An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (27 page)

No one was more directly affected by the treaty than the governor of Louisiana, who had invested thousands of dollars in a conspiracy to detach Kentucky from a country that was now Spain’s ally. Defiantly Carondelet continued with his plan, sending Thomas Power from New Orleans with the promised $9,640 for Wilkinson.

The arrival of Carondelet’s messenger in May 1796 should have caused the acting head of the army some embarrassment. But in answer to Power’s formal request to travel to Fort Greeneville for their meeting, Wilkinson answered grandly— and conveniently for someone acting as Carondelet’s eyes—that since the United States was at peace with everyone, “the officers of the American army have no concealments to make, and therefore our camps and our forts are free to the ingress and egress of all persons who deport themselves with propriety.”

Catering to the general’s taste for expensive living, Power had brought a gift of “segars from Havana,” but what cheered Wilkinson’s spirits more was the news that the money promised by Carondelet had finally arrived in the north and was waiting for him at New Madrid. The cash, as Power confided to Gayoso, was urgently needed because of “the [financial] embarrassments of gen. Wilkinson . . . For a long time past he has been expecting this money, the delay of which has been the cause of much trouble to him, involving him in great difficulties.” To escape detection and avoid the risk of another murder, he and Power agreed that the dollars should be packed in barrels of sugar and coffee ostensibly being sent for sale in Louisville with no more than a thousand coins in each barrel so that the extra weight would not be noticed.

Power was back in New Madrid within ten days of leaving Fort Greeneville, but without written authorization from Wilkinson to pick up the money on his behalf. This minor problem, caused by the general’s reluctance to entrust compromising material to someone so liable to be searched, had large consequences. Since it would have taken months to obtain permission from New Orleans, Colonel Tomás Portell, commandant of the fort at New Madrid, agreed to make the handover anyway, but he and Power wrote formal explanations for Carondelet to show why they had ignored his instructions. Thus of all the payments Wilkinson received from Spain, none was better documented than this sum of $9,640, and none would figure more prominently in the accusations leveled against him.

Yet it was already clear to Wilkinson at least that the San Lorenzo treaty had snuffed out any lingering prospect of Kentucky’s secession. Granted their long-held wish, the western settlers no longer had any motive for leaving the Union. That was the assumption made in Philadelphia, and accepted by Madrid. In New Orleans, Natchez, and New Madrid, however, the colonial administration thought otherwise. For Carondelet and Gayoso, the Spanish Conspiracy remained alive, and neither had any intention of abandoning the Mississippi forts built on Wilkinson’s recommendation to limit American expansion. Having fortified and garrisoned the Chickasaw Bluffs post, Gayoso even went on to construct an armed stockade almost opposite the mouth of the Ohio itself. In the summer of 1796, Carondelet wrote explicitly to Benjamin Sebastian, and the other members of the conspiracy, “It may be confidently asserted, without incurring the reproach of presumption, that his Catholic Majesty
will not carry the above mentioned
treaty into execution
.”

Sebastian, who personally worked on details of the conspiracy with both Gayoso and Carondelet during the first half of 1796, was rewarded with a pension and was authorized to offer $100,000 to the usual list of “notables” who could help bring about secession. As the linchpin of the entire conspiracy, Wilkinson was to be recompensed still more highly, not simply with fame and the governorship of the future Mississippi republic, but with the solid inducement of one hundred thousand acres in Illinois.

S
ECURE IN THE KNOWLEDGE
that $9,640 was waiting for him in New Madrid, Wilkinson was more concerned with the opportunity that suddenly presented itself of destroying General Anthony Wayne. Taken with the two other treaties of 1795—the Jay agreement establishing good relations with Britain and the Greeneville treaty with the western confederation—San Lorenzo left the United States without an obvious enemy, and, as Wilkinson’s allies adamantly insisted, without the need for a large army commanded by a major general. With the support of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, the House voted in April 1796 for an army of two thousand led by a brigadier general. The issue of personalities loomed so large that Chauncey Goodrich, a Federalist congressman from Connecticut, called it a plot “to get rid of General Wayne and place the army in the hands of a Jacobin and what is worse a western incendiary.”

The president, however, still clung to his vision of an inclusive United States that depended on a large army. In a paper presented to Congress in February, Timothy Pickering, the secretary of war, declared the Legion to be essential “to preserve peace with the Indians, and to protect theirs and the public lands.” The pendulum began to swing back, and helped by Wayne’s presence in Philadelphia, the Federalist majority in the Senate voted in May to keep the major general and the Legion. Since money had to be saved, they would instead abolish Wilkinson’s rank. Suddenly Wayne seemed about to win. As the heat of a Washington summer grew intolerable, however, a compromise deal was hammered out that reduced the army but retained both generals until the military budget was discussed again the following year.

Nevertheless, the contest between the two men remained in the balance, with Wilkinson acutely vulnerable to any revelation about his Spanish connections. That same summer, Wilkinson became aware of the widening circle of Kentuckians contacted by Power as part of the conspiracy. Fearful that someone would mention the name of the ringleader, Wilkinson pleaded with Gayoso, “For the love of God, my friend, enjoin greater secrecy and caution in all our concerns . . . Never suffer my name to be written or spoken. The suspicion of Washington is wide awake.”

Not only was Spanish security lax, but the barrels of money in New Madrid that were due to come up the Ohio in July or August were lethal evidence of his treachery. The danger of discovery was underlined when one of Wilkinson’s messengers was arrested as he returned from New Madrid by the commander of Fort Massac, Captain Zebulon Pike. With flattery, good humor, and the promise of promotion, Wilkinson cajoled Pike into releasing the messenger. The captain duly became a major, and the friendship forged in such unlikely conditions ensured that a few years later his son, Zebulon Pike the explorer, would become Wilkinson’s right-hand man. But the incident showed that any boat coming up the river was liable to be stopped and searched.

In June, shortly before leaving Philadelphia, General Wayne was summoned to see the new secretary of war, James McHenry, who passed on the administration’s own intelligence about Wilkinson’s activities. Much was tainted, coming as it did from Federalist opponents, or personal enemies such as Humphrey Marshall. In the latest round of their contest, he had been debarred from his Senate seat in January 1796 while charges of “gross fraud” and “perjury” brought on evidence supplied by Wilkinson’s friends were investigated. Nevertheless, Wayne saw enough to realize that Wilkinson was a Spanish rather than a British “pensioner,” and the name of Thomas Power figured so prominently there could be no doubt that he was the general’s link with New Orleans.

Hurrying back west, Wayne arrived in mid-July and immediately relieved Wilkinson of his command, putting him again in seclusion at Fort Washington. At the same time he sent Pike an urgent order to arrest Power whenever he appeared, with particular instructions to search for hidden documents. Days later, Wayne received specific warning from a Kentucky merchant, Elisha Winters, that Power would be coming upriver with “a royal chest” containing money and dispatches for Wilkinson. Mad Anthony had every reason to believe that the trap was about to close on his enemy.

On August 8, 1796, Lieutenant John Steele on river patrol halfway between Massac and Louisville stopped a large boat rowed by ten oarsmen. Boarding it, he discovered Thomas Power in the cabin with a cargo of barrels of sugar, coffee, and rum destined, according to Power’s documents, for sale in Louisville. Power protested vigorously that he was a legitimate merchant flying the Spanish flag, and that a diplomatic incident would be created if Steele damaged his cargo. Later the steersman on the boat recollected, “Had Steel [
sic
] looked into a bucket on the top of the boat, containing old tobacco, he would have found papers enough to hang Wilkinson himself.” However, the lieutenant was not the most enterprising officer in the army— after twenty years’ service he still retained the same rank as when he enlisted. Although suspicious because Power was not a regular merchant, he merely examined the barrels without opening them, then waved the Irishman on.

In a breathless account of the incident to Carondelet, Power admitted that he had used up a fortnight’s rum ration as a reward to keep the oarsmen rowing at full speed in case Steele changed his mind and came after them, “because, had I fallen into his hands for a second time, I was lost.” In Louisville, Power lodged the barrels of cash with a friend, then bought a horse to gallop to Cincinnati, where he gave Wilkinson the news that he had again escaped disaster by the skin of his teeth. The dollars were eventually taken to Frankfort, where all but $640 that Power kept for himself was put into Nolan’s safekeeping. In November, much of it seems to have been laundered through a bond for $4,000 drawn on Harry Innes. By then Wilkinson had taken the battle against Wayne to Philadelphia.

T
HE KNOWLEDGE THAT HE WAS
once more in funds had an immediate effect on Wilkinson’s outlook. In a long letter sent to Carondelet in September, he briskly outlined the ambitious program he intended to follow in the nation’s capital: “My views at Philadelphia are to keep down the military establishment, to disgrace my commander, and to secure myself the commandant of the army; should you advise such action otherwise, I will throw up my commission and return to Kentucky: on this point write me particularly by Power.” There was not the slightest chance that the baron would do anything but encourage his prize asset in his ruthless ambition to take command of the U.S. army.

In the same letter, Wilkinson also described the basic strategy he would adopt to account for the money received from Spain: “If I am questioned by Washington on my arrival at Philadelphia, I will avow a mercantile connection with New Orleans since [1788] and in which I still remain interested.” In effect whatever cash Carondelet sent would appear as profits on tobacco sold, or as insurance payouts for goods that had been ruined. “I will deny receiving a dollar by Power and I will add that a balance is still due me. To circumstantiate this assertion I will cause the faithful Philip Nolan now with me to make an account in form with a letter of advice dated at New Orleans last autumn.” Throughout the years ahead, Wilkinson would always follow this strategy to explain away the one incontrovertible proof of his relationship with Spain.

Rich once more and secure in his cover story, General James Wilkinson left Cincinnati in October with Nancy and their youngest son, James Biddle, and was rowed up the Ohio in the army’s comfortable keelboat. At Pittsburgh, he met Andrew Ellicott, the commissioner appointed to survey the southern boundary of the United States under the terms of the San Lorenzo treaty, as he was traveling downstream with a large party of soldiers and scientists. Generously, Wilkinson handed over the boat for Ellicott’s use.

An upright Quaker dedicated to astronomy, Ellicott was the antithesis of the volatile, spendthrift general. His reputation for painstaking, meticulous accuracy was unmatched. Computing his position by celestial observation, he had established the state borders of Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, and the District of Columbia and laid out the future federal capital on the banks of the Potomac River. Yet this serious man was immediately seduced by Wilkinson’s kindness and ease of manner. Ahead of Ellicott lay an epic journey around the borders of the United States that would last almost four years, but throughout that time, during which he stumbled upon the general’s terrible secret, Ellicott never ceased to regard him as a friend.

At Pittsburgh, Nancy received the devastating news that fourteen-year-old John, their eldest son, had died of a fever. “I am proud of my little Sons,” she had once written, “they are allowed to be very handsome & that I think the Smallest of there Perfections.” But the eldest was her favorite, the one who most took after her, who “reads prettily” and “has an amazing turn to writing” and, like her, always wanted to be back in Philadelphia, away from the frontier. The loss could only have caused her utmost grief. It may well have contributed to Wilkinson’s strangely downbeat message to Gayoso in November, ostensibly about the direction of Spanish policy but ending on an unmistakably low note: “Involved as I am in uncertainty, it is impossible to act with energy or even propriety.”

If sadness had sapped his buoyant spirits, it did not alter his determination to bring down General Wayne. Demanding a court of inquiry, Wilkinson added one new charge to the old ones of negligence in the Fallen Timbers campaign. He now wanted Wayne to explain why he had hired Newman to smear him as a British spy. Although the accusations were petty, and Wayne was supported by both Washington and McHenry, Wilkinson’s supporters in Congress, led by John Brown in the Senate and in the House by Jonathan Dayton, the Speaker, had enough political weight to force the War Department to cave in and authorize a court of inquiry into Wayne’s behavior. In one of his last messages to McHenry, Wayne wrote bluntly, “The fact is my presence with the army is very inconvenient to the nefarious machinations of the Enemies of Government & may eventually prevent them from dissolving the Union.”