encourage settlers to scatter across an area too large to govern.
His advice on frontiers certainly convinced the Council of the Indies to recommend later that year the establishment of an inviolable boundary between Texas and Louisiana stretching north from the Gulf Coast along the Arroyo Hondo River, today the Calcasieu River. Folch himself rigidly turned down every American request to descend the three great rivers flowing through the Floridas.
But the greatest immediate value of Wilkinson’s paper lay in the intelligence about Lewis and Clark, which by any standard represented high-grade information. Publicly Jefferson had characterized Lewis and Clark’s expedition as no more than the kind of “literary pursuit which [Spain] is in the habit of permitting within its own dominions.” Nevertheless, their proposed route following the upper reaches of the Missouri would take them through territory still claimed by Spain. Furthermore, in a secret message to Congress in January 1803, Jefferson had revealed that the expedition’s real purpose was to “explore the whole line, even to the Western ocean,” thus establishing a claim to the entire region.
Recognizing the importance of Wilkinson’s information, Casa Calvo immediately instructed Antonio Cordero y Bustamante, the energetic acting governor of Texas, to take steps to counter this “daring undertaking” and to make every effort to “divert and even to destroy such expeditions.” As a result, at least three attempts by an armed patrol of two hundred men sent out under Captain Pedro Vial were made to kill or capture Lewis and Clark’s party. Had they succeeded, the history of western exploration would have been delayed for a generation, with far-reaching consequences including the unopposed expansion of British settlement throughout Oregon.
With the added prospect of Wilkinson’s report on the president’s thinking, Casa Calvo and Folch agreed it was worth paying him twelve thousand dollars. As a bonus, they also gave Wilkinson a permit to export sixteen hundred barrels of flour annually to Havana, a source of profit with the potential to make good some of the shortfall on his original demand.
For the first time, Wilkinson received the full amount of his reward for treachery without having to pay intermediaries or risk the murder of messengers. And unlike in previous betrayals, on this occasion he intended to replicate his success by betraying Spain’s secrets to the United States.
IN THE UNITED STATES nothing was known of his return to active work as a Spanish agent, but doubts about his loyalty were never far from the surface. Apart from his initial report on the peaceful state of the city, Wilkinson had gone silent in New Orleans, ignoring Dearborn’s increasingly frantic demands for information. “You have taken no notice of any of my letters,” the secretary of war wrote in February, “[at a time] when information had been highly important relative to any Military operations.” When Wilkinson did reply, it was to cast doubts on Claiborne’s capacity, declaring that the province would be better run by “a Military executive Magistrate.” Alerted by Daniel Clark to rising anti-American feeling in the city, and apparently fearing some sort of military coup, Jefferson asked Dearborn in February to intervene: “It is so important that Wilkenson’s [
On March 4, all of Louisiana was officially handed over to the United States, and in those outlying forts and towns that had not yet registered the original transfer from Spain to France, the flags of all three nations were flown within a single day. On that day the general’s term of office as military commissioner officially ended, and Dearborn wasted no time in ordering his return to Washington. By then rumors were beginning to spread through New Orleans about Wilkinson’s sudden purchases of sugar. Suspecting another Spanish payment, Clark persuaded an equally dubious Morales to let him examine the Louisiana books, but, as he reported back to Claiborne, found nothing—the twelve thousand dollars appeared only in the Mexico accounts. Wilkinson’s assertion that an old tobacco deal had at last paid off strained credulity, but there seemed no other explanation.
When the general sailed for Washington in April 1804, he took with him the mirror image of “Reflections,” a twenty-two- page strategy document prepared for American eyes, accompanied by eighteen hand-drawn maps of the country between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande— the very territory he suggested that Spain should fortify against U.S. expansion. He also transported a large cargo of sugar purchased with part of the payment for “Reflections,” and the assurance that once more his Spanish handlers would not refer to him by name, only by his old
WITHIN WEEKS OF HIS RETURN to Washington, Wilkinson had developed a relationship with Jefferson close enough to suggest he did have an inkling of what the president concealed in his heart. If so, part of the secret concerned Jefferson’s continuing apprehension of the dangers of a standing army, and his wish for greater control over it.
To meet Jefferson’s needs, Wilkinson drew up a new set of Articles of War on his return from New Orleans that dramatically increased the president’s power in matters of military discipline. The most contentious change concerned the individual soldier’s allegiance. Under the old Articles of War, composed in 1776, a soldier swore “to be true to the United States of America” and was forbidden to utter “traitorous and disrespectful words against the authority of the United States in Congress assembled.” The Constitution had designated the president as commander in chief, but so far as the army was concerned, the chain of command stopped at the senior general. The president had to exert control through him over the military, the most potent instrument of executive authority.
Wilkinson proposed to alter the Articles so that each officer and soldier swore to “observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the officers appointed over me,” and it would become an offense to utter “traitorous and disrespectful words against the President” or other government officers. The suggested change made the military structure constitutional, but it also shifted the primary loyalty of a soldier from his country to his government.
The change seemed to give dangerous power to the executive, and opposition to the new Articles immediately became entangled in the continuing saga of Colonel Thomas Butler’s uncropped pigtail, which had, by 1804, become the focal point of resentment against Wilkinson among forcibly retired officers of the once Federalist army. The issue created an unholy alliance between the Federalist stronghold of New England and the frontiersmen of Tennessee, where the colonel was stationed with the Second Regiment. Acting together, they mustered enough support in the Senate to approve a petition against the order for short hair and to throw out the new Articles of War. Until the twin issues of the pigtail and the Articles were resolved, Jefferson could not ignore the importance of the general’s support for the Constitution and the Republican administration.
Beyond his political usefulness, Wilkinson had another more immediate claim on the president’s attention. The general’s unparalleled knowledge of the west met one of the abiding passions in Jefferson’s life. From his childhood, when his father, Peter Jefferson, founded the Loyal Land Company to buy territory beyond the Appalachians, through the purchase of Louisiana and the creation of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the western lands occupied a strikingly important place in Jefferson’s imagination. In the winter of 1783–84, as a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, he had specified how they should be purchased from the Native Americans, how they should be surveyed and sold to eastern settlers, and how their structure of government should be created. The west was the canvas on which Jefferson envisioned a new republican society being drawn. His desire for information about the region was insatiable.
When James Wilkinson arrived in Washington with his sketch maps and direct information of the area, the president had already sent two ambassadors, James Monroe and John Armstrong, to Madrid to negotiate the exact dividing line between the Louisiana Purchase and Mexico. Since Louisiana had originally been discovered and settled by the French, this resolved itself into a question of how much land their colonists had explored in the eighteenth century. Jefferson believed that French exploration had taken them several hundred miles west of the Mississippi, justifying a border along the Sabine River. Encouraged by Wilkinson’s “Reflections,” however, Spain insisted that the boundary ran almost eighty miles east of the Sabine River. Their own detailed maps showed the line following the Arroyo Hondo, then extending northward until it crossed the Red River close to Natchitoches. Lack of knowledge about the geography of the area handicapped the American response. Wilkinson’s advice was consequently as welcome in Washington as it had been in New Orleans.
His maps no longer exist, but his information about the Red River can be deduced from the report he sent Dearborn in July. A mixture of fact and fiction, some of which came from Philip Nolan, and some from French maps procured in New Orleans, it revealed for the first time to non–Native Americans that this mighty feeder of the lower Mississippi had “its source in the East side of a height, the top of which presents an open plain, so extensive as to require the Indians four days in crossing it.” This was the high, flat tableland that straddles the New Mexico/Texas border called the Llano Estacado.
