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

Luther Martin, the grandstanding, alcoholic, self- appointed guardian of democracy, and best known of Burr’s team, tracked down Major James Bruff and encouraged him to testify. As Bruff excitedly told everyone in the stagecoach carrying him to Richmond, Martin had promised “he would lash General Wilkinson into tortures” with his cross-examination. The major brought not only his own, far from credible, testimony concerning alleged confessions of conspiracy that Wilkinson had chosen to reveal privately to him behind locked doors and convenient bushes, but affidavits to the same effect from Wilkinson’s other enemies in St. Louis, inlcuding Samuel Hammond, “with whom General Wilkinson had a conversation nearly similar to the one held with me.” Bruff was joined by Swartwout, and a reluctant Thomas Power, who had been subpoenaed in New Orleans. All contributed to the impression that, as Luther Martin put it, “General Wilkinson is the alpha and the omega of the present prosecution.”

Quite apart from his personal hostility to Burr, Jefferson’s tactics left them little option but to pursue the general. When the president first told Congress about the conspiracy on January 22, 1807, he dated the moment at which the administration realized what was being planned not to William Eaton’s information in October, but to Wilkinson’s letter on November 25 This conveniently obscured the nightmare period when the cabinet lost control of events, but it portrayed the general as solely responsible for detecting the conspiracy, and deserving most of the credit for defeating it. By destroying Wilkinson, Burr’s team undermined the very existence of a plot. And behind him was a larger target.

In his address to Congress, Jefferson had declared that Burr “contemplated two distinct objects, which might be carried on either jointly or separately . . . One of these was the severance of the Union of these States by the Alleghany mountains; the other, an attack on Mexico.” His public statements hammered at the theme of Burr’s undoubted guilt in seeking to destroy the Union. In private he went further, referring to “treason stalking through the land,” and accusing the Federalists of “making Burr’s cause their own, mortified only that he did not separate the Union or overturn the government.”

Burr’s defense team responded by issuing subpoenas for the presidential papers, and especially for his letters to the general. “The president has undertaken to prejudge my client by declaring ‘of his guilt there can be no doubt,’ ” Martin thundered in court. “He has let slip the dogs of war, the hellhounds of prosecution, to hunt down my friend. And would this president of the United States, who has raised all this absurd clamor, pretend to keep back the papers which are wanted for this trial, where life itself is at stake?” It was, on both sides, a political as well as a legal contest.

To Jefferson’s intense frustration, at every hearing, from the first application in February 1807 before the Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus for Swartwout and Bollman, the leading judge was the chief justice, John Marshall, an overt Federalist appointed to his position by John Adams in 1801. In releasing Burr’s two messengers, Marshall had laid out what was to be his unchanging opinion, that the constitution specified that “treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them,” and that “conspiracy is not treason . . . To conspire, and actually to levy war are distinct offences.” As a result, when Burr appeared before Marshall at a preliminary hearing on March 31 in Richmond, the capital of Burr’s home state, Marshall would indict him only on the grounds of levying war against a foreign power, a charge that amounted to a misdemeanor. It was left to the grand jury, whose hearings began on May 22, to decide whether to reinstate the charge of treason. Again in charge of the case, this time as judge of the circuit court in Virginia, Marshall did not challenge the president’s refusal to let his papers be subpoenaed, although he continued to make plain his opinion that the treason charge was unsound.

The appearance in court of General James Wilkinson on June 15 was consequently one of high drama, bringing onto the stage the prosecution’s chief witness and the defense’s primary target. For political connoisseurs, he would serve as a surrogate for the president; for conspiracy theorists, he was the one person who might be able to throw light on Burr’s real intentions; but for enthusiasts of crude emotional confrontation, nothing matched the electric moment when Wilkinson approached Burr in the handsome, white-paneled hall of Virginia’s House of Delegates.

“Wilkinson strutted into court and took his stand in a parallel line with Burr on his right hand,” wrote Washington Irving. “Here he stood for a moment, swelling like a turkey cock and bracing himself for the encounter of Burr’s eye. The latter did not take any notice of him until the judge directed the clerk to swear General Wilkinson; at the mention of the name Burr turned his head, looked him full in the face with one of his piercing regards, swept his eye over his whole person from head to foot, as if to scan its dimensions, and then cooly resumed his former position, and went on versing with his counsel as tranquilly as ever. The whole look was over in an instant, but it was an admirable one. There was no appearance of study or constraint in it; no affectation of disdain or defiance; a slight expression of contempt played over his countenance.”

Irving wrote from the point of view of a New York Federalist and someone who confessed to feeling “no sensation but compassion for [Burr].” From Wilkinson’s perspective, the scene played differently. “I was introduced to a position within the bar very near my adversary,” he wrote Jefferson two days later. “I saluted the bench and inspite of myself my eyes darted a flash of indignation at the little traitor, on whom they continued fixed until I was called to the Book; here, sir, I found my expectations verified— this lion-hearted, eagle- eyed Hero, jerking under the weight of conscious guilt, with haggard eyes in an effort to meet the indignant salutation of outraged honor; but it was in vain, his audacity failed him. He averted his face, grew pale, and affected passion to conceal his perturbation.”

For the next four days Wilkinson gave evidence before the grand jury. Seeing himself as the nation’s savior confronting its betrayer must have left him ill- prepared for the hostility he faced, not just from Burr’s lawyers, but from the foreman of the jury, John Randolph. A disease in adolescence had left him with a childlike voice and no facial hair, condemning him to be an outsider in Virginia’s testosterone-fueled society. Politically, he exploited his position on the sidelines to become a coruscating, merciless critic of any frailty or compromise that he detected among the main players. “He is a very slight man but of the common stature,” his fellow congressman William Plumer noted. “At a little distance, he does not appear older than you are; but, upon a nearer approach, you perceive his wrinkles and grey hairs . . . [His opponents] ridicule and affect to despise him; but a despised foe often proves a dangerous enemy.”

Although nominally a Republican, he made a particular target of Jefferson’s extensive use of federal power, basing his criticism, to the president’s intense irritation, on the doctrine of state sovereignty put forward in 1798 by Jefferson himself. This stance ensured that Randolph was also adamantly opposed to a standing army—in 1800 he dismissed it in Congress as “a handful of Ragamuffins.” In Wilkinson himself, Randolph discerned a wickedness that had tempted Jefferson into compromising his former values, and he roundly declared that the general was “the only man I ever saw who was a villain from the bark to the core.” It became Randolph’s mission to persuade his fellow jurors to indict the general as a traitor, more vicious than Burr.