An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (23 page)

By contrast Wayne’s reputation in Philadelphia was corroded by reports of his “petulant” behavior toward his officers, and his authoritarian regime amounting to what one subordinate called “abject servitude.” Some of the complaints stemmed from the commander’s natural abrasiveness—“There is no calculating on anything but insult and oppression [from him],” one subordinate complained. But Wayne’s behavior clearly became more extreme as the pressure of molding his new army mounted. In November 1793, the general lost all self- control when Major Thomas Cushing complained about an inefficient captain on Wayne’s staff.

Instead of investigating the complaint, Wayne placed the major under arrest and charged a junior officer, Captain Isaac Guion, with unmilitary conduct for daring to offer evidence to substantiate Cushing’s original complaint. When Colonel John Hamtramck, the solid, unexcitable commander of the First Sub- Legion, explained that Wayne’s staff officer really had failed to carry out general orders, Wayne issued him an official reprimand for his “disrespectful” intervention. “There is no doubt about it,” Hamtramck concluded, “the old man really is mad.”

Like others slighted by Wayne, the three officers turned to the convivial Wilkinson for sympathy, and he supported them because he, too, felt disparaged by the autocratic Wayne. “My General treats me with great civility, and with much professed Friendship,” he told Harry Innes in October, “yet I am an O, for he conceals his intentions from me, never asks my opinion, & when sense of Duty forces me to give it, he acts against it.”

To retaliate, Wilkinson instigated a string of pinprick complaints about unsatisfactory supplies at Fort Washington of gunpowder, uniforms, food, and disciplinary power, all of which required Knox to send Wayne irritating reminders ordering him to inquire “into the nature and degree of the Confusion of Stores and Clothing complained of by Brigadier General Wilkinson,” and to remedy instantly “complaints relative to the pay department in the district of Brigadier General Wilkinson.” Even on the question of discipline, Wilkinson found cause for criticism. “Your remarks of the disproportionate punishments of death, or one hundred lashes, are just,” Knox agreed, “and the suggestions of hard labour, seem to promise better success, and I shall communicate the same to Major-general Wayne.”

With growing conviction, Wilkinson believed he could persuade Knox to replace Wayne as commander. When Wayne demanded more troops, Wilkinson sent Philadelphia his plan for a lightning strike into the heart of Indian territory with an army half the Legion’s size. When Wayne declared that he required two hundred cavalry to protect each supply train to the forts, Wilkinson let the War Department know that he had needed only one hundred militia. When Wayne had to order the Kentucky cavalry to come under his direct command, Wilkinson was quick to remind Knox how those same horsemen volunteered to serve under him.

To Wayne himself, however, Wilkinson remained loyal and friendly. “Ever anxious for action & ready for duty,” he wrote Wayne from Fort Jefferson, “you have only to order & the execution will follow, with promptitude & Energy.” As Christmas 1793 approached, a festive invitation was sent to the Legion’s commander: “Mrs. W. ventures to hope your Excellency may find it convenient & consistent to take dinner with Her on the 25th inst. with your suite, & any eight or ten gentlemen of your cantonment you may think proper should attend you; she begs leave to assure you the Dinner shall be a Christian one, in commemoration of the Day, and in Honor of Her Guest, and on my part I will promise a welcome from the Heart, a warm fire, and a big- bellied Bottle of the veritable Lachrymae Christi. We pray you answer.”

L
ACHRYMA
C
HRISTI,
a sweet, succulent Mediterranean wine, did not come cheap in the land of raw, moonshine whiskey. That the near-bankrupt Wilkinson could afford it on a general’s salary of $104 a month pointed to his successful role as Agent 13. He already had four thousand dollars from Carondelet, but the sudden collapse of the French threat to Louisiana promised still more.

Overconfident about the outcome of George Rogers Clark’s raid, Genêt had been slow to send him the orders and money needed to recruit an armed force. The delay proved fatal. Genêt’s flouting of diplomatic protocol led Washington to demand the ambassador’s recall in December 1793. Deprived of funds, Clark found it difficult to acquire a credible quantity of boats and arms. In February 1794, when he advertised for “volunteers for the reduction of Spanish posts on the Mississippi,” offering to pay them a thousand acres each or a dollar a day, fewer than a hundred men came forward. The expedition finally drifted to a halt fifty miles short of the nearest Spanish fort.

Wilkinson immediately wrote Carondelet in April 1794 claiming credit for Clark’s failure. His lobbying had undermined popular support in Kentucky for the adventure, and he assured the governor that he had receipts showing he had spent no less than $8,640 “to retard, disjoint and defeat the mediated irruption of General Clark in L[ouisian]a.” He was also responsible for the army’s efforts to prevent sympathizers from shipping supplies for Clark’s men down the Ohio River. Together with further payments on his pension now due, he expected to be paid $12,000.

The satisfactory nature of his activities as a Spanish agent contrasted sharply with the frustration of being an American general. By the time this letter was sent, his quarrel with Wayne had spilled into the open and threatened to split the Legion apart.

13
P
OISONED
V
ICTORY

I
N HIS FIERCELY DRIVEN WAY,
General Anthony Wayne was not at first aware of what was happening. Only in January 1794 did he realize that his officers had split, as he told Knox, into “two distinct Parties.” The hostility of the newest intake of junior officers alerted him to the situation. On the smallest excuse, he complained, they “offered their Resignations and prepared to depart without further Ceremony, saying they were
advised
to do so by
experienced
officers.” Yet even then, he did not suspect his former friend of being at the root of the problem.

The invitation to share Christmas and a bottle of Lachryma Christi with the Wilkinsons had been refused only because, as Wayne tersely explained, he was busy moving his headquarters to Fort Greeneville, a new outpost constructed even farther into Indian territory. Early in the new year the Legion was moved to this gigantic stockade enclosing fifty acres, where the final stages of its training would take place. Supplying an army in such a remote post created incessant problems. Wayne constantly had to drive the victuallers Elliott and Williams to produce fatter cattle and fresher casks of beef, and the War Department to provide more blankets and blue and buff uniforms, and to deliver promptly the silver dollars needed to pay his men their four dollars a month. But he did not at first connect these difficulties with his second-in- command.

Always sensitive to the smallest insult to his vanity, Wilkinson had been infuriated by Wayne’s refusal of the Christmas invitation. During the early months of 1794, Wilkinson periodically declared himself to be close to resignation. “I am unsettled in my purpose whether I shall join the army or not,” he told Innes, and with still more of a flourish told Brown, “I owe so much to my own feelings and to Professional reputation, that I cannot consent to sacrifice the one, or to hazard the other, under the administration of a weak, corrupt minister or a despotic, Vainglorious, ignorant General.” But in truth, as he recognized himself, he could never quit the army “because I know the profession of arms to be my Fort[e], and I verily believe that the Hour may possibly come when my talents into that line might be of important account to our Country.”

Instead, he devoted himself to encouraging the opposition to Wayne until camp gossip took to labeling the two camps using terms such as “such an Officer is in favor of Wayne— and such a one is in favor of Wilkinson.” The depth of Wilkinson’s hatred could be gauged from an article he sent to a Cincinnati newspaper signed “Army Wretched” that damned Wayne for drunkenness, incompetence, wastefulness, and favoritism toward “his pimps and parasites.” Unfortunately for this attempt to stampede public opinion, General Charles Scott visited Wayne’s command headquarters at Fort Greeneville soon afterward and offered a different perspective on the general’s conduct. “During my stay I found him attending with great Sobriety & extream attention to the Duty of army,” Scott reported to Knox, “he paid the most Unwearied attention to the most minute thing possible
in
person
.” When the government published Scott’s testimony in rebuttal, Wilkinson contemptuously dismissed Scott, once his friend and comrade-in-arms, as “a fool, a poltroon and a scoundrel.”

By the spring, Wayne’s supporters had made him aware of Wilkinson’s hostility. Wayne’s suspicions were directed particularly at the failure of the victuallers Elliott and Williams to supply the army with enough food. In Wayne’s view, this was a deliberate attempt to sabotage his preparations for war, and he accused Wilkinson to his face of being “the cause of the fault of the Contractors.” His second- in- command retaliated in his own fashion, as Wayne discovered when a Philadelphia merchant reported that some senators were proposing to impeach the Legion’s commander “at the request of Wilkinson for Pedulation, Speculation, Fraud &c.”

The longer the Legion remained inactive, the more poisonous the conflict became. No army can remain ready for battle—“in the crouch,” to use modern jargon—for long without the aggression beginning to spill over into feuds and quarrels. But for the Legion, the lengthy delay was especially damaging. Even after training was completed, federal negotiators continued their talks with Little Turtle and other Native American leaders in an attempt to arrange a new boundary that would guarantee Indian land rights, but allow settlers to move into the Ohio Valley. In the summer, as though the waiting had undermined their physical health as much as their morale, an epidemic of illness ravaged the troops. “We labor under a universal influenza,” Wilkinson told his friends, “and tertians [fevers], quotidians & intermittents rage beyond anything I have ever seen.”

Yet while there remained a chance of signing a peace treaty with the Six Nations in the north and the western confederation in the northwest, Washington and Knox forbade Wayne to take any aggressive action. Chafing against the restraint, Wayne inched northward, constructing a fort that he named Recovery on the site of St. Clair’s defeat.

Quite suddenly the talks broke down because Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and their allies could not bring themselves to yield up the swath of land in the Northwest Territory demanded by U.S. negotiators. In a historic misjudgment, they insisted on maintaining the Ohio River as the border. On June 30, 1794, more than a thousand Shawnee and other warriors under Blue Jacket launched a surprise attack on Fort Recovery, the site where St. Clair’s army had been annihilated. This time the attack failed, but it put an end to negotiations. Immediately Scott and the Kentucky horsemen were summoned to join the regulars, and on July 28 the Legion of the United States at last marched from Fort Greeneville.

A
S THE
SECONDMOST
SE
NIOR
OFFICER,
Brigadier General James Wilkinson had command of the right wing. It gave him a close-up position from which to criticize Wayne. He duly carped at the decision to leave the biggest cannons behind and, more insistently, at the slowness of the advance— twelve careful miles a day, always surrounded by a swarm of cavalry and riflemen, and halting well before nightfall so that entrenchments and fortifications could be put in place. Instead of following the St. Marys River westward, out into the open prairie where centers of Indian population were situated, Wayne struck due north, still keeping to rough territory so that the army had to force its way through “Thickets almost impervious,” one of his men complained, “thru Marassies [morasses], Defiles & beds of Nettles more than waist high & miles in length.” This unexpected maneuver, made possible by the absence of heavy artillery, wrong-footed the western confederation’s army and put the Legion between Blue Jacket and supplies he expected from the British in Fort Miami, a newly constructed outpost, close to present Toledo, Ohio.

When the Legion at last emerged from the undergrowth, they found themselves on the banks of the Maumee River, which flows northward into Lake Erie. Even Wilkinson, who had spent the previous days offering Wayne unsought advice on where they might be, was overwhelmed by the pristine beauty of the open countryside before them. “The River meandering in various directions thro a natural meadow in high cultivation & of great extent,” he wrote John Brown, “this meadow bounded by noble eminences, crowned with lofty timber on either side, with Indian Villages, scattered along the Eastern [bank] & the British flag [flying] upon the Western Bank; after a dreary Journey of more than 200 miles from the Ohio, thro an uncultivated Wilderness, [the scene] fills the mind with the most Interesting Emotions, and affords the most pleasing recreation to the Eye.”

Once more, Wayne ignored his second-in- command’s advice to make a rapid move against Blue Jacket and instead spent days erecting yet another armed camp, Fort Deposit, where the army stored its tents and wagons. With his soldiers refreshed and unburdened, Wayne then marched northeast along the Maumee River towards the wooded hillside from which Fort Miami dominated the valley. On August 19, the Legion’s scouts found the Indians’ abandoned camp. Again Wilkinson and other senior officers urged immediate pursuit and attack, the kind of rapid maneuver that the Legion was designed for, but again Wayne chose the safer option of setting up camp.