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

Almost immediately, however, Wilkinson sensed a coolness in the secretary’s manner. Its origin lay in the letter Wilkinson had sent to Lewis through the War Department. Armstrong had read its contents and decided that its commonsense advice about generals remaining above the fray was that of a coward. As he expostulated to the astonished Wilkinson, it “struck at the very foundation of military character and service and . . . was calculated to bring shame and dishonour upon the American arms.” The suspicion of Wilkinson’s cowardice, once formed, proved almost impossible to shift. Whatever the supreme commander suggested thereafter appeared to Armstrong to arise from his reluctance to expose himself to danger.

On July 23 the secretary of war had formulated a new strategy for the invasion of Canada. In place of the original, failed idea of invading at three widely separated points, he proposed to concentrate forces at Sackets Harbor, a natural haven at the east end of Lake Ontario, close to the entrance to the St. Lawrence River, and opposite the major British supply base at Kingston in Canada. He would then leave it up to Wilkinson to choose whether to capture Kingston or to sail straight down the St. Lawrence and seize Montreal. Armstrong’s proposal made no reference to the practicalities of command structure, supply lines, equipment, weather, or enemy strength. It assumed that the naval squadron under Commodore Isaac Chauncey had established control of Lake Ontario. It concluded that circumstances offered a unique opportunity that had to be grasped at once to end the war before Christmas.

Realistically, Wilkinson asked for more details about his own command, in particular about his relationship to Hampton, senior as a major general but junior for the proposed invasion. He also questioned the assumption that Chauncey had control of the lake. Aware that disheartened troops needed to be built up in morale, training, and experience after the first disastrous year of war, Wilkinson suggested that the campaign should begin with a series of small operations to exploit General Harrison’s success at the west end of Lake Ontario, where British defenses were weakest. Still unconscious of Armstrong’s doubts about his courage, he concluded, “These suggestions spring from my desire to hazard as little as possible in the outset, and to secure infallibly whatever may be attempted, with the intention to increase our own confidence, to diminish that of the enemy, and to popularise the war.”

Convinced that the general lacked nerve, Armstrong brushed away this cautious strategy and the rationale of rebuilding skills and morale. The choice, he explained, was simply between taking Kingston or going straight down the St. Lawrence. Either plan would leave the U.S. army in control of the river and force the enemy “to fight his way to Quebec, to perish in the attempt, or to lay down his arms.” At that moment, Wilkinson may have guessed that he was being handed a poisoned chalice. The problem did not lie in Armstrong’s strategy of cutting the St. Lawrence, the vital artery linking Lower Canada in the east to Upper Canada in the west, but in his failure to appreciate the means needed to achieve that end.

From Eustis, Armstrong had inherited a crippling range of organizational failings created by the lack of staff officers, inefficient supply arrangements, and a chaotic system of recruitment that was further handicapped by the refusal of Massachusetts and Connecticut to muster their militia for the war. As a result, barely thirteen thousand soldiers of the twenty-five thousand on the muster list were available for service. Of those the great majority were new recruits with barely a year’s training, and the acerbic Winfield Scott judged their officers to be “imbeciles and ignoramuses.” Promotion through seniority resulted in Wilkinson’s being surrounded by a generation of brigadiers and colonels as gray-haired as himself who lacked the vigor and abrasive drive to make an inefficient organization produce wagons, weapons, and reinforcements.

Armstrong’s attention to these systemic weaknesses was spasmodic and ineffective. Of most immediate concern to Wilkinson, Armstrong not only failed to clear up the confusion of Hampton’s role, but allowed General Lewis, Wilkinson’s second-in- command, to go on leave for a month just before the operation began and appointed as his quartermaster general Robert Swartwout, brother of Burr’s lieutenant, who would only take the post part-time. The project that aroused the secretary of war’s real enthusiasm was planning the assault on Kingston.

In August, General Wilkinson traveled up the Hudson River and across country to Sackets Harbor, and on the twenty-fifth he held a council of war to decide which of Armstrong’s two plans of attack should be adopted. The council was attended by Morgan Lewis, Swartwout, and the most dynamic officer in Wilkinson’s army, Jacob Brown, whose religion and aggressive leadership won him the nickname the Fighting Quaker. The fifth member of the council, Commodore Isaac Chauncey, was, next to Wilkinson himself, the most important.

Since the attack on Kingston would require the army to be shipped across the open waters of Lake Ontario, Chauncey’s squadron of eight vessels had to establish complete dominance over the British. They had shown their superiority each time the two fleets had met, but the British vessels were still at large. However, the decision was unexpectedly simplified when Swartwout announced that only twenty- five boats were available to carry Wilkinson’s soldiers to Kingston instead of the three hundred that were needed. Unanimously, the council decided the army should march down the banks of the St. Lawrence to attack Montreal, leaving Chauncey’s fleet with the task of guarding its entrance against British warships. Once the target was chosen, Wilkinson sent orders to Hampton on Lake Champlain to be ready to move against Montreal from the south.

For the first time since his appointment, the general’s spirits soared. “All things go well here,” he assured Armstrong the following day. Within a short time, he expected Chauncey to defeat the British, his men to become healthy, and Hampton to communicate with him: “I hope he does not mean to take the stud [start sulking]. But if so, we can do without him, and he should be sent home.”

Nothing was quite as simple as Wilkinson in his burst of optimism imagined. Almost half his forces, thirty-five hundred men, were located at Fort George, near Niagara at the west end of the lake. Despite all efforts, Chauncey proved unable to trap the British squadron. One in three of the troops at Sackets Harbor remained sick. Transportation was crippled by a lack of boats and horses. The summer was coming to an end. And Hampton had unmistakably taken the stud, not only refusing to reply to Wilkinson’s messages, but complaining to Armstrong that his “command instead of being a separate one has sunk within that of a district.” To mollify him, Armstrong secretly promised that he intended to take personal command of the operation, then assured Wilkinson that Hampton and his four thousand troops would cooperate “cordially and vigorously.”

None of these concerns affected Wilkinson’s mood. He hired a spy to report on British positions in Kingston. He ordered the construction of a dozen large keelboats capable of carrying sixty men each. He was in command with people around him to execute his orders, and as always the sensation restored his confidence. In that rejuvenated state of mind, he decided to go in person to Fort George to hurry the transportation of the troops there back to Sackets Harbor. It entailed a journey of about 130 miles in an open boat, but the incompetence of the Fort George commander, Brigadier General John Boyd, described by Winfield Scott as “vacillating and imbecile beyond all endurance,” made Wilkinson’s presence necessary.