An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (44 page)

A
HEAD OF THEM IN
N
EW
O
RLEANS,
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
at this time
I could be justifiable in compelling men by force to enter the service. Many good-disposed citizens do not appear to think the danger considerable, and there are others who (perhaps from wicked intentions) endeavor to turn our preparations into ridicule.”

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
Aurora
newspaper, edited by the sympathetic William Duane, he portrayed himself isolated in the midst of “acknowledged traitors and masked confederates.” This was, he wrote, a different Wilkinson, “unmoved and indefatigable . . . no more jocose, volatile or convivial. He seemed wrought in thought and silence! and was to be found only with the troops, at the works, or in his office.”

Early in January, John Adair, his friend for more than fifteen years, arrived in the city. Whatever his expectations of Wilkinson—it was said that Adair still hoped to arrange the handover of the city to Burr— Adair was too ill to do anything but send word that he wanted to see the general. The same afternoon, a detachment of 120 troops under the command of Wilkinson’s trusted aide Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Kingsbury surrounded his hotel. Adair was dragged from his room and taken to military headquarters, where he was held until he could be put on a ship bound for Washington alongside Swartwout, Bollman, and Ogden. Adair’s arrest was followed by that of Workman, on the grounds that the judge was “strongly suspected for being connected with Burr,” and that of the editor of the
Orleans
Gazette
, James Bradford, and a financier, Lewis Kerr, who was accused of plotting “to plunder the bank.”

All mail addressed to Burr and his associates was intercepted and opened, and travel outside the city was restricted to those with military permits. The streets were patrolled by detachments of armed soldiers with the power to apprehend anyone the general wanted to detain. Such was his authority, he had only to issue a warrant. The list of his suspects lengthened rapidly until by February it extended to printers, legislators, traders, lawyers, and “the Bar in general.”

O
N
J
ANUARY
10, 1807, Burr with his small band of followers landed at Vicksburg and, for the first time, learned that the president had ordered his arrest. Wilkinson, who might have enabled the conspiracy to succeed, had made its failure inevitable. In despair, Burr surrendered to Cowles Mead, Mississippi’s acting governor.

The disparity between the eighty men who came ashore with him and the “eight to twelve thousand” that Wilkinson talked of later caused the general to be ridiculed. There were, however, signs of the support that Burr commanded in the south, even after Jefferson’s proclamation was known.

Only thirty or forty of the Natchez militia responded to the muster call to defend the city, and when Burr was indicted before a grand jury in Washington, Mississippi, its members not only denounced Burr’s arrest as a triumph for “the enemies of our glorious Constitution” but immediately found him “not guilty of any crime or misdemeanor against the United States.” Jefferson and Dearborn believed that a grand jury in New Orleans would have brought in similar verdicts had his supporters been arraigned there.

Once set free, Burr bade an emotional farewell to his men on February 13 and disappeared into the wilderness. The failure to capture him in Mississippi despite Wilkinson’s offer of a five- hundred-dollar reward, and the deployment of a snatch squad of officers in civilian clothes, meant that the potential threat continued. So, too, did Wilkinson’s hard- line policy despite the release of some of his prisoners, including Bradford. Reconvened in January, the legislature protested angrily against the general’s destruction of civil liberties, forcing Claiborne to offer a partial apology on his behalf. “I believe the General is actuated by a sincere disposition to serve the best interest of his country,” he declared, “but his zeal, I fear, has carried him too far.” By then, however, it was apparent that the general’s methods were endorsed by President Jefferson and his administration.

T
WO DAYS AFTER
D
EARBORN
learned of Wilkinson’s loyalty from Lieutenant Smith, he gave the general blanket powers to “dispose of the troops in such manner, as will most effectually intercept and prevent any unlawful enterprize.” In addition Dearborn ordered, “Any person or persons who may be found in or about your camp or post, with evident intention of sounding either officer or soldier, with a view to an unlawful expedition, should be arrested.”

Any lingering doubts about his past associations—Dearborn commented, “Your name has been very frequently mentioned with Burr, Dayton and others”—evaporated with the arrival of the upright Isaac Briggs.

As the Quaker recounted, “After a most arduous journey, in the midst of a severe winter, of more than 1200 miles, 600 of it through wilderness, on the first day of the year, 1807, I arrived in Washington city, and waited on the President with my despatches. Immediately on his opening them, he exclaimed with earnestness, ‘Is Wilkinson sound in this business?’ I replied very promptly, ‘There is not the slightest doubt of it.’ ”

From that moment, Jefferson showed himself ready to support whatever Wilkinson did, regardless of the cost to the principles of individual liberty and the rule of law. In reply to the letters that Briggs delivered, including copies of those from Burr and Dayton, Jefferson urged the general on January 3, 1807, to “act on the possibility that the resources of our enemies may be greater and deeper than we are yet informed.” A month later, answering a flood of letters from Wilkinson detailing his measures to protect New Orleans, Jefferson wrote approvingly, “We were pleased to see that without waiting for [the orders sent in November] you adopted nearly the same plan yourself and acted on it with promptitude.”

By then Bollman and Swartwout, the first of the prisoners to be arbitrarily arrested and deported, had arrived in the capital, yet the president still insisted that the threat of attack by an “overwheming force” from the Mississippi justified Wilkinson in what he did. He offered a single note of caution. Referring to popular opinion “in a nation tender as to anything infringing liberty, especially from the military,” Jefferson expressed the hope that “you will not extend this deportation where there is only suspicion . . . in that case public sentiment will desert you, because seeing no danger here, violations of the law are felt with strength.” Even then, the president made a specific exception for the ringleaders, Burr and Blennerhassett, who should be deported immediately and without trial to Washington, “should they fall into your hands.” Of Wilkinson’s military rule, he said nothing directly, but alluding to rumors that the administration was distancing itself from the general, the president ended, “Be assured you will be cordially supported in the line of your duties.”

Until then no one had been more tender about the military infringing liberty than Jefferson—even years later, in correspondence with John Adams, he did not hesitate to describe the comparatively mild restrictions on free speech contained in the alien and sedition laws as “terrorism.” The explanation that Jefferson himself offered for his endorsement of Wilkinson’s behavior was sent to John Colvin, editor of two Republican newspapers and of Jefferson’s own memoirs: “A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.” Wilkinson’s need to defeat the threat posed by Burr “constituted a law of necessity and self- preservation, and rendered the
salus populi
[safety of the people] supreme over the written law.”