Unfortunately for him, the creditor he addressed was the flint- hearted La Cassagne, who had sold the Wilkinsons their Louisville house. Although professing to be deeply moved by the plea—“not only because my own interests are materially affected, but because you must thereby be subject to innumerable pangs— which must destroy in a great measure that peace of mind which you have long laboured to secure”— La Cassagne behaved like a shark. The loan would be extended only if it was guaranteed by the wealthy Peyton Short, and the terms would include charging interest not just on the principal but on the interest already accrued. Together with other loans he had backed, Short was left liable for nine thousand dollars, and Wilkinson’s next three largest creditors were owed another thirteen thousand dollars. Even with this burden hanging over him, he might have carried on trading.
Secretly Wilkinson sent Hugh McIlvain, who was owed five thousand dollars, to New Orleans with two hundred hogsheads of tobacco, equivalent to roughly two hundred thousand pounds. But this sale also failed. Not only was much of the cargo in poor condition, but in 1791 Madrid arbitrarily capped sales of tobacco in New Orleans at forty thousand pounds. Wilkinson’s days as a trader were over. The former brigadier general was equipped for only one other profession. Showing an uncharacteristic practicality, he had already made preparations to return to a way of life for which he was better suited.
IN LATE OCTOBER 1790, the torrent of settlers spreading into the Ohio Valley provoked a backlash. Under the outstanding fighter Little Turtle, a 1,500- strong army was assembled from Native American tribes in the area south of Lake Erie, and in a series of ambushes and skirmishes it destroyed a U.S. column of 320 regular soldiers and more than 1,000 militia under General Josiah Harmar. Although the defeat occurred far to the northwest of Cincinnati, it posed a clear threat to Kentucky’s settlers, and Wilkinson immediately volunteered to lead a column of volunteers in a retaliatory attack.
“The voice of all ranks called me,” he told Miro, always his faithful confidant. Although winter was coming, he promised to lead them through “all obstacles arising from the inclemency of the season, from Frost, from Ice &Snow, from deep and Rapid Rivers.” He had, however, overestimated his popularity. Not until the spring of 1791 did the Kentucky committee, the embryonic state’s governing body, authorize a punitive raid, and the command was given to General Charles Scott, with Wilkinson only second-in-command. The raiders consisted of about eight hundred horsemen, and in six weeks they destroyed dozens of villages, killed scores of Indians, and burned hundreds of acres of young corn. Wilkinson took independent command of a party responsible for torching several habitations, taking thirty- two lives and seizing fifty-four captives. Back in Kentucky, the raid was counted such a success that a second was called for before the summer was over. This time the Kentucky committee put Wilkinson in command. About five hundred volunteers followed him on a daring expedition deep into Indian territory as far as the Wabash and Eel rivers, near modern Logansport, Indiana. There they burned the Kickapoo village of Anguile and surrounding cornfields and killed or captured forty-two Indians. Reporting to the president, Henry Knox, the secretary of war, commented approvingly, “The consternation arising from the demonstration of their being within our reach must all tend to the great object, the establishment of peace.” He also alluded to Wilkinson’s letter sent on August 26 expressing a desire “to enter the military service of the United States.”
Wilkinson was never wholly honest about his motives for any major decision, and the guise that he presented to Knox was that of a patriotic frontiersman anxious to serve his country. “During a residence of more than seven years in these woods, I have spared no pains, nor no expence to make myself acquainted, with the extensive regions watered by the Mississippi, and its tributary streams,” he wrote. “I have personally explored much of this extensive tract, have acquired an exact knowledge of a great part and a general knowledge of the whole— It is my wish to be employed in some station in which I may be able to employ and apply my information, and my small abilities to the public advantage, and my own honor.” The station he had in mind was command of the new regiment that Congress authorized to be raised in response to Harmar’s defeat.
Replying almost at once, Knox sent a congratulatory message “in the name of the President of the United States, for the zeal, perseverance and good conduct manifested by you in the Command of the expedition, and for the humanity observed towards the prisoners whom you captured; and also to thank the officers and privates of volunteers, for their activity and bravery while under your command.”
With such an endorsement and his record in the Revolutionary War in his favor, Wilkinson’s suitability to command the new regiment should not have been in doubt. Against him, however, was a letter sent by Thomas Marshall, father of John and uncle of Humphrey, to George Washington in October 1789 in which he sketched the outline of the Spanish conspiracy “to effect a violent seperation from the United States.” The accusation was largely based on Marshall’s memory—“not very accurate,” he admitted— of the proposals for independence Wilkinson had put before the 1788 Danville convention. Although these were not secret, Marshall insisted he had seen a letter from Miro promising to place Wilkinson’s ideas “before the king of Spain.” To this message, Washington had replied, “I was greatly alarmed at the nature of the transactions mentioned in it . . . It is true I had previously received some verbal and written information on the subject of a similar tenor; but none which placed the affair in such an alarming point of view.” He begged Marshall to keep him informed of Wilkinson’s actions.
Two years later, the president had heard no more from Marshall, but further allegations had come from another, less reliable source. James O’Fallon acted as agent to the South Carolina land company that was attempting to bribe the Georgia legislature into selling it twenty million acres of land on the Yazoo River. In September 1790 he warned the president, among others, that “an influential American has been engaged in trade to New Orleans and now acts the part of secret Agent for Spain in Kentucky.” Although there could be no doubt about the agent’s identity, Washington made no public comment. Presumably, he suspected the motives of a notoriously unreliable source. Nevertheless, he had now heard two specific charges about Wilkinson’s collusion with Spain.
Weighing the allegations against the clear evidence of Wilkinson’s ability, the president came to a fateful decision. Writing to Alexander Hamilton, always his closest confidant in military matters, he stated his belief that Wilkinson had behaved foolishly, but not illegally. Demonstrating a sound grasp of human psychology, Washington explained that it was “expedient” to give him command of the regiment: “To hold a post of such responsibility would feed his ambition, soothe his vanity, and by arresting discontent produce a good effect.” All this was true, but lacking Miro’s intimacy with the man, he did not appreciate that Wilkinson’s true life took place at a different level.
What had begun four years earlier as an expression of loyalty to Spain designed to finesse lucrative privileges from its uncertain empire had imperceptibly become a reality. “Some men are sordid, some vain, some ambitious,” he had declared in his 1787 memorial. “To detect the predominant passion, to lay hold and to make the most of it is the most profound secret of political science.” In this case, it was Miro who had found the secret. Trapped by economic need and emotional attachment, James Wilkinson had become Spain’s man. No matter what encouragement he was given by the president, the new lieutenant colonel would still dissemble.
THE ARMY THAT General James Wilkinson had left in 1781 came to an end on December 23, 1783, in the delicate blue- and-white symmetry of Maryland’s Senate chamber in Annapolis. Shortly after midday, its commander in chief bowed to the members of Congress, who were his political masters, and announced in balanced phrases suitable to his surroundings that he was laying down his command: “Happy in the confirmation of our Independence and Sovereignty, and pleased with the oppertunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable Nation, I resign with satisfaction the Appointment I accepted with diffidence.”
It was the last act in the slow dissolution of the great force created to win independence that at its peak had a nominal strength of thirty- five thousand men, though closer to twenty-five thousand in practice. From the beginning of 1783, recruiting had gradually ceased, soldiers on two-and three- year terms did not have their enlistments extended, and men sent home on furlough were no longer expected to report back. Constantly pushed to make greater economies by a virtually bankrupt Congress, the army reduced regiments to companies, amalgamated five or six companies to make a new regiment, then demobilized that, too.
The approaching end was so obvious in March 1783 that officers grew anxious they were about to be returned to civilian life before Congress had fulfilled its promise to make up pay arrears or guarantee a pension for their service. In their main camp at Newburgh, New York, a document was circulated that urged them to threaten a strike unless their demands were met—“[Tell Congress] that though despair itself can never drive you into dishonour, it may drive you from the field.” For a brief ten days the heroic defenders of liberty took on the hideous mask of a standing army that could bully a democratic government into doing its will.
The threat was defused by a moment of pathos— Washington strained to read a speech of reproof to the assembled officers, then remarked as he put on a pair of spectacles that he had grown gray in service of the Revolution and was now going blind as well. The sight of their unshakable commander’s frailty took the sting from
