An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (22 page)

The high point of his service in the Revolutionary War was a savagely violent bayonet attack at night that he personally led on a British position at Stony Point, New York, in 1779. Reviewing his record, Washington noted that he was too impetuous, but decided it was a fault in the right direction, and at the end of the war approved his promotion to major general. By then his single-minded, almost autistic focus had earned him a telling nickname, Mad Anthony, and Jefferson’s note of the 1792 cabinet discussion about the general’s qualities pointed in the same direction. Wayne was thought to be “brave & nothing else,” with the danger he would “run his head ag[ains]t a wall where success was both impossible & useless.”

True to character, Wayne attacked the problem of creating virtually a new army from scratch as though it were an enemy position. All but a handful of the enlisted men came from New England and the middle states. They lived far from the territory they were to defend and lacked any obvious motive for hostility to Indians. Except for a large contingent of Connecticut farm-workers, most were town dwellers from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, more than half were foreign-born, and almost 40 percent were illiterate. Although patriotism motivated some, and as many as one in five had served in the Revolutionary War, the majority enlisted to escape whatever civilian life had to offer—debts, prison, or boredom—and a large minority signed up because the recruiters made them drunk. Even with the threat of hanging if caught and a ten-dollar bounty for bringing back a deserter, the annual rate for desertion rarely dropped below 10 percent.

Wayne established a training camp for these new recruits at Fort Fayette outside Pittsburgh, but immediately encountered a new handicap. Almost one quarter of the army’s officers, those with experience who should have been the Legion’s instructors, had been killed in St. Clair’s defeat—a horrifying ratio equal to that of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. To overcome the almost insuperable difficulties, Wayne instituted a regime of legendary severity.

“Every thing depends on discipline,” Knox had told him. “The public interest, the national Character and your personal reputation.” Wayne needed no encouragement. The guardroom and whipping were for minor offenses. Drunkenness, sleeping on guard duty, and desertion made a soldier liable to flogging with up to one hundred lashes, and one in ten of those found guilty of such offenses were condemned to death by hanging or firing squad. For drill he relied on the close-quarter maneuvers of Steuben’s Blue Book, but the training included marksmanship, maneuvers with cavalry and artillery, and incessant digging of entrenchments and fortifications. Whatever happened, they were never again to be surprised by a dawn attack.

S
O LONG AS
Major General Anthony Wayne remained out of view, Brigadier General James Wilkinson could live with the humiliation of seeing command of the Legion exercised by a man he despised. In character, behavior, and outlook, Wayne was his antithesis. Despite a reputation as a philanderer, Mad Anthony lacked charm. While his second-in- command went to great lengths to be liked, Wayne was largely indifferent to what men thought of him. Confronted by an angry Canadian farmer or hostile Kentucky representatives, Wilkinson backed off, but Wayne rode roughshod over those in his way.

Professionally, however, they were at one in their belief that the army needed more training and discipline. In a curiously self- righteous judgment, Wilkinson assured his superiors in November 1792 that the officers of the First American Regiment “had contracted Ideas of speculation incompatible with the principles of [a] Soldier of Honor; some were pedlars, some drunkards, almost all fools.” Wayne agreed that the task facing them was “to make an army from the rawest heterogeneity of materials, that were ever collected together.” The force that they would create, he told Wilkinson, must “produce a conviction not only to the Indians but to the World that the United States of America are not to be insulted with impunity.”

For almost a year, Wilkinson was able to exercise a nearly independent command from Fort Washington while Wayne was occupied with training his new recruits at Fort Fayette. The arrangement allowed Wilkinson to devote himself without interruption to his twin careers as general and as spy. In his military role, he flogged drunkards, kept the chain of forts under his command supplied and defended, and set himself to map and acquire intelligence about the territory north of the Ohio Valley where war could be expected. Seen from New Orleans, however, nothing compared to the value of his secret activities. Indeed when the convulsive effects of the French Revolution came rolling across the Atlantic like a tsunami, it seemed to the governor of Louisiana that he alone could protect Spain’s North American empire against this unexpected threat.

It began with the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, an event that provoked his brother monarch, Charles IV of Spain, to declare war on republican France. Consequently, when the headstrong, short- tempered Ed-mond Charles Genêt arrived in the United States as France’s ambassador in March that year, he came determined to attack Spanish interests in the west.

Within months of Citizen Genêt’s arrival, his Spanish counterpart, Josef de Jaudenes, sent Carondelet the alarming news that Genêt “is engaged in secretly seducing and recruiting by every means that presents itself all the Frenchmen, and others as well, to form an expedition against Louisiana.” Genêt’s fellow countrymen in New Orleans responded with nightly performances of the “Marseillaise” in the theater until Carondelet banned the tune, and more than one hundred French residents signed a petition asking for their government to intervene in Louisiana. Meanwhile, George Rogers Clark promised to lead a force that Genêt named “the French Revolutionary Legions on the Mississippi” and do for France what Wilkinson planned for Spain, give her control of the Mississippi basin by seizing New Orleans. “The possession of New Orleans will secure to France the whole Fur, Tobacco and Flour trade of this western world,” Clark predicted.

In alarm, Carondelet demanded that Gayoso should “send as soon as possible a canoe to New Madrid with a letter for General W[ilkinson] asking him to advise us properly . . . of whatever maybe concocted, either in Kentucky or in Cumberland [modern Alabama and middle Tennessee] contrary to the interests of Spain.”

Carondelet’s plea arrived at a convenient moment for Wilkinson— several Kentucky creditors, among them Humphrey Marshall and Peyton Short, were pressing for payment on old debts. It was apparent from his reply to Carondelet’s plea that Wilkinson saw the chance of an unexpected windfall. He conjured up a nightmare variant of the original Spanish Conspiracy— Kentucky might still detach itself from the United States, but this time as an ally of France. In graphic terms, he warned Carondelet of the dangers of “the projected attack against Louisiana by the people of Kentucky at the instigation of the French minister.” Having played on the governor’s all too susceptible fears, Wilkinson characteristically offered to remove them. An informant had already been recruited from Clark’s inner circle, and Wilkinson promised that no expense would be spared in persuading Kentucky’s leading citizens to turn against the adventure. Finally he could also guarantee that the army would prevent any supplies from being shipped down the Ohio to Clark’s French Legions.

The value of Wilkinson to Carondelet was made starkly clear in a secret warning that the governor sent to the royal council that October. To defend the forts on the Mississippi between St. Louis and Vicksburg, a distance of five hundred miles, the governor could muster only ninety regular troops and two hundred militia. Should Clark’s forces reach Natchez, he predicted, “It is evident that all Louisiana will fall into their hands with the greatest rapidity and ease.” From his point of view, everything depended on Agent 13.

In this symbiotic relationship, Wilkinson’s spendthrift habits made Caron-delet equally essential to him. His need for more money was underlined by the return of Nancy from Philadelphia in May 1793 after a ten-month absence.

The boys, including eight- year-old Joseph, the youngest, had been left behind in Philadelphia. None of his letters suggests that Wilkinson missed them, but his writing is full of references to what Nancy’s absence meant to him. It was, he said, “Hell on earth” without her. He urged the Biddles to “hurry her back.” Extravagantly, he declared to his commanding officer that he was “panting, sighing, dying for her embrace,” and he demanded that Wayne either arrange for her to be sent down the Ohio or “give me plenty of Indian fighting.” Although it was a convention, amounting to a military joke, that lovelorn warriors were supposed to drown their sorrows in blood, everything suggests that Wilkinson’s words came as close to sincerity as was possible for him.

Extravagance was the most obvious sign of his affection. As an officer, he rode everywhere on horseback, but even on the frontier he always had a horse- drawn carriage for Nancy. In Kentucky the vehicle was remembered as a coach with four matched black horses; in Cincinnati it was drawn by no more than a pair, but it was “the only carriage in the place.” He named a major street in Frankfort after her. At a time when Virginia law treated real estate as belonging to the husband alone, he bought land in her name as well as his. Her popularity with his fellow soldiers from privates through General Wayne— she was said to be the one person who could persuade him to show mercy to a soldier condemned to death by court-martial— and beyond him to Henry Knox, clearly caused Wilkinson pride rather than jealousy because he never ceased to involve her in the army’s social events, and that despite the obvious fact that most people preferred her to him. The disparity appeared in anecdotes, and more lastingly in the compliments paid by Thomas Chapman, an English traveler, in his
Journal of a
Journey through the United States
. Of Wilkinson, he could offer little more than a wooden tribute, not altogether believable, to his “unimpeached integrity, unexampled liberality & Hospitality,” but what really moved the Englishman was “the good sence, Affable deportment & elegant manners of the General’s amiable Wife, who surpasses any Lady I have met with in the course of my Travels through the United States.”

They were too intimately attached, and she was too sensitive, for Nancy not to have had some idea of the Spanish connection, but it is doubtful that she understood its full complexity. To his dying day, he would publicly insist that every payment from New Orleans was a profit or insurance payment on his tobacco trade, and even to himself he never seemed to acknowledge what was involved. Yet Nancy’s need for little luxuries such as sugar and coffee, and his desire to see her in an elegant carriage, and their joint pleasure in parties and liberal hospitality, were inseparable from his need for Carondelet’s dollars.

N
ANCY’S ARRIVAL AT
Fort Washington was followed barely a month later by the distinctly less welcome appearance of Wayne and a long convoy of boats carrying the Legion, now more than eleven hundred strong. The decision to ship his men down the Ohio was prompted by Wayne’s conviction that they were being corrupted by their proximity to the taverns and brothels of Pittsburgh—“that Gomorrah,” as he called it. A hint of the commander’s state of mind emerged when he landed at Cincinnati and, to Wilkinson’s relief, discovered it to be “filled with ardent poison & Caitiff wretches to dispose of it . . . a man possessed of the least tincture of morality must wish his stay here as short as possible.” The army was moved to a site between the river and a swamp that Wayne named Hobson’s Choice, implying that no alternative place could be found.

But Wayne faced more problems than creating an encampment in rough country. The most serious was the information from Philadelphia that a lack of recruits would limit the size of the Legion to three thousand men, and that to make up the numbers fifteen hundred Kentucky volunteers would have to be taken on. The least of his anxieties seemed to be the conduct of his second- in- command, which, Wayne assured Knox, “bespeaks the officer & merits my highest approbation.” Knox, however, was more cautious and felt it necessary to issue a thinly veiled warning to Wilkinson in May 1793: “I am persuaded your good sense as well as inclination will lead you to unite cordially with General Wayne, and promote a spirit of harmony throughout the whole corps.”

The general’s arrival did indeed bring to the surface the jealousy and bitterness Wilkinson felt at being passed over for command. Through the summer, each of Wayne’s many failings was passed on to the formidable array of political contacts that Wilkinson still maintained in Philadelphia. The most prominent was his brother- in- law, Clement Biddle, the president’s lawyer, who had always received a heavy correspondence from Wilkinson detailing the difficulties he encountered with quarreling officers and inadequate equipment.

The Biddle influence was reinforced by Knox’s liking for Nancy Wilkinson, who, until her return to the Ohio in May 1793, served as a two- way channel of communication between her husband and the War Department. “I have often expressed to her and to Colonel Biddle,” Knox assured Wilkinson that spring, “the pleasure your conduct gave to the President of the United States.” And to reinforce the coziness, the president himself was the recipient of gifts from Wilkinson, such as two kegs of fish taken from the Miami River on the uttermost limits of the United States and presented in the modest hope that “the novelty of the thing may render it acceptable.” Washington accepted the fish, politely agreeing that they were “truly a Novelty here,” but a second gift, sent in April 1793, pleased him more. This was a map drawn by Wilkinson of the country north of the Ohio where war with the Indians could be expected. It was, the president assured him, “the best description extant of the country to which it relates” and “affords me the greatest satisfaction.”