ON THE VERY DAY that James Wilkinson entered New Orleans, a weary Lieutenant Thomas Smith stepped into President Jefferson’s study in the White House and removed his slippers. When he had unpicked the soles, he handed over the general’s two letters for the president, and his message to the secretary of war. Smith left no account of his record journey—almost fourteen hundred miles covered in thirty- three days— or of the president’s response to this first indication of Wilkinson’s loyalty. But Smith’s fatigue must have been as extreme as the president’s relief.
During the weeks without news, and the continuing doubts about how the general might use the troops under his command, the administration had remained paralyzed. Dearborn had guessed that Wilkinson would try to make war on Spain. Urgent messages had been sent south instructing him to keep the peace, and ordering Captain Thomas Swaine, commander of the eastern defenses on the Mobile River, not to leave his post to attack the Spanish, whatever Wilkinson might command. But until the creased pages were removed from their wrapping, and Jefferson began to read Wilkinson’s looped handwriting, no one knew what had actually happened.
However alarming the references to the “deep and dark conspiracy” and the “eight or ten thousand men” who were to rendezvous in New Orleans, the discovery that the army’s commander in chief was loyal and planned to defend the city outweighed every other consideration. The difference it made to Jefferson’s administration was immediately evident when the cabinet met the following day. For the first time, decisive action could be taken to frustrate Burr’s plans. As the president explained to Congress, “Two days after the receipt of General Wilkinson’s information . . . orders were despatched to every intersecting point on the Ohio and Mississippi, from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, for the employment of such force either of the regulars or of the militia, and of such proceedings also of the civil authorities, as might enable them to seize on all the boats and stores provided for the enterprise, to arrest the persons concerned, and to suppress effectually the further progress of the enterprise.”
The first action against Burr was taken by Governor Edward Tiffin of Ohio, based on information that the cabinet’s confidential agent, John Graham, had gained from men recruited by Blennerhassett. Shortly before the president’s proclamation arrived, Ohio militia raided Blennerhassett’s island home. They were just too late to capture its owner, who had left hours earlier with his friend Colonel Comfort Tyler. In their absence, the soldiers seized about a dozen boats and two hundred barrels of provisions, as well as destroying Blennerhassett’s library and beautiful furniture. In late December, Blennerhassett, Tyler, and a force numbering no more than eighty men joined up with Burr, who had acquired two more large boats from Andrew Jackson. By the end of the year, their small convoy was sailing down the Mississippi just ahead of the news of Jefferson’s proclamation that was spreading southward like a tide.
AHEAD OF THEM IN NEW ORLEANS, James Wilkinson was working feverishly to repair the city’s defenses. A force of fewer than eight hundred troops had been set to rebuilding the ruined walls of Fort St. Louis, and constructing new barriers across strategic roads and canals into the city. Governor William Claiborne ordered the tiny fleet of four gunboats and two bomb ketches to be put under Wilkinson’s command, and an urgent meeting was convened with leading merchants to ask them for money and men to equip the vessels for action. The first indication that Wilkinson had something more extreme in mind came on December 6, just before this meeting, when he wrote Claiborne, “Under circumstances so imperious, extraordinary measures must be resorted to, and the ordinary forms of our civil institutions must, for a short period, yield to the strong arm of military law . . . I most earnestly entreat you to proclaim martial law over this city, its ports and precincts.”
During the long months of uncertainty about Wilkinson’s loyalty, Claiborne had received no communication from Washington. Both Jackson and Mead, had, however, counseled him not to trust the general. In a message announcing his intention to defend Natchez at all costs, Mead told the governor, “Burr may come—and he is no doubt desperate . . . Should he pass us, your fate will depend on the General, not on the Colonel. If I stop Burr, this may hold the General in his allegiance to the United States. But if Burr passes this Territory with two thousand men, I have no doubt but the General will be your worst enemy.” Forced to choose between losing the city to Burr or to Wilkinson, Claiborne temporized. On December 7, he refused Wilkinson’s demand for martial law, but only on the technical grounds that it suspended the citizen’s right of habeas corpus, a power that resided solely with the legislature, which was not in session.
Two days later, New Orleans’s merchants met and volunteered to supply crews and money for the navy. With their agreement, Claiborne simultaneously put an embargo on ships leaving the port during the emergency. This measure halted all trade, and if sustained long would drive the merchants and the city into bankruptcy, but for a few weeks it was acceptable because everyone shared the burden. To the merchants’ consternation, Wilkinson dismissed their offer as inadequate. In the expectation of a naval attack from the Gulf of Mexico backed by British frigates, he demanded the use of New Orleans’s sailors for a minimum of six months. When this was refused, he told Claiborne that he would round up the seamen forcibly, pressing them into service as the British navy did.
By now the governor was deeply alarmed. “I submit it to your cool reflection,” he replied, “whether
Wilkinson, however, was unrelenting. The argument he used for attacking civil liberties has become familiar. “We have reached an extremity in our public affairs,” he brusquely informed Claiborne, “which will not only justify, but which imperiously demands, the partial and momentary dispensation of the ordinary course of our civil institutions, to preserve the sanctuary of public liberty from total dilapidation.”
The general estimated Burr’s forces at between seven and twelve thousand men, but it was not just this outside threat he had to confront. In New Orleans, Burr sympathizers could be found in the resentful Creole population, and among the shadowy but influential membership of the Mexico Association. Privately, Wilkinson assured Samuel Smith that three quarters of the population were unreliable. Consequently the sweeping powers of martial law and impressment were essential because “unless I am authorized to repress the seditious and arrest the disaffected, and to call the resources of the place into active operation, the defects of my force may expose me to be overwhelmed by numbers; and the cause and the place will be lost.” With increasing feebleness, Claiborne still held out, insisting that the judiciary alone had the power to enforce the law, “nor can any acts of mine arrest or suspend their powers.”
By mid-December, however, his protests had become irrelevant. Sensing the governor’s weakness, Wilkinson simply bypassed the constitutional safeguards and carried out what amounted to a military coup in the city. On December 14 a series of arbitrary arrests began. First, the courier Erick Bollman was seized on suspicion of treason by Wilkinson’s soldiers, then Swartwout and his traveling companion, Peter Ogden. Bollman was hustled onto a gunboat and shipped out of the city, while Swartwout, as he later told a friend, “was taken from prison in the night under a guard of soldiers and hurried through swamps and marshes to an unfrequented place in the woods . . . and threatened by the officer if [I] attempted to escape, death would be the consequence.” According to Swartwout, they did shoot when he tried to get away, but their muskets misfired. Later he and Ogden were both chained up on a bomb ketch moored in the river.
The arrests, coming on top of the rumors of Burr’s approaching army, created panic in the city. A judge, James Workman, issued writs of habeas corpus for the release of all three men, but Wilkinson immediately rearrested them, declaring that he took full responsibility for “the two traitors who were the subjects of the writs.” He promised to continue to arrest “all those against whom I have positive proof of being accomplices in the machinations against the state.” Angrily Workman told Claiborne that by law his next step should be to call on the sheriff to have the general arrested, but in such dangerous circumstances he was prepared to let the governor intervene. When Claiborne refused to act, Workman resigned. As an early historian of Louisiana put it, “This was acknowledging the fact that Wilkinson was supreme dictator, and that henceforth his will was to be the law.”
Most of this was motivated by his need to act the superpatriot. But another factor was at work. Nancy Wilkinson lay dying.
Carried downriver from Natchez in December, she was lodged in the house of the Creole millionaire Bernard de Marigny. Shortly before she died on February 23, her son James returned from his epic journey down the Arkansas River so that she was not alone at her death. “Oh god how heavy have been my afflictions,” Wilkinson confided to Jonathan Williams, and it would be strange if the awful waiting for her end, and the eventual grief, did not contribute to his savagery. Always a convivial drinker, the general seems now to have begun drinking to dull his senses, to the tragedy in his private life and, perhaps, to the monstrous edifice he was creating in public. In an unsigned letter to the
