That dramatic change owed nothing to the efforts of the U.S. army under its commander in chief, but much to Andrew Ellicott’s success in guiding American loyalties toward independence in the face of Gayoso’s refusal to implement the treaty. When he saw the Spanish troops begin to evacuate the Natchez fort in February 1798, Ellicott wrote in understandable triumph to his wife, Sally, “My Love,—I have at length worried the Spaniards out.” By the time Wilkinson made his late arrival, Winthrop Sargent, former secretary of the Northwest Territory, had been installed as governor of Natchez, and Ellicott was deep in the wilderness east of the Mississippi cutting a trail through the matted undergrowth along the line of the thirty-first parallel with a team of American and Spanish astronomers, surveyors, and axmen.
In October, the general visited the two boundary commissioners, Ellicott and Spain’s Esteban Minor, in their camp. His motives caused deep suspicion on both sides. Ostensibly the purpose was to join Sargent and Ellicott in a conference to choose who should be involved in the government of the future Mississippi Territory. The discussions were dominated by Wilkinson, partly because Sargent was ill, but mostly because Ellicott felt himself to be under an obligation to the general.
In steamy heat and attacked by clouds of gnats and mosquitoes, the scientist’s unyielding determination to make exact astronomical measurements had driven the leading surveyor, Thomas Freeman, and the head of the military detachment, Lieutenant John McLary, to outright mutiny. As the U.S. boundary commissioner, Ellicott had the authority to suspend Freeman, but to deal with McLary, a military appointee, he needed Wilkinson’s intervention. Before the meeting at the camp, Ellicott asked the general for help and received a heartwarming reply: “My friend, you are warranted in drawing upon my confidence and my friendship at your discretion . . . Your refractory subaltern shall be relieved and his successor shall be taught how to respect a national Minister.”
As he later admitted, Ellicott had already begun to discount the importance of the information he had sent Pickering, and it was certainly outweighed by the value of such prompt assistance. At the meeting, he supported Wilkinson in the appointment of judges and other federal officials. He also gladly promised to comply with the general’s private request for sketch maps of the terrain that would show “the interesting Roads, and practicable points of approach from below with such remarks on the face of the country as may assist a military man in his conceptions and intelligence of the theatre before him.” Then, freed of his two troublemakers, Ellicott returned to his scientific odyssey through the unmapped wilderness.
At the very end of October, Wilkinson spent several days in discussions at Loftus Heights with Daniel Clark Jr., who had traveled up from New Orleans to see him. On Ellicott’s recommendation, Clark had been appointed U.S. consul in New Orleans. When the evacuation of Natchez took place, Clark formally applied to become a citizen of the United States. Less formally, he developed a plan with his uncle for his future country to seize New Orleans by force without further delay. They feared that the power of the gigantic French armies terrorizing Europe would be used to force its frail ally to hand over New Orleans and all Louisiana. Clark’s journey to see Wilkinson was undertaken to persuade him join in a preemptive strike before the formidable French took control.
Wilkinson pretended to be enthusiastic about the plan for seizing New Orleans but claimed that the government’s policy of avoiding war with Spain prevented him from taking any action. “I would to heaven I could procure an order for the operation you wish,” he assured Clark senior in a letter from Fort Adams. “I would hazard my fame and fortune without much hesitation to precipitate an event which is to happen.” In reality, he could not afford to risk Gayoso’s enmity, and there was never the slightest chance that he would undertake any action against Spanish forces.
Suspicious about Wilkinson’s real motives, Clark may have asked whether the general was still being paid by Gayoso, because it is equally clear that Wilkinson informed Clark, truthfully, that since the western settlers had achieved their goal with the opening of the Mississippi, the Spanish Conspiracy was at an end. From Fort Adams, Clark wrote his uncle that he believed this “assurance that the disgraceful connexion should be broken off.”
On November 4, the young man left the fort having failed to achieve his object. The meeting might have been utterly inconsequential, except that out of it grew a campaign to expose Wilkinson that proved so damaging, his past as a paid agent of Spain came in the end to haunt him like Banquo’s ghost.
THE FIRST STEP WAS TAKEN, inadvertently, by the guileless Andrew Ellicott. On November 8, Ellicott reached Darling’s Creek, a tributary of the Pearl River, and was preparing a map of the area that Wilkinson had requested. Then, as he put it in his journal, “by a very extraordinary accident, a letter from the Governor General [Gayoso] on its way to a confidential officer in the Spanish service [Power] fell into my hands for a few hours.” In fact what he had was Power’s copy of the letter. Ellicott’s refusal to explain how it came into his hands suggests it was stolen and had to be returned before the loss was discovered. Only Clark could have engineered the theft of the letter, and its swift conveyance to Ellicott. His motives can be deduced from its contents.
Gayoso’s letter was written in response to the news of Wilkinson’s visit to the commissioners’ camp. This, the governor suggested, had to be seen in relation to the Spanish Conspiracy, and the fears of those involved that their participation might be exposed by publication of their letters. “I wonder you could not see the design of General Wilkinson’s visit to Mr Ellicott’s and Mr Minor’s camp,” Gayoso explained to Power. “It was to fall upon some measures to obtain his papers. They are all safe and never will be made use of against him if he conducts himself with propriety. In fact the originals are at the court [in Madrid], the copies only are here.”
To Clark, the most important item was the evidence of blackmail— it explained Wilkinson’s refusal to participate in his projected attack on New Orleans— but the implications were different for Ellicott. He saw in the letter “unequivocal proof” of the conspiracy, and as he later explained, this document more than any other evidence convinced him that Wilkinson must have been involved in a plot “calculated to injure the United States.” He promptly sent Pickering another long and deeply ciphered dispatch with this fresh indication of the general’s treachery. Yet even then, he felt compelled to discover whether there might not be some other, more innocent explanation.
With the folly of the truly innocent, he wrote Wilkinson on December 16, 1798, “I have seen a letter of Mr. Power’s, in his own hand writing, dated the 23d ultimo, in which your name is mentioned in a manner, that astonished me; I dare not commit any part of it to paper, but if I should ever have the pleasure of another interview with you, I will communicate the substance of it under the injunction of secresy. If the design of it, has been to injure you in my opinion, it has failed in its effect, for in the most material point I am confident it is false.”
However friendly the tone of the Quaker’s letter, the general could not afford to let someone with Ellicott’s moral authority possess such damning knowledge. Since denial was impossible, Wilkinson set about destroying Ellicott’s reputation. From friends in Natchez, the astronomer learned that Wilkinson and Thomas Freeman had become companions and were intent on smearing his name. The least harmful allegation they circulated was that he had been in the pay of Spain, but what almost broke Ellicott’s heart was the story that he and his son, Andy, a surveyor on the boundary-marking team, had, as Freeman put it, “a beastly, criminal, and disgraceful intercourse” with their washerwoman, Betsy. “It was said, and generally believed,” Freeman declared, “that that extraordinary trio, father, son, and washerwoman, slept in the same bed, at the same time—I did not see, but I believed it. I was even pressed myself by the old sinner, Ellicott, to take part of his bed with his washerwoman and himself, for the night.”