While Wilkinson was expected to hold the existing army in check, Jefferson and Dearborn instituted the decisive reform that was to shape its future by creating a military academy at West Point. Although set up specifically to train artillery and engineer officers, it, too, was expected to tilt the army away from its old Federalist roots. One of its first cadets, Joseph Swift, later a commandant of the academy himself, remembered being interviewed by Jefferson, who asked, “ ‘To which of the political creeds do you adhere?’ My reply was that as yet I had done no political act, but that my family were Federalists. Mr Jefferson rejoined, ‘There are many men of high talent and integrity in that party, but it is not the rising party.’ ” The hint, repeated by Dearborn, convinced Swift to keep his opinions to himself. In the long term, however, West Point performed its function, not by fostering Republicanism but by encouraging a professional ethic that displaced political loyalties.
By making Jefferson’s “chaste reformation” possible, Wilkinson lost popularity, but preserved an important constitutional principle. He had acquiesced in the axing of some of his closest military friends— only Major Thomas Cushing, marked down as “violently opposed to the administration,” survived—and thereby incurred the hatred of Federalists. But on a larger canvas, what mattered was that he had defended the fundamental basis of any democracy’s relationship with the army, that the military must always be at the service of the civil power. Jefferson’s appreciation of that important service provides the best explanation for his subsequent dealings with the general.
WITHIN THE WAR DEPARTMENT, however, Wilkinson continued to be regarded with suspicion. During the Saratoga campaign, Henry Dearborn was one of those who regarded Wilkinson as a turncoat for betraying Benedict Arnold and, more openly than any other secretary of war, set out to restrict Wilkinson’s capacity for doing mischief. Administratively, functions concerning pay and equipment once performed by military officers, who might be beholden to the commanding general, were transferred to civilian staff answerable to the war secretary. The general’s direct command over operational duties now had to be mediated through three colonels appointed to command the three regiments that constituted the fighting forces of the army. West Point was put under the direct control of the war secretary. Above all, the whole thrust of Jefferson’s famous program of “frugal government” hobbled any scope for maneuver by leaving troops perpetually short of uniforms, ammunition, and transport. As though to underline the weakness of the commander in chief, Dearborn’s directives ensured that from the summer of 1801 Wilkinson spent most of the next eighteen months away from headquarters in Pittsburgh where his family lived. Instead, he was required to supervise the construction of a road linking Lakes Erie and Ontario on the northern frontier, then to negotiate a series of land treaties with Choctaw and Cherokee Indians so that settlers could move into western Tennessee and the Mississippi Territory.
Depressed by his lack of prospects, Wilkinson attempted unsuccessfully to secure the governorship of the Mississippi Territory following Winthrop Sargent’s dismissal. When Jefferson refused on the grounds that a general could not be a chief executive—“no military man should be so placed as to have no civil superior”—he then applied to be made surveyor general, only to be frozen out by Dearborn’s bleak mistrust.
After six months in the wilderness “under extreme ill health, during an inclement season,” Wilkinson passed his first night under a solid roof in Fort Adams on January 27, 1803. There he found the United States facing an international crisis over the long-settled question of navigation rights on the Mississippi. The emergency was precipitated by Juan Morales, acting intendant of Louisiana, who in October 1802 aribitrarily closed the depot at New Orleans to American goods. This precipitate move, interrupting trade worth almost two million dollars a year, was widely thought to be an aberration attributable to his interfering character.
In reality Morales’s orders came directly from King Carlos IV. Their purpose was to create an opening for French traders and represented the first public evidence of the secret treaty by which Spain had ceded Louisiana to France. When the treaty was signed in 1800, Talleyrand promised that French power would transform Louisiana into a “wall of brass” preventing further American expansion, and Napoleon gave an explicit assurance that the former French colony would never be transferred. A French army under General Charles Leclerc presently engaged in restoring order in Saint Domingue, present-day Haiti, was expected to land at the end of the year to take possession of the colony. His arrival would create an immediate French empire stretching from Guadeloupe in the West Indies to the Canadian border, with the French-dominated province of Quebec just beyond.
To Wilkinson’s frustration, even in this extreme situation he was given no orders to prepare the army for action. Lacking any direct information on the government’s intentions, he wrote Dearborn urging the need for the United States to move first to “get possession of New Orleans by treaty or by arms” before Leclerc arrived. In either event, he pleaded to be involved:
“In the first case . . . my intimacy with the inhabitants, their prejudices, habits and interests, would enable me to conciliate and attach all parties to our government; in the last case, my knowledge of every approach and every defense, and the firm adherents which I have within the place, might be of important avail in the attempt [to capture it].”
In fact, the general was already in contact with people in the city, including two old friends- turned-enemies, Daniel Clark and Thomas Power. The prospect of being ruled by France put them in the same camp as the general once more, and both had begun to supply him with information about French intentions and the city’s defenses. Despite lack of instructions from the War Department, Wilkinson concentrated close to five hundred men at Fort Adams ready for an assault on New Orleans.
The transfer of New Orleans from Spain’s fragile possession to France’s immense power was not an outcome that the United States could accept. “There is on the globe one single port, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy,” Jefferson instructed his minister to France, Robert Livingston. “It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce, and contain more than half of our inhabitants.” In February 1803 James Monroe was sent to join Livingston with the goal of purchasing the city from France.
Still kept out of the loop, General Wilkinson could reply only in the vaguest terms to officers who pestered him for information. “If Mr Monroe succeeds all will be well,” he told one young favorite, Captain Jacob Kingsbury, “but if he should fail, we shall have noise, bustle & Bloodshed. Keep your sword with a good Edge & be quiet.”
As Livingston and Monroe’s negotations with Francois Barbe- Marbois, Napoleon’s minister of finance, dragged on through the spring, Dearborn sent the army’s senior general to negotiate more Indian treaties, this time with Creek communities, to release land for the benefit of Georgia settlers. In 1802 and 1803, Wilkinson reckoned he covered more than sixteen thousand miles by land and sea in pursuit of unmartial duties. He took the opportunity to explore “every critical pass, every direct route & every devious way between the Mexican Gulph & the Tennessee river” so that American forces would have the opportunity to seize not just New Orleans but the Floridas as well. But his knowledge was never called upon.
In July 1803 a near- desperate Wilkinson was back in Fort Adams. In an anguished letter to Dearborn, he complained that although he had enough troops to seize the city at any time, he could make no detailed plans because he was still being kept in the dark about the government’s intentions. “If anything professional is to be done which may imply trust & hazard—I hope you may confide the execution to me,” he declared, “or give an order to someone to knock me on the head.”
Writing to Alexander Hamilton, Wilkinson revealed his growing impatience: “I have extended my capacities for utility but not my sphere of action & in the present moment my destination is extremely precarious. To divorce my sword is to rend a strong ligament of my affections & to wear it without active service is becoming disreputable.” His use of this allusive, overelaborate language, enabling him to hint at possibilities rather than reveal intentions, was a sure sign that he was looking for more rewarding opportunities than those allowed by Dearborn.
Given Ellicott’s warning, Dearborn’s desire to restrain his general’s room for maneuver was understandable, but it seriously underestimated his capacity for usefulness as well as resentment and intrigue. Hamilton, who understood him well, advised that where Wilkinson was concerned “to act towards him so as to convince him that he is not trusted . . . is the most effectual way that can be adopted to make him unfaithful.” In his memoirs, the general not only quoted that advice, but capitalized the words to give them extra emphasis.
Not until July 1803 did the news finally arrive in Washington of Livingston and Monroe’s agreement to purchase not just New Orleans but the entire vulnerable province of Louisiana that Miro, Carondelet, and Gayoso had struggled so hard to keep out of American hands. What precipitated the deal was the decimation of Leclerc’s army in Saint Domingue by disease and warfare. Once the dream of an American empire had gone, Napoleon abruptly cut his losses and, to finance his planned invasion of Britain, accepted Monroe and Livingston’s offer of
