An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (36 page)

On March 4, all of Louisiana was officially handed over to the United States, and in those outlying forts and towns that had not yet registered the original transfer from Spain to France, the flags of all three nations were flown within a single day. On that day the general’s term of office as military commissioner officially ended, and Dearborn wasted no time in ordering his return to Washington. By then rumors were beginning to spread through New Orleans about Wilkinson’s sudden purchases of sugar. Suspecting another Spanish payment, Clark persuaded an equally dubious Morales to let him examine the Louisiana books, but, as he reported back to Claiborne, found nothing—the twelve thousand dollars appeared only in the Mexico accounts. Wilkinson’s assertion that an old tobacco deal had at last paid off strained credulity, but there seemed no other explanation.

When the general sailed for Washington in April 1804, he took with him the mirror image of “Reflections,” a twenty-two- page strategy document prepared for American eyes, accompanied by eighteen hand-drawn maps of the country between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande— the very territory he suggested that Spain should fortify against U.S. expansion. He also transported a large cargo of sugar purchased with part of the payment for “Reflections,” and the assurance that once more his Spanish handlers would not refer to him by name, only by his old
nom d’espionnage
, Agent 13.

W
ITHIN WEEKS OF HIS RETURN
to Washington, Wilkinson had developed a relationship with Jefferson close enough to suggest he did have an inkling of what the president concealed in his heart. If so, part of the secret concerned Jefferson’s continuing apprehension of the dangers of a standing army, and his wish for greater control over it.

To meet Jefferson’s needs, Wilkinson drew up a new set of Articles of War on his return from New Orleans that dramatically increased the president’s power in matters of military discipline. The most contentious change concerned the individual soldier’s allegiance. Under the old Articles of War, composed in 1776, a soldier swore “to be true to the United States of America” and was forbidden to utter “traitorous and disrespectful words against the authority of the United States in Congress assembled.” The Constitution had designated the president as commander in chief, but so far as the army was concerned, the chain of command stopped at the senior general. The president had to exert control through him over the military, the most potent instrument of executive authority.

Wilkinson proposed to alter the Articles so that each officer and soldier swore to “observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the officers appointed over me,” and it would become an offense to utter “traitorous and disrespectful words against the President” or other government officers. The suggested change made the military structure constitutional, but it also shifted the primary loyalty of a soldier from his country to his government.

The change seemed to give dangerous power to the executive, and opposition to the new Articles immediately became entangled in the continuing saga of Colonel Thomas Butler’s uncropped pigtail, which had, by 1804, become the focal point of resentment against Wilkinson among forcibly retired officers of the once Federalist army. The issue created an unholy alliance between the Federalist stronghold of New England and the frontiersmen of Tennessee, where the colonel was stationed with the Second Regiment. Acting together, they mustered enough support in the Senate to approve a petition against the order for short hair and to throw out the new Articles of War. Until the twin issues of the pigtail and the Articles were resolved, Jefferson could not ignore the importance of the general’s support for the Constitution and the Republican administration.

Beyond his political usefulness, Wilkinson had another more immediate claim on the president’s attention. The general’s unparalleled knowledge of the west met one of the abiding passions in Jefferson’s life. From his childhood, when his father, Peter Jefferson, founded the Loyal Land Company to buy territory beyond the Appalachians, through the purchase of Louisiana and the creation of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the western lands occupied a strikingly important place in Jefferson’s imagination. In the winter of 1783–84, as a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, he had specified how they should be purchased from the Native Americans, how they should be surveyed and sold to eastern settlers, and how their structure of government should be created. The west was the canvas on which Jefferson envisioned a new republican society being drawn. His desire for information about the region was insatiable.

When James Wilkinson arrived in Washington with his sketch maps and direct information of the area, the president had already sent two ambassadors, James Monroe and John Armstrong, to Madrid to negotiate the exact dividing line between the Louisiana Purchase and Mexico. Since Louisiana had originally been discovered and settled by the French, this resolved itself into a question of how much land their colonists had explored in the eighteenth century. Jefferson believed that French exploration had taken them several hundred miles west of the Mississippi, justifying a border along the Sabine River. Encouraged by Wilkinson’s “Reflections,” however, Spain insisted that the boundary ran almost eighty miles east of the Sabine River. Their own detailed maps showed the line following the Arroyo Hondo, then extending northward until it crossed the Red River close to Natchitoches. Lack of knowledge about the geography of the area handicapped the American response. Wilkinson’s advice was consequently as welcome in Washington as it had been in New Orleans.

His maps no longer exist, but his information about the Red River can be deduced from the report he sent Dearborn in July. A mixture of fact and fiction, some of which came from Philip Nolan, and some from French maps procured in New Orleans, it revealed for the first time to non–Native Americans that this mighty feeder of the lower Mississippi had “its source in the East side of a height, the top of which presents an open plain, so extensive as to require the Indians four days in crossing it.” This was the high, flat tableland that straddles the New Mexico/Texas border called the Llano Estacado.

The next section, however, led Jefferson astray. “West of this high plain,” Wilkinson went on, “my informants report certain waters (which run to the Southward) probably those of the Rio Bravo, and beyond these they report a ridge of high mountains extending North and South.” What made this misleading was that it compressed the actual geography, narrowing the distances involved. The Pecos River was confused with the Rio Bravo (alternatively named the Rio Grande), and the Sangre de Cristo mountains merged with the Rockies farther to the west.

By an extraordinary coincidence, the arrival of the distinguished German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in Washington that summer made it possible to compare Wilkinson’s information and sketches with the first authoritative map of the region. While in Mexico City, Humboldt had been given the rare privilege of examining the government’s closely guarded charts and atlases and, from them, had produced his magisterial
Chart of the Kingdom
of New Spain
, covering Texas and New Mexico.

When he appeared in Washington in June 1804, Jefferson questioned Humboldt closely, then invited Wilkinson to dinner so that he and the German could compare information. Unfortunately, a fever required Wilkinson to be bled so heavily the day before that he was unable to leave his bed. By way of apology, the next day he sent Jefferson two souvenirs of the Southwest, a buffalo hide with an Osage drawing of a horned toad, and the leaves and fruit of a cotton tree.

His absence hardly mattered because at the president’s urging Humboldt later met Wilkinson in person and let him borrow his precious chart. For Jefferson, the information it contained was intoxicating. What it showed was indeed that the Red River rose in the high plateau, as Wilkinson had described; that the narrow ridge of the Rockies lay a little farther west; and that on the other side of the ridge the land sloped down to California and the Pacific Ocean. In other words, it appeared that the Red River would take an explorer almost to the watershed between the Mississippi basin and the Pacific, with a clear run down to the ocean on the other side.

That Humboldt’s chart should have confirmed the information from Nolan so closely makes it probable they had both studied the same Spanish maps, the Irishman presumably having had access to copies in the offices of the governors who found him so delightful. Alternatively, Humboldt may have incorporated data from Wilkinson’s inaccurate sketches into the map shown to the president. Whatever the explanation, the coincidence confirmed Wilkinson in Jefferson’s estimation as an utterly reliable source of information about the west.

The discovery that the Red River offered a clear route toward the Pacific prompted the president to immediate action. He commissioned the Scottish scientists William Dunbar and George Hunter to make a preliminary study of its lowest reaches and, in the fall of 1804, began to organize a much larger expedition led by Thomas Freeman, Wilkinson’s old ally against Ellicott, to explore the river to its source. This was to be the southern counterpart to Lewis and Clark’s northern exploration of the upper Missouri, and Congress was asked to set aside five thousand dollars to fund it. The Red River expedition was born out of Jefferson’s passion, but was made possible by Wilkinson’s information. Shortly afterward the president gave tangible proof of the value he attached to the general’s unsurpassed knowledge of the west.

In November, Jefferson announced to Congress that the Louisiana Purchase was to be split into two, the southern portion being known as the Orleans Territory, and the rest to be called the Louisiana Territory. Before the end of 1804, William Claiborne, already governor of New Orleans, had his power extended to cover all the southern part of the Purchase. At the same time, the president appointed as governor of the Louisiana Territory, General James Wilkinson.

21
B
URR’S
A
MBITION

W
HAT PREOCCUPIED THE THOUGHTS
of every westward- looking American were signs of the imminent collapse of the Spanish empire. As Spain was squeezed harder between Napoléon’s army and Britain’s navy, the fantastic three- hundred-year- old machinery of its colonial administration began to seize up. The fleets carrying silver from Peru and Mexico still sailed twice a year to Cádiz, but soldiers went unpaid for longer, local officials were left unsupervised, and Madrid’s slackening grip was sharply evident in Casa Calvo’s unilateral decision to divert twelve thousand dollars of Mexico’s revenue to Wilkinson without Spain’s direct permission. In similar circumstances in 1787 Miró had not felt able to do more than make the American a loan, while Carondelet’s payments were possible only because they were in line with the existing policy of the royal council. The empire’s shuddering edifice positively invited outsiders to think of what might replace it.

According to Alexander von Humboldt’s recollection of his conversations in 1804, Jefferson speculated that after the Spanish empire disappeared the republic of the United States would become the model for a still larger project, “a future division of the American continent into three great republics which were to include Mexico and the South American states.” But while Jefferson dreamed of the spread of republican virtue, other Americans, inspired by Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan-born liberationist and veteran of the Revolution, imagined a general Creole uprising leading to an independent South American empire. The remainder, including Wilkinson and perhaps most adventurers, found it hard to think beyond the mother lodes of silver ore that surfaced repeatedly in the western range of Mexico’s Sierra Madre.

Although Wilkinson shared his information about the different roads to Mexico with President Jefferson, he had already discussed it with another would- be adventurer, the vice president, Colonel Aaron Burr. “To save time of which I need much and have little,” Wilkinson wrote urgently in May 1804 immediately after landing in Charleston, “I propose to take a Bed with you this night, if it may be done without observation or intrusion—Answer me and if in the affirmative I will be with [you] at 30 after the 8th Hour.”

A clandestine meeting, set up without preliminaries, indicated that Burr and Wilkinson already knew each other’s mind, but that their thoughts needed to be kept secret. Since Burr’s house in Richmond Hill lay on the road from Charleston to Washington, it was easy for Wilkinson to break his journey unobserved. The nature of their discussions was never divulged, but they must have concerned the opportunities that Burr might find in the west. In particular, Wilkinson wanted the youthful Claiborne replaced as governor of Louisiana, and his eagerness to meet Burr suggested that the vice president was his preferred candidate as successor.

The timing of their encounter was significant. Burr had another ten months before his term of office ended, but no obvious political future. He had just been defeated in the race for governor of his home state, New York, a result he blamed on the scurrilous allegations about his financial probity made by his bitter political rival Alexander Hamilton. Burr was in a dangerous mood when he met Wilkinson. As Charles Biddle reported, the vice president was ready “to call out the first man of any respectability concerned in the infamous publications concerning him.”

The provocation came just six weeks after his meeting with Wilkinson Hamilton’s comment that Burr was “a dangerous man unfit to be entrusted with the reins of power” was enough for the challenge to be issued, answered, and shots exchanged on the hillside of Weehawken, New Jersey, overlooking the Hudson River. What destroyed Burr’s political career, in the north at least, was the report that Hamilton had intentionally fired wide before the colonel deliberately shot his opponent in the gut.