An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (46 page)

“Wilkinson strutted into court and took his stand in a parallel line with Burr on his right hand,” wrote Washington Irving. “Here he stood for a moment, swelling like a turkey cock and bracing himself for the encounter of Burr’s eye. The latter did not take any notice of him until the judge directed the clerk to swear General Wilkinson; at the mention of the name Burr turned his head, looked him full in the face with one of his piercing regards, swept his eye over his whole person from head to foot, as if to scan its dimensions, and then cooly resumed his former position, and went on versing with his counsel as tranquilly as ever. The whole look was over in an instant, but it was an admirable one. There was no appearance of study or constraint in it; no affectation of disdain or defiance; a slight expression of contempt played over his countenance.”

Irving wrote from the point of view of a New York Federalist and someone who confessed to feeling “no sensation but compassion for [Burr].” From Wilkinson’s perspective, the scene played differently. “I was introduced to a position within the bar very near my adversary,” he wrote Jefferson two days later. “I saluted the bench and inspite of myself my eyes darted a flash of indignation at the little traitor, on whom they continued fixed until I was called to the Book; here, sir, I found my expectations verified— this lion-hearted, eagle- eyed Hero, jerking under the weight of conscious guilt, with haggard eyes in an effort to meet the indignant salutation of outraged honor; but it was in vain, his audacity failed him. He averted his face, grew pale, and affected passion to conceal his perturbation.”

For the next four days Wilkinson gave evidence before the grand jury. Seeing himself as the nation’s savior confronting its betrayer must have left him ill- prepared for the hostility he faced, not just from Burr’s lawyers, but from the foreman of the jury, John Randolph. A disease in adolescence had left him with a childlike voice and no facial hair, condemning him to be an outsider in Virginia’s testosterone-fueled society. Politically, he exploited his position on the sidelines to become a coruscating, merciless critic of any frailty or compromise that he detected among the main players. “He is a very slight man but of the common stature,” his fellow congressman William Plumer noted. “At a little distance, he does not appear older than you are; but, upon a nearer approach, you perceive his wrinkles and grey hairs . . . [His opponents] ridicule and affect to despise him; but a despised foe often proves a dangerous enemy.”

Although nominally a Republican, he made a particular target of Jefferson’s extensive use of federal power, basing his criticism, to the president’s intense irritation, on the doctrine of state sovereignty put forward in 1798 by Jefferson himself. This stance ensured that Randolph was also adamantly opposed to a standing army—in 1800 he dismissed it in Congress as “a handful of Ragamuffins.” In Wilkinson himself, Randolph discerned a wickedness that had tempted Jefferson into compromising his former values, and he roundly declared that the general was “the only man I ever saw who was a villain from the bark to the core.” It became Randolph’s mission to persuade his fellow jurors to indict the general as a traitor, more vicious than Burr.

The hearings were secret, but both protagonists agreed, for their own purposes, that the general had become the main focus of the grand jury hearings. Wilkinson portrayed himself as victim, while Randolph declared, “There was scarcely a variance of opinion amongst us [in the grand jury] as to his guilt.” In fact, most jurors opposed Randolph’s move to arraign Wilkinson, but did vote to indict Burr on a charge of treason on the basis of the general’s testimony and the ciphered letter he produced. And at a later hearing, when Burr’s lawyers called three grand jurors to give evidence intended to demonstrate the general’s untrustworthiness, their accounts strengthened rather than undermined Wilkinson’s standing as a witness.

With Burr bailed out on ten thousand dollars and directed to appear for trial on August 3 on charges of treason, referring to the threat to New Orleans, and high misdemeanor, relating to the attack on Mexico, Wilkinson was released from his ordeal. “Your enemies have filled the public ear with slanders, & your mind with trouble on that account,” the president wrote consolingly from Washington. “The establishment of their guilt will let the world see what they ought to think of their clamors; it will dissipate the doubts of those who doubted for want of knolege [
sic
], and will place you on higher ground in the public estimate and public confidence. No one is more sensible than myself of the injustice which has been aimed at you.”

T
HE PROSECUTION BEGAN
with William Eaton’s recollected conversations in the winter of 1805–6 with the accused: “Colonel Burr now laid open his project of revolutionizing the territory west of the Allegheny, establishing an independent empire there; New Orleans to be the capital, and he himself to be the chief; organizing a military force on the waters of the Mississippi, and carrying conquest to Mexico.” Eaton was partially supported by Commodore Truxton, who said nothing of secession, but remembered Burr declaring at that time that he “intended to attack Veracruz and Mexico, give liberty to an enslaved world, and establish an independent government in Mexico.”

Secession returned in an affidavit from Colonel George Morgan, founder of New Madrid, and a pioneer settler in the west from the 1780s, who told of Burr’s conversation when he came to stay in the summer of 1806. “After dinner I spoke of our fine country,” the old man testified. “I observed that when I first went there, there was not a single family between the Allegheny mountains and the Ohio; and that by and by we should have congress sitting in this neighborhood or at Pittsburg [
sic
]. We were allowed to sport these things over a glass of wine: ‘No, never’ said Colonel Burr, ‘for in less than five years you will be totally divided from the Atlantic states.’ The colonel entered into some arguments to prove why it would and must be so.” Before the argument was over, Burr had shocked Morgan further by insisting that “with two hundred men he could drive congress, with the president at its head, into the river Potomac.”

Marshall’s narrow interpretation of what constituted treason, however, pushed the focus of the trial to the events that took place on Blennerhassett’s island in the Ohio River, since it was there that men, arms, and transport were most obviously brought together to “levy war.” Blennerhassett’s gardener, Peter Taylor, offered a vivid account of a conversation with his normally fastidious employer: “He made a sudden pause and said, ‘I will tell you what, Peter, we are going to take Mexico, one of the finest and richest places in the whole world.’ He said that Colonel Burr would be the king of Mexico, and Mrs. Alston, daughter of Colonel Burr, was to be the queen of Mexico whenever Colonel Burr died. He said that Colonel Burr had made fortunes for many in his time, but none for himself; but now he was going to make something for himself.”

The evidence of other young men invited by Blennerhassett to join an undefined adventure in the west— the defense insisted it was merely to settle Burr’s 300,000- acre holding on the Ouachita River— was inconclusive, and in any event while they were on the island, Burr was demonstrably a hundred miles away with Andrew Jackson. On August 20, Burr moved to have the trial ended because the evidence “utterly failed to prove any overt act of war had been committed.” Marshall accepted that the Blennerhassett gathering was not treasonous and refused to hear any evidence relating to events subsequent to it. The prosecution case quickly lapsed, with many witnesses, including Wilkinson, unheard, and when the jurors were called upon to give their verdict, they did so with heavy qualification: “We of the jury say that Aaron Burr is not proved to be guilty under this indictment by any evidence submitted to us. We therefore find him not guilty.”

The wording implied that a fuller hearing might have produced a different verdict, and on the street there was little doubt about Burr’s guilt. Half of those called for jury service in the next trial admitted to entrenched opinions against him, and no one thought him innocent. Jefferson’s fury was unrestrained. Marshall’s handling of the trial, he told Wilkinson, amounted to “a proclamation of impunity to every traitorous combination which may be formed to destroy the Union.”

Unhampered by the judge’s narrow interpretation, Burr’s second trial, beginning in September, for the misdemeanor of planning to attack Mexico, came closer to revealing the true nature of the conspiracy. From its opening debate about the failure of the president to respond to a subpoena duces tecum that required him to produce two letters from the general sent on October 21 and November 12, the defense had Wilkinson in their sights. “We shall prove that he turned traitor to Colonel Burr,” Luther Martin rasped in his brandy-roughened voice, “and violated his engagement with him, by endeavoring to sacrifice him to the government.”

The documents that Wilkinson sent the president on October 21 following Swartwout’s surprise appearance provided the defense with their opening. In his copy and translation of Burr’s ciphered letter, the general was shown to have omitted the opening sentence, “Yours postmarked 13th May is received,” and to have doctored other passages to make them less compromising. In the accompanying letter to Jefferson, Wilkinson had stated, “I am not only uninformed of the prime mover and ultimate objects of the daring enterprize, I am ignorant of the foundation on which it rests, of the means by which it is to be supported,” although Swartwout had told him that it was led by Burr and Mexico was its target. Finally, a postscript on the back of the letter suggested that “some plan be adopted to correct the destination of the associates.” Read together, the inference was clear— that the general was closely associated with the traitor and at least half inclined to collaborate with him, and, as Luther Martin caustically observed, “that he has placed himself in such a situation, he must hang Mr. Burr or be himself eternally detested.”

But in their eagerness to bring down the general, the defense went too far. Martin put Bruff on the stand to give evidence that Wilkinson had privately confessed his involvement in a conspiracy, only to see his story rendered unbelievable when the general produced a letter from Governor Harrison of Indiana warning him, before he even arrived in St. Louis, that Bruff was so unreliable no one in the city trusted him: “The bare idea of his being in your confidence would frighten some of them [the inhabitants] out of their senses.” Nor did Wickham do any better with Thomas Power, who had been brought unwillingly from New Orleans to testify to delivering dollars from Carondelet to Wilkinson. In near hysteria, Power flatly refused as a Spanish citizen to say anything derogatory about the general.

Nevertheless, watching Wilkinson being assailed by his attorney’s unrelenting cross-examination, Harman Blennerhassett noted with satisfaction, “He exhibited the manner of a sergeant under courtmartial rather than the demeanor of an accusing officer confronted with his culprit. His perplexity and derangement, even upon his direct examination, has placed beyond all doubt ‘his honor as a soldier and his fidelity as a citizen.’ ”

The general’s case was not helped by the decision of the government’s lead attorney, George Hay, to throw him to the wolves. “My confidence in him is shaken, if not destroyed,” Hay admitted to Jefferson. “I am sorry for it on his own account, on the public account, and because you have expressed opinions in his favor.” As a result, the prosecution rarely challenged the defense’s use of unsupported allegations, leading questions, and hearsay evidence to indict Wilkinson.

In his summing-up, Marshall accepted the central thrust of Burr’s defense that the two men were inseparable: “It is obvious that Col. Burr, whether with or without reason, calculated on his co-operation with the army which [Wilkinson] commanded, and that on this co- operation, the execution of his plan greatly, if not absolutely depended.” When the jury found Burr not guilty, they also implicitly cleared Wilkinson. But in popular opinion, both were judged to be treacherous to the core.

T
HE PRESIDENT’S EXTRAORDINARY
efforts to see Burr convicted, and his endorsement of Wilkinson’s unconstitutional regime in New Orleans, suggest how gravely he viewed the threat presented by the conspiracy. It was the ultimate test of the republican democracy he had tried to foster in the Mississippi Valley, where central government was denuded of power in favor of the states and the citizen. Addressing Congress on January 31, 1807, he declared that the conspiracy had been defeated by “the patriotic exertions of the militia wherever called into action, by the fidelity of the army, and energy of the commander- in-chief.” In reality, however, these were not the vital ingredients.

Apart from the small detachment of Ohio militia that descended on Blennerhassett’s island, and the thirty men of the Mississippi militia who arrested Burr at Natchez, the citizens’ army was conspicuous by its absence. The fidelity of the regular army was unquestionable, but the soldiers would have marched to war with Spain as readily as they patrolled the streets of New Orleans. Equally the commanding general would have given the same bravura display in an attack across the Sabine as in his role as savior of the nation. What makes the Burr Conspiracy a pivotal event in American history lay in the evidence given by every witness who was invited to aid Burr in his enterprise. Sooner or later, each one made it plain that he was prepared to join the expedition only if it was part of the United States’ war with Spain.

That was the transformation in the western settlers that Burr, the easterner, never appreciated. Trying to recruit Colonel George Morgan’s family, Burr had told the old man “that our taxes [in the west] were very heavy, and demanded why we should pay them to the Atlantic parts of the country?” as though he were talking to the whiskey rebels of the eighteenth century. But in the Mississippi Valley the border mentality that had allowed Rogers Clark, Blount, Sevier, and especially the younger Wilkinson to switch loyalties to serve their own advantage had gone. The certainty of the national frontier drawn by Andrew Ellicott in 1798, the pride in the sudden doubling of the U.S. landmass through the Louisiana Purchase, and the guarantee of property rights under U.S. law that each settler depended upon had created something new, a clear attachment to the nation.