An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (31 page)

On November 4, the young man left the fort having failed to achieve his object. The meeting might have been utterly inconsequential, except that out of it grew a campaign to expose Wilkinson that proved so damaging, his past as a paid agent of Spain came in the end to haunt him like Banquo’s ghost.

T
HE FIRST STEP WAS TAKEN,
inadvertently, by the guileless Andrew Ellicott. On November 8, Ellicott reached Darling’s Creek, a tributary of the Pearl River, and was preparing a map of the area that Wilkinson had requested. Then, as he put it in his journal, “by a very extraordinary accident, a letter from the Governor General [Gayoso] on its way to a confidential officer in the Spanish service [Power] fell into my hands for a few hours.” In fact what he had was Power’s copy of the letter. Ellicott’s refusal to explain how it came into his hands suggests it was stolen and had to be returned before the loss was discovered. Only Clark could have engineered the theft of the letter, and its swift conveyance to Ellicott. His motives can be deduced from its contents.

Gayoso’s letter was written in response to the news of Wilkinson’s visit to the commissioners’ camp. This, the governor suggested, had to be seen in relation to the Spanish Conspiracy, and the fears of those involved that their participation might be exposed by publication of their letters. “I wonder you could not see the design of General Wilkinson’s visit to Mr Ellicott’s and Mr Minor’s camp,” Gayoso explained to Power. “It was to fall upon some measures to obtain his papers. They are all safe and never will be made use of against him if he conducts himself with propriety. In fact the originals are at the court [in Madrid], the copies only are here.”

To Clark, the most important item was the evidence of blackmail— it explained Wilkinson’s refusal to participate in his projected attack on New Orleans— but the implications were different for Ellicott. He saw in the letter “unequivocal proof” of the conspiracy, and as he later explained, this document more than any other evidence convinced him that Wilkinson must have been involved in a plot “calculated to injure the United States.” He promptly sent Pickering another long and deeply ciphered dispatch with this fresh indication of the general’s treachery. Yet even then, he felt compelled to discover whether there might not be some other, more innocent explanation.

With the folly of the truly innocent, he wrote Wilkinson on December 16, 1798, “I have seen a letter of Mr. Power’s, in his own hand writing, dated the 23d ultimo, in which your name is mentioned in a manner, that astonished me; I dare not commit any part of it to paper, but if I should ever have the pleasure of another interview with you, I will communicate the substance of it under the injunction of secresy. If the design of it, has been to injure you in my opinion, it has failed in its effect, for in the most material point I am confident it is false.”

However friendly the tone of the Quaker’s letter, the general could not afford to let someone with Ellicott’s moral authority possess such damning knowledge. Since denial was impossible, Wilkinson set about destroying Ellicott’s reputation. From friends in Natchez, the astronomer learned that Wilkinson and Thomas Freeman had become companions and were intent on smearing his name. The least harmful allegation they circulated was that he had been in the pay of Spain, but what almost broke Ellicott’s heart was the story that he and his son, Andy, a surveyor on the boundary-marking team, had, as Freeman put it, “a beastly, criminal, and disgraceful intercourse” with their washerwoman, Betsy. “It was said, and generally believed,” Freeman declared, “that that extraordinary trio, father, son, and washerwoman, slept in the same bed, at the same time—I did not see, but I believed it. I was even pressed myself by the old sinner, Ellicott, to take part of his bed with his washerwoman and himself, for the night.”

A more wounding charge could hardly have been made against someone with Ellicott’s grave, Quaker background, undeviating scientific integrity, and utter devotion to his wife, Sally, who bore him thirteen children and all her life moved him to such endearments as “My darling,” “My love,” and “Dearest of all earthly beings.”

The episode showed how dangerous it was to be a threat, however inadvertent, to Wilkinson. It also demonstrated how armored against exposure the general had become. In his next message, Pickering sharply reprimanded Ellicott for passing on malicious allegations and refused to hear any more. Consequently the boundary commissioner said nothing about his encounter some months later with Captain Tomás Portell, the former commandant of New Madrid. Having supervised the packing of $9,640 into sugar and coffee barrels for Wilkinson, Portell was able to give the shaken commissioner firsthand testimony that the money was earned by spying, and not, as the general insisted, by trade.

Another year passed before Andrew Ellicott returned from the wilderness. By the time he reached his home in Philadelphia, he was a changed man, physically run-down, as he admitted, and psychologically scarred. But he was no less determined to see General Wilkinson uncovered as a Spanish spy.

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T
HE
F
EDERALIST
F
AVORITE

B
Y THE END OF
1798, it seemed that no one, whether Federalist or Republican, American or Spaniard, wanted to hear anything bad against Wilkinson. Even the French were prepared to think well of him as they began to exert pressure on Spain to hand over Louisiana. In Paris, Joseph de Pontalba, former citizen of New Orleans and self- appointed expert on the Spanish colony, recommended the general’s immediate recruitment. “Four times from 1786 to 1792, preparations were made in Kentucky and Cumberland to attack Louisiana,” Pontalba recklessly declared in his memorandum to Napoléon, “and every time this same individual caused them to fail through his influence over his countrymen. I make these facts known to show that France must not neglect to enlist this individual in her service.”

Had Napoléon’s plans to land an army of forty thousand troops in Louisiana been realized, Wilkinson might have received such an approach. But the threat of French hostilities produced for him an offer that flattered his vanity beyond anything that Napoléon might have offered.

In April 1798, the growing arrogance of France’s military government provoked a crisis in its dealings with the United States. The flashpoint was the diplomatic insult, known as the XYZ affair, when three representatives of Foreign Secretary Talleyrand demanded a bribe of fifty thousand pounds sterling, approximately $150,000, before the U.S. ambassadors could present their credentials. The news provoked an outraged Congress to authorize a dramatic increase in the army. In a first installment, twelve regiments, each of one thousand men, were to be raised to create what was called the New Army, and this was followed by further increases until Congress had approved a force of more than forty thousand men. In overall command was George Washington, newly promoted to lieutenant general, with two major generals, Alexander Hamilton and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, as operational commanders, all superseding Wilkinson in seniority. Yet astonishingly he did not appear to resent his demotion.

That George Washington had been placed in supreme command of the New Army made the loss easier to bear, but it was Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s deputy, who found the key to Wilkinson’s volatile loyalties.

As early as February 1799, when the recruits began to come in, Hamilton had promised Wilkinson that he wanted their relationship to result in “great mutual satisfaction.” When Wilkinson replied offering his full support, Hamilton suggested to Washington, “It strikes me forcibly that it be right and expedient to advance this gentlemen to the grade of major general.” Hamilton had only sporadically met Wilkinson since the Conway cabal, but he clearly understood Wilkinson’s temperament. “I am aware that some doubts have been entertained of him,” Hamilton acknowledged, “and that his character, on certain sides, gives room for doubt. Yet he is at present in the service; is a man of more than ordinary talent, of courage and enterprise . . . and will naturally find his interest as an ambitious man in deserving the favour of the government; while he will be apt to become disgusted if neglected, and through disgust may be rendered really what he is now only suspected to be.” On June 25, George Washington agreed to recommend to the president “promoting Brigadier Wilkinson to the Rank of Maj[o]r General.” Conspicuously he said nothing about the brigadier’s abilities, only that “it would feed his ambition, soothe his vanity, and by arresting discontent, produce the good effect you contemplate.”

Their reading of his character showed insight, and Wilkinson responded to the encouragement as they had hoped. But what Washington and Hamilton could not imagine was how deeply ingrained his double life had become. In a curious way, it freed him from any sense of social obligation. His ambition might be fed and his vanity soothed, but the only real constraints that affected him were a desire to be popular and a fear of being found out. With one notable exception, he never seems to have felt that he was betraying anyone, merely that he was seizing an opportunity.

T
HE EXCEPTION WAS HIS WIFE.
Sensitive, gentle, and, in middle age, possibly depressive, Nancy had a neediness that Wilkinson had to meet. Whether from love, or an egocentric desire not to let her down, he always struggled to fulfill her wants. Hamilton’s request that he come to Philadelphia in early 1799 to advise on the disposition of the New Army consequently threw Wilkinson into a dilemma. It was a necessary step toward promotion, but Nancy became distraught at the prospect of being left alone in Natchez. “The anxiety of my wife at the idea of our separation, gives us both agony, and so sensibly affects her whole frame, that I shall not be able to tear myself from her as soon as I expected,” Wilkinson confided to Gayoso in May.

She had arrived from Pittsburgh just a few months earlier, and her reluctance to return to a frontier society could be guessed from a line in one of Wilkinson’s letters to Sargent begging him to write her with some words “commendatory of the climate and society [of Natchez].” Coached by her popular, outgoing husband, she had brought with her suitable gifts to offer southern society, including “a few cranberries, a northern berry valuable for its rarity in this quarter and its fine aromatic flavor when properly prepared,” for Gayoso’s American wife, Margaret.

During those months an unmistakable intimacy grew up between the two families, despite the barbed relations between the husbands. The Wilkinsons rented Gayoso’s exquisite estate of Concordia, perched high above the Mississippi, and they planned for their children to exchange visits. Gayoso might exert some discreet blackmail on Wilkinson, and Wilkinson might complain of his landlord, “The Mingo asks too much for his dirty acres,” but when Nancy pleaded to be allowed to accompany her husband back to Pennsylvania, Wilkinson had no hesitation in enlisting Gayoso’s help: “Would you take the trouble to point out the dangers and the incommodations of the voyage? It would have great weight with my Ann, and will oblige me, but the thing must appear like a suggestion of your own— you perceive I treat you with the intimacy and unreserve of a Brother.”

Aside from the habitual distaste for honesty, his tendency to enlist others in dealing with his wife does suggest a tenderness toward her that no one else evoked. It even softened his feelings toward Ellicott. As he was about to sail from New Orleans, he wrote the boundary commissioner, “I left Mrs. Wilkinson with our friend Walker at Concord House, in tolerable health but deep affliction. My own solicitude exceeds anything I have before experienced on Her account and my absence will be shortened by every means in my power. I shall find pleasure in reporting your progress to the President, and rendering you any service in my power.”

T
HE
SUMMER
IN
P
HILADELPHIA
sealed an unlikely friendship with Hamilton, based personally on a shared excess of physical energy, and professionally on a desire to reform the army. Since neither wanted to see French ideas of liberty and equality undermining its discipline, Wilkinson was drawn into the Federalist strategy of weeding out any officer who was a Republican sympathizer and, in the words of a critic, “has had the audacity to mount the French cockade.” This threatened to make the New Army an overtly political animal—“We were very attentive to the importance of appointing friends of the Govern[ment] to military stations,” Hamilton assured McHenry.

It was exactly what Republicans had warned would happen once a standing army was permitted— professional soldiers would be loyal to the government and could be used to intimidate its opponents. Their fears had been reinforced by the restrictions on public criticism of the government brought in under the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. When the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures, under the covert prompting of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, resolved that the acts were unconstitutional, it drew from Hamilton, the army’s operational commander, a reaction that was the stuff of Republican nightmares. The resolves, he told Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts on February 12, 1799, were evidence of “a regular conspiracy to overturn the government,” and armed force was the proper response: “when a clever force has been collected let them be drawn towards Virginia, for which there is an obvious pretext— and then let measures be taken to act upon the laws, and put Virginia to the test of resistance.”