Favor or Affection.” The implication, that Mad Anthony Wayne had allowed the army’s command structure to be undermined by factionalism, was cleverly judged, since the quarrel between the two generals gave it a basis in reality. Even officers suspicious of Wilkinson supported a return to impartial discipline.
He followed up his announcement with a prolonged tour of inspection of the line of outposts that stretched to Fort Wayne, as though he needed space after his confinement in Fort Washington. Before he left, orders for rations and pay and clothing sprayed out from Fort Greeneville. Captain Shaumburgh was hurried north to negotiate the handover of Detroit from the British, Colonel Hamtramck was commanded to bring about a peaceful solution to a quarrel with the Chippewa in his area, and supplies and dollars were despatched to Fort Massac to feed and pay the garrison now commanded by Captain Zebulon Pike, father of the future explorer.
Wherever he went, Wilkinson deliberately spread his influence at the ex- pense of Wayne’s. But as always his chief weapon lay in Congress. The opportunity to strike was provided by a seismic shift in the relationship between Spain and the United States.
THE CHANGE WAS CAUSED by the war in Europe. In July 1795 a French army came within striking distance of Madrid, forcing Carlos IV’s government to make a hasty peace with France. By the logic of power politics, this set Spain against Britain, forcing Spain to make a new alliance in North America as protection against a possible British attack on Louisiana. The price of friendship with the United States was high, an agreement to open the Mississippi to the flatboats of Kentucky farmers. In October 1795, the Treaty of San Lorenzo was signed between the two nations. It promised not only that the river would be open to trade, but that a clearly defined frontier would be run along the thirty- first parallel between the United States and the Spanish colonies of East and West Florida.
No one was more directly affected by the treaty than the governor of Louisiana, who had invested thousands of dollars in a conspiracy to detach Kentucky from a country that was now Spain’s ally. Defiantly Carondelet continued with his plan, sending Thomas Power from New Orleans with the promised $9,640 for Wilkinson.
The arrival of Carondelet’s messenger in May 1796 should have caused the acting head of the army some embarrassment. But in answer to Power’s formal request to travel to Fort Greeneville for their meeting, Wilkinson answered grandly— and conveniently for someone acting as Carondelet’s eyes—that since the United States was at peace with everyone, “the officers of the American army have no concealments to make, and therefore our camps and our forts are free to the ingress and egress of all persons who deport themselves with propriety.”
Catering to the general’s taste for expensive living, Power had brought a gift of “segars from Havana,” but what cheered Wilkinson’s spirits more was the news that the money promised by Carondelet had finally arrived in the north and was waiting for him at New Madrid. The cash, as Power confided to Gayoso, was urgently needed because of “the [financial] embarrassments of gen. Wilkinson . . . For a long time past he has been expecting this money, the delay of which has been the cause of much trouble to him, involving him in great difficulties.” To escape detection and avoid the risk of another murder, he and Power agreed that the dollars should be packed in barrels of sugar and coffee ostensibly being sent for sale in Louisville with no more than a thousand coins in each barrel so that the extra weight would not be noticed.
Power was back in New Madrid within ten days of leaving Fort Greeneville, but without written authorization from Wilkinson to pick up the money on his behalf. This minor problem, caused by the general’s reluctance to entrust compromising material to someone so liable to be searched, had large consequences. Since it would have taken months to obtain permission from New Orleans, Colonel Tomas Portell, commandant of the fort at New Madrid, agreed to make the handover anyway, but he and Power wrote formal explanations for Carondelet to show why they had ignored his instructions. Thus of all the payments Wilkinson received from Spain, none was better documented than this sum of $9,640, and none would figure more prominently in the accusations leveled against him.
Yet it was already clear to Wilkinson at least that the San Lorenzo treaty had snuffed out any lingering prospect of Kentucky’s secession. Granted their long-held wish, the western settlers no longer had any motive for leaving the Union. That was the assumption made in Philadelphia, and accepted by Madrid. In New Orleans, Natchez, and New Madrid, however, the colonial administration thought otherwise. For Carondelet and Gayoso, the Spanish Conspiracy remained alive, and neither had any intention of abandoning the Mississippi forts built on Wilkinson’s recommendation to limit American expansion. Having fortified and garrisoned the Chickasaw Bluffs post, Gayoso even went on to construct an armed stockade almost opposite the mouth of the Ohio itself. In the summer of 1796, Carondelet wrote explicitly to Benjamin Sebastian, and the other members of the conspiracy, “It may be confidently asserted, without incurring the reproach of presumption, that his Catholic Majesty
Sebastian, who personally worked on details of the conspiracy with both Gayoso and Carondelet during the first half of 1796, was rewarded with a pension and was authorized to offer $100,000 to the usual list of “notables” who could help bring about secession. As the linchpin of the entire conspiracy, Wilkinson was to be recompensed still more highly, not simply with fame and the governorship of the future Mississippi republic, but with the solid inducement of one hundred thousand acres in Illinois.
SECURE IN THE KNOWLEDGE that $9,640 was waiting for him in New Madrid, Wilkinson was more concerned with the opportunity that suddenly presented itself of destroying General Anthony Wayne. Taken with the two other treaties of 1795—the Jay agreement establishing good relations with Britain and the Greeneville treaty with the western confederation—San Lorenzo left the United States without an obvious enemy, and, as Wilkinson’s allies adamantly insisted, without the need for a large army commanded by a major general. With the support of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, the House voted in April 1796 for an army of two thousand led by a brigadier general. The issue of personalities loomed so large that Chauncey Goodrich, a Federalist congressman from Connecticut, called it a plot “to get rid of General Wayne and place the army in the hands of a Jacobin and what is worse a western incendiary.”
The president, however, still clung to his vision of an inclusive United States that depended on a large army. In a paper presented to Congress in February, Timothy Pickering, the secretary of war, declared the Legion to be essential “to preserve peace with the Indians, and to protect theirs and the public lands.” The pendulum began to swing back, and helped by Wayne’s presence in Philadelphia, the Federalist majority in the Senate voted in May to keep the major general and the Legion. Since money had to be saved, they would instead abolish Wilkinson’s rank. Suddenly Wayne seemed about to win. As the heat of a Washington summer grew intolerable, however, a compromise deal was hammered out that reduced the army but retained both generals until the military budget was discussed again the following year.
Nevertheless, the contest between the two men remained in the balance, with Wilkinson acutely vulnerable to any revelation about his Spanish connections. That same summer, Wilkinson became aware of the widening circle of Kentuckians contacted by Power as part of the conspiracy. Fearful that someone would mention the name of the ringleader, Wilkinson pleaded with Gayoso, “For the love of God, my friend, enjoin greater secrecy and caution in all our concerns . . . Never suffer my name to be written or spoken. The suspicion of Washington is wide awake.”
Not only was Spanish security lax, but the barrels of money in New Madrid that were due to come up the Ohio in July or August were lethal evidence of his treachery. The danger of discovery was underlined when one of Wilkinson’s messengers was arrested as he returned from New Madrid by the commander of Fort Massac, Captain Zebulon Pike. With flattery, good humor, and the promise of promotion, Wilkinson cajoled Pike into releasing the messenger. The captain duly became a major, and the friendship forged in such unlikely conditions ensured that a few years later his son, Zebulon Pike the explorer, would become Wilkinson’s right-hand man. But the incident showed that any boat coming up the river was liable to be stopped and searched.
In June, shortly before leaving Philadelphia, General Wayne was summoned to see the new secretary of war, James McHenry, who passed on the administration’s own intelligence about Wilkinson’s activities. Much was tainted, coming as it did from Federalist opponents, or personal enemies such as Humphrey Marshall. In the latest round of their contest, he had been debarred from his Senate seat in January 1796 while charges of “gross fraud” and “perjury” brought on evidence supplied by Wilkinson’s friends were investigated. Nevertheless, Wayne saw enough to realize that Wilkinson was a Spanish rather than a British “pensioner,” and the name of Thomas Power figured so prominently there could be no doubt that he was the general’s link with New Orleans.
Hurrying back west, Wayne arrived in mid-July and immediately relieved Wilkinson of his command, putting him again in seclusion at Fort Washington. At the same time he sent Pike an urgent order to arrest Power whenever he appeared, with particular instructions to search for hidden documents. Days later, Wayne received specific warning from a Kentucky merchant, Elisha Winters, that Power would be coming upriver with “a royal chest”
