the expedition up the river in the spring of 1806, with Wilkinson’s latest protege, Captain Richard Sparks, in command of the military detachment, Wilkinson’s advice also ensured that a troop of two hundred Mexican cavalry were being dispatched from Nacogdoches under Captain Francisco Viana to intercept them.
The general’s anxieties were understandable. His adherence to Jefferson had begun as political calculation. But no one had entrusted him with more power, and Wilkinson had responded as he always did to those who flattered his vanity—with wholehearted devotion. That Jefferson might withdraw his trust created an almost intolerable anxiety.
IN THE TWO YEARS since Wilkinson had written “Reflections,” General Salcedo, the commandant of the Internal Provinces, had moved more than seven hundred troops forward to beef up defenses on the Texas border, and Antonio Cordero, the energetic governor of Chihuahua, had been transferred to take over the forward province of Texas. This aggressive policy had been recommended by Agent 13 as a way of preventing the United States from expanding farther west. Rising tension reached a new pitch in October 1805 when Spanish forces occupied two fortified positions east of the Sabine River, the border with Texas as designated by the United States.
On June 11, 1806, Wilkinson received a letter from Henry Dearborn concerning the military situation in the south. Negotiations had failed to persuade the Spanish to withdraw. The presence of their forces on U.S. territory was effectively an invasion. “You will therefore with as little delay as possible repair to the Territory of New Orleans,” the war secretary ordered, “and take upon yourself command of the Troops in that quarter, together with such Militia or Volunteers as you may need for the defence of the country.”
He was being given the chance of war, with overall command. It would enhance his position as commanding general and bring him “fame and honor,” as he acknowledged. At worst, the mere threat of attack might procure a Spanish bribe to keep the peace. At best, it would allow Burr to make his attack on Veracruz and might lead to the seizure of the Mexican silver mines. It should have been the culmination of all Wilkinson’s preparations.
Instead, Dearborn’s letter threw Wilkinson into rage and despair. All he could see was that his enemies had won. This was what Burr had hinted at, and Hunt had predicted. Until that moment Wilkinson had dismissed their reports as groundless. That very month, his confidence had been reinforced by a letter from Samuel Smith passing on Jefferson’s opinion that he could not have made “a fitter appointment” as governor. Now, as Wilkinson told Dearborn, “your letter [has] corrected my delusions.”
The order to leave St. Louis might be dressed up as a military deployment, but to Wilkinson’s eyes, the harsh reality was to force him out of Louisiana. “Bruff, Lucas &c say it is done to get me out of the way to make room for Hammond,” he told Smith. What made it “more afflicting” was the consequent need to move his now seriously ill wife. To Dearborn, he complained that Bruff’s attempt to stir up trouble between “a General in Chief and a Minister of War” and to “draw down unmerited suspicions upon men of purest honor” was tantamount to treason. But to Smith he raged about the worst betrayal of all: how could Jefferson have praised him one day and condoned his dismissal the next?
The letters to Dearborn and Smith were sent on June 17. Then there was silence. Throughout the summer and fall of 1806, it was as though the commanding general of the U.S. army and Burr’s right-hand man had simply disappeared. In the absence of any communication, neither the federal government nor the conspirators knew what had happened to him. On the Ohio, Aaron Burr and Jonathan Dayton gathered funds, men, and equipment for their next move and wondered why they had not heard from their collaborator. In Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Henry Dearborn debated with increasing anxiety why the army commander was no longer replying to letters or complying with orders. No one knew which way James Wilkinson would jump.
23
THE GENERAL AT BAY
ON OCTOBER 22, 1806, the president summoned a cabinet meeting in the White House to be attended by his senior heads of department, Secretary of State James Madison, Albert Gallatin from Treasury, Henry Dearborn from War, and Gideon Granger, the postmaster general. Three critically important items were on the agenda—the Spanish threat east of the Sabine River, the nature of Aaron Burr’s movements, and the loyalty of General James Wilkinson. The first two matters were quickly dealt with— they agreed that troops should be moved to the most southwesterly city in the United States, Natchitoches, to mount a credible deterrent to Spain, and Burr needed to be “strictly watched” to ensure that he did not put into action any plan that might injure the United States. The third question really tested the best political minds in the nation: “General Wilkinson being expressly declared by Burr to be engaged with him in this design as his Lieutenant or first in command, and suspicion of infidelity in Wilkinson being now become very general, a question is proposed what is proper to be done as to him?”
Gideon Granger, once Wilkinson’s outspoken supporter, was responsible for raising the question. Three days earlier he had taken a sworn statement from William Eaton, formerly the U.S. consul in Tripoli, who had won a famous victory at Derna in 1805 leading a force that included the Marine Corps against the Barbary pirates in North Africa. Eaton claimed that after his return to the United States, Aaron Burr had approached him and “laid open his project of revolutionizing the western country, separating it from the Union, establishing a monarchy there, of which he was to be the sovereign, New Orleans to be his capital; organizing a force on the Mississippi, and extending conquest to Mexico.” Burr offered to appoint Eaton second- in-command of the army that was to be led by General James Wilkinson.
The extravagance of the plot invited skepticism, and Eaton, who was seeking compensation from the government for debts he had incurred in North Africa, was not entirely reliable. When he originally brought his story to the attention of the president earlier in the year, Jefferson had dismissed it, saying he had “too much confidence in the integrity and the attachment to the Union of the citizens of [the western] country to admit an apprehension.” The ease with which the cabinet disposed of the Burr question suggests that even at this late date his plans were not their chief concern. The real problem lay with the most powerful man in the Mississippi Valley, and its urgency was contained in the phrase “suspicion of infidelity in Wilkinson being now become very general.”
The one person in the cabinet who had up to that point consistently refused to entertain any such suspicion was the president himself, and the consequences were starkly obvious. In New Orleans, the Creole population was close to rebellion against Claiborne’s government, and the Spanish ambassador, Carlos Martinez de Casa-Yrujo, had let it be known that both Burr and Dayton had approached him with plans to exploit the unrest and use it to split off the western states from the Union. Everyone in the room must have been aware that the fate of the country now depended on what Wilkinson decided to do.
If he acted as a loyal commander against Spain, its invasion was easily countered. If he acted as a Spanish agent, the consequences were incalculable. Protected by the army, New Orleans was safe. Left vulnerable, it could fall to assault from the Mississippi or to an internal revolt. Unsupported by Wilkinson, Burr could be contained. Supported by Wilkinson, and the military following he could count on, Burr’s conspiracy became a genuine insurrection. The cabinet agonized over these questions, and Dearborn, at least, could have been forgiven for wanting to say to the president, “You were warned.”
Yet however they approached it, there was no easy answer to the question “What is proper to be done as to him?” because no one had been able to contact Wilkinson. He was out of reach and out of control. Dearborn had alerted the president to the problem early in September. “Genrl Wilkinson had not left St Louis on 28th July and I cannot account for his delay,” Dearborn reported. “In his letters to me after the rcpt. of his orders, he ingaged at all events to be in Fort Adams by the twenty- fifth of July. I have received no letters from him for several weeks.”
It took three or four weeks for a letter to come from St. Louis to Washington, and as much as two months from Fort Adams, depending on the level of the Ohio. But clearly Wilkinson had not moved from St. Louis six weeks after Dearborn’s instructions to go to the Sabine “with as little delay as possible.” Not until the end of August, ten weeks after the original order reached him, did the general finally take a boat south to Natchez, news that only reached Dearborn a month later. Meanwhile Claiborne and Mississippi’s acting governor, Cowles Mead, had been ordered to call out the militia, but Colonel Cushing’s refusal to allow any troops to move forward to Natchitoches without direct orders from Wilkinson prevented them from being deployed. From Washington it was difficult to make sense of what was happening. They could only be sure that, as Claiborne put it, “all was not right.”
The desperation in the White House made itself apparent in an extraordinary order to Navy Secretary Robert Smith to call in two senior captains, Stephen Decatur and Edward Preble, for a secret briefing before leaving for
