An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (3 page)

James Wilkinson was just six years old when Joseph died. Into his absence, the son projected the picture of the ideal gentleman, and of the way he should behave under duress. “The last words my father spoke to me,” Wilkinson declared, “were ‘My son, if you ever put up with an insult, I will disinherit you.’ ” Whether the dying Joseph actually uttered such baleful words is questionable— as the younger son, James was not the heir— but the idea they expressed was branded deep into his son’s personality. In adult life, the merest hint that Wilkinson had not behaved properly would be met with an explosion of anger and, frequently, a challenge to settle the matter with sword or pistol. His violent reaction, almost hysterical at times, must have had its roots in the psychological pressure of seeing his father ground down by debt.

In the absence of banks, Maryland planters borrowed from each other— Stoakley’s broad acres ended up in the hands of three of Calvert County’s most prominent families. Thus the creditors Joseph Wilkinson was staving off would have been his friends. Among the excuses he must have offered them, the deceits he must have practiced, and the slow, corrosive experience of letting down those who had trusted him most, the one thing he evidently clung to, the single asset that no one could take from him, was his standing as a gentleman. In his son’s
Memoirs
, the references to his father suggest a man grown almost pathologically touchy about his social standing. The value was passed on intact to his son, who would in his turn always believe that the image of respectability excused the reality of betrayal.

Nevertheless, Joseph Wilkinson’s faith in the social advantages of being a gentleman had some justification. Although the plantation had to be sold to meet his debts, his creditors showed forebearance. His widow, Betty, was allowed to keep the Heighe land she had inherited, and some acres of Stoakley. It was not much, but in time the property gave her elder son, Joseph Wilkinson III, sufficient standing to marry Barbara Mackall. By 1783 Barbara’s inheritance from her wealthy father had allowed her husband to become the owner of almost six hundred acres and a gristmill. The two Wilkinson daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, also survived, each marrying a local farmer and raising a family. It was the youngest child, the impressionable James, who found it hardest to recover from the catastrophe.

As was normal for young men of his class, he was educated by a private tutor, at the expense of his grandmother Mrs. Elizabeth Heighe. Apart from his brother, he was brought up in a household of adoring women whom he clearly learned to charm with his liveliness and energy. What must have been especially delightful to adults was his quick intelligence. His teacher, David Hunter, had the distinction of being a graduate from the highly regarded University of Glasgow in Scotland. Wilkinson’s first Spanish handlers noted that he had had “a very good education,” and the Latin tags and classical references that decorated his conversation, as well as the high-flown rhetorical flourishes used to disguise his true intentions, were proof of how well he had been grounded in the eighteenth- century curriculum of the classics, English literature, grammar, and rhetoric. But more far- reaching were the lessons Wilkinson learned from friends of his age. These were the sons of Maryland planters who could look forward to inheriting a plantation and the privileges that went with it. They taught each other the niceties of social distinction and etiquette and largely ignored the knowledge of their social inferiors.

Aged thirteen the boy was sent with several others, including his brother, Joseph, and John Custis, George Washington’s stepson, to Baltimore, seventy miles away, to be inoculated against smallpox, an expensive precaution that was, he explained, restricted to “young gentlemen from the Southern provinces.” The procedure required some pus from a smallpox victim to be rubbed into an open cut, usually made in the hand of the patient, creating a small, localized infection sufficient to create immunity. It was dangerous enough to kill one or two patients in every hundred, and Dr. Stevenson, the Irish doctor who treated Wilkinson, strictly forbade his patients to exercise for fear of spreading the infection through the blood more quickly than the body could cope with it.

With the easy disdain of his class, Wilkinson recalled, “I paid little respect to the prescribed regimen, and although my physician frequently attempted to alarm me by exclaiming, ‘Young gentleman, by Jasus, you will be peppered,’ I escaped with slight eruptive fever and was marked by a single pustule.”

What made it impossible to lie still was the stimulation of urban life. With just 564 houses located inside its nominal limits in 1774, Baltimore was hardly a metropolis, but Wilkinson was entranced by its “bustle and excitement” compared to the isolation of a plantation life. “I thought myself transported to another region,” he recalled, “[by the crowds] of men, women and children, the wagons, drays, carts, dogs and horses, and the numerous tawdry signs swinging over the street.”

Serving the great wheat fields of northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, Baltimore’s port was already close to displacing Philadelphia for shipping grain and flour to Europe, and becoming the center for the tobacco trade. Most of the buildings were wooden, many still rough-hewn by ax, and the streets were beaten earth, but a brick-built courthouse and marketplace had been constructed alongside stone-built wharves and warehouses. The population, estimated at about thirteen thousand, had long overspilled the city boundaries. To a country boy, however aristocratic his background, the broad horizons it offered were irresistible. “Thus were the bonds of local attachment rent,” he recorded in his fifties, but it was not just Baltimore that seduced him. He was developing an appetite for excitement.

Elizabeth Heighe’s charity made itself felt once more when Wilkinson was sixteen, and he was sent to study at the medical school in Philadelphia. The Heighes had a high respect for medicine, and a few years later Wilkinson’s young cousin James Heighe Blake, another landless young aristocrat, would also become a medical student in Philadelphia. Having qualified as a doctor, Blake’s high reputation led in time to his election as mayor of Washington, where he founded the city’s first school and its public health service. Wilkinson was never likely to follow that path. He enjoyed the idea of being a doctor more than the reality.

What weighed most heavily with him was the attraction of studying in Philadelphia. If Baltimore was another region, the City of Brotherly Love was a different universe. In 1774, it was the largest city in British America, with a population of forty thousand, paved streets, a university, a hospital, theaters, such public amenities as a library and firefighting service, and the sort of polite society where a young man short on money but long on charm could hope to flourish. This was where he began his real education, in which “I sought by imitating the best examples to acquire gracefulness of address and ease of manners.” Girls were his motivation or, in the elaborate language he used when dressing up the naked truth, “These inclinations were seconded by my solicitude to merit the acquaintance of the most accomplished and respectable of the fair sex, whose ages corresponded with my own.” His formal education took second place.

Philadelphia’s medical curriculum covered anatomy and surgery, the supporting sciences of chemistry, botany, and pharmacy, as well as the critically important field known as materia medica, which included diagnosis of ills and prescription of cures. Students were expected to take three years to graduate, but Wilkinson had the added advantage of staying with an elderly relative, John Bond, who was an experienced doctor. Many eighteenth-century students learned their trade by serving as apprentices to qualified physicians, and Wilkinson undoubtedly picked up some additional skills from his host. In April 1775, after less than two years’ study, he impatiently decided he was qualified to practice medicine.

He set up his practice in the distant settlement of Monocacy, Maryland, about forty miles west of Baltimore. It had been settled for barely a generation, and mostly by Germans, whose language Wilkinson did not speak. Aged seventeen, only partially trained and short of money, he was probably unable to find a more desirable area, but the drab routine of administering pills to inarticulate farmers and taking their blood was hardly likely to appeal to someone who had devoted so much energy to getting ahead in Philadelphia’s high society. Before the summer was over, he had discovered a new, more exciting vocation.

On his very first day in Philadelphia, Wilkinson happened to see a military parade, with a company of artillery and four companies of infantry. The spectacle of marching redcoats, fife- and-drum bands, and horse- drawn guns thrilled him. “It appeared like enchantment,” he wrote, “and my bosom throbbed with delight, and from that day I felt the strongest inclination to military life.” The flames of his enchantement were fanned by Dr. Bond’s reminiscences of his earlier career as a military surgeon during the French and Indian War. “Like any old soldier [he] took pleasure in recounting the details of battles, particularly Braddock’s defeat near Pittsburgh and Wolfe’s victory on the Plains of Abraham, and to this circumstance I ascribe my earliest military predilections.”

When news of the shots fired at Lexington reached Monocacy, Wilkinson’s immediate instinct was to join the fight against the British, but what drove him was the desire for battle rather than the love of liberty. “My youth had not allowed me the time or means to investigate the merits of the controversy,” he conceded. So far as constitutional matters were concerned, it was enough to know that the representatives of the thirteen states assembled in congress had opted for rebellion, a choice “seconded by my feelings and supported by that predilection for arms which I had previously imbibed.” His reaction was typical of the bellicose fury that swept through the colonies in response to the shedding of American blood. In the words of one Philadelphia correspondent, “The
Rage Militaire
, as the French call a passion for arms, has taken possession of the whole Continent.”

A company made up of planters’ sons had been assembled in Georgetown, Maryland, about forty miles away, and once a week Wilkinson rode down the Potomac Valley to drill with them. This was his first taste of soldiering, and the patriotic excitement of preparing for war swept away his thin ambition to be a doctor. Less than three months after setting up his practice, he had enlisted in the army. For Wilkinson, the obvious unit to join was the Maryland militia, but no company existed in Monocacy, and to be commissioned into the Georgetown company, he would, as an outsider, have to put his name forward to the local committee of safety. Intoxicated by the news of the battle of Bunker Hill and by his own dreams of glory, however, he decided “not to await the tardy procedings of committees and conventions” and in July 1775 rode straight toward the sound of gunfire in Boston.

2
C
ITIZENS
AND
S
OLDIERS

T
HE YOUNG SUBALTERN’S TIMING
could not have been better. The Continental Army, created by Congress in June 1775 with General George Washington as its commander, had just begun to send its first units to Boston to reinforce the New England militia besieging General Thomas Gage’s army of redcoats. Wilkinson immediately attached himself as a volunteer to a Pennsylvania rifle company, but the new army needed officers. That September, on the basis of his short training at Georgetown, Wilkinson was appointed a captain in the recently raised Second Continental Regiment, commanded by Colonel James Reed. Put in command of a troop made up largely of frontiersmen, the
banditti
who so infuriated the planters, Wilkinson immediately encountered a problem that would dog him throughout his military career—how to reconcile the requirements of a disciplined army with the expectations of individual liberty.

The young captain was appalled by “the familiarity which prevailed among the soldiers and officers of all ranks; from the colonel to the private, I observed but little distinction, and I could not refrain from remarking to the young gentlemen with whom I had made acquaintance that the military discipline of their troops was not so conspicuous as the civil subordination of the community in which I had lived.” His reaction might have been expected, given the sharp contrast between his Maryland-bred, aristocratic outlook and the democratic habits of riflemen drawn largely from New Hampshire, but it was part of a larger clash that divided both the army and Congress itself.

Within weeks of taking command of the New England militia outside Boston, George Washington came to a similar conclusion about the civilian soldiers from the north. Like his newest lieutenant, he was shocked by the “irregularities” of their behavior toward officers, their lack of discipline, and their tendency to leave camp whenever they felt they could be more useful at home. “All the General Officers agree,” he reported to Congress, “that no Dependence can be put on the Militia for a continuance in Camp, or Regularity and Discipline during the short time they may stay.” Washington never doubted that the Continental Army had to be made up of full- time, or at least long- serving, professional soldiers if they were to defeat the disciplined ranks and firepower of British troops. The conviction was etched into him by long years in command of the Virginia militia and experience of action with trained British forces during the French and Indian War.

Nevertheless, the New England militia had inflicted such heavy losses on their attackers in the battle of Bunker Hill that the British never again attempted to break out of Boston. “When I look to the consequences of it in the loss of so many brave Officers, I do it with horror,” General William Howe reported to London after his hard-won victory. “The Success is too dearly bought.” Nor did every American general agree with the commander in chief’s assessment. Washington’s adjutant general, Horatio Gates, who had been trained as a professional soldier in the British army, declared that he “never desired to see better soldiers than the New England men made.” And Congress remained hostile to the threat of political intimidation posed by professional soldiers. “A Standing Army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the Liberties of the People,” Samuel Adams declared. “Soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a Body distinct from the rest of the Citizens.”