An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson

According to Wilkinson, he affected a friendly air with Swartwout, expressing admiration when he heard of plans to recruit no fewer than seven thousand men for the Mexican expedition, and to finance it with silver taken from the New Orleans banks. The general explained that “although I could not join the expedition, [the border dispute] might prevent my opposing it.” Swartwout said that he was due to meet Burr on November 20 and invited Wilkinson to write the colonel with his response.

Most of what the young man had to say would have been familiar to the general from his discussions with Burr. The numbers involved would have surprised him, however, as would the highly significant information— mistaken, as it turned out—that Commodore Truxton, Burr’s adviser on naval matters, had enlisted the help of the British navy. Every plot aimed at New Orleans had always assumed that its fall would be guaranteed by the arrival of two or three frigates at the mouth of the Mississippi. Yet even knowing this apparently crucial fact, Wilkinson still hesitated. For ten days, he remained in Natchitoches considering how the military should react.

Even in his Memoirs, written to show his unswerving patriotism, he could not help revealing the attractions of accepting that the conspiracy was too far advanced to be stopped and simply launching an attack across the Sabine River: “If I had faultered [sic] in duty at that critical moment; if I had been inclined to close with the splendid offers of Colonel Burr, I should have struck the Spaniards, which my orders would have fully justified, and Burr would then have reached New Orleans, without opposition; and I could have deliberated on the part I should take, with entire safety.” It was a possibility he considered in detail, working out that he could wait to see whether Burr succeeded in taking New Orleans, “and without hazarding blame on either side, I should have been left at liberty to take advantage of events and choose my part.”

As late as October 17, Wilkinson wrote to Dearborn suggesting that a hundred picked men could seize the Spanish headquarters at Nacogdoches. Although he stressed that the purpose would only be to negotiate its return in exchange for a truce in the area, any kind of conflict with Spain, whatever the excuse, would obviously have given a vital impetus to Burr’s conspiracy and have blurred his own association with it.

During those days, Wilkinson held the fate of the United States in his hands. Had fighting with Spain broken out on the Sabine River, Andrew Jackson made it clear he would have led the Tennessee militia to seize the Floridas, and John Adair was undeniably prepared to take Kentuckians into Mexico. In the confusion, New Orleans would have given itself up to Burr. What the final outcome might have been is impossible to say, but the radical Republican John Randolph was clearly correct when he later declared to Congress, “The agency of the Army was the whole pivot on which that plot turned.”

While he still wrestled with the problem, Wilkinson did write Burr, as Swartwout had asked, and sent the letter to Natchez to await the colonel’s arrival. What he said was never known. He might have explained that the border situation made it impossible to help or mentioned the possibility of a surprise assault across the Sabine or merely asked for more information.

Certainly he did not declare the conspiracy to be an act of treason; otherwise, when asked about the letter later, Wilkinson would have said so. All he offered by way of explanation was that when he returned to Natchez, “I recovered [the letter] and destroyed it.”

For most of the time, it is clear that the general and his second- in-command leaned toward war. But two obstacles stood in the way. The more obvious was the risk. Command of three thousand trained soldiers, however meanly paid, gave Wilkinson control of the largest single source of power within the republic, and he was desperate not to lose the prize. But psychology may have counted for more. In court, William Eaton declared on oath that when Burr told him Wilkinson was to be his lieutenant, “I replied, ‘Wilkinson will be a lieutenant to no man in existence.’ ” That was an unchanging truth. In the end, Wilkinson always destroyed any friendship that threatened his self- esteem.

Given his emotional volatility, the anger and anxiety produced by Burr’s letter may have contributed to Wilkinson’s indecision. Briggs, who saw him three weeks later, remarked that he seemed a changed man from the sunny figure he had encountered in September.

In the end, Wilkinson decided to play for time. On October 18, Swart-wout was sent away from camp so that he could not observe what was happening. Then Wilkinson composed two documents for the president that contained the first authentic news of the Burr Conspiracy. In a personal letter, dated October 21, he wrote of his discovery that “a numerous and powerful association, extending from New York through the Western states to the territories bordering on the Mississippi, has been formed with the design to levy and rendezvous eight or ten thousand men in New Orleans . . . I have no doubt the revolt of this Territory will be made an auxiliary step to the main design of attacking Mexico, to give it a New Master in place of the promised liberty.” To frustrate this plot, the general proposed to make “the best compromise with Salcedo in my power, and throw myself with my little Band into New Orleans to be ready to defend that Capital against usurpation and violence.”

Yet, as he himself admitted, “I have never, in my whole life, found myself under such circumstances of perplexity and embarrassment as at present.” To give himself room for maneuver, he pretended to believe that Jefferson might still give approval to Burr’s scheme in the event of war. “It is my desire,” he wrote, “to avert a great public calamity, and not to mar a salutary design.” On the back of the letter, he scribbled an alternative scenario: “Should Spain be disposed to war seriously with us, might not some plan be adopted to correct the destination of the associates, and by a suitable appeal to their patriotism, engage them in the service of their country?” Then he made out a copy of the ciphered letter together with a hasty translation, omitting or doctoring the more compromising details.

On October 22, these papers, together with a note to Dearborn telling him that he would advance to the Sabine River immediately to negotiate the withdrawal of both armies from the disputed border, were given to Lieutenant Thomas Smith with strict instructions that they were to be seen by no one but the president. Resourcefully the lieutenant sewed them into the souls of his slippers and set off for Washington.

On October 23, Wilkinson sent a cryptic message to the senior officer in New Orleans, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Freeman, telling him of a “threat too highly confidential to be whispered,” but which required the city’s ineffective defenses to be put in order immediately. On the same day, the general and Cushing set out on a forced march with a company of soldiers to the Sabine River, sixty miles away. Once there, Wilkinson dispatched a trusted officer, Captain Walter Burling, to contact Governor Cordero in Nacogdoches, proposing that each army withdrew from the disputed area, “without yielding a Pretension, ceding a right, or interferring with the discussion which belongs to our superiors.” In practice, this would entail the Spanish remaining behind the Sabine River, while the Americans retreated east of the Arroyo Hondo, the deep stream that Spain claimed as its frontier. The result would create a buffer territory, about fifty miles wide east to west, and stretching north from the Gulf of Mexico to the thirty-first parallel, the line specified by the Treaty of San Lorenzo as the border between the two nations.

Cordero, sensing the weakness behind the proposal, wanted to reject it, but Colonel Herrera had his orders from Salcedo and quickly accepted. On November 6, an agreement was signed by both sides, creating the Neutral Ground, which would for almost twenty years serve as a buffer dividing the two powers in the west. Devoid of government, it gradually became peopled by citizens of every country— the very embodiment of the border society—and its eventual collapse into lawlessness exemplified the built-in weakness of such communities.

With the border problem temporarily solved, the general immediately rode hard back to Natchitoches, covering the sixty miles in a day, and leaving Cushing to bring back the troops. At Natchitoches, he found a copy of the original Burr letter, delivered in his absence by another courier, Erick Bollman. Also waiting for him was a mysterious message sent by James Lowry Donaldson, one of Louisiana’s land commissioners, “that a plan to revolutionise the western country has been formed, matured, and is ready to explode— that Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Orleans, and Indiana, are combined, to declare themselves independent on the 15th November.”

The mystery lay less in the message than in its alleged effect on Wilkinson It was “decisive on my conduct,” he declared in his Memoirs, as though even then he had half hoped not to have to commit himself. “I had not formed a decided opinion, of the nature and objects of Burr’s enterprise before the receipt of Mr Donaldson’s letter. I then first perceived [the enterprise] was wholly unauthorised by the government—highly criminal in the design,— most alarming in its extent; and I had no longer any difficulty as to the course of conduct, my duty and the interests of the nation required me to pursue.”

Donaldson’s letter, however, said nothing of the kind. It stressed Donaldson’s belief that the story was so like “a second Spanish Conspiracy” it could only be a trick—“a stratagem set on foot by the patrons of the Western World.” But it carried a different meaning for Wilkinson. The letter demonstrated the changed emphasis of Burr’s conspiracy— New Orleans was to be seized, not as a jumping- off point for Mexico, but to bring about the secession of the western states. It was indeed a second Spanish Conspiracy, and as the