An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (48 page)

Nevertheless, no one could deny that the first use of the new force was directed at Americans. In an attempt to force Britain into negotiations, the Embargo Act banned all trade with her. Faced by bankruptcy, many merchants from New Orleans to Boston chose to find a way round the embargo by smuggling flour, cotton, and tobacco through Canada or Spanish Florida. Customs officials who tried to interfere were beaten up or otherwise intimidated, while local militia often preferred to ignore smugglers, who were liable to be their own neighbors.

As always in military matters, the president relied on his newly vindicated general to implement his political goals. In August 1808, Jefferson ordered Wilkinson to send newly trained recruits north to reinforce federal officials on the Canadian border. “The armed resistance to the embargo laws on the Canada line,” the president explained, “[convinced] us at an early period that the new ‘regular’ recruits of the northern States should be rendezvoused there.” The use of militia troops would have been, he acknowledged, “expensive, troublesome and less efficacious.” Wilkinson promptly deployed three companies along the New York section of the border and ordered existing garrisons in smuggling ports to take extreme measures against smugglers. From Boston, artillery captain Joseph Swift eagerly reported back, “There would be no difficulty in planting a battery that would ensure an obedience to the law.”

D
ESPITE HIS BEST EFFORTS,
Jefferson could not prevent the United States from becoming embroiled in the cataclysm of Napoléon’s attempt to dominate Europe. At sea, American ships were attacked by French privateers and boarded and often confiscated by the British navy. On land, the government was shaken by the nationalist earthquake that altered Latin American history—the uprising of the Spanish people on May 2 against France’s military occupation. Once content to rule Spain through a puppet government under its king, Ferdinand VII, Napoléon now instituted direct rule, placing his own brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne. From Chile to Florida, the legitimacy of this new Madrid government was immediately questioned. The dormant liberationist movement begun in 1806 by Francisco de Miranda in Venezuela revived and would, in the years ahead, spread across the continent.

The first American response to the new situation came from Wilkinson. On October 6 he wrote an alchoholic, rambling, but typically guileful memorandum on future policy in Latin America from his temporary headquarters in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Although addressed to Dearborn, its audience was clearly the president.

Wilkinson appealed first to Jefferson’s well-known prejudices against the corrupting influence of European sophistication—“it multiplies our wants, depresses our tastes, infects our manners and corrupts our principles.” He looked forward to “the Liberation of the American Continent from the Shackles of European Government, and the Nations of the West forming a distinct community united by common protection, defence and happiness.” This community he called “United America.” The only threat to its independence, he argued, came from the intervention of British power in the area, and he singled out the captain general of Cuba, Someruelos— “extremely feminine in his exterior and feeble in his intellect”—as particularly susceptible to British influence.

As always, Wilkinson’s compelling description of a problem was followed by a solution that could be provided only by someone with his particular talents: “I know more of Spanish America, am better known by name and military character—impressive to despotic governments— than any other American.” Bringing Someruelos into the U.S. camp was a task that would enable him to regain public confidence “by a display of zeal, integrity, devotion, perseverance and successful exertion. I would give my life for such an opportunity.”

Reluctant to become involved, Jefferson preferred a policy of strict neutrality. “The patriots of Spain have no warmer friends than the Administration of the United States,” he declared, “but it is our duty to say nothing for or against either [side].” Nevertheless, in a final, very public manifestation of confidence in his commanding general, he gave Wilkinson permission to approach Someruelos.

After eight years of compromising collaboration, the president and the general remained as mutually dependent as ever. Despite the dire effect on its fighting ability, Wilkinson turned a blind eye to the Republicans’ relentless political screening of new officers in the enlarged army. The Federalist
Boston Gazette
complained that “beardless boys who belch beer and democracy” were promoted above non- Republican officers with experience, and fifty years later General Winfield Scott remembered, “Many of the appointments were positively bad, and a majority of the remainder indifferent. Party spirit of that day knew no bounds, and of course was blind to policy. Federalists were almost entirely excluded from selection, though great numbers were eager for the field.”

For his part, Jefferson responded to Wilkinson’s desperate appeal for help with his legal costs—“for half or even a third of the sum, my necessities being extreme”—by allowing the money to be paid in the form of recompense for extra rations the general must have bought during his time in New Orleans. The president also overlooked the fifty barrels of flour that the general took for sale in Cuba in breach of the Embargo Act. Nevertheless in February 1809, when Wilkinson was still on the high seas to Havana, the president also approved the appointment of two new brigadiers, Wade Hampton and Peter Gansevoort, both staunch Republicans. In the very last days of his administration, Jefferson was making sure that the general would never again have a monopoly of influence within the army.

W
HEN
W
ILKINSON SAILED FROM
A
NNAPOLIS
on January 24, 1809, he was ostensibly making for New Orleans. Seven weeks earlier, responding to reports of British military preparations for an attack on the city, Dearborn had ordered him to assemble “as large a proportion of our regular troops at New Orleans and its vicinity as circumstances will permit.” Although intended for the defense of the city, the presence of two thousand troops concentrated so close to Baton Rouge and West Florida, also constituted a diplomatic move and was, in Spanish eyes, seen as encouragement to potential rebels in the colonies. Consequently Wilkinson’s mission to Havana caused a flurry of concerned messages along the borderland that was the commander in chief’s natural home.

From Pensacola, Vizente Folch sent Someruelos a message that although Wilkinson had been “sincerely attached” to the Spanish cause and remained a personal friend, he was not to be trusted. The captain general replied in similar tone, observing that “His Majesty had some relations [with] No. 13” in the past, but Folch was to be wary of him now. These anxieties about Wilkinson’s intentions were only increased by news from Norfolk, the first port at which he called, that at the end of a magnificent banquet given in his honor, he had proposed a toast to “the New World governed by itself and independent of the Old.”

Unfortunately for Wilkinson’s ambition to regain public confidence, Someruelos remained loyal to the Spanish royal family and, angered by the “New World” speech, refused to see him. Next, the general tried to visit Folch in Pensacola, but was again frustrated, this time by the governor’s pressing need to be in Baton Rouge. When Wilkinson eventually arrived in New Orleans in April, his public diplomatic mission appeared to have failed. Nevertheless, his public support for the revolutionaries whose aims, he confessed to Dearborn, “excite in my Breast the Strangest Solicitude to participate in the glorious Atchievement” did have some effect.

Encouraged by the general’s remarks and the nearby presence of U.S. troops, a force of American rebels seized Baton Rouge and proclaimed “the free and independent” republic of West Florida. Although swiftly annexed by the United States, this fragment of West Florida was the first district within the Spanish empire to achieve its independence—six months before Venezuela’s more famous declaration— and could claim to be the precursor of the liberationist avalanche that would sweep Spanish rule away.

T
HE GENERAL WAS RECEIVED
with surprising warmth on his return to New Orleans. Many turned out to cheer, and the merchant community who had come to hate Daniel Clark gave a dinner in his honor. But the popularity of a satirical pamphlet depicting him as “the Grand Pensioner” showed that the past was not entirely forgotten.

“Sweet was the song sung on Monday evening,” the pamphlet,
The Pensioner’s
Mirror
, declared, “when it was announced by a herald from headquarters, that his Serene Highness, the Grand Pensioner de Godoy, was approaching the city and that he was to make his triumphal entry yesterday . . . When his serene highness entered the city, the bells they rung,
The
pensioner is come, um, um, um,
and the drums re-echoed the joyful tidings. How grand the spectacle! What terror did it carry to the hearts of traitors!”

The barbs of a pamphlet might be ignored. Wilkinson’s immediate concern was the situation of the two thousand troops sent to New Orleans in December. Taken from garrisons primarily on the Atlantic coast, and containing a high proportion of hastily trained recruits, both officers and soldiers, they had arrived in a city already overflowing with French refugees fleeing the anti-Napoleonic backlash in Cuba. Some had been billeted in the city, the remainder had been housed in tents and temporary wooden barracks across the river. For young men, the pleasures of New Orleans were ruinous, as Wilkinson put it, to “health, morals and discipline,” and their largely untried, politically correct officers could not cope. By March 24, barely a month after their arrival, almost a quarter of the total force were on the sick list, others were not fit to bear arms, and desertion rates were soaring. When the general at last appeared on April 19, close to a third of his command were unfit for duty.

Within three days, he announced his intention to move the troops away from the city as soon as arrangements could be made, and that meanwhile mosquito nets were to be provided for all the tents. On May 12, three weeks after his arrival, he sent a long, angry letter to William Eustis, secretary of war in James Madison’s new administration: “You will observe, Sir, we have an army without a general staff; and an hospital without surgeon, purveyor, matron, or nurse . . . The troops are without bunks or births to repose on, or musquitoe nets to protect them against that pestiferous insect with which this country abounds.”

This crossed with a message from Eustis sent on April 29 in response to the sickness figures, urging Wilkinson to get the men out of New Orleans. “It will be desirable,” he declared, “that [they] should be transported either to the high ground in the rear of Fort Adams or in the rear of Natchez.” Since the first troops left the city only in early June, six weeks after Wilkinson discovered the situation, it is probable, although he denied it, that Wilkinson received this message before the men moved and deliberately ignored it.

The ostensible reason was that New Orleans wisdom insisted that in summer the heat and “effluvia” from the water made river journeys dangerously unhealthy, and a voyage upriver to Natchez would take at least a month. But it was also clear that Wilkinson wanted to teach Eustis, the sixth secretary of war he had dealt with, who was master in their relationship. As he informed his court-martial, “peremptory, unqualified orders, at a thousand miles distance, evince an excess of temerity, which no military man will justify.”

The general was also distracted by the sort of intoxication that overtakes a fifty-two- year- old man when he falls in love with a twenty- two-year- old girl. Since Celestine Laveau Trudeau was the daughter of Louisiana’s surveyor general, and one of the city’s leading citizens, the courtship could not be rushed.

The place he chose for a new camp was Terre aux Boeufs, seven miles downriver from New Orleans where a defense could be mounted against a naval force coming up the Mississippi. Although three feet below the level of the river on the other side of the levee, Wilkinson assured Eustis that “it was perfectly dry” and in a later description made it sound idyllic with cattle grazing in lush clover fields and “a charming shade along the front . . furnished by a grove of majestic live oak trees.”

Once the ground had been cleared by a work party under the indefatigable Major Zebulon Pike, a tented encampment was set up for a force that had by then reached about 2,300 men. As the troops arrived, the sickness rate fell rapidly from its May peak of 600 with 53 further losses from death and desertion, to 442 at the end of June and only 13 other losses.

Unfortunately for General Wilkinson’s calculated defiance, and tragically for the well-being of his men, the rain that had held off for most of June began to fall again. The river that had shrunk until it was half a mile from the camp began to rise until it lapped the levee only fifty-five yards away. Above and below Terre aux Boeufs, it broke through the embankments until the lower ground became lakes and swamps. Trodden down by hundreds of men, the clover fields turned to mud. Within the tents the men lay in pools of water until in mid- July the boats were broken up to make wooden floors. The latrines, long, makeshift ditches known as sinks, which had been dug at the back of the camp, overflowed, and raw sewage spread over the ground, contaminating water supplies, spreading disease, and attracting clouds of flies. The coffins of those that died could not be buried more than a few inches below the surface, and the corpses soon putrefied in the heat.

On July 16, Captain John Bentley of the military police inspected the camp and gave Wilkinson a devastating report on what he found: “The whole camp abounds with filth and nastiness of almost every kind . . . The kitchens are generally in a very bad state; in some instances holes have been dug to form them, which have become the receptacle of all manner of filth, and on the left of the dragoons, it is not uncommon to see men in the day time, easing themselves within a few yards of the kitchens! I beg leave to suggest the propriety of procuring necessary tubs for the use of the sick, who are not able to go to the sinks. The sewers have become the receptacle of stinking meat, refuse of vegetables, old clothes, and every species of filth. It is necessary that a number of new sinks should be dug, in place of those covered, and those that ought to be covered. You will be assailed with a very unpleasant smell, in walking down the levee, from the front to the flank guard . . . The burying ground requires immediate attention; the lids of many of the coffins are but very little, if any, below the surface, and covered with but a few inches of earth; the stench arising from the burying ground is sensibly observed on the left of the dragoons.”