An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (21 page)

In December 1791, just before leaving for Fort Washington, Wilkinson put up his most valuable asset for sale, the town of Frankfort, with its strategic location, fine house, and ferry. His haggling over the price offered by Andrew Holmes, another Lexington storekeeper, brought a cry of pure anguish from Short. “To save me in this hour of extreme distress,” he wrote, “I now call upon you by every principle that ever warmed an honest heart. Both God and man can witness that you now have it in your power. I beg, entreat, and conjure you to avail yourself of the happy occasion— embrace the offer made you by Mr. Holmes.” To his relief, Wilkinson finally accepted Holmes’s price, three hundred thousand pounds of tobacco, in January 1792. Less than twelve months later, Kentucky’s legislature chose Frankfort as the site of the newly independent state’s capital. Land values quickly rose, and the fortune that Wilkinson always dreamed of passed instead to Holmes, and soon afterward to his creditors.

Still outstanding were a further fourteen hundred dollars due to La Cassagne and other debts amounting to more than fifteen thousand dollars, about twelve times his military salary. In the first four months of his career in the army, he sent his friend and legal adviser in Lexington, Judge Harry Innes, $180 from his meager pay of $104 a month to satisfy the most urgent demands and asked him to stave off the rest. “I pray you, my friend, to say that I have left (if you think as I do) sufficient property to discharge my debts and that I am determined to do this at any sacrifice,” Wilkinson told Innes. “There is much confusion in my books and papers, but yet under such an explanation as I can give, justice may be done.”

He had a few remaining assets— the house in Louisville, and a partial interest in up to seventy-five thousand acres elsewhere in Kentucky, although their real ownership was in dispute. These doubts about property titles were the legacy of Virginia’s confused and corrupt land- sales policy. To establish ownership entailed complex legal battles pitting wealthy outsiders against homegrown occupiers, and that destroyed the market for land in Kentucky.

In April 1792, Wilkinson wrote again to Innes, offering to transfer all his assets and give him “uncontrolled power over my whole property in your own language.” He wanted above all else to “remove the shackles [of debt] which oppress my spirit and sit heavy on my soul.” The heaviest shackle on his soul was the penal interest on what he owed La Cassagne— within two years the charges increased an original loan of one thousand dollars by almost half. In this desperate state, Carondelet’s offer of four thousand dollars must have appeared as a lifeline. Yet Wilkinson took five months to respond. So long as he had a chance of being made commander of the Legion, he appears to have resisted the lure.

The decision to send La Cassagne to pick up Wilkinson’s back pay as a Spanish agent demonstrated not only that he had made an irrevocable, life-changing decision but, more mundanely, that his credit had finally run out.

The Frenchman spent three months in New Orleans developing contacts in the city— he later settled there and made another fortune as a slave dealer—but when he arrived back in Louisville in November, he passed on only twenty- six hundred dollars to Wilkinson. The rest was retained to pay off the loan. In December 1792, Wilkinson sent Carondelet the first report for which he had been paid as a spy.

I
N HIS OTHER LIFE,
he was the energetic, extrovert officer praised by Washington and Knox. No hint appeared of the inner struggle caused by the temptation of treachery and the threat of bankruptcy. With the warmer weather in 1792, he sent out construction, foraging, and haymaking parties to each of the new forts. And at Fort Washington, he also demonstrated a gift, learned perhaps from his mentor Horatio Gates, for raising the morale of defeated troops.

Although its professional core had been strengthened, the army still relied heavily on the militia, especially for cavalry duties, and unlike most of his colleagues Wilkinson understood that the militia had to be cajoled rather than ordered. He made a habit of detaching them as guards and scouts so that they did not have to come under the army’s direct command. At the same time, he paid proper attention to the full-time soldiers’ fundamental need for regular food, pay, and clothing, and a barrage of dispatches hurtled up the Ohio and on to Philadelphia if supplies were lacking. By the summer, Knox could assure Washington, “The Vice of drunkeness is no more among the Officers who fall under his personal observation— and the Troops are in a great degree reformed.”

Another sign of his influence was apparent in the increasingly stylish language of his subordinates. One major smoothly alluded to a failed Indian attack as “an attempt at mischief,” another termed the ambush of Indian cattle thieves as an effort “to baffle their intentions,” and a letter of gratitude to Mrs. Wilkinson for a gift allowed a third major to offer a dizzying example of gentlemanly eloquence: “Be pleased therefore, Madam, to accept the thanks of my family,
alias the mess
, for your polite attention in sending us garden seeds, etc., and should we be honored by a visit from the donor, the flowers shall be taught to smile at her approach, and droop as she retires.” Aping Wilkinson’s flamboyant manner was a sure indication of a desire to follow his lead.

The military theater of parades and ceremonial that he devised served a similar purpose, allowing everyone from privates to colonels the chance to show off. On May 1, 1792, General Wilkinson put on a frontier version of St. Tammany’s Day, the Pennsylvania spring celebration that was turning into a national holiday. A wigwam was erected beside the Ohio River close to the red- painted walls of Fort Washington, and there influential civilians such as Winthrop Sargent, secretary of the Northwest Territory, John Cleves Symmes, who owned a million of its acres, various judges, and Cincinnati’s “most respectable citizens,” according to the
Kentucky Gazette
, together with Wilkinson’s senior officers, “sat down to a most sumptuous dinner at 3 o’clock, where the following toasts were drank [
sic
] under the discharge of many cannon. (1) North American Nation; (2) Washington; (3) The Congress; (4) The Atlantic States; (5) The Western Settlements; and eleven others of a similar nature, 16 in all.” Later Wilkinson mustered his troops on the edge of the nearby forest and reviewed them, clad, according to the
Gazette
, in “hunting shirt, mocassins, belt, knife and tomahawk—a real woodman’s dress,” then ended the day with “an excellent and eloquent appeal to the feelings of his men.” Whatever the private thoughts of the soldiers, they must at least have been a long way from the horrific scenes of St. Clair’s defeat.

Symmes, who had seen Wilkinson in action, noted that “his familiar address and politeness render him very pleasing to the militia of Kentucky by whom he is much respected and loved.” The
Gazette
’s fawning reporter went further. The general, he declared, was “a gentleman and a scholar who delighted in surroundings of beauty and refinement.” None of them could have imagined that such a flamboyant, charismatic figure was secretly intending to accept Spain’s offer of four thousand dollars to become a spy.

A
T THE PROSPECT
of being freed from his debts, James Wilkinson’s mercurial spirits soared. His mood was reflected in the first report he sent in December 1792 to his new handler. It was imaginative, lively, and permeated with untruth. He claimed to be in command of “2000 select troops composed of Musketeers, Chasseurs, Light, and Artillery,” and to be paid “independent of prerogatives and facilities 3000 dollars a year.” Despite this, he pretended to be so disillusioned by having to soldier under “an incompetent Secretary of War and an ignorant Commander- in-Chief” that he wished to be given a commission in the Spanish army where his passion for “military fame” could be gratified. But he was ready to let Carondelet decide “whether I am to continue in this quarter or descend the Mississippi to New Orleans.”

All this— the inflation of his powers and pay scale, as well as the feigned indifference to his career—was designed to make Carondelet realize how much Wilkinson was worth. The clear implication was that the Spaniard should think of paying the general more to keep him from resigning. By way of encouragement Wilkinson also promised, “I have not abandoned those views, principles and attachments which I professed to Miró.” As evidence of his commitment, he pressed Carondelet to strengthen Spanish defenses on the Mississippi, a tactical hint that prompted the governor to authorize additional galleys on the river and garrisons for the forts at Walnut Hill and New Madrid. Militarily, Wilkinson promised his paymaster that the Spanish empire had little to fear from its neighbor, owing to the “intestinal discord” between New England and the south and between the Atlantic states and the west. The conflict, he concluded, “renders the whole [nation] weak and contemptible, the occasion is favorable to Spain and you know how to improve it.”

The deep relationship with Miró, the change of allegiance, and the repeated pledges of loyalty to Spain’s interests must have made this final momentous transition seem like a small step. But by reporting to the Spanish governor in return for payment while he held the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. army, Wilkinson had crossed a Rubicon. He was no longer a private citizen, and his actions had moved beyond moral flexibility or political grandstanding. A soldier who aided a foreign power broke his military oath and was liable to court-martial. If it could be proved that he had attempted to suborn others from their loyalty to the United States, Wilkinson would face the death penalty for treason.

12
D
ISCIPLINE
AND
D
ECEIT

T
HE CREATION OF THE LEGION
of the United States remains a high point of military innovation in the country’s history. This force was designed for the particular needs of fighting on the North American continent, but organized according to the most sophisticated European thinking on how best to use the three different arms of infantry, artillery, and cavalry. Henry Knox, bookseller, general, and secretary of war, was largely responsible for the concept, and in recommending the Legion to the president, he cited both classical authorities, such as the historian Polybius on the Roman legion, and eighteenth-century experts such as Marshal Maurice de Saxe, author of
My Reveries on the Art of War
. But George Washington, adamantly conservative on the shape of the army he wanted for fighting the British, turned Knox’s radical ideas into reality.

What made a disciplined army essential was not just the defense of settlers, but the implementation of the president’s ambitious policy toward Native Americans. From the Kentucky settlers’ point of view, Indian attacks required the sort of punishment inflicted by Wilkinson in 1791 that would clear the land of its original inhabitants. In Philadelphia, however, the president was determined to find a place for Native Americans within the Union, an approach warmly endorsed by Henry Knox.

“It is painful to consider that all the Indian Tribes once existing in those States, now the best cultivated and most populous, have become extinct,” Knox had written Washington in July 1789. “If the same causes continue, the same effects will happen, and in a Short period the Idea of an Indian on this side of the Mississippi will only be found in the page of the historian.” Knox proposed that “instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population,” the United States should impart “our Knowledge of cultivation, and the arts, to the Aboriginals of the Country by which the Source of future life and happiness [might be] preserved and extended.”

It would be difficult and expensive, he acknowledged. In the long term, the Indians would have to learn how to farm and to develop “a love for exclusive property,” and in the short term, the boundaries of their lands needed to be defined and protected from unscrupulous settlers. But the policy was cheap compared to war. To overawe the Indians and restrain the settlers, an army of at least five thousand would be needed.

Knox’s plan underpinned the administration’s first formal treaty, signed in August 1790 with Alexander McGillivray, the half-Scots leader of the Creeks. Later that year, in December, Washington gave a similar guarantee of inviolable boundaries and protection by the federal government to Cornplanter, the Seneca chief: “No State nor person can purchase your lands, unless at some public treaty held under the authority of the United States. The general Government will . . . protect you in all your just rights.”

This policy of inclusion was damaged in the south by Georgia’s hunger for Creek land, and destroyed in the north by New York and Pennsylvania’s program to expel the Six Nations from their rich lands below Lakes Ontario and Erie. The Northwest Territory, covering modern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, belonged to the federal government, however, and there Knox and Washington were determined to make their ideas a reality. In the long term, the chain of forts stretching north from the Ohio would keep both Indians and settlers pacified. In the short term, the Legion had to regain control of the area.

The Legion’s salient characteristic was the integration of guns, horses, rifles, and bayonets within a single unit. Traditionally, each was accustomed to train and act separately: the artillery found a strategic position and fired; the cavalry waited for a weakness, then charged; the riflemen sniped and scouted ahead of the infantry; and the infantry formed a line or column with the sole purpose of concentrating the impact of a volley and a charge regardless of what was happening around them.

Large armies fighting static battles could afford such specialization, but in the wilderness of North America, Native American warfare had demonstrated the superiority of small forces and rapid movement. According to Knox, the smallest feasible unit numbered exactly 1,280, excluding officers, and was made up of about 720 infantrymen and 400 riflemen, with the remainder divided between artillery and cavalry. The Legion of the United States consisted of four such self-contained, miniature armies, together with officers and staff. But for these sub-legions to be effective, each arm had to train both separately and in unison. From the moment he was appointed in April 1792, General Wayne’s goal was to prepare his soldiers to fight in this new way. It required longer training and more intense discipline than the old model. But intensity was Wayne’s dominant characteristic.