An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (12 page)

Washington’s one expectation of Wilkinson was that, to sort out problems as they occurred, “you will employ as much of your time with the Army as will be consistent with the great Objects of your appointment.” In this, he was per sistent ly disappointed.

Within two months of Wilkinson’s appointment, the commander in chief was wearily writing to Congress, “I am again reduced to the necessity of acting the part of Clothier General.” During the next year, the tone of his requests for Wilkinson’s presence at headquarters grew steadily more acerbic as the official clothier general repeatedly found excuses to remain in Philadelphia, or to be absent on duties elsewhere. Even a direct order from Washington in October 1780—“I shall expect to see you with the army immediately after receipt of this letter”—was ignored for ten days before he received the casual reply “I expect this day to borrow a sufficient fund to carry me to your excellency’s quarters, and propose setting out tomorrow or the next day.”

Initially Wilkinson attempted to make an inefficient clothing system work, but lack of funds exacerbated its shortcomings. By early 1780, he had established three supply depots in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, but in June, when the depot in Massachusetts held “thirty-five waggons load of Summer Clothing that the army are most distressed for,” he had no means of transporting it to Pennsylvania where it was needed. In the fall of 1780, he warned that “the very scanty stock of clothing on hand” made winter shortages inevitable, but although material had been purchased in Boston, the Board of War was unable to have it made into uniforms, “for want of money to pay the workmen.” In October 1780, Wilkinson presented Congress with a plan to centralize both the procurement and issue of uniforms and blankets under his office, rather than continuing to have fourteen different departments— the thirteen states plus the clothier general— bid against each other for the same clothing, each working on commission and spending money provided by Congress. Nothing came of this seemingly rational proposal, however, because it depended on a central government with sufficient power to impose its wishes on the states that brought it into being.

A more energetic clothier general might have forced through the practical improvements that eventually came in 1782 or at least have shaken the system into greater effectiveness. But what Wilkinson required was glory or at least public approval, and without it he simply lost interest. By March 1781, Washington confessed to such frustration—“I have so repeatedly without effect called upon you to attend to the business of your Department near Headquarters”— that he was forced to appeal to Congress to intervene: “I know not how necessary Mr. Wilkinson’s almost constant residence in Philadelphia may be, but should it not be deemed essential, I could wish that Congress would interpose their authority since mine has been ineffectual.”

According to the newspapers, Wilkinson had been distracted by social pleasures such as his noisy participation in a fashionable evening at Hart’s Tavern in Philadelphia, where he organized dances with names like Burgoyne’s Surrender and Clinton’s Retreat. At the same time, financial pressure diverted his energies into maximizing the income from Trevose. He placed advertisements offering the pasture for rent at “seven shillings and sixpence [about $1.25] per week”; he bred horses for sale in the markets at Philadelphia and Trenton and promoted the services of the stallions at his Godolphin stable for “four guineas the season.” He also contacted his old Maryland acquaintances and accepted a commission to sell their tobacco to French buyers. He even undertook to act as clothing agent for Maryland, effectively competing with himself as clothier general, and with apparent success if the 1780 report of the state’s congressmen is to be believed. They castigated the Board of War for its inability to provide enough uniforms for Maryland’s troops, but Wilkinson was lauded as “a native of Maryland a man of Honor and a good officer,” who could be relied on to look after the state’s interests.

Yet he was not alone in neglecting the needs of the Continental Army during this period. From early spring in 1778 when news began to spread that France and the United States had signed a treaty of alliance on February 6—the direct result of Saratoga—an irrational overconfidence seemed to grip the civilian population. When the British evacuated Philadelphia fearing that a French fleet might blockade them, gamblers in Lancaster offered bets at five to one on the war being over in six months. In October, Pennsylvania’s supreme executive council decided it would no longer pay a bounty for recruits because “the war would be shortly finished, and there was no need for throwing the State to farther expence.”

By 1779 Spain had also declared war against Britain, and the following year the fabulously wealthy Netherlands joined the alliance. The Revolution had become international, Britain was isolated, and independence appeared a foregone conclusion. Other state legislatures behaved like Pennsylvania’s, growing reluctant to help in the recruitment, feeding, and clothing of the Continental Army and thus making their own contribution to the mutinies in the winter of 1779–80. By the spring of 1780 General Jedidiah Huntington felt compelled to ask, “Is it not a possible Thing to revive the feelings which pervaded every Breast in the Commencement of the War, when every Man considered the Fate of his Country as depending on his own exertion?”

The mood of complacency was exploded in May 1780 when Henry Clinton’s army, shipped south from New York in December, besieged General Benjamin Lincoln in Charleston and forced an army of thirty-three hundred men to surrender. It was the most severe loss of the war, and two more hammer blows followed. In August, Horatio Gates fled in panic from the bloody defeat at Camden, South Carolina, where more than one thousand Americans were killed or wounded; then in September came the most pulverizing blow of all, Benedict Arnold’s treachery.

The Marquis de Lafayette was with Washington in an upstairs room at West Point when he opened a packet of letters taken from Major John André and realized that Arnold had planned not only to hand over West Point and with it control of the Hudson Valley to the British, but to let them capture the commander in chief. The enormity of the treachery—perhaps enough to defeat the Revolution at a stroke—physically shocked Washington. Lafayette noted that Washington’s head was down, and the papers in his hand trembled. “Arnold has betrayed me,” he whispered. “Whom can we trust now?”

A sense of horror rippled through the nation. In Philadelphia and Bucks County, Wilkinson drew up lists of suspected Loyalists, then called on patriotic Americans to boycott their homes and businesses. “Wilkinson is ready to burst with Indignation,” one of Joseph Reed’s friends reported. “[He] is drawing up Associations against any Intercourse with Tory & Suspicious Characters.” No one was immune from the wave of bitter recrimination. “We were all astonishment, each peeping at his next neighbor to see if any treason was hanging about him,” Alexander Scammell, Washington’s adjutant general remembered. “Nay, we even descended to a critical examination of ourselves.”

Reed himself, Pennsylvania’s chief executive, was targeted as a turncoat by Republicans, who alleged that contacts he had made with the British were preliminaries to his own switch of loyalties. In his new role of loyalty judge, Wilkinson drew up a flowery-worded “Address of Confidence” to Reed and cajoled his wide circle of military and fashionable friends to sign it. Although it did not silence the rumors, his action earned Reed’s gratitude.

This volatile environment gave birth to two astonishing developments. Congress at last yielded entirely to Washington’s demand for a professional army completely centralized in its structure, training, and supply. The states’ militia should be used simply “as light Troops to be scattered in the woods and plague rather than do serious injury to the Enemy,” he told Congress in September 1780. “The firmness requisite for the real business of fighting is only to be attained by a constant course of discipline and service.” In the last year of the war, General Greene’s southern army of Continentals and militia bore some resemblance to this model, but Washington’s vision of a fully professional force may ultimately have been beyond the resources of a near- bankrupt Congress.

Nevertheless, in the wake of Arnold’s treachery, the need to finance such an army gave rise to a still more surprising demand by the New York legislature in October 1780. It called for every state to be made to pay the requisition made upon it by Congress, and in the event of a default Congress should “Direct the Commander-in Chief . . . to march the Army . . . into such a state: and by a Military Force, compel it to furnish its deficiency.” This was the nightmare predicted by every opponent of a standing army, that it would be used by the government to coerce its own citizens. Yet so widespread was the panic that Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut adopted the same resolution in November.

In the event, no action was taken on their demand, and the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown a year later made further army reform irrelevant, but both initiatives threw long shadows down the years that followed. When peace came, no one was prepared to argue for more than the smallest possible military force to defend the United States.

O
N MARCH
27, 1781, Wilkinson resigned as clothier general, citing with uncharacteristic honesty a lack of aptitude for the job. “I should be wanting in Personal Candour and in Public Justice,” he wrote in his letter of resgination, “if I did not profess that I find my Mercantile knowledge, on thorough examination, inadequate to the just Conduct of the Clothing Department, under the proposed establishment.” Behind this truth was another more compelling one. Washington’s criticism of Wilkinson’s incompetence had led Congress to cut his salary by half, and as Wilkinson belatedly recognized, he had no possibility of appealing against Washington’s judgment. Even to question it “would be esteemed a sort of impiety.” Still encumbered by loans taken out to pay for Trevose, he could not afford the loss of half his salary, and it was urgent to find some other way of earning a living.

In October 1781, Reed repaid a favor by appointing Wilkinson a general in the Pennsylvania militia and helping him win election to the Pennsylvania assembly representing Bucks County. Such influential positions should have been profitable, but in the wake of Cornwallis’s surrender on October 19, 1781, the wartime economy began winding down, and Wilkinson’s lack of “mercantile knowledge” was a handicap in making money in a falling market.

Through the remaining months of the war, he cobbled together earnings from Trevose with what he made from Maryland’s tobacco deals and uniforms, but the income was not enough to meet his needs. Shortly before Yorktown, his natural optimism abruptly gave way to deep gloom that expressed itself in forebodings about the war. Since General Nathanael Greene had won a series of victories in the early part of 1781, helping to drive Cornwallis back to the coast, there was little justification for his dark mood. “I think General Wilkinson too desponding,” Reed protested with a hint of exasperation. Yet, the very success of his old patron may have contributed to Wilkinson’s despondency.

By chance he had visited Greene in June 1780 at his then headquarters in Springfield, New Jersey, arriving as a British and Hessian column from Staten Island was advancing into the New Jersey hills to threaten the American position. Wilkinson at once led out a vigorous reconnaissance patrol that provided Greene with intelligence about enemy movements, and in the aftermath of the victorious skirmish that turned back the British force, the general wrote appreciatively to Clement Biddle, “General Wilkinson was with me the other day in the action of Springfield; and was very active in discovering the enemy’s motions. It is a pity so good an officer is lost to the service.” Whatever Wilkinson’s other shortcomings, none of his generals doubted his tactical sense and energy. At least part of the twenty- four-year-old’s dark mood must have sprung from the realization that he had thrown away a career for which he possessed a natural talent.

In the months following Yorktown, it became clear that the conflict was effectively over, and diplomatic contacts began to move toward peace negotiations. By the end of 1782, Wilkinson was by his own account without “cash or credit,” and, with the birth of his first child, John, faced the added expense of fatherhood. Ownership of Trevose had become a burden, but it created an ambition that never left him of making a fortune from land speculation. As he aged, his hunger for it grew larger until he dreamed of possessing an empire comprising much of Texas. The ambition gave shape to the rest of his career and to his treachery. And before the war was over, he took the first step to achieving it.

In the spring of 1783, he sold Trevose, and Nancy moved with one-year- old John, and his newborn brother, James, into her father’s house. By September 3, 1783, when the Treaty of Paris was signed, James Wilkinson had crossed the Appalachians to join the flood of Americans hoping to buy cheap land on the western frontier.

7
T
HE
K
ENTUCKY
P
IONEER

K
ENTUCKY
WAS DESTINED
to be bought. So thought the first Euro pe ans who found a way through the mountains and were stunned by the natural wonderland on the other side. “The vallies are of the richest soil, equal to manure itself, impossible in appearance ever to wear out,” the Dutch-born, South Carolina–based explorer John William de Brahm reported in 1756. “This country seems longing for the hands of industry to receive its hidden treasures, which nature has been collecting and toiling since the beginning ready to deliver them up.” Watered by innumerable clear streams, forested with gigantic trees that three men with outstretched arms could not circle, its woodland provided a haven to “innumerable deer,” elk, and beaver, and the grasslands fed buffalo that arrived at salt licks in their thousands and stood belly deep in the blue grass “more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements,” according to Daniel Boone, “browzing on the leaves of the cane, cropping the herbage on those extensive plains.”