An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (53 page)

Nevertheless, in a final bid to escape the impending wreck of his career, the general searched for a last- ditch victory. Unable to ride because of his illness, he had himself towed in a sled “on which a box is placed to receive my bed” to Plattsburgh to discuss a winter offensive with General George Izard, who had been drafted to replace Hampton. From there Wilkinson went on to Albany to suggest to New York governor Daniel Tompkins an attack on Prescott, using the combined forces at French Mills and Plattsburgh, bulked up with New York militia. Tompkins, who had been warned by John Armstrong to expect a sick old man on the edge of resignation, was surprised by the veteran’s unabated forcefulness. “He threatens to make a dash soon,” he told Armstrong after the meeting. “I have great confidence in your penetration upon most subjects, but I fear you have not formed a correct judgment of the General’s talents and qualifications. He is wonderfully tenacious of his authority and is very indifferent about his old carcass, and vapours too much.”

Determined to prevent the general from exercising command again, Armstrong immediately ordered General Jacob Brown to take two thousand men from French Mills back to Sackets Harbor and withdrew the rest to Plattsburgh. Wilkinson protested that this order “blasted all my hopes, subjected the public to millions of expense, [and] sacrificed thrice the number of men Prescott would have cost.” As he had done throughout his career, he responded by demanding a public inquiry, then, without waiting for Armstrong’s reply, fixed on another, less ambitious target. This was a strongpoint called La Colle Mill, situated thirty miles farther down the Champlain Valley, whose capture would open the road to Montreal.

On March 29, a force of 3,999 men accompanied by eleven guns marched north from Plattsburgh. For the last time in his career, the general issued a stirring order—“Every officer and every man [must] return victorious or not at all, for with double the force of the enemy, this army must not give ground”—but for the first time in his career, he neglected intelligence. Without maps, his inexperienced scouts became lost, and the heaviest of his artillery, the eighteen-pounders, sank axle-deep in slushy mud.

Not until late on March 30 did the first men reach the target, an imposing, stone- built mill with stone walls on either side offering protection to the six hundred defenders. From about 150 yards, the attackers fired their muskets, and when they proved ineffective, the lighter guns, twelve-pounders, were brought up. Once it became clear that their shot could do no more than chip the stone walls, the conflict descended into stalemate until at dusk Wilkinson ordered his men to withdraw. Two days later, the last of his force dragged the guns back into camp. Even before the expedition had left Plattsburgh, orders had been sent from Washington relieving him of his command pending a court- martial. Thus the military career of Major General James Wilkinson ended with a whimper on April Fools’ Day.

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T
HE
C
HANGING OF THE
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UARD

T
HE COURT- MARTIAL ORDERED
for the general’s failure on the Canadian frontier was the third military tribunal he had faced. On top of that, he had already been subjected to four congressional investigations into allegations of misdeeds, and two more unofficial trawls through his past by Luther Martin and Daniel Clark. Despite the wealth of allegations against him, he had not yet been found guilty, and it was said of him with increasing frequency that he had never won a battle but never lost an inquiry. The sheer number of probes testified to his public reputation among contemporaries, and from the perspective of two hundred years it is tempting to regard them as rough justice, a way of getting even for the undoubted lies he told to conceal his actions as a Spanish agent.

Yet with the hindsight of history, what seems overwhelmingly obvious is that the wrong accusations were leveled against him. Even the one charge of which he was certainly guilty, covert treachery to the United States, was less damaging than his overt and repeated betrayal of the army. Yet no court could try him for acquiescence in its political neutering and financial strangulation because the instigators were Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

Thus when John Armstrong drew up the list of charges for Wilkinson’s third court-martial, they ranged from his failure to ensure the army’s swift departure from Fort George and Sackets Harbor through the fiasco at La Colle Mill, and for good measure included drunkenness, conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, publicly disparaging the army, and cowardice. Those, however, were not the crimes with which he should have been charged. The war itself, the ultimate prosecutor and judge of military misdoings, revealed where he was truly culpable. The humiliations of 1812 and 1813 would not end until a properly funded, professionally trained army took the place of the starved constabulary that Jefferson and Madison had espoused. Wilkinson should have been tried for colluding with his political masters.

The first attempt to organize a court- martial a month after his suspension from duty collapsed when he protested that of the five officers available to try him, only three were generals. “General Wilkinson declines being tried by a court of the smallest legal number unless wholly composed of General officers,” Armstrong regretfully explained to the president, “and the court not being so composed was dissolved.” It left Wilkinson, as he assured his friend Solomon van Rensselaer, “quite at ease, a man at large, and a Maj. Gen. without a command.” Leaving Albany, he and van Rensselaer made a poignant visit to the hillsides of Saratoga, where Wilkinson had first tasted real military glory. From there he traveled by steamboat down the Hudson to New York City, where another friend, General Morgan Lewis, in charge of the city’s defenses, welcomed him. In June, he at last rejoined the divine Celestine in Frederick, Maryland, but no one could suppose that Wilkinson would be at ease until his trial took place.

During the summer, he and Celestine suffered the loss of their seven-month-old girl, Marie, who had been born in November 1813 while the general was in the north. For Wilkinson, it was in a sense a double tragedy, because the girl had taken the place of James Biddle, killed two months earlier on September 17 in Florida on active service. Yet the general’s grief was soon dissipated by the larger shock of a British fleet sailing into Chesapeake Bay.

As early as July 17, 1814, Wilkinson was convinced that British threats of retaliation for the burning of the Parliament House in York were more than mere words and had raged that Armstrong’s “malignant spirit” prevented him from taking any action to defend the capital. The secretary of war himself firmly denied that Washington was in danger, although he had seen the ships sail into the Patuxent River. “They certainly do not come here!” he insisted. “What the devil will they do here? No! No! Baltimore’s the place.” On August 17, while General William H. Winder in command of six thousand militia still debated whether to throw up defenses on the Bladensburg road leading into the city, and Armstrong remained incapable of recommending any action, Wilkinson pleaded with the secretary of state, James Monroe, to be allowed to intervene: “Could my arrest be suspended and my sword restored for a short period, I would take command of the militia and save the city or forfeit my life.”

There was no reply. On August 24, in less than three hours, General Robert Ross’s column of forty-five hundred British regulars scattered Winder’s force from the vital Bladensburg bridge, which had been left unfortified and intact. By nightfall, flames were rising from the Capitol. In the aftermath of the catastrophe, Armstrong at last resigned, leaving James Monroe to run the War and State departments in tandem.

In such circumstances, the task of finding enough generals for Wilkinson’s court-martial hardly ranked as a priority. It was not until November, after the general had sent Madison a personal letter begging for his trial to begin, that a date was set. The place selected was Utica, New York, uncomfortable and cold in winter, but convenient for the senior officers of the Ninth Military District, who would have to attend. On January 3, 1815, General Henry Dearborn opened the proceedings of a court-martial made up of six other generals and six colonels and prepared to listen to one of the most experienced and skillful military lawyers conduct his own defense. Everyone in the court knew the general, most had served with him, and some, such as General Morgan Lewis, were his friends. The man on trial was the incarnation of a military ethos discredited by the war, but since each of his judges had subscribed to the same compromised values, they were not likely to find him guilty.

At the outset, Wilkinson disposed of the danger presented by the special judge advocate appointed by Monroe to prosecute him, Martin Van Buren. Arguing that a civilian could have no standing in a military court, Wilkinson had the brilliant advocate thrown out, thus ensuring that he would not fall victim to unexpected legal booby traps. On the military charges, his defense was a straightforward claim that the handicaps imposed on the commander of the Montreal expedition by the weather, the secretary of war, and a treacherous colleague made success impossible. The official correspondence supported him, and Wilkinson had no difficulty in showing that the deficiencies of the supply system, patchily supervised by General Swart-wout among his other duties as an infantry brigadier, could not be blamed on the commander. And although the action at La Colle Mill undoubtedly could be, Wilkinson diminished its significance by suggesting his force was conducting an armed reconnaissance and simply turned back having discovered the enemy’s strength.

The more serious accusations Wilkinson had to face were the personal ones of intoxication, swearing, and cowardice. Yet here, too, the court was unlikely to find against him. The general’s record of taking harsh measures against drunkenness was well- known, and no one questioned his assertion that it was “a vice my soul detests and which I have always exerted my authority to eradicate from the army.” That he should instead have been taking laudanum, as Colonel Swift suggested, was a different matter. Not only did Swift testify that “the campaign was in no wise influenced” by its effects, every officer in court had at some time suffered from diarrhea and been forced to make use of the drug’s binding properties. Colonel King’s story about the general’s damning the army must have raised a secret smile among generals often driven to still worse profanities by subordinates who had let them down. As to the imputation of cowardice, four grizzled generals and colonels with more than a century of service among them testified to his courage, and Colonel Jacob Kingsbury recalled that at Fallen Timbers two aides standing next to the general had fallen to enemy fire while Wilkinson “had exposed himself more than necessary” to the bullets.

The verdict of the court-martial delivered by General Henry Dearborn on March 21, 1815, was not a surprise: “He is hereby honourably acquitted of all and every one of the charges and specifications against him.” On April 15, this was formally approved by the president. But while the court was still in session, a more damning judgment had been brought in, not just on General James Wilkinson but on the entire era that he represented.

I
N
D
ECEMBER
1814, the Treaty of Ghent brought an end to the disastrous war. Before the news arrived, General Andrew Jackson, defending a strong position in front of New Orleans with six thousand militia, routed an attack across open ground by eight thousand seasoned regulars led by General Edward Pakenham on January 8, 1815. His victory was taken by most civilians, and many historians, to be the war’s crowning achievement. For professional soldiers, however, what mattered in military terms was the change that took place in the north.

During 1814, the experience of war coupled with an intense system of training instituted by General Winfield Scott had brought about a material change in the ability of the troops to withstand the shock of battle. It was first apparent at the battle of Chippewa on July 5, 1814, when the superiority of Scott’s troops in infantry maneuvers and artillery fire won what an exultant General Jacob Brown declared to be “the first victory gained over the enemy on a plain”—that is, without advantage of ground or surprise.

Two weeks later, Scott’s soldiers, now led by Brown in person, took part in the bloodiest conflict of the war, the confusing, terrifying battle of Lundy’s Lane. There was no victory, but the uncompromising, disciplined gallantry the soldiers showed throughout most of a day when they were forced to fight on two sides, first in the front and then the rear, was, if anything, still more impressive. They matched the firepower and ferocity of British troops honed over fifteen years of war, volley for volley, and charge for charge, until nightfall and exhaustion brought the bloodshed to an indecisive end. No one could doubt the difference compared with the performance in previous engagements from Detroit to Crysler’s Field. As John Fortescue, the foremost authority on the nineteenth- century British army, admitted, “The British were beaten. It was evident that the experience of two campaigns had at last turned the Americans into soldiers who were not to be trifled with.”

In earlier days, the gains might have been thrown away. Republican ideology demanded that a professional army be reduced to a skeleton, and defense entrusted to the mythical qualities of a citizen army. But at Bladensburg, a shocked Madison had seen with his own eyes the difference between professional soldiers and amateurs. “I could never have believed,” he exclaimed to a friend just before the White House was torched, “that so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force, if I had not witnessed the scenes of this day.”