It was useless for Wilkinson to explain that pigtails were as out-of- date as knee breeches, and that short hair was “recommended by the ablest generals of the day,” meaning the crop-haired Napoléon Bonaparte. Despite being twice court-martialed, Butler refused to accept that the general had the authority to order a haircut. Gradually Butler’s queue became the rallying point for conservatives opposed to Jefferson’s reforms. Bystanders such as Andrew Jackson condemned Wilkinson’s order as “despotic,” others called him a “detestable persecutor,” and, most woundingly, “a time-serving, superannuated coxcomb, the fawning flatterer of Adams and Jefferson, a perfect Vicar of Bray”— a reference to the eighteenth-century satire on an English clergyman whose political sympathies changed from Whig to Tory and back according to the views of each new monarch on the throne.
The fury that the mere cutting of a pigtail aroused explains why Thomas Jefferson needed Wilkinson. Had the general thrown his weight against the Republican reforms of the army, the Federalist backlash, inside its ranks and among former officers, would have had a leader, and as Adams had recognized earlier, a disaffected army could create a constitutional crisis with unpredictable consequences. Wilkinson’s switch of allegiance was therefore crucial, as the barrage of attacks on him made clear. According to the Federalist senator and former soldier William North, the general was the only senior officer “friendly to the politics of the now reigning party.” Without him, the ten-year-old federal government, so easily defied by lawbreakers such as William Blount, might not be able to impose its will on a determined army.
The lesson of France was fresh in the mind of every Republican: on November 9, 1799, the French military, led by General Napoléon Bonaparte, had overthrown the legitimate government, the Directory, despite the country’s constitution having been approved by more than a million voters. Even with Wilkinson’s support, Elbridge Gerry still felt bound to warn the president in May 1801 that forts and arsenals should be “placed under the protection of faithful officers and corps,” meaning Republicans, to prevent “their seizure or destruction . . . by a desperate faction.”
While Wilkinson was expected to hold the existing army in check, Jefferson and Dearborn instituted the decisive reform that was to shape its future by creating a military academy at West Point. Although set up specifically to train artillery and engineer officers, it, too, was expected to tilt the army away from its old Federalist roots. One of its first cadets, Joseph Swift, later a commandant of the academy himself, remembered being interviewed by Jefferson, who asked, “ ‘To which of the political creeds do you adhere?’ My reply was that as yet I had done no political act, but that my family were Federalists. Mr Jefferson rejoined, ‘There are many men of high talent and integrity in that party, but it is not the rising party.’ ” The hint, repeated by Dearborn, convinced Swift to keep his opinions to himself. In the long term, however, West Point performed its function, not by fostering Republicanism but by encouraging a professional ethic that displaced political loyalties.
By making Jefferson’s “chaste reformation” possible, Wilkinson lost popularity, but preserved an important constitutional principle. He had acquiesced in the axing of some of his closest military friends— only Major Thomas Cushing, marked down as “violently opposed to the administration,” survived—and thereby incurred the hatred of Federalists. But on a larger canvas, what mattered was that he had defended the fundamental basis of any democracy’s relationship with the army, that the military must always be at the service of the civil power. Jefferson’s appreciation of that important service provides the best explanation for his subsequent dealings with the general.
WITHIN THE WAR DEPARTMENT, however, Wilkinson continued to be regarded with suspicion. During the Saratoga campaign, Henry Dearborn was one of those who regarded Wilkinson as a turncoat for betraying Benedict Arnold and, more openly than any other secretary of war, set out to restrict Wilkinson’s capacity for doing mischief. Administratively, functions concerning pay and equipment once performed by military officers, who might be beholden to the commanding general, were transferred to civilian staff answerable to the war secretary. The general’s direct command over operational duties now had to be mediated through three colonels appointed to command the three regiments that constituted the fighting forces of the army. West Point was put under the direct control of the war secretary. Above all, the whole thrust of Jefferson’s famous program of “frugal government” hobbled any scope for maneuver by leaving troops perpetually short of uniforms, ammunition, and transport. As though to underline the weakness of the commander in chief, Dearborn’s directives ensured that from the summer of 1801 Wilkinson spent most of the next eighteen months away from headquarters in Pittsburgh where his family lived. Instead, he was required to supervise the construction of a road linking Lakes Erie and Ontario on the northern frontier, then to negotiate a series of land treaties with Choctaw and Cherokee Indians so that settlers could move into western Tennessee and the Mississippi Territory.
Depressed by his lack of prospects, Wilkinson attempted unsuccessfully to secure the governorship of the Mississippi Territory following Winthrop Sargent’s dismissal. When Jefferson refused on the grounds that a general could not be a chief executive—“no military man should be so placed as to have no civil superior”—he then applied to be made surveyor general, only to be frozen out by Dearborn’s bleak mistrust.
After six months in the wilderness “under extreme ill health, during an inclement season,” Wilkinson passed his first night under a solid roof in Fort Adams on January 27, 1803. There he found the United States facing an international crisis over the long-settled question of navigation rights on the Mississippi. The emergency was precipitated by Juan Morales, acting intendant of Louisiana, who in October 1802 aribitrarily closed the depot at New Orleans to American goods. This precipitate move, interrupting trade worth almost two million dollars a year, was widely thought to be an aberration attributable to his interfering character.
In reality Morales’s orders came directly from King Carlos IV. Their purpose was to create an opening for French traders and represented the first public evidence of the secret treaty by which Spain had ceded Louisiana to France. When the treaty was signed in 1800, Talleyrand promised that French power would transform Louisiana into a “wall of brass” preventing further American expansion, and Napoléon gave an explicit assurance that the former French colony would never be transferred. A French army under General Charles Leclerc presently engaged in restoring order in Saint Domingue, present-day Haiti, was expected to land at the end of the year to take possession of the colony. His arrival would create an immediate French empire stretching from Guadeloupe in the West Indies to the Canadian border, with the French-dominated province of Quebec just beyond.
To Wilkinson’s frustration, even in this extreme situation he was given no orders to prepare the army for action. Lacking any direct information on the government’s intentions, he wrote Dearborn urging the need for the United States to move first to “get possession of New Orleans by treaty or by arms” before Leclerc arrived. In either event, he pleaded to be involved: