by an “overwheming force” from the Mississippi justified Wilkinson in what he did. He offered a single note of caution. Referring to popular opinion “in a nation tender as to anything infringing liberty, especially from the military,” Jefferson expressed the hope that “you will not extend this deportation where there is only suspicion . . . in that case public sentiment will desert you, because seeing no danger here, violations of the law are felt with strength.” Even then, the president made a specific exception for the ringleaders, Burr and Blennerhassett, who should be deported immediately and without trial to Washington, “should they fall into your hands.” Of Wilkinson’s military rule, he said nothing directly, but alluding to rumors that the administration was distancing itself from the general, the president ended, “Be assured you will be cordially supported in the line of your duties.”

Until then no one had been more tender about the military infringing liberty than Jefferson—even years later, in correspondence with John Adams, he did not hesitate to describe the comparatively mild restrictions on free speech contained in the alien and sedition laws as “terrorism.” The explanation that Jefferson himself offered for his endorsement of Wilkinson’s behavior was sent to John Colvin, editor of two Republican newspapers and of Jefferson’s own memoirs: “A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.” Wilkinson’s need to defeat the threat posed by Burr “constituted a law of necessity and self- preservation, and rendered the salus populi [safety of the people] supreme over the written law.”

This was— and is—a specious argument, one based on circular logic, since the agency that restricts liberty invariably maintains that it is the only competent judge of the danger. As Adams tartly pointed out, he could claim that the alien and sedition laws were made necessary by the threat of “terrorism” from Jefferson’s own Republican clubs with their close links to the Jacobins in France, who were, after all, the originators of terror as a political tactic.

Recognizing the inherent weakness of his reasoning, Jefferson did suggest an extra safeguard to Colvin, that of retrospective judgment. “The officer who is called to act on this supreme ground, does indeed risk himself on the justice of the controlling powers of the constitution, and his station makes it his duty to incur that risk.” Thus Wilkinson might later find himself held criminally responsible for his actions. In his defense, however, he had only to claim honest intention, because as Jefferson insisted, “In all these cases, the purity and the patriotism of the motives should shield the agent from blame.”

Guided by the hints in Jefferson’s letters, Wilkinson adopted this as his own defense. “I have never attempted to justify the infractions of the law which were forced on me in New Orleans by an impending great calamity,” he told Daniel Clark in May 1807. “Yet I can never repent what I have done, and would repeat it a thousand times, for if a destructive evil to a national community can be arrested by the ruin of an individual, should he pause? I think not, and under this impression I have acted.”