It began with the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, an event that provoked his brother monarch, Charles IV of Spain, to declare war on republican France. Consequently, when the headstrong, short- tempered Ed-mond Charles Genêt arrived in the United States as France’s ambassador in March that year, he came determined to attack Spanish interests in the west.
Within months of Citizen Genêt’s arrival, his Spanish counterpart, Josef de Jaudenes, sent Carondelet the alarming news that Genêt “is engaged in secretly seducing and recruiting by every means that presents itself all the Frenchmen, and others as well, to form an expedition against Louisiana.” Genêt’s fellow countrymen in New Orleans responded with nightly performances of the “Marseillaise” in the theater until Carondelet banned the tune, and more than one hundred French residents signed a petition asking for their government to intervene in Louisiana. Meanwhile, George Rogers Clark promised to lead a force that Genêt named “the French Revolutionary Legions on the Mississippi” and do for France what Wilkinson planned for Spain, give her control of the Mississippi basin by seizing New Orleans. “The possession of New Orleans will secure to France the whole Fur, Tobacco and Flour trade of this western world,” Clark predicted.
In alarm, Carondelet demanded that Gayoso should “send as soon as possible a canoe to New Madrid with a letter for General W[ilkinson] asking him to advise us properly . . . of whatever maybe concocted, either in Kentucky or in Cumberland [modern Alabama and middle Tennessee] contrary to the interests of Spain.”
Carondelet’s plea arrived at a convenient moment for Wilkinson— several Kentucky creditors, among them Humphrey Marshall and Peyton Short, were pressing for payment on old debts. It was apparent from his reply to Carondelet’s plea that Wilkinson saw the chance of an unexpected windfall. He conjured up a nightmare variant of the original Spanish Conspiracy— Kentucky might still detach itself from the United States, but this time as an ally of France. In graphic terms, he warned Carondelet of the dangers of “the projected attack against Louisiana by the people of Kentucky at the instigation of the French minister.” Having played on the governor’s all too susceptible fears, Wilkinson characteristically offered to remove them. An informant had already been recruited from Clark’s inner circle, and Wilkinson promised that no expense would be spared in persuading Kentucky’s leading citizens to turn against the adventure. Finally he could also guarantee that the army would prevent any supplies from being shipped down the Ohio to Clark’s French Legions.
The value of Wilkinson to Carondelet was made starkly clear in a secret warning that the governor sent to the royal council that October. To defend the forts on the Mississippi between St. Louis and Vicksburg, a distance of five hundred miles, the governor could muster only ninety regular troops and two hundred militia. Should Clark’s forces reach Natchez, he predicted, “It is evident that all Louisiana will fall into their hands with the greatest rapidity and ease.” From his point of view, everything depended on Agent 13.
In this symbiotic relationship, Wilkinson’s spendthrift habits made Caron-delet equally essential to him. His need for more money was underlined by the return of Nancy from Philadelphia in May 1793 after a ten-month absence.
The boys, including eight- year-old Joseph, the youngest, had been left behind in Philadelphia. None of his letters suggests that Wilkinson missed them, but his writing is full of references to what Nancy’s absence meant to him. It was, he said, “Hell on earth” without her. He urged the Biddles to “hurry her back.” Extravagantly, he declared to his commanding officer that he was “panting, sighing, dying for her embrace,” and he demanded that Wayne either arrange for her to be sent down the Ohio or “give me plenty of Indian fighting.” Although it was a convention, amounting to a military joke, that lovelorn warriors were supposed to drown their sorrows in blood, everything suggests that Wilkinson’s words came as close to sincerity as was possible for him.
Extravagance was the most obvious sign of his affection. As an officer, he rode everywhere on horseback, but even on the frontier he always had a horse- drawn carriage for Nancy. In Kentucky the vehicle was remembered as a coach with four matched black horses; in Cincinnati it was drawn by no more than a pair, but it was “the only carriage in the place.” He named a major street in Frankfort after her. At a time when Virginia law treated real estate as belonging to the husband alone, he bought land in her name as well as his. Her popularity with his fellow soldiers from privates through General Wayne— she was said to be the one person who could persuade him to show mercy to a soldier condemned to death by court-martial— and beyond him to Henry Knox, clearly caused Wilkinson pride rather than jealousy because he never ceased to involve her in the army’s social events, and that despite the obvious fact that most people preferred her to him. The disparity appeared in anecdotes, and more lastingly in the compliments paid by Thomas Chapman, an English traveler, in his Journal of a Journey through the United States. Of Wilkinson, he could offer little more than a wooden tribute, not altogether believable, to his “unimpeached integrity, unexampled liberality & Hospitality,” but what really moved the Englishman was “the good sence, Affable deportment & elegant manners of the General’s amiable Wife, who surpasses any Lady I have met with in the course of my Travels through the United States.”
They were too intimately attached, and she was too sensitive, for Nancy not to have had some idea of the Spanish connection, but it is doubtful that she understood its full complexity. To his dying day, he would publicly insist that every payment from New Orleans was a profit or insurance payment on his tobacco trade, and even to himself he never seemed to acknowledge what was involved. Yet Nancy’s need for little luxuries such as sugar and coffee, and his desire to see her in an elegant carriage, and their joint pleasure in parties and liberal hospitality, were inseparable from his need for Carondelet’s dollars.
NANCY’S ARRIVAL AT Fort Washington was followed barely a month later by the distinctly less welcome appearance of Wayne and a long convoy of boats carrying the Legion, now more than eleven hundred strong. The decision to ship his men down the Ohio was prompted by Wayne’s conviction that they were being corrupted by their proximity to the taverns and brothels of Pittsburgh—“that Gomorrah,” as he called it. A hint of the commander’s state of mind emerged when he landed at Cincinnati and, to Wilkinson’s relief, discovered it to be “filled with ardent poison & Caitiff wretches to dispose of it . . . a man possessed of the least tincture of morality must wish his stay here as short as possible.” The army was moved to a site between the river and a swamp that Wayne named Hobson’s Choice, implying that no alternative place could be found.
But Wayne faced more problems than creating an encampment in rough country. The most serious was the information from Philadelphia that a lack of recruits would limit the size of the Legion to three thousand men, and that to make up the numbers fifteen hundred Kentucky volunteers would have to be taken on. The least of his anxieties seemed to be the conduct of his second- in- command, which, Wayne assured Knox, “bespeaks the officer & merits my highest approbation.” Knox, however, was more cautious and felt it necessary to issue a thinly veiled warning to Wilkinson in May 1793: “I am persuaded your good sense as well as inclination will lead you to unite cordially with General Wayne, and promote a spirit of harmony throughout the whole corps.”