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

Emperor Agustín was to disappoint everyone. Dull and reactionary, he lacked the boldness of a real leader despite the powers granted him— “more the Lamb than the Lion, the Spinster than the Soldier,” in Wilkinson’s pungent judgment. Wilkinson’s own preference was for the most enterprising of the emperor’s lieutenants, Antonio Cordero y Bustamante, the future president of Mexico. As governor of Texas in 1806, Cordero had confronted Wilkinson at the height of the Burr Conspiracy, and the experience of having been on opposite sides during those convulsive days created an immediate friendship. Cordero was, according to the general, “literally a Washington in all his great qualities . . . bravest of the brave, judicious, modest to timidity yet daring to Death.”

With Cordero’s assistance, Wilkinson’s effortless rise to influence seemed destined to continue. He delivered to the emperor a second paper on the settlement of Texas, suggesting that it be divided in half, with the eastern, and more desirable, province being renamed Iturbide. Instead of being settled by Anglo settlers, such as Austin proposed, who were “slothful, ready to vice, insensible to social affection and [to] really permanent social life,” Wilkinson recommended that Iturbide should be “inhabited by cultured Catholic people, dedicated to manufacturing and all kinds of industry.” This was shrewd salesmanship, aimed at an emperor who was revealing himself to be a Catholic hard- liner, anxious to bring back the Inquisition and restore Jesuit supervision of religion. What the general really had in mind became apparent only at the end of the document, when he suggested that the governor of this Catholic province should be “an official of honor, fidelity, intelligence, adaptability, and political sagacity.” In short, himself.

Occasionally he reduced his dream to ownership of two hundred thousand acres near Galveston, “divinely situated on the Coast of the Gulph with a good harbour & salubrious climate, with Fish and oysters at the Door and droves of Buffalo & wild horses in thousands on our rear.” But none of it was realistic. Resistance to the emperor’s autocratic rule led to his abdication early in 1823, leaving Wilkinson to start all over again.

Running short of money, he moved from the center of Mexico City to a house on the outskirts. There he acted as a consultant to a stream of business and political visitors from the United States. “We stopped at the lodgings of our countryman, General W[ilkinson], who received us in the kindest manner,” the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Joel Poinsett, reported. “He has been sometime here, and we sat up to a late hour, listening to his interesting account of the country.” His expertise and his introductions to people in government earned him enough to live quietly while the prospect of his great prize hovered just beyond his reach. Mexico wanted Texas settled, but whether by immigrants from the United States or elsewhere, and whether under central or provincial government control, could not be decided. Nor were the successors to Iturbide’s rule much more secure than the emperor. Meanwhile, as the tone of Poinsett’s letter suggested, the general was in danger of turning into a curiosity on the sidelines rather than a power at the center.

That summer he played his trump card and presented to the congress of the newly reestablished republic of Mexico his full-length portrait of George Washington, the republican statesman, standing with peaceful hand outstretched, and dressed in civilian black, the garb almost obscuring his military sword. The gesture won Wilkinson great acclaim and a sympathetic hearing for his claims for unpaid debts, for unawarded land, and for a new payment of fifteen thousand dollars, which may have been recompense for himself. But gratitude did not immediately translate into action. Slowly the general was becoming an exile. He said as much in a letter to Thomas Jefferson written in March 1824.

They had corresponded only once since the unfortunate reference to “Long Tom.” In 1818, Jefferson decided that he had been unfairly criticized in Alexander Wilson’s classic American Ornithology for failing to send the ornithologist on Zebulon Pike’s Red River expedition. Sensitive to the charge of impeding scientific study, Jefferson asked Wilkinson to remind him of the circumstances. From the Magnolia Grove plantation, Wilkinson assured his president that he was not to blame. Pike’s mission was to explore the Red and Arkansas rivers. It was not an expedition suitable for scientists, and it was sent without the president’s specific knowledge.

Jefferson had not acknowledged this helpful reply, and other letters Wilkinson had written had gone astray. Consequently the general had to invent a reason for getting in touch from Mexico. The way to catch Thomas Jefferson was through his curiosity. Writing in early 1824, Wilkinson sent packets of Mexican seeds— for parsley, lettuces, beans, cantaloupes, avocados, red corn, peas, tomatoes, and chilies. With the last of these came cooking suggestions— they were best “when young mixed with meat for ragout, when ripe, clean out seed, mixed with syrup makes a sweetmeat.” Superficially his letter was in the same vein, the intrepid intelligence officer reporting back matters of interest to his commander, and as usual the truth required some dressing up. He had been intending to leave the country when he “unexpectedly became entangled” in the American claims for compensation, and as a result “I have been detained here in involuntary exile.” Ruefully he admitted being unable to tell whether “I have been duped and deceived more by the Republican or Imperial governments.” But his detention at least made it possible to pass on information about Mexican politics, and about his own efforts to help “the People of the Western hemisphere form a close knit League of National Republicks.”

Only toward the end of six closely scrawled pages did the guise slip. What he really wanted was some reply to all the messages he had sent Jefferson, some acknowledgment from the father figure who had never entirely failed nor ever quite fulfilled the general’s need for approval, “a letter sent under cover to [the] consul of the United States would certainly reach me here.” In a shaky hand, the aged Thomas Jefferson wrote on the envelope, “Arrived May 21,” but still there was no reply.

Desperate for a response, Wilkinson wrote again to Jefferson on July 1, now portraying himself on the verge of such success that people would “envy the good fortune I have acquired by patience, perseverance and long suffering.” But his letter ended with the same yearning for the smallest sign of approval: “I shall be detained here still two months, I beg you to write me as a mere spirit of recognition.” This time, however, the words were not even read. The last tenuous link with Thomas Jefferson had been broken.

DESPITE HIS SHOW OF OPTIMISM, the general’s affairs were no closer to a solution. In September 1824 he told his son Joseph, “I have just made a contract apparently for a claims adjustment.” He expected to be paid and to leave in two or three weeks. But six months later he was still in Mexico City, and now in such dire financial straits that he had to ask Joseph to send him some money. In return, his son could have one hundred thousand acres either in Galveston or farther north in Texas where the general expected to be given land. But without money or influence his dream was no longer really credible. In the summer of 1825, he even had to ask Poinsett, the ambassador, to give him an introduction to the new governor of Texas and Coahuila.

Age had crept up on the general. He still rode in the morning outside his little villa, but he grew tired easily. There was a constant pain in his stomach, and though he dosed himself regularly with laudanum, the relief was short-lived, and the discomfort longer. The animal energy that had given credibility to James Wilkinson’s fantasies was running out. At a deeper level, he had lost the impetus to keep the show going. Jefferson’s continuing silence removed the one audience he craved. The only person to influence his life more profoundly had been the original model of deceit, his real father, Joseph Wilkinson. The adoration the boy had given him had been transferred from one powerful successor to another, but none had come as close as Jefferson to occupying his father’s place. Now, without a figure of authority to observe and applaud the performance, James Wilkinson may have felt that it was hardly worth going onstage anymore.