An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (38 page)

The fort was built in an old- fashioned, star-shaped style to allow defenders to give covering fire wherever possible. Dearborn had just introduced a design for a cheaper, square blockhouse that would become the classic fort of the western prairies. With the Indian threat pushed back beyond the Mississippi, Fort Massac was about to become redundant, but it played a curiously fraught role in Wilkinson’s life. There he had come closest to exposure as a Spanish agent, first with the arrest of Owens’s murderers, and again when Thomas Power was stopped with Wilkinson’s barrels of silver dollars. There, too, he now became entrapped in the events that would see him branded forever as a traitor.

On June 8, 1805, Aaron Burr’s boat was rowed briskly into shore. He was in a hurry and drove his boatmen hard. During the next thirty-six hours, he and Wilkinson spent much time in private conversation. According to Wilkinson, they discussed Burr’s political ambitions, and in particular the discovery that his chances of being elected in Tennessee had gone because he’d arrived there too late. Instead, Wilkinson had suggested “he might be returned [as a delegate] from New Orleans.” For Daniel Clark, the man who became Wilkinson’s most damaging accuser, this was simply implausible “Here,” he wrote in his
Proofs of the Corruption of General James Wilkinson
, “is the first period at which I have positive proof of the general’s participation in Burr’s plans.” After Fort Massac, every move made by the two men would come to be studied in detail by contemporaries and by historians in order to understand the roles they played in the Burr Conspiracy.

T
HE ONE SALIENT FEATURE
of the conspiracy was the position of power occupied by the general. To Burr and Dayton, it was obvious that whatever they might plan depended on Wilkinson’s co-operation. Everything hung on that. Not only had he been given the supreme military and political authority in the territory bordering Mexico, but within the army he possessed a dominating, personal influence. Its extent was made apparent when the long chronicle of Colonel Thomas Butler’s pigtail reached its final chapter.

Summoned to a second court-martial in New Orleans in July 1805, Butler was found guilty of “disobedience of orders” and “mutinous conduct” and was sentenced to suspension from his command of the Second Regiment for one year without pay. The city itself, however, had a more terminal punishment for his insubordination. On September 7, the colonel died of the yellow fever that repeatedly plagued New Orleans. His death triggered a final outburst of fury against Wilkinson, but also left vacant the command of the Second Regiment. The appointment of Butler’s successor started a turf war between the commanding general and the secretary of war that determined where power lay within the army.

By right of seniority, Butler’s successor should have been Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Cushing, adjutant general and Wilkinson’s close friend. But before the appointment could be made, Dearborn warned the general, “No measures should be taken in the consequence of the death of Colonel Butler in regard to promotions until you receive further information from this department.” The department’s preferred candidate for command of the Second Regiment was Colonel Samuel Hammond, a militia officer well-known to Dearborn as Wilkinson’s sworn enemy. The choice was deliberate. In Dearborn’s jaundiced view, the bloodbath of Federalist officers had produced a paradoxical result. Their places had been taken not by Republicans but by Wilkinson supporters.

The commander of the First Regiment, Colonel Thomas Hunt, was Wilkinson’s friend, as was Major Andrew Nicoli, next in line to become adjutant general. The superintendent of West Point military academy, Colonel Jonathan Williams, was a convivial companion whose enthusiasm for good living and military music once led the general to send him a mock-serious warning: “For your own amusment puff every Cheek at your will—let the Hills resound & the vallies sing— but give no occasion for those who listen with invidious pleasure, to fasten upon us the
foul
imputation of Ariostocratic Pomp & parade at the public expence.” With Cushing in command of the Second Regiment, Wilkinson’s allies would be everywhere.

Among senior officers below the rank of colonel, a high proportion put their names to a remarkable memorial just eighteen months later attesting to the qualities of Wilkinson’s character: “Generous, benevolent, and humane— his heart, his hand, and his purse, are ever open, and ready to succour distress, and relieve misfortune—hardy, enterprising, daring and brave, he encounters obstacles with alacrity, and is most exalted when pressed by difficulties . . With him for a leader, we shall neither fear dangers, nor foresee difficulties— but shall march to battle, with the assurance of victory.”

Alarmed by the extent of Wilkinson’s following within the army, Dearborn needed to put Hammond in a position of power where he could create a rival source of patronage within the army. But as each of Dearborn’s predecessors, going back to Henry Knox, had discovered, it was difficult to defeat the general in a head-on confrontation. Because Hammond was not a regular officer, giving him command of the Second Regiment threatened to block a long chain of potential promotions that allowed each rank down to mere lieutenants to count on moving up to the vacancy immediately above them. Such a move, protested Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, was “striking at the very root of ambition & stifling in the bud every noble sentiment.” Similar denunciations of Dearborn’s flouting of military convention streamed in from other outraged officers. When Wilkinson’s allies in the Senate, led by Samuel Smith, discovered that Hammond had once actively supported the subversive French minister Genêt, the excuse was enough to have his appointment overturned. Cushing duly took command of the Second Regiment, and a shuffling of promotions restored harmony to the army.

The result left Dearborn’s attempt to limit Wilkinson’s power in ruins. All three colonels—Hunt and Cushing in command of the infantry regiments, and Henry Burbeck, commander of the artillery—opposed Dearborn’s political interference and gave the Senate “great credit” for overturning Hammond’s appointment. The result was unmistakable. With the Burr Conspiracy beginning to take shape, Wilkinson’s sympathizers held every key post in the army. He had a clear-cut plan for seizing Texas, New Mexico, and possibly silver-rich Chihuahua. The one necessary condition for action was the outbreak of war, and the worsening dispute over the borders of Louisiana seemed certain to provide what he wanted.

22
B
ETRAYER
B
ETRAYED

O
N JULY
3, 1805, some hours after breakfast, General James Wilkinson’s convoy arrived at the St. Louis levee. He should have been there two days earlier, but had to make a detour to St. Genevieve so that a judge could administer the oath of office that the governor had forgotten to take in Washington; in the only public apology of his life, Wilkinson confessed to Jefferson that the omission “excites the sharpest self-reproach and exposes me to severe reprehension.” From the levee, a troop of cavalry escorted him as he rode on horseback up the slope to the central square, where he was greeted by a ragged volley of shots fired by 100 armed Indians, then by a sharper salute from the 240 soldiers drawn up for his inspection. This was followed by speeches of welcome in French, the language of the long- established Creole inhabitants, and in English, the language of the newcomers.

The next day, on the Fourth of July, he and his officers sat down to dinner at a three- hundred-foot-long table decorated with eighteen gilded pyramids, seventeen representing the number of states, each inscribed, “Prudence, Morality, Wisdom, Law,” and the eighteenth decorated in gold letters reading, “United States— Glory & Power—
Sic Semper Omnia
[So everything should be forever],” on one face and on the other, “James Wilkinson—Protection.” Inspired by music from the military band and the “courteous and affable manners and fascinating charms” of the ladies of St. Louis, the festivity continued through the night and “did not cease,” the
National Intelligencer
confided in its inimitable style, “till the gentle Aurora with lighted taper in her rosy fingers conducted each angelic form to her downy pillow.” Almost from the moment the revelers awoke, relations between governor and citizens went downhill.

The reception reflected St. Louis’s pride in its sophistication. The city was more than forty years old and boasted around two hundred houses, the majority built of stone, and a population that included prosperous citizens such as Auguste Chouteau, aspiring new arrivals such as Timothy Kibby, and almost one thousand other inhabitants, largely French Canadian, Native American, and mixed race, with a scattering of British and Spanish. The economy depended on the fur trade and mining—iron, lead, and salt— but as in all frontier communities the central concern was land, the fundamental source of wealth in a preindustrial economy. At the heart of that concern were two questions: Who owned it? How could they prove it?

The answers affected everyone living within the Louisiana Purchase, both around St. Louis and in the Orleans Territory. They fostered popular resentment against the United States, soured the reputations of the two governors, Claiborne and Wilkinson, and powerfully influenced the development of the Burr Conspiracy.

The problem began with the confusion caused by the rapid transfer of sovereignty between Spain, France, and the United States. The difficulty of harmonizing three different kinds of property law was compounded by systematic tampering with the land registry files. “There has been Leaves cut out of the Books and others pasted in with Large Plats of Surveys on them,” Silas Bent, the American-appointed surveyor general of the Louisiana Territory, reported in 1806. “The dates have been evidently altered in a large proportion of the certificates. Plats have been altered from smaller to Larger. Names erased and others incerted and striking difference in collour of the ink etc.”

To clear up the confusion, Congress appointed a board of land commissioners to examine the legal title of all property owners within the Louisiana Purchase. Their investigation sparked fury among the Creole inhabitants. The standard demanded was that of United States law, meaning there had to be documentary evidence of the original grant, a surveyor’s plat of the property, and registration of it in a land office. Any disputes would be decided in court by the American adversarial system rather than the French and Spanish legal process that depended on a consensual pursuit of facts. According to Amos Stoddard, the temporary governor who first had to confront the problem, nineteen out of twenty existing French and Spanish owners were likely to lose their property under this process.

From the safety of Washington, Wilkinson had repeatedly urged Stoddard “to conciliate the people,” by which he meant the Creoles, but all five of the military officers who administered Louisiana Territory supported the newcomers who wanted the land. Most claims were still working their way through the courts, but already properties were being transferred from French to American owners. Now the explosive issue was Wilkinson’s responsibility.

From his first day in office, when he chose to avoid a settlers’ welcoming banquet in favor of lunch with Auguste Chouteau, Wilkinson showed a consistent bias in favor of the Creoles. Although justified in terms of democratic justice— when Louisiana became the Missouri Territory in 1812, the legislature would quickly vote to restore much of the Creoles’ land— this was a dangerous policy. It not only made enemies among Anglo-American settlers, but turned the military administrators against him. Two in particular, Major James Bruff, whose banquet Wilkinson spurned, and Colonel Samuel Hammond, were landowners as well, and each was to become a dangerous enemy. Both were retired professional soldiers, now in the militia, and as their military and civilian superior General Wilkinson loftily dismissed their opposition. Hammond he termed “a hackneyed scoundrel,” and Bruff nothing more than “a damned cunning fellow.”

For someone so subtle in playing off one individual against another, Wilkinson’s confrontation with the Anglo-American settlers seemed almost willful. Edward Hempstead, a leading St. Louis citizen, expressed a widely shared feeling when he wrote of the governor, “From a rank Federalist to a suspected Republican, he became a bigot and is now a petty tyrant.” Yet there was method in his quarreling. Many of the actions that aroused antagonism among the newcomers—his hostility to the judges, and his refusal to pardon Hammond’s nephew for murdering a Kickapoo man, for example— conciliated Creole and Native American feelings Since these people constituted a majority in the territory, his policy was more democratic than tyrannical. Unpopular though he was with the Anglo-Americans, Wilkinson’s stance helped reconcile a diffuse, frontier population to U.S. government.

In New Orleans by contrast, Governor Claiborne imposed the land laws and legal system of the United States without regard to the feelings of the majority Creole population and was faced with near rebellion. As Jefferson himself acknowledged, they were driven to this extreme by “the call on them by the land commissioners for their deeds” and by “the administration of justice in our forms, principles & language.” Whatever private reservations he might have about the roughshod tactics of the governor of Louisiana Territory, in public Jefferson unequivocally approved of his policy. “Not a single fact has appeared,” he told Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland in May 1806, “which occasions me doubt that I could have made a fitter appointment than Genl. Wilkenson [
sic
].”

I
T WAS PRECISELY THE HOSTILITY
of the French inhabitants toward their new rulers that Colonel Aaron Burr hoped to exploit when he was rowed into New Orleans in June 1805. He arrived, as he told his daughter, Theodosia, on “an elegant barge, [with] sails, colors, ten oars, [and] a sergeant and ten able, faithful hands.” Burr boasted that it had been supplied by the army’s commanding general, although it actually belonged to Captain Daniel Bissell and was carrying officers to Colonel Butler’s court-martial. More impressive than the boat, however, was the letter that Burr carried with him from James Wilkinson to his former agent Daniel Clark Jr. Written at Fort Massac and couched in typically misty terms, it recommended the former vice president as someone “whose worth you know well how to estimate. If the persecutions of a great and honourable man can give title to generous attentions, he has claims to all your civilities and your services. You cannot oblige me more than by such conduct, and I pledge my life to you it will not be misapplied. To him I refer you for many things improper to a letter, and which he will not say to any other.”