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

army, but only supplied four. The military boats in Natchez that were supposed to supplement them turned out to be rotten and unseaworthy. Accordingly the troops were crammed onto the few boats that could be hired in New Orleans and, with agonizing slowness, were rowed upstream in the sultry summer heat. One regiment as well as the sickest on board were left behind in New Orleans, and another hundred invalids were put ashore at the army post at Pointe Coupee. Not until mid-October did the first boats reach Fort Washington behind Fort Adams, and the remainder were landed at Natchez near the end of the month. More than two hundred men had succumbed on the boats, but weakened by disease and recurrent fevers, including malaria, another five hundred died after they reached dry land.

Inevitably, the officer in charge of such a catastrophe would face a public inquiry. On December 19, 1809, before any conclusion was reached, President Madison suspended General James Wilkinson from command of the U.S. army pending the outcome of a congressional investigation.

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MADISON’S ACCUSATIONS

ICONFESS, THE STRENGTH of my mind was shaken,” James Wilkinson admitted when he learned of President James Madison’s decision. For the first time in his career, the general had no allies in government. He faced an unfriendly Congress, and an administration that was downright hostile. Yet he soon recovered his mental alertness, thanks to a sense of “conscious rectitude, an implicit reliance on my Creator, an invincible flow of animal spirits, and a firmness of resolution which had supported me under almost every vicissitude of human life.” Of these, the flow of animal spirits, meaning his remorseless, bounding energy, counted for most. That was apparent in early 1810, once command had formally been handed over to Brigadier Wade Hampton in Natchez. Instead of heading straight for Washington, Wilkinson first turned south for New Orleans and the embrace of Celestine Trudeau.

They were married on March 5. The ceremony took place in the chapel of the fashionable Ursuline nuns who, the groom must have been uneasily aware, had been enthusiastic supporters of Aaron Burr’s. The honeymoon was brief, but indubitably passionate since Celestine bore him a daughter nine months later. Yet not even a young bride could keep him away from the battle to save his career. Less than a week after they were married, he sailed for Washington, and he and his wife would not see each other again for more than two years.

The long delay in bringing him to face a court was largely deliberate, a device adopted by Madison and Eustis to force him out of the army, but the process was also slowed by the long list of offenses that required investigation. During the disastrous summer of 1809, Daniel Clark’s Proofs of the Corruption of General Wilkinson and His Connexion with Aaron Burr had been published, containing every document that Clark and Power could unearth in New Orleans that pointed to the general’s guilt. Although the Spanish records escaped them, the impact was more powerful than their piecemeal presentation the previous year. Accordingly Congress appointed two committees to investigate the separate issues of the general’s role as a Spanish agent, and his responsibility for the army’s loss of life.

Both eventually reported in February 1811. Within military circles, the more potentially damaging was the inquiry into the debacle at Terre aux Boeufs. To his frustration, the general was not allowed to appear personally, and witnesses who testified to filthy conditions and poor food were not cross- examined. The imputation that Wilkinson alone was to blame was thus left unchallenged except by one balky member of the committee, William Crawford of Pennsylvania. Convinced that other factors must be involved since almost three quarters of the deaths had occurred after leaving the camp, Crawford voted against recommending action against the general. Presented with a confused report, Congress decided simply to ignore it. The second committee under Ezekiel Bacon made no recommendation but passed directly to the executive the voluminous and familiar evidence that Daniel Clark had assembled about the general’s connections to Spain.

Unlike their predecessors, neither President Madison nor Secretary of War Eustis had any intention of rescuing the general. For ten weeks, he was left in limbo, apart from an informal suggestion that he should return to New Orleans to be with Celestine “and wait there the farther pleasure of the House of Representatives, without the resumption of my command.” The general indignantly refused, declaring that “sooner than consent to such a degradation, I would bare my bosom to the fire of a platoon.” Eventually, eighteen months after his suspension, public pressure from both his friends and enemies to have him brought to trial at last forced the secretary of war to agree to a meeting on May 14, 1811.

“Mr. Eustis received me with great cordiality,” Wilkinson recorded, “and pressed my hand, until it almost ached.” With the same apparent friendliness, Eustis explained smoothly that “the President felt for my situation very sensibly, and felt every disposition to do me justice; that on the score of the Burr business, I stood perfectly acquitted, and in relation to the Spanish business, he was also satisfied.” Nevertheless, Eustis continued, the awkward problem created by Ellicott’s information about his spying still remained. Eustis hoped that the general might agree it needed to be cleared up, “but that this was a mere suggestion, which he offered to my consideration.” Turning to Terre aux Boeufs, Eustis acknowledged the president’s wish for a third inquiry, this time under military auspices, in order “to satisfy the public mind, vindicate your character, and justify your conduct.” It should take place, the secretary recommended, in New Orleans, far away from Washington.

As a master of military maneuvering, Wilkinson had no difficulty in perceiving the opportunities and pitfalls in this proposal. Without hesitation, he accepted the suggested inquiry and insisted that its scope should be as wide as possible. Although Celestine’s absence caused “the keenest pangs which crossed my bosom,” he also stipulated that it should take place on the Atlantic coast close to the center of power rather than in her home city. Madison agreed to these conditions, and on June 1, 1811, Wilkinson was ordered to stand trial at a court- martial, accused of aiding the Burr conspiracy, accepting a pension from the Spanish government, and being responsible for the disaster at Terre aux Boeufs.

By the time he entered the courthouse in Fredericktown, Maryland, the general faced an astonishing list of eight different charges, subdivided into twenty-five specific offenses. Chronologically they covered events from 1787 through 1809, and in seriousness from the waste of public money to disobedience to orders, which was punishable by death. In defiance of natural justice, they ignored the statute of limitations, ignored the double- jeopardy prohibition against being tried twice for the same alleged offense, and admitted hearsay evidence. Wilkinson made no objection and even encouraged the government to spread its net wide. This should have made Madison and Eustis pause for thought.

In May 1811, Wilkinson completed his first memoirs, entitled Burr’s Conspiracy exposed and General Wilkinson vindicated against the slanders of his enemies. The book was in many ways a rehearsal of the case he would make at his court- martial. In it he painted a picture of himself as a former friend of Burr’s, taken by surprise when the conspiracy became clear, but motivated at all times by upright, unshakable patriotism, and unjustly criticized by malignant enemies. From the opening paragraphs where he described himself as “persecuted to the verge of destruction, without a dawn of relief, his humble fortune ruined and his domestic happiness blasted, for his fidelity to his country,” he adopted a tone of wounded innocence that was too contrived to be wholly believable. But as always, the posturing deflected attention from his cleverness.

Contained within the turgid pages was a formidable defense of his conduct based on a vast range of obsessively hoarded documents, an astonishing network of contacts, and an exhaustive ability to research information. Its strength was demonstrated by the impact on two brilliant lawyers, Roger B. Taney, a future Supreme Court chief justice, and John H. Thomas. Each had thought the general complicit in the conspiracy, but became so convinced of his innocence that they volunteered to defend him without fee. Thus when his court- martial began on September 4, 1811, before eleven army officers selected by a hostile administration and under the direction of a Republican loyalist, Brigadier Peter Gansevoort, the defendant had already secured one important victory.

GENERAL JAMES WILKINSON ARRIVED in the courtroom dressed in the gaudy gold-braided uniform he had devised for himself, with his sword strapped to his waist. When Gansevoort reminded him that as a prisoner he must surrender his weapon, the general unbuckled the sword and handed it over with the tragic observation that it was the first time he had been deprived of “the untarnished companion of my thigh for forty years.”

The first days of the hearings were concerned with the charges related to the Spanish pension and the Burr