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

the influence of laudanum.

Yet they contain a mine of information about military and political life Most people telling the story of their life rely on their integrity to make the account credible. Because James Wilkinson’s double life was based on invention, he felt bound to back up assertions with documentary proof. Consequently, much of the Memoirs consists simply of correspondence, depositions, contracts, and army regulations, which together offer an inimitable view of the stage on which he acted. Thus for all their faults, the Memoirs succeed in illustrating Wilkinson’s historical importance in the two arenas for which he deserves to be remembered—opening up the Mississippi to western settlers, and ensuring that a restive army remained subject to civilian control.

In his preface, he admitted to a small regret, that having devoted so much space to “the illustration of my persecutions . . . I have not been able to touch the last twenty- five years of my service.” Even the brief summary of what had been left out—eight voyages by sea, four descents of the Mississippi, and “I traversed a trackless wilderness four times from the borders of Louisiana to the frontiers of Georgia”— suggested the physical resilience that helped distinguish him among the generals of his time. The omission would, he promised, be made good in future volumes.

ON THE FRONTISPIECE, the general had printed a couplet from Richard Savage’s play Sir Thomas Overbury that he felt applied to his experience:

For patriots still must fall for statesmen’s safety,

And perish by the country they preserve.

The target, as he made obvious, was “cold, selfish, timid” James Madison, but the statesman for whose safety the patriotic Wilkinson ultimately fell escaped any hint of criticism. Unlike every other authority figure in Wilkinson’s life, Thomas Jefferson was immune to even private attack. Their relationship dominated Wilkinson’s career and clearly went further than was apparent on the surface.

Occasionally, the general would hint as much. In January 1811, he sent Jefferson a letter denying a rumor that he had boasted, “As to Long Tom— meaning you— he dare say nothing, for I have got him under my thumb,” to which the president replied dismissively, “My consciousness that no man on earth has me under his thumb is evidence enough that you never used the expression.” But Wilkinson returned to the topic. A year later Monroe heard it said that when the general intervened with Morales in 1803 after the withdrawal of American rights to use New Orleans as a depot, he did so at the president’s suggestion. Jefferson’s alleged purpose was not to discourage Morales, but to encourage him in his high- handed action in order to manipulate public opinion in favor of U.S. intervention. This time Jefferson reacted with fury. Which was more likely, he demanded of Monroe, “that I should descend to so unmeaning an act of treason, or that [Wilkinson] in the wreck now threatening him [his court- martial], should wildly lay hold of any plank.”

Yet Wilkinson was not the only source of such rumors. One evening in January 1797, the adventurer John D. Chisholm, who was making detailed plans on behalf of William Blount to capture West Florida and Louisiana, went to Blount’s Philadelphia house and was shown by his son into the dining room. “Instead of finding him alone as usual,” Chisholm reported, “I found Mr Jefferson and Genl. Wilkinson at Table with him.” What they were talking about, Chisholm could not tell, but he made a guess. “It immediately struck me, but I might be wrong, that [Blount] sent for me in order to open my Plan to these Gentlemen.”

Chisholm kept his mouth shut and learned nothing more, but it is plausible that the three men were indeed discussing how the Spanish colonies might be taken, and in particular the best way to reach Santa Fe. Later that year Wilkinson sent his personal assistant to Jefferson with a message that ran, “In the Bearer of this Letter— Mr. P. Nolan, you will behold the Mexican traveler, a specimen of whose discoveries I had the honor to submit to you in the Winter 1797.”

Jefferson was always eager to acquire Spanish territory, not by war but by economic and diplomatic pressure. Often the first point of contact had to be unofficial, and sometimes more probing than could be admitted. This must have been one motive for appointing Wilkinson governor of Louisiana Territory, and for the unofficial permission to send out exploration and spying parties. A similar impulse led him to select Wilkinson to discover whether Captain General Someruelos might be ready to take Cuba out of the Spanish empire. In short, the general’s sinuous morality made him the ideal candidate for the dirty and deniable work that an upright president needed doing without knowing how it was done.

Naturally enough, Jefferson always remained aloof. “I have ever and carefully restrained myself from the expression of any opinion respecting General Wilkinson, except in the case of Burr’s conspiracy,” he told Monroe. “As to the rest of his life, I have left it to his friends and his enemies, to whom it furnishes matter enough for disputation. I classed myself with neither.” It was a wise way to treat someone whose likes and hatreds were so unpredictable, and operationally necessary. And it was presidential in tone. But considering how much the general had done for him, it lacked warmth.

For his part, Wilkinson, who never remained faithful to any other superior, was always Jefferson’s man. He gave him the army’s loyalty, Burr’s conspiracy, Louisiana’s border. Long after he had damned every other statesman to perdition, he attempted to win Jefferson’s constantly withheld friendship. And the crux of his life proved to be the moment when he sacrificed a career of treachery to be steadfast not just to his nation but to his president.

IN JUNE 1817 the general sailed for New Orleans. The Memoirs had not made him rich. The printing costs were high, and his hopes for the sales of a second printing overoptimistic. Scores of copies were sent to the longsuffering van Rensselaer to sell “at any reasonable sacrifice,” and other friends were enlisted to take up remaindered volumes. But he had enough cash—four hundred dollars, to be exact—to pay the deposit on a fourteen-hundred-dollar cotton plantation fifteen miles south of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi. With cotton prices climbing to thirty-five cents a pound and sugar at nine cents a pound, he intended, he announced, to grow both and “with the will of God to make a fortune in five years.” Although the words were addressed to van Rensselaer, the audience most captivated by his dreams was always Wilkinson himself. “Suppose I get you a plantation adjoining me on the Mississippi on a spot as healthy as Albany,” he wrote, “where you may so invest a Capital of $30,000 as to yield you $5,000 the first year, and $10,000 the Third, will you sell, pack up and embark and land at New Orleans where I will meet you and carry you home in a Steam Boat?”

The reality of the van Rensselaer estates in New York, vast, well settled, and productive, outweighed the attractions of swampland in the Mississippi delta. But Wilkinson continued to believe in his rural idyll. His reunion with Celestine had allowed him to meet for the first time his twin daughters, Stephanie and the delightfully named Theofannie, who had been born in January 1816. Having only known sons before, he was enchanted.

“Blessed with my Celestine and two beloved little daughters, as good and beautiful as angels, with a bare subsistence which I am endeavouring to improve by my labours,” he declared, “I hold myself above the attractions of the world, envy no man’s condition, enjoy tranquillity and happiness without alloy.” Having transported all his archives to New Orleans, he intended to offer the public more reminiscences because he had so far only been able “to glance at one fifth of my public life.” In this new drama, he would devote himself to nothing but farming and writing. “I decline all company, refuse all public appointments, and in my Books, my Pen, my divine little Creole, and our charming little girls, Stephanie and Theofannie, I enjoy more tranquillity and happiness than I have experienced in my variegated life.”

For a time the role suited him. Even when he fell sick and fever reduced him after three weeks in bed to “a mere skeleton,” he soon bounced back to health, “new flushed, as elastic as [a] Billiard Ball, and with the grace of Heven will not have another maladay of any kind for ten or fifteen years to come.” Evidence of the sixty- two-year- old general’s happiness was the birth of another child, Theodore, in 1819.

The serpent in his Eden was lack of money. The plantation did not generate profits on the scale he imagined, and his wealthy Trudeau relations may well have contributed to the family’s upkeep as the Biddles had thirty years before. In 1819 Celestine’s sister, Josephine, “the same lively Dame” who had accompanied her to Maryland, married “a Creole of 3 or 400,000$ fortune,” and the struggling Wilkinsons must have been something of an embarrassment. That same year General John Adair brought a civil suit against him in Natchez for false imprisonment during the Burr Conspiracy and was awarded twenty- five hundred dollars in damages, a sum far beyond Wilkinson’s ability to pay. Within twelve months, Congress rescued him from ruin by voting three thousand dollars for his relief, but poverty took the gloss off his rural dream. Then, writing to van Rensselaer in 1821, he revealed a wider dissatisfaction with his surroundings.

His letter was devoted to the crisis created by Missouri’s insistence in 1820 that it be admitted to the Union