An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (43 page)

With the border problem temporarily solved, the general immediately rode hard back to Natchitoches, covering the sixty miles in a day, and leaving Cushing to bring back the troops. At Natchitoches, he found a copy of the original Burr letter, delivered in his absence by another courier, Erick Bollman. Also waiting for him was a mysterious message sent by James Lowry Donaldson, one of Louisiana’s land commissioners, “that a plan to revolutionise the western country has been formed, matured, and is ready to explode— that Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Orleans, and Indiana, are combined, to declare themselves independent on the 15th November.”

The mystery lay less in the message than in its alleged effect on Wilkinson It was “decisive on my conduct,” he declared in his
Memoirs
, as though even then he had half hoped not to have to commit himself. “I had not formed a decided opinion, of the nature and objects of Burr’s enterprise before the receipt of Mr Donaldson’s letter. I then first perceived [the enterprise] was wholly unauthorised by the government—highly criminal in the design,— most alarming in its extent; and I had no longer any difficulty as to the course of conduct, my duty and the interests of the nation required me to pursue.”

Donaldson’s letter, however, said nothing of the kind. It stressed Donaldson’s belief that the story was so like “a second Spanish Conspiracy” it could only be a trick—“a stratagem set on foot by the patrons of the
Western World
.” But it carried a different meaning for Wilkinson. The letter demonstrated the changed emphasis of Burr’s conspiracy— New Orleans was to be seized, not as a jumping- off point for Mexico, but to bring about the secession of the western states. It was indeed a second Spanish Conspiracy, and as the creator of the first one, Wilkinson would be inescapably tied into it. No matter what he and the army did on the frontier, he would be seen as participating in an attempt to separate the western states from the Union.

Even to Thomas Jefferson, desperate though he was to believe the best of his general, the diversion of troops looked deliberate. Writing to warn Claiborne in December of Burr’s coming attack, he explained, “Genrl. Wilkenson [
sic
] is believed to be kept at bay on the west side of the Misisipi [
sic
] by a Spanish force under advice from Yrujo who has been duped by Burr to believe he means only the capture of N Orleans and the separation of the western country.” The president was ready to see Wilkinson as a victim, but others might not be so kind. As Chief Justice John Marshall would repeatedly explain in his court, the law treated an attempt to wage war on a country at peace with the United States as a misdemeanor, but war against a province governed by the United States was treason.

This was why Wilkinson could no longer afford to stand back. He had to oppose Burr outright. And the equivocal letter sent to the colonel to await his arrival in Natchez had to be destroyed instantly.

The choice had been forced on him, but the decision to portray himself as the savior of the nation, and the histrionic manner in which he played the role, was Wilkinson’s entirely. “The plot thickens,” he wrote in a message to Cushing, urging him to bring all available troops to New Orleans, “yet all but those concerned sleep profoundly! My God! what a situation has our Country reached. Let us save it if we can . . . hurry, hurry after me and if necessary let us be buried together in the place we shall defend.” Apart from a single company, the entire garrison of Natchitoches, under the command of Major Moses Porter, was ordered to New Orleans, with fresh orders to Freeman to repair the city’s defenses urgently, but “manifest no hurry or emotion for you are surrounded by secret agents, yet use every exertion in your power.”

With men sweating at the oars, the general’s boat then swept down the Red River, covering more than one hundred and fifty miles in three days. But when they reached the Mississippi, the general demonstrated how little he believed in the melodrama he was creating. Instead of hastening down-river to protect beleaguered New Orleans, he turned upriver to Natchez, where his letter was awaiting Burr, and where the genuine tragedy of Ann Wilkinson’s approaching death was unfolding.

N
ANCY’S FAMILY WAS ALL HER LIFE.
She needed to have tenderness around her. Until she met James Wilkinson, the affection that nourished her had come from her father and brothers and sisters. While her husband was away, she found it in her children, and to a lesser extent in the military circles surrounding her. What she could not bear was loneliness. But in the last febrile stages of her illness, her elder son, James Biddle, was still lost in the mountains, the younger was living far off in Philadelphia, and her husband was distracted by a military emergency. His brief return must have come as a gift. But an undeniably operatic atmosphere existed in the elegant mansion as Ann lay dying of tuberculosis and her husband sat nearby scribbling messages of increasing wildness to save himself from disgrace.

A second letter was written to the president on November 12 warning of “a deep, dark and wide-spread conspiracy, embracing the young and the old, the democrat and the federalist, the native and the foreigner, the patriot at ’76 and the exotic of yesterday, the opulent and the needy, the ins and the outs.” Superbly, the general promised to use “indefatigable industry, incessant vigilance and hardy courage” to defend New Orleans, admitting only to a slight trepidation at the thought of the “desperate enthusiasts who would seek my life, and although I may be able to smile at danger in open conflict, I will confess I dread the stroke of the assassin, because it cannot confer an honourable death.” But wrapped in the hyperbole lay the shape of the plan he had conceived. “To give effect to my military arrangements, it is absolutely indispensable New Orleans and its environs should be placed under martial law.” Ten years earlier, he had used the same stratagem in Detroit in response to a supposed threat of British invasion. The experience had shown that martial law had the double merit of creating a state of panic and giving him total control.

Two more letters went to Freeman with further orders for improving the defense of the city, and the assurance that “I have made up my mind to perish in the storm, in defence of the government and integrity of the union, and every officer I have the honour to command will do the same.” On the same day he wrote William Claiborne with instructions to act urgently in repairing New Orleans’s defenses, but to “demonstrate no hurry” because “you are surrounded by disaffection where you least suspect it.” That letter was no sooner sealed than he began another to Samuel Smith, insisting that Claiborne be dismissed for failing to prepare adequate defenses; then, having asserted that the “Integrity of the Union is menaced by the impious ambition of a desperate Band,” he demanded that his salary should be increased— “Shall I be suffered to starve or to exhaust the last Cent of my private purse, or abandon every thing like respectability in office?”

Finally, the ever reliable Walter Burling was sent all the way to Mexico City with a message for José de Iturrigaray, viceroy of Mexico, explaining the heroic efforts Wilkinson had already made to protect Spain’s possessions against Burr, his immediate intention to “spring like Leonidas into the breach defending it, or perish in the attempt,” and his pressing need to be repaid for the expenses he had incurred—eighty-five thousand pesos spent “in shattering the plans and destroying the union and harmony among the bandits being enrolled along the Ohio, and thirty-six thousand in the dispatch of supplies and counter-revolutionists—which sums I trust will be reimbursed to the bearer.”

Aside from the calculated need to squeeze a profit from the emergency, this was not the language of a cold-blooded plotter, as his enemies later alleged. With his wife dying in an upstairs bedroom, James Wilkinson was performing his different roles as patriot, as spy, as military hero, with the desperate intensity of a man on the edge of breakdown. Failure to convince his audience would kill off his characters as surely as tuberculosis was killing his wife and condemn him to cope with intolerable reality.

Invited to the Concordia mansion on about November 15, Isaac Briggs was struck by the change in the general’s demeanor since September. “I confess I approached him with caution,” Briggs recounted. “His wife lay at this time, in the same house, apparently at the point of death. The General met me in a mood the reverse of that described in the former conversation: then, all was gaiety; now, every thing in his manner was throughout, solemn, impressive and pregnant with alarm. He took me aside, and immediately put the question: ‘Can you go to the seat of government of the United States?’ ”

The recruitment of Briggs to act as messenger to Jefferson, not only carrying his dispatches, but testifying to his patriotism with a Quaker’s unshakable integrity, was essential to Wilkinson’s plans. Briggs’s initial skepticism, even after being told of the conspiracy, only added to his usefulness. “How dost thou know these things?” he demanded. “May all this not be a deception?” To satisfy his doubts, Wilkinson had to produce Burr’s and Dayton’s letters, to point to the connection between the
Western World
stories and Dayton’s blackmailing suggestion that he was about to be dismissed, and to pave the way for the conclusion that Briggs reached after a night’s sleep. “I could not resist the inference,” the Quaker wrote, “that did Colonel Burr aim to secure the cooperation of General Wilkinson, the use of such means perfectly accorded with the opinion I had acquired of [Burr’s] character—to impose on [Wilkinson] the conviction on the one hand that his reputation with his country was destroyed beyond his power to redeem it; and on the other to hold up to his view such allurements as were well calculated to fascinate his ambition.”

Convinced that Jefferson had to be informed of what was really happening, Briggs set off for Washington on November 18 with the general’s dispatches and copies of Burr’s and Dayton’s letters. Any hope of rescuing Wilkinson’s reputation rested with him. Elsewhere in the south, Burr and Dayton had already shredded it beyond repair. Cowles Mead, acting governor of Mississippi, was so convinced of Wilkinson’s complicity that he refused the general’s request to call out the militia for fear they would be used in the plot and instead told William Claiborne in New Orleans, “It is here believed that General Wilkinson is the soul of the conspiracy.” Andrew Jackson, himself uncomfortably close to Burr, followed up with a second warning to Claiborne sent on November 12: “Be upon the alert; keep a watchful eye upon our General and beware of an attack, as well from our own country as Spain. I fear there is something rotten in the State of Denmark.” Theater was already blurring with reality when the general arrived in New Orleans on November 25 ready to take the stage in the greatest role of his life, not as Hamlet, but something closer to Julius Caesar.

25
T
HE
G
ENERAL
R
EDEEMED

O
N THE VERY DAY
that James Wilkinson entered New Orleans, a weary Lieutenant Thomas Smith stepped into President Jefferson’s study in the White House and removed his slippers. When he had unpicked the soles, he handed over the general’s two letters for the president, and his message to the secretary of war. Smith left no account of his record journey—almost fourteen hundred miles covered in thirty- three days— or of the president’s response to this first indication of Wilkinson’s loyalty. But Smith’s fatigue must have been as extreme as the president’s relief.

During the weeks without news, and the continuing doubts about how the general might use the troops under his command, the administration had remained paralyzed. Dearborn had guessed that Wilkinson would try to make war on Spain. Urgent messages had been sent south instructing him to keep the peace, and ordering Captain Thomas Swaine, commander of the eastern defenses on the Mobile River, not to leave his post to attack the Spanish, whatever Wilkinson might command. But until the creased pages were removed from their wrapping, and Jefferson began to read Wilkinson’s looped handwriting, no one knew what had actually happened.

However alarming the references to the “deep and dark conspiracy” and the “eight or ten thousand men” who were to rendezvous in New Orleans, the discovery that the army’s commander in chief was loyal and planned to defend the city outweighed every other consideration. The difference it made to Jefferson’s administration was immediately evident when the cabinet met the following day. For the first time, decisive action could be taken to frustrate Burr’s plans. As the president explained to Congress, “Two days after the receipt of General Wilkinson’s information . . . orders were despatched to every intersecting point on the Ohio and Mississippi, from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, for the employment of such force either of the regulars or of the militia, and of such proceedings also of the civil authorities, as might enable them to seize on all the boats and stores provided for the enterprise, to arrest the persons concerned, and to suppress effectually the further progress of the enterprise.”

The first action against Burr was taken by Governor Edward Tiffin of Ohio, based on information that the cabinet’s confidential agent, John Graham, had gained from men recruited by Blennerhassett. Shortly before the president’s proclamation arrived, Ohio militia raided Blennerhassett’s island home. They were just too late to capture its owner, who had left hours earlier with his friend Colonel Comfort Tyler. In their absence, the soldiers seized about a dozen boats and two hundred barrels of provisions, as well as destroying Blennerhassett’s library and beautiful furniture. In late December, Blennerhassett, Tyler, and a force numbering no more than eighty men joined up with Burr, who had acquired two more large boats from Andrew Jackson. By the end of the year, their small convoy was sailing down the Mississippi just ahead of the news of Jefferson’s proclamation that was spreading southward like a tide.