An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (51 page)

When the three- pronged invasion that was to conquer Canada took place, the reality of twelve years of pinched funding and political neutering became painfully apparent. In August 1812, General William Hull humiliatingly surrendered Detroit without a fight; in October, General Stephen van Rensselaer was defeated at Queenston Heights above Niagara; and from his base in Albany, General Henry Dearborn, handicapped by ill health, found it impossible even to reach the frontier. On January 13, 1813, faced by a rising storm of criticism, Eustis chose to resign.

In the discussions to choose his successor, Wilkinson’s name was suggested, offering a hint of the glittering prospects that might have come his way in other circumstances. John Adams thought that on merit he should have been chosen, but, recognizing how deeply Wilkinson was distrusted, added, “His vanity and the collision of Factions have rendered his appointment improper and impossible.” Instead, the president appointed John Armstrong, who had been a junior officer on General Gates’s staff at Saratoga.

In his training regime and his efforts to restore morale, however, Wilkinson’s showing as a general already compared favorably to anything in the north. And he was about to execute a textbook military operation to enlarge the territory of the United States.

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1813, on the shaky grounds that the Spanish- held remnant of West Florida was part of the Louisiana Purchase, Congress authorized its seizure. In effect, this meant capturing Mobile, the capital. With maps drawn years earlier by Andrew Ellicott, and notes and sketches from his personal observations, Wilkinson had the intelligence to plan his attack with care. Supplies were concentrated upstream at Fort Stoddert on the Mobile River, a squadron of gunboats was readied for an attack from the sea, and in late March the general divided the twelve hundred men he had available into an overland detachment under Colonel John Bowyer and a seaborne force under his personal command.

His preparation was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Andrew Jackson at the head of three thousand Tennessee volunteers, ready to undertake the invasion of the Floridas he must have discussed with Aaron Burr. On this occasion, John Armstrong frustrated the plan by ordering Jackson to disband the volunteers. Rather than obey this command, Jackson earned himself a devoted following and his imperishable nickname of Old Hickory by marching them back to Nashville intact. Their absence left Wilkinson free to achieve his goal with his original force.

Although on a miniature scale, his pincer movement with four hundred land troops under Colonel Bowyer coming down the Mobile River and a seaborne force of eight hundred coming ashore from gunboats was almost perfectly executed. Its only flaw occurred when the oarsmen rowing Wilkinson across Lake Pontchartrain equalized the boat, leaving the fifty-six-year-old general, his staff, and boatmen clinging to the upturned hull for several hours until rescued by passing fishermen. Before dawn on April 12, Bowyer’s troops deployed opposite Fort Charlotte, and at daylight troops from the second and third regiments landed from gunboats in the bay. As Wilkinson’s report boasted, the sleepy garrison realized they were surrounded only when they were awoken by the sound of bugles blowing outside.

Later that morning Wilkinson sent the Spanish commander, Cayetano Perez, a diplomatic message saying that they came “not as the enemies of Spain, but on the order of the President to relieve the garrison which you command from the occupancy of a post within the legitimate limits of [the United] States.” On April 15, Perez and his garrison surrendered and were shipped along the coast by American gunboats to Pensacola, where Wilkinson’s old friend Vizente Folch was waiting to receive them. The very ease of it detracted from Wilkinson’s achievement. But what might have happened had things gone wrong was illustrated eighteen months later when a garrison of barely a hundred soldiers in the wooden fort that Bowyer had constructed was able to hold off a seaborne assault by a squadron of four British warships with more than a thousand men on board and drive one of their frigates ashore. As it was, Wilkinson’s bloodless operation secured the entire coastal region as far east as the Perdido River, the present border between Alabama and Florida, and represented the only territorial gains that the United States made in the entire war.

On May 19, Wilkinson returned to New Orleans a hero, and waiting for him was a reward— his promotion, after twenty- one years as a brigadier, to major general. The secretary of war had in fact already recommended the higher rank before news of Mobile’s capture reached Washington. But Armstrong had in mind a still greater prize, as he was replacing General Henry Dearborn in command of the Ninth War District, comprising the Canadian border from Lake Erie to the Atlantic— the area of operations where the war could be won or lost. Accordingly the new major general was ordered to report immediately to the capital, and accompanying the official message, John Armstrong sent a flattering personal letter reminding Wilkinson of their participation in the great victory of 1777. “Why should you remain in your land of
cypress
,” the secretary wrote, “when patriotism and ambition equally invite you to one where grows the
laurel
? . . . Come to the north and come quickly. If our cards be well played we may renew the scenes of Saratoga.”

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N THE DE CADES THAT HAD PASSED
since the victory at Saratoga, Armstrong had grown bald, Wilkinson gray-haired. Neither had the vigor of their youth, but Armstrong, who had never exercised independent command, still ached to do so. On the other hand, the effervescent Wilky, who had inspired Gates and kept a chaotic headquarters in order, seemed to have grown tired at last. Psychologically he had been whipped by Madison and Eustis, and physically a fever he had contracted at Terre aux Boeufs had left its mark. The three doctors who examined him at the time all agreed that the illness was serious, one reporting that he had suffered “violent paroxysms.” To reduce the fever, Wilkinson had been bled five times. He also had to use laudanum heavily.

Composed of drops of morphine mixed with sweet wine, laudanum was widely prescribed not only to provide relief from pain but as an antidote to fevers, insomnia, and loose bowels. But Wilkinson first took it after Saratoga specifically to relieve stress. Although the general liked to refer to his “iron constitution,” at times of tension he was almost invariably afflicted by diarrhea, and even today laudanum is prescribed as its antidote. He used the drug periodically throughout his career, but after Terre aux Boeufs, when all his doctors commented on his extreme anxiety, his consumption became habitual. With this change came an increasingly clear pattern of lassitude and depression alternating with high energy and application.

Replying to Armstrong, Wilkinson attempted his familiar, upbeat style: “I receive the order with pleasure and shall obey it with alacrity because it may furnish a more favorable opportunity than I can find elsewhere to testify to the world my readiness to offer my best faculties and to lay down my life if necessary for the honor and independence of our country.” But physically he conveyed a different message.

Celestine, “my divine little Creole,” as he complacently described her to his middle- aged friends, was pregnant, making his reluctance to move north understandable. When he did so on June 10, he took with him both Celestine and her sister, traveling first to Mobile, where his son James Biddle was stationed, then across country to Milledgeville, Georgia. The large party, slowed by Celestine’s condition and the general’s desire for comfort, took a month to bounce along the federal road.

In Georgia’s capital, he learned of the first American success in the north when General William Harrison and Commander Oliver Perry seized control of Detroit and Lake Erie in the west, and Dearborn captured the British strongpoint Fort George in the center between Lakes Erie and Ontario. But for Wilkinson the triumph was shrouded by news of the heroic death of his protégé and ideal son, General Zebulon Pike, killed while leading his troops in a seaborne assault on York, subsequently renamed Toronto, the capital of Upper Canada. Sorrowfully Wilkinson wrote to his contemporary Morgan Lewis, once New York’s governor, now a major general, lamenting Pike’s courageous impetuosity. It was contrary to the lesson taught by Napoléon, that “a general officer does not expose his person but in the last resort,” Wilkinson told Lewis. “Subordinates execute, while chiefs command; to mingle in the conflict is to abandon the power of direction.”

On August 3, almost six weeks after Armstrong told him to come north, Major General James Wilkinson met the secretary of war and learned that he was to be given the supreme command on the Canadian frontier. It offered the opportunity to win undying glory by leading his nation’s army to victory and driving the British out of North America. This was the ultimate reward any soldier could hope for, an accolade for years of service to his country. And for Wilkinson in particular, it offered the chance of redemption for a life soiled with accusations of iniquity.

Almost immediately, however, Wilkinson sensed a coolness in the secretary’s manner. Its origin lay in the letter Wilkinson had sent to Lewis through the War Department. Armstrong had read its contents and decided that its commonsense advice about generals remaining above the fray was that of a coward. As he expostulated to the astonished Wilkinson, it “struck at the very foundation of military character and service and . . . was calculated to bring shame and dishonour upon the American arms.” The suspicion of Wilkinson’s cowardice, once formed, proved almost impossible to shift. Whatever the supreme commander suggested thereafter appeared to Armstrong to arise from his reluctance to expose himself to danger.

On July 23 the secretary of war had formulated a new strategy for the invasion of Canada. In place of the original, failed idea of invading at three widely separated points, he proposed to concentrate forces at Sackets Harbor, a natural haven at the east end of Lake Ontario, close to the entrance to the St. Lawrence River, and opposite the major British supply base at Kingston in Canada. He would then leave it up to Wilkinson to choose whether to capture Kingston or to sail straight down the St. Lawrence and seize Montreal. Armstrong’s proposal made no reference to the practicalities of command structure, supply lines, equipment, weather, or enemy strength. It assumed that the naval squadron under Commodore Isaac Chauncey had established control of Lake Ontario. It concluded that circumstances offered a unique opportunity that had to be grasped at once to end the war before Christmas.

Realistically, Wilkinson asked for more details about his own command, in particular about his relationship to Hampton, senior as a major general but junior for the proposed invasion. He also questioned the assumption that Chauncey had control of the lake. Aware that disheartened troops needed to be built up in morale, training, and experience after the first disastrous year of war, Wilkinson suggested that the campaign should begin with a series of small operations to exploit General Harrison’s success at the west end of Lake Ontario, where British defenses were weakest. Still unconscious of Armstrong’s doubts about his courage, he concluded, “These suggestions spring from my desire to hazard as little as possible in the outset, and to secure infallibly whatever may be attempted, with the intention to increase our own confidence, to diminish that of the enemy, and to
popularise
the war.”

Convinced that the general lacked nerve, Armstrong brushed away this cautious strategy and the rationale of rebuilding skills and morale. The choice, he explained, was simply between taking Kingston or going straight down the St. Lawrence. Either plan would leave the U.S. army in control of the river and force the enemy “to fight his way to Quebec, to perish in the attempt, or to lay down his arms.” At that moment, Wilkinson may have guessed that he was being handed a poisoned chalice. The problem did not lie in Armstrong’s strategy of cutting the St. Lawrence, the vital artery linking Lower Canada in the east to Upper Canada in the west, but in his failure to appreciate the means needed to achieve that end.

From Eustis, Armstrong had inherited a crippling range of organizational failings created by the lack of staff officers, inefficient supply arrangements, and a chaotic system of recruitment that was further handicapped by the refusal of Massachusetts and Connecticut to muster their militia for the war. As a result, barely thirteen thousand soldiers of the twenty-five thousand on the muster list were available for service. Of those the great majority were new recruits with barely a year’s training, and the acerbic Winfield Scott judged their officers to be “imbeciles and ignoramuses.” Promotion through seniority resulted in Wilkinson’s being surrounded by a generation of brigadiers and colonels as gray-haired as himself who lacked the vigor and abrasive drive to make an inefficient organization produce wagons, weapons, and reinforcements.

Armstrong’s attention to these systemic weaknesses was spasmodic and ineffective. Of most immediate concern to Wilkinson, Armstrong not only failed to clear up the confusion of Hampton’s role, but allowed General Lewis, Wilkinson’s second-in- command, to go on leave for a month just before the operation began and appointed as his quartermaster general Robert Swartwout, brother of Burr’s lieutenant, who would only take the post part-time. The project that aroused the secretary of war’s real enthusiasm was planning the assault on Kingston.

In August, General Wilkinson traveled up the Hudson River and across country to Sackets Harbor, and on the twenty-fifth he held a council of war to decide which of Armstrong’s two plans of attack should be adopted. The council was attended by Morgan Lewis, Swartwout, and the most dynamic officer in Wilkinson’s army, Jacob Brown, whose religion and aggressive leadership won him the nickname the Fighting Quaker. The fifth member of the council, Commodore Isaac Chauncey, was, next to Wilkinson himself, the most important.