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

During 1814, the experience of war coupled with an intense system of training instituted by General Winfield Scott had brought about a material change in the ability of the troops to withstand the shock of battle. It was first apparent at the battle of Chippewa on July 5, 1814, when the superiority of Scott’s troops in infantry maneuvers and artillery fire won what an exultant General Jacob Brown declared to be “the first victory gained over the enemy on a plain”—that is, without advantage of ground or surprise.

Two weeks later, Scott’s soldiers, now led by Brown in person, took part in the bloodiest conflict of the war, the confusing, terrifying battle of Lundy’s Lane. There was no victory, but the uncompromising, disciplined gallantry the soldiers showed throughout most of a day when they were forced to fight on two sides, first in the front and then the rear, was, if anything, still more impressive. They matched the firepower and ferocity of British troops honed over fifteen years of war, volley for volley, and charge for charge, until nightfall and exhaustion brought the bloodshed to an indecisive end. No one could doubt the difference compared with the performance in previous engagements from Detroit to Crysler’s Field. As John Fortescue, the foremost authority on the nineteenth- century British army, admitted, “The British were beaten. It was evident that the experience of two campaigns had at last turned the Americans into soldiers who were not to be trifled with.”

In earlier days, the gains might have been thrown away. Republican ideology demanded that a professional army be reduced to a skeleton, and defense entrusted to the mythical qualities of a citizen army. But at Bladensburg, a shocked Madison had seen with his own eyes the difference between professional soldiers and amateurs. “I could never have believed,” he exclaimed to a friend just before the White House was torched, “that so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force, if I had not witnessed the scenes of this day.”

The proof that a new era had arrived lay in Congress’s belated willingness to accept that reality and the consequences that flowed from it. Although the peacetime army was reduced, its size of ten thousand men commanded by two major generals, and four brigadier generals, made swift expansion possible. The criterion for selecting officers was whether they were “competent to engage an enemy on the field of battle,” without reference to how they might vote. Under a new secretary of war, William Crawford, funding was provided for a permanent general staff to take responsibility for military organization, for an expanded military academy at West Point to train young officers in their profession, and for improved conditions and a uniform drill for new recruits. Much of their training was to be implemented by Scott, who by the time of his retirement in 1861 had set in motion the evolution of the modern U.S. army.

The passing of the old guard was signaled by the dismissal of four fifths of the army’s existing officers. Their culling was brutal. A commission headed by General Jacob Brown removed an entire generation who had enlisted during the Revolution or in the first years of independence. Weeks after his appearance at Wilkinson’s trial, Jacob Kingsbury, a veteran from the Revolutionary War, was cut off without a pension, leaving him, as he movingly revealed, “at the advanced age of sixty turned out upon the world, destitute of support, with a large and helpless family, and can expect no relief but from the Government whom I have served faithfully for more than forty years.” To avoid starvation, Thomas Cushing, who had been at Wilkinson’s side at every crucial phase of his career, begged for employment as a justice of the peace.

There was no place either for General James Wilkinson in this modern age. Like his old friends, he, too, was returned to civilian life without ceremony. But at least the executive felt obligated to find him some federal job—in which “no money is handled,” specified one administration official—that would provide a salary. “I am willing to do the best we can for Wilkinson,” Madison assured Monroe in May 1815, “and hope he will not frustrate our dispositions by insinuations or threats which must be defied.” The War Department even showed itself ready to accept his notoriously unreliable accounts for $3,317 of secret service expenditure, and for a further $7,700 spent on compensation for military damage and other unexpected costs. But nothing the executive offered him could make up for the wound that forcible retirement inflicted on his vanity.

There was talk of a post with the navy in New York, a place on the boundary commission with Canada, and a job as commissioner of Indian affairs, but he rejected every suggestion, not politely but angrily. “General Wilkinson has broken through all decorum and indulges the most malignant rage in every conversation,” A. J. Dallas, Monroe’s deputy at the War Department, warned Madison. “He will leave Washington next week for active mischief elsewhere.”

Dallas’s prediction was correct. The general’s finances made it folly to refuse these well-paid appointments, but Wilkinson was determined not to feel under an obligation to the administration that had dismissed him. What he wanted was revenge. He became a vocal member of the Association of Disbanded Officers, campaigning for pensions or lump- sum payoffs from the federal government. He wrote vituperative articles for William Duane’s anti-administration newspaper, Aurora , denouncing Madison for throwing old soldiers to the wolves,, and Monroe for “the disorganization of the army.” In New York, he was guest of honor at a Federalist Tammany Society dinner, where he was toasted as “The Hero of ’76 who sustains the principles of ’76, and who detected and exposed treason in its infancy,” and his speeches in response lambasted Madison’s administration for its vicious betrayal of the servants of the Revolution.

But he had only one way to demonstrate how badly he had been treated. On October 28, 1815, a discreet announcement appeared in the newspapers: “Mr. Small of Philadelphia, has issued proposals for publishing, in 3 vols. 8vo. a work entitled— Memoirs of my own times , by James Wilkinson, late major-general in the service of the United States.” Three volumes, each of five hundred pages, would tell his and the nation’s story from Bunker Hill onward.

His research, like his reconnaissance, was detailed and prodigious. He had been in the habit of retaining all important letters, and making duplicates of his own correspondence, but now he began to badger friends, colleagues, and the clerks at the War Department for copies of letters sent and received. This, the third version of his memoirs, was the first to begin with his birth and early years. The theme of selfless patriotism betrayed by mean-minded politicians was apparent in its opening paragraph. “My youth furnished objections to my unsolicited promotion, and my age has since afforded President Madison a pretext for turning me out of the service,” he wrote with italicized emotion. “And thus it appears that from youth to age I have been a subject of persecution; yet it is my pride and my boast that my life has been devoted to my country.”

There were no domestic distractions to his writing. In the summer of 1815, Celestine and her Trudeau entourage of sister and servants and slaves set sail for New Orleans. His young wife was pregnant again and anxious to be at home for the birth. Left alone, the general rented a house near Philadelphia, still the nation’s largest city, at the “3 mile Stone near the Red Hart [tavern] on the Road to the City.” Recovered in health, with something like his old ebullient vigor, he transported trunkfuls of documents to his new home and prepared to lash out at every enemy and repay every insult. The news created wide interest. Former governor of Pennsylvania Thomas McKean, a friend of John Adams’s, thought that with his experience “he is better qualified to give a description of the [Revolution] than any other gentleman I know.”