Although its professional core had been strengthened, the army still relied heavily on the militia, especially for cavalry duties, and unlike most of his colleagues Wilkinson understood that the militia had to be cajoled rather than ordered. He made a habit of detaching them as guards and scouts so that they did not have to come under the army’s direct command. At the same time, he paid proper attention to the full-time soldiers’ fundamental need for regular food, pay, and clothing, and a barrage of dispatches hurtled up the Ohio and on to Philadelphia if supplies were lacking. By the summer, Knox could assure Washington, “The Vice of drunkeness is no more among the Officers who fall under his personal observation— and the Troops are in a great degree reformed.”
Another sign of his influence was apparent in the increasingly stylish language of his subordinates. One major smoothly alluded to a failed Indian attack as “an attempt at mischief,” another termed the ambush of Indian cattle thieves as an effort “to baffle their intentions,” and a letter of gratitude to Mrs. Wilkinson for a gift allowed a third major to offer a dizzying example of gentlemanly eloquence: “Be pleased therefore, Madam, to accept the thanks of my family, alias the mess, for your polite attention in sending us garden seeds, etc., and should we be honored by a visit from the donor, the flowers shall be taught to smile at her approach, and droop as she retires.” Aping Wilkinson’s flamboyant manner was a sure indication of a desire to follow his lead.
The military theater of parades and ceremonial that he devised served a similar purpose, allowing everyone from privates to colonels the chance to show off. On May 1, 1792, General Wilkinson put on a frontier version of St. Tammany’s Day, the Pennsylvania spring celebration that was turning into a national holiday. A wigwam was erected beside the Ohio River close to the red- painted walls of Fort Washington, and there influential civilians such as Winthrop Sargent, secretary of the Northwest Territory, John Cleves Symmes, who owned a million of its acres, various judges, and Cincinnati’s “most respectable citizens,” according to the Kentucky Gazette, together with Wilkinson’s senior officers, “sat down to a most sumptuous dinner at 3 o’clock, where the following toasts were drank [sic] under the discharge of many cannon. (1) North American Nation; (2) Washington; (3) The Congress; (4) The Atlantic States; (5) The Western Settlements; and eleven others of a similar nature, 16 in all.” Later Wilkinson mustered his troops on the edge of the nearby forest and reviewed them, clad, according to the Gazette, in “hunting shirt, mocassins, belt, knife and tomahawk—a real woodman’s dress,” then ended the day with “an excellent and eloquent appeal to the feelings of his men.” Whatever the private thoughts of the soldiers, they must at least have been a long way from the horrific scenes of St. Clair’s defeat.
Symmes, who had seen Wilkinson in action, noted that “his familiar address and politeness render him very pleasing to the militia of Kentucky by whom he is much respected and loved.” The Gazette’s fawning reporter went further. The general, he declared, was “a gentleman and a scholar who delighted in surroundings of beauty and refinement.” None of them could have imagined that such a flamboyant, charismatic figure was secretly intending to accept Spain’s offer of four thousand dollars to become a spy.
AT THE PROSPECT of being freed from his debts, James Wilkinson’s mercurial spirits soared. His mood was reflected in the first report he sent in December 1792 to his new handler. It was imaginative, lively, and permeated with untruth. He claimed to be in command of “2000 select troops composed of Musketeers, Chasseurs, Light, and Artillery,” and to be paid “independent of prerogatives and facilities 3000 dollars a year.” Despite this, he pretended to be so disillusioned by having to soldier under “an incompetent Secretary of War and an ignorant Commander- in-Chief” that he wished to be given a commission in the Spanish army where his passion for “military fame” could be gratified. But he was ready to let Carondelet decide “whether I am to continue in this quarter or descend the Mississippi to New Orleans.”
All this— the inflation of his powers and pay scale, as well as the feigned indifference to his career—was designed to make Carondelet realize how much Wilkinson was worth. The clear implication was that the Spaniard should think of paying the general more to keep him from resigning. By way of encouragement Wilkinson also promised, “I have not abandoned those views, principles and attachments which I professed to Miró.” As evidence of his commitment, he pressed Carondelet to strengthen Spanish defenses on the Mississippi, a tactical hint that prompted the governor to authorize additional galleys on the river and garrisons for the forts at Walnut Hill and New Madrid. Militarily, Wilkinson promised his paymaster that the Spanish empire had little to fear from its neighbor, owing to the “intestinal discord” between New England and the south and between the Atlantic states and the west. The conflict, he concluded, “renders the whole [nation] weak and contemptible, the occasion is favorable to Spain and you know how to improve it.”
The deep relationship with Miró, the change of allegiance, and the repeated pledges of loyalty to Spain’s interests must have made this final momentous transition seem like a small step. But by reporting to the Spanish governor in return for payment while he held the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. army, Wilkinson had crossed a Rubicon. He was no longer a private citizen, and his actions had moved beyond moral flexibility or political grandstanding. A soldier who aided a foreign power broke his military oath and was liable to court-martial. If it could be proved that he had attempted to suborn others from their loyalty to the United States, Wilkinson would face the death penalty for treason.
12
DISCIPLINE AND DECEIT
THE CREATION OF THE LEGION of the United States remains a high point of military innovation in the country’s history. This force was designed for the particular needs of fighting on the North American continent, but organized according to the most sophisticated European thinking on how best to use the three different arms of infantry, artillery, and cavalry. Henry Knox, bookseller, general, and secretary of war, was largely responsible for the concept, and in recommending the Legion to the president, he cited both classical authorities, such as the historian Polybius on the Roman legion, and eighteenth-century experts such as Marshal Maurice de Saxe, author of My Reveries on the Art of War. But George Washington, adamantly conservative on the shape of the army he wanted for fighting the British, turned Knox’s radical ideas into reality.
What made a disciplined army essential was not just the defense of settlers, but the implementation of the president’s ambitious policy toward Native Americans. From the Kentucky settlers’ point of view, Indian attacks required the sort of punishment inflicted by Wilkinson in 1791 that would clear the land of its original inhabitants. In Philadelphia, however, the president was determined to find a place for Native Americans within the Union, an approach warmly endorsed by Henry Knox.
“It is painful to consider that all the Indian Tribes once existing in those States, now the best cultivated and most populous, have become extinct,” Knox had written Washington in July 1789. “If the same causes continue, the same effects will happen, and in a Short period the Idea of an Indian on this side of the Mississippi will only be found in the page of the historian.” Knox proposed that “instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population,” the United States should impart “our Knowledge of cultivation, and the arts, to the Aboriginals of the Country by which the Source of future life and happiness [might be] preserved and extended.”