An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (33 page)

Within twelve months, Lewis’s list had been used to purge the largely Federalist officer corps. More than half left the army, some forced into resignation, but most simply dismissed. Angry Federalists accused the administration of politicizing the military, and Dearborn himself virtually admitted it was retaliation for Hamilton’s attempt to pack the army in 1799. “We have been much more liberal towards [the Federalists] than they would be towards us,” he told the congressman Joseph Vamum, “and in future I think we ought to give them measure for measure.” Military efficiency was not ignored— of forty-four officers deemed unfit, thirty-eight were dismissed, Republicans and Federalists alike— but in the end the army had a more distinctly Republican tinge than the raw numbers suggest, because the ax fell most heavily on the senior, strongly Federalist officers, especially those on the general staff. Many of Wilkinson’s favorites were culled, among them Captain Bartholomew Shaumburgh, deemed to be “opposed to the administration,” and Major Isaac Guion, “violently opposed.” According to Federalist congressman James Bayard, the commanding general should have been among them because the slimmer army no longer required even a brigadier general in command.

Had Jefferson and Dearborn really wanted to save money, they might have been tempted. It was soon apparent that the cuts would reduce military spending by less than expected— in the end by forty thousand dollars rather than half a million dollars— and Wilkinson’s salary was now more than twenty- five hundred dollars a year, with almost half as much again in expenses. Many Republicans also believed him to be too closely associated with Hamilton and the Federalists. Against the commanding general’s name, however, no mark appeared. Possibly Lewis felt it would have been presumptuous, but more plausibly he had been told that none was needed. The president had a specific role for the general to play in the new Republican army. Wilkinson’s survival depended on his acquiescence.

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NE OF THE FIRST
to become aware of the general’s closeness to the new administration was Andrew Ellicott. Since his return to Philadelphia in the dying days of John Adams’s government, he had been pleading to be paid eight thousand dollars in unclaimed salary for his years in the wilderness. Despairing of the Federalists, he wrote as a friend and fellow member of the American Philosophical Society to Thomas Jefferson, asking for his help. Instead of a reply from the president, he received one in March 1801 from Wilkinson, oozing friendliness, and offering him one of the best- paid jobs in the federal government: “What do you think of the surveyorgeneral’s office in the N.Western Territory—you could fill it and I am sure it is not filled now.”

The surveyor general was responsible for organizing the Public Lands Survey, the great government enterprise that would eventually measure out one million square miles of land between the Appalachians and the Pacific Ocean, transforming wilderness into property and capital. It paid two thousand dollars a year with another five hundred dollars for his clerk, a suitable post for Ellicott’s son Andy. Desperate for the financial security it represented, but appalled by the implicit condition of silence that came with it, the astronomer replied in a tortured letter to his crooked would-be benefactor, begging for time to make up his mind and wailing at the unfairness that forced him to sell his scientific books and instruments so that he could feed his family. “I now find that I am inevitably ruined and know not for what,” he exclaimed. “I never betrayed the interests of my country, I never used a farthing of money that was not my own, I never lost a single observation by absence of inattention, and never when out on public business was caught in bed by the sun.”

After five weeks’ wrestling with temptation, Ellicott finally turned the offer down and, in June 1801, wrote Jefferson a complete account of what he knew of the general’s Spanish connections. It began with a specific warning about Wilkinson’s activities that Ellicott had received from President Washington; it included testimony from Thomas Power and Daniel Clark; and it ended with the final detail of Captain Tomás Portell’s recollection that the $9,640 “was not on account of any mercantile transactions, but of the pension allowed the General by the Spanish government.” The letter ended, as Ellicott recalled, with the blunt warning that “General W. was not a man to be trusted; and if continued in employ, would one day or other disgrace and involve the government in his schemes.”

Neither then nor in the future did President Jefferson ever acknowledge receipt of this letter. On a later occasion before Congress, he even denied its existence. Yet he clearly not only received Ellicott’s warning, but almost certainly passed it on to the man most directly concerned, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn. The following year, when a disgruntled Wilkinson toyed with the idea of leaving the army and taking the job of surveyor general himself, Dearborn deemed him unsuitable, scrawling across his letter of application, “Such a situation would enable him to associate with Spanish agents without suspicion.”

It is impossible not to find Jefferson’s prolonged dealings with Brigadier General James Wilkinson equivocal and troubling. Knowing his past as a spy, the president still trusted him as commander in chief. More than that, he added civil and diplomatic posts to the general’s military command until at a crucial moment Wilkinson single- handedly possessed enough power to decide the fate of the nation. The general once described Jefferson as “a fool” to his Spanish handler, and the risk taken by the president was an undeniable folly that could have destroyed the still-unformed nation. Yet, it was also a cold calculation. In exchange for trusting Wilkinson, the president expected to gain what he considered to be the priceless return of a compliant army.

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N
A
PRIL
30, 1801, the commanding general demonstrated in a small but unmistakable way his intention to comply with the wishes of the Republican president. He issued a general order requiring every man under his command to cut off the queue or pigtail of long hair worn by all eighteenth-century soldiers. As a fashion, it had come in during the early eighteenth century when shoulder- length wigs were discarded, but in civilian life it was rapidly disappearing, partly on hygienic grounds, and, after the French Revolution spread a taste for simplicity, partly because it seemed old-fashioned. For a conservative institution like the army, that was its value. The queue served as a reminder of its past.

Washington wore it to his dying day, as did all the officers in the heroic days of the Revolution. Indeed, the difficulty in making it look smart helped to distinguish a good soldier. To achieve the best result, it was essential to add tallow grease as the hair was braided and to powder the finished queue liberally with flour. The result might be what the general order called “a filthy and insalubrious ornament,” but it served as the outward and visible sign of the army’s difference from the civilian population. Wilkinson’s order consequently caused deep anguish, especially to tradition-minded, predominantly Federalist officers.

“I was determined not to [cut my hair], provided a less sacrifice to my feelings would have sufficed,” Captain Russell Bissell of Connecticut confessed to his father. “I wrote my Resignation, & showed it, but . . . the Col[onel]. was not impowered to accept . . . I was obliged to submit to the act that I despised, and if ever you see me you will find that I have been closely cropped.” Others did resign over the issue, but the adamant refusal of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Butler, a cantankerous, dyed- in- the-wool traditionalist, to deprive himself of what he regarded as “the greatest ornament of a soldier” demonstrated how deep resistance ran.

It was useless for Wilkinson to explain that pigtails were as out-of- date as knee breeches, and that short hair was “recommended by the ablest generals of the day,” meaning the crop-haired Napoléon Bonaparte. Despite being twice court-martialed, Butler refused to accept that the general had the authority to order a haircut. Gradually Butler’s queue became the rallying point for conservatives opposed to Jefferson’s reforms. Bystanders such as Andrew Jackson condemned Wilkinson’s order as “despotic,” others called him a “detestable persecutor,” and, most woundingly, “a time-serving, superannuated coxcomb, the fawning flatterer of Adams and Jefferson, a perfect Vicar of Bray”— a reference to the eighteenth-century satire on an English clergyman whose political sympathies changed from Whig to Tory and back according to the views of each new monarch on the throne.

The fury that the mere cutting of a pigtail aroused explains why Thomas Jefferson needed Wilkinson. Had the general thrown his weight against the Republican reforms of the army, the Federalist backlash, inside its ranks and among former officers, would have had a leader, and as Adams had recognized earlier, a disaffected army could create a constitutional crisis with unpredictable consequences. Wilkinson’s switch of allegiance was therefore crucial, as the barrage of attacks on him made clear. According to the Federalist senator and former soldier William North, the general was the only senior officer “friendly to the politics of the now reigning party.” Without him, the ten-year-old federal government, so easily defied by lawbreakers such as William Blount, might not be able to impose its will on a determined army.

The lesson of France was fresh in the mind of every Republican: on November 9, 1799, the French military, led by General Napoléon Bonaparte, had overthrown the legitimate government, the Directory, despite the country’s constitution having been approved by more than a million voters. Even with Wilkinson’s support, Elbridge Gerry still felt bound to warn the president in May 1801 that forts and arsenals should be “placed under the protection of faithful officers and corps,” meaning Republicans, to prevent “their seizure or destruction . . . by a desperate faction.”

While Wilkinson was expected to hold the existing army in check, Jefferson and Dearborn instituted the decisive reform that was to shape its future by creating a military academy at West Point. Although set up specifically to train artillery and engineer officers, it, too, was expected to tilt the army away from its old Federalist roots. One of its first cadets, Joseph Swift, later a commandant of the academy himself, remembered being interviewed by Jefferson, who asked, “ ‘To which of the political creeds do you adhere?’ My reply was that as yet I had done no political act, but that my family were Federalists. Mr Jefferson rejoined, ‘There are many men of high talent and integrity in that party, but it is not the rising party.’ ” The hint, repeated by Dearborn, convinced Swift to keep his opinions to himself. In the long term, however, West Point performed its function, not by fostering Republicanism but by encouraging a professional ethic that displaced political loyalties.

By making Jefferson’s “chaste reformation” possible, Wilkinson lost popularity, but preserved an important constitutional principle. He had acquiesced in the axing of some of his closest military friends— only Major Thomas Cushing, marked down as “violently opposed to the administration,” survived—and thereby incurred the hatred of Federalists. But on a larger canvas, what mattered was that he had defended the fundamental basis of any democracy’s relationship with the army, that the military must always be at the service of the civil power. Jefferson’s appreciation of that important service provides the best explanation for his subsequent dealings with the general.

W
ITHIN THE
W
AR
D
EPARTMENT,
however, Wilkinson continued to be regarded with suspicion. During the Saratoga campaign, Henry Dearborn was one of those who regarded Wilkinson as a turncoat for betraying Benedict Arnold and, more openly than any other secretary of war, set out to restrict Wilkinson’s capacity for doing mischief. Administratively, functions concerning pay and equipment once performed by military officers, who might be beholden to the commanding general, were transferred to civilian staff answerable to the war secretary. The general’s direct command over operational duties now had to be mediated through three colonels appointed to command the three regiments that constituted the fighting forces of the army. West Point was put under the direct control of the war secretary. Above all, the whole thrust of Jefferson’s famous program of “frugal government” hobbled any scope for maneuver by leaving troops perpetually short of uniforms, ammunition, and transport. As though to underline the weakness of the commander in chief, Dearborn’s directives ensured that from the summer of 1801 Wilkinson spent most of the next eighteen months away from headquarters in Pittsburgh where his family lived. Instead, he was required to supervise the construction of a road linking Lakes Erie and Ontario on the northern frontier, then to negotiate a series of land treaties with Choctaw and Cherokee Indians so that settlers could move into western Tennessee and the Mississippi Territory.

Depressed by his lack of prospects, Wilkinson attempted unsuccessfully to secure the governorship of the Mississippi Territory following Winthrop Sargent’s dismissal. When Jefferson refused on the grounds that a general could not be a chief executive—“no military man should be so placed as to have no civil superior”—he then applied to be made surveyor general, only to be frozen out by Dearborn’s bleak mistrust.

After six months in the wilderness “under extreme ill health, during an inclement season,” Wilkinson passed his first night under a solid roof in Fort Adams on January 27, 1803. There he found the United States facing an international crisis over the long-settled question of navigation rights on the Mississippi. The emergency was precipitated by Juan Morales, acting intendant of Louisiana, who in October 1802 aribitrarily closed the depot at New Orleans to American goods. This precipitate move, interrupting trade worth almost two million dollars a year, was widely thought to be an aberration attributable to his interfering character.