An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (2 page)

The bet paid off. Every postrevolutionary government in the American hemisphere has had to undergo the ordeal of a military coup, with the exception of the United States. The key to its good fortune was the prolonged, intricate collusion that took place between the founding fathers and the artist in treason.

Thus the paradox running through James Wilkinson’s career is the service he performed for the United States while he was unmistakably betraying it. That tortured relationship reached its peak with Thomas Jefferson, who not only confirmed Wilkinson as commander of the U.S. army, but appointed him to the posts of governor of Louisiana Territory and commissioner of Indian affairs. No president trusted Wilkinson more, or asked so much in return, or, at the apogee of Aaron Burr’s conspiracy, came closer to a catastrophic misjudgment of Wilkinson’s uncertain loyalties. As Congressman John Randolph pointed out, “The agency of the Army was the whole pivot on which that plot turned.” Why then did James Wilkinson choose to defend his country at the cost, as it turned out, of his career?

T
HE FEAR OF BEING FOUND
out haunted the general throughout his life as a spy. His tradecraft was exemplary. He rarely met his handlers. He communicated through a wide range of ciphers and codes, some of whch remain unbreakable because the source books have been lost. He took pains to ensure that his payment in silver dollars came hidden in casks of coffee and sugar and was laundered through banks and real estate deals. To explain away any transfers of money that came to light, he had a watertight cover story backed by forged documents and false testimonials showing them to be the outcome of commercial deals.

The effectiveness of his methods was such that although he faced four official investigations, and many more private and newspaper inquiries, none turned up any hard evidence that he had actually passed information on to Spain in return for money. Nevertheless, Wilkinson was well aware that in one area he remained vulnerable. He could do nothing about the bureaucratic efficiency of the Spanish imperial government.

Once deciphered, his reports were copied in duplicate, sometimes in triplicate, so that local officials in New Orleans, their regional superiors in Havana, and their central masters in Madrid would all be aware of what Agent 13, the key Spanish operative in North America, had to disclose. Repeatedly, he begged his handlers to destroy his letters, “to hide them in deepest oblivion.” When the empire began to crumble, his anxieties became acute. To reasure him, one of his last Spanish contacts, Governor Don Vizente Folch of West Florida, grandly promised him that every incriminating document had been sent to Havana, and “before the United States shall be in a position to conquer that capital, you and I, Jefferson, Madison, with all the secretaries of the different departments . . . will have made many days’ journey on the voyage to the other world.”

So it proved, and Wilkinson died before his secret was uncovered. But in the last years of the nineteenth century a cache of papers relating to his activities was found in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Not until the first quarter of the twentieth century, however, when a succession of dogged historians began to dig through the estimated two hundred thousand documents sent back from Havana to Madrid in 1888, was the smoking gun found. Hundreds of letters, reports, comments, and assessments exchanged between Wilkinson, his handlers, and their superiors, the secretary of the Indies and the royal council in Madrid, testify to the scale and importance of his activities. Seventy years ago, they gave rise to two biographies that traced his life but shrank from exploring either the full extent of his treachery or the reasons why successive administrations were ready to tolerate and in some circumstances collude with his activities. To make real sense of the behavior detailed in those documents, it is necessary to see the world through his eyes, and to understand why he found it so rewarding to lead a double life.

H
IS BITTEREST ENEMIES
testified to his charm. According to an early Kentucky historian, Humphrey Marshall, who came to hate Wilkinson after being cheated on a land deal, the general was not only “easy, polite and gracious” but possessed that seductive trait of focusing “assured attention, cordiality and ease” on each person he talked to. His language was lively and inventive. In a letter to George Washington, Wilkinson dismissed an allegation of taking Spanish money as the sort of attack that was inevitable “in these times of general calumny, when slander on stilts stalks over the fences of reputation.” He was musical, widely read, and imaginative enough to choose the perfect present for those he wished to impress— maps and Indian artifacts for Jefferson, thoroughbred horses for a Spanish commandant, and an exotic Alpine strawberry plant for a frontier governor.

To explain his taste for espionage, a CIA profiler might apply the four classic motives for treachery—money, ideology, coercion, or excitement—and conclude that the general was driven by his fear of poverty and boredom. Probing more deeply, a psychologist might guess that the general’s infectious enthusiasm, intoxicating confidence, instinctive lying, and sudden contempt for rivals suggested a narcissistic personality.

Yet neither of these explanations quite captures the cold detachment that underlay the vanity, energy, and extravagance. Both as soldier and spy, Wilkinson always hungered for intelligence. It gave him a sense of power. He did not care about the source—gossip, maps, and explorers were equally acceptable—so long as it told him something about the love life of a rival, a path through the mountains, or the ground that a battle might be fought on. As a result, he possessed an exceptionally well-informed, clear-eyed view of the rapidly changing era in which he lived, and of the advantages to be wrung from it. When Aaron Burr expected his collaboration in a conspiracy to tear the United States apart, it was this calculating appraisal that shaped Wilkinson’s response.

It is impossible to deny the psychological fascination of James Wilkinson’s ability to live a double existence in public view for so many years. Indeed, to judge him by the dark canons of treachery, his long record as commander and spy must rank as one of the most extraordinary careers as a secret agent in the history of espionage. But the lasting value of his divided loyalty is the unique perspective it offers of the young, vulnerable republic taking shape and gathering strength. Viewed through General James Wilkinson’s chilly, binocular vision, the struggle to establish the identity of the United States appears as it really was, an uncertain adventure in dangerous times.

1
T
HE
P
ENNILESS
A
RISTOCRAT

E
XCESS
WAS BRED INTO HIM.
It showed in his large aspirations, his wild expenditure, his undisciplined behavior, and his gigantic autobiography. In
Memoirs of My Own Times
, James Wilkinson spread himself across more than two thousand highly colored pages, but, as he confessed to friends, he had still only been able “to glance at one fifth of my public life.”

A tendency to grandiose living was habitual in the society into which he was born on March 24, 1757, the colonial aristocracy of Maryland planters. His grandfather Joseph Wilkinson, a tobacco merchant from England, had arrived in the province in the early years of the eighteenth century. This was the era when Europeans suddenly realized that the great landmass of British America contained uncountable acres that could be surveyed and converted into property. Anyone with enough money to pay his passage might hope to own an estate that would have made him a squire or a petty lord in Europe. The result was a growing flood of immigrants, especially to the middle colonies of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and northern Virginia, that threatened to engulf the proprietorial rights of the great families, the Calverts, the Penns, and the Fairfaxes, who had overall possession of the land.

A sharp divide soon opened up between the established settlements near the coasts and rivers, where the ground was already measured out by the proprietors for sale or rent, and the interior where the poorer immigrants settled, often squatting rent-free on territory beyond the proprietors’ control.
Banditti
was the word commonly used to describe these savage incomers, mostly Presbyterian Scots-Irish from Ulster and Germans from the Palatine state in the Rhine valley, who occupied the land as though it were their own. William Byrd of Virginia compared them to “the Goths and Vandals of old,” while in Pennsylvania James Logan, in charge of the Penn family’s affairs, complained of the disrespect “these bold and indigent strangers” showed for eighteenth-century conventions, “saying as their excuse when challenged for titles [to property], that we had solicited for colonists and they had come accordingly.”

Joseph Wilkinson had money enough to buy a plantation of almost nine hundred acres in Calvert County, a thumb of coastal land bordered on the east by Chesapeake Bay and on the west and south by the slow waters of the Patuxent River as it broadened into the bay. The location ensured that his family would grow up with values quite distinct from the egalitarian and rebellious impulses of those farther west.

The Calverts, who owned Maryland, maintained better control than their neighbors the Penns. As early as 1718, the assembly, under presure from Charles Calvert, the earl of Baltimore and “Absolute Lord and Proprietary of this Province of Maryland,” passed legislation requiring each county to employ a team of nine public surveyors to parcel out the land. The best of it was sold in large units, as much as ten thousand acres to the nobly born or well moneyed, but a hundred acres of indifferent soil were available free to a single individual who paid his or her own passage or worked for a number of years as an indentured servant. Although frequently breached, this plan proved surprisingly effective as social engineering and helped bring about the growth of a society with class distinctions as well-defined as in aristocratic England.

“The Manners of Maryland are somewhat peculiar,” a bemused John Adams observed in 1777 when he visited for the first time. “They have but few Merchants . . . The Lands are cultivated, and all Sorts of Trades are exercised by Negroes, or by transported Convicts, which has occasioned the Planters and Farmers to assume the Title of Gentlemen, and they hold their Negroes and Convicts, that is all labouring People and Tradesmen, in such Contempt, that they think themselves a distinct order of Beings. Hence they never will suffer their Sons to labour or learn any Trade, but they bring them up in Idleness or, what is worse, in Horse Racing, Cock fighting, and Card Playing.”

This was an exaggeration—the rapidly growing port of Baltimore had many merchants, and industrial enterprises such as the giant water mills erected by the Ellicott brothers on the Patapsco River in the 1760s were creating a middle class. Nevertheless, the structure of colonial Maryland did remain remarkably feudal right up to the Revolution. To a New England lawyer such as Adams, it could only appear alien, but to James Wilkinson, who grew up in it, hierarchy appeared not only natural, but the proper way for society to be organized.

Stoakley Manor, the Wilkinsons’ plantation, lay beside a meandering river called Hunting Creek, about four miles north of Prince Frederick, the present county capital. Other properties in Calvert County were more than three times its size, but Stoakley was large enough to justify the family’s belief that they belonged to the distinct order of gentlemen. They were related to the Mackalls, the richest family in the county, and Joseph Wilkinson’s son, another Joseph, married Althea Heighe, whose siblings and cousins owned seven or eight other plantations. It must have seemed a good match at the time. The young Joseph had inherited Stoakley in 1734 on the death of his father, and Althea, generally known as Betty, had 150 acres of her own, as well as “one feather bed and furniture” left to her by her wealthy father.

Although some of the land was devoted to wheat and other crops, tobacco underpinned Maryland’s economy, and to such an extent that until 1733 when paper money was introduced, tobacco leaf was an official currency alongside silver dollars and gold sovereigns, even for such payments as rents, taxes, and fines. Throughout the 1730s, the international demand for it rose, so that within a decade prices doubled. For a time, all tobacco planters prospered, the Wilkinsons among them. But shortly before young Joseph married Betty Heighe and took over the running of Stoakley, the boom began to tail away. By the time that their son James was born in 1757, the youngest of four children, the family was in debt, and the plantation heavily mortgaged.

Any one of several difficulties could have overwhelmed an inexperienced young planter. From the 1740s, Maryland’s producers had to accept increasingly complex bureaucratic controls introduced by the assembly to improve the quality of the province’s tobaccco. Their French customers caused a sharp fall in prices by manipulating the market, while Dutch merchants abruptly changed fashion from the bright- flavored tobacco known as Sweetscented to the heavier Oronoco leaf. But in the long term, the most crucial decision facing every tobacco planter during this period was whether to rely on European convicts and indentured servants for labor or to switch to the new fashion for African slaves. Perhaps Joseph Wilkinson had scruples about using slaves or perhaps he overstretched himself financially in buying them at thirty-five pounds sterling (approximately $175) a head; perhaps he had been brought up as an idle gentleman with no head for business, or perhaps he had gambled and lost heavily on cockfighting or cardplaying. No record of bankruptcy exists, but the estate was broken up and sold soon after Joseph’s premature death in 1764 at the age of thirty-three.