“In the first case . . . my intimacy with the inhabitants, their prejudices, habits and interests, would enable me to conciliate and attach all parties to our government; in the last case, my knowledge of every approach and every defense, and the firm adherents which I have within the place, might be of important avail in the attempt [to capture it].”
In fact, the general was already in contact with people in the city, including two old friends- turned-enemies, Daniel Clark and Thomas Power. The prospect of being ruled by France put them in the same camp as the general once more, and both had begun to supply him with information about French intentions and the city’s defenses. Despite lack of instructions from the War Department, Wilkinson concentrated close to five hundred men at Fort Adams ready for an assault on New Orleans.
The transfer of New Orleans from Spain’s fragile possession to France’s immense power was not an outcome that the United States could accept. “There is on the globe one single port, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy,” Jefferson instructed his minister to France, Robert Livingston. “It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce, and contain more than half of our inhabitants.” In February 1803 James Monroe was sent to join Livingston with the goal of purchasing the city from France.
Still kept out of the loop, General Wilkinson could reply only in the vaguest terms to officers who pestered him for information. “If Mr Monroe succeeds all will be well,” he told one young favorite, Captain Jacob Kingsbury, “but if he should fail, we shall have noise, bustle & Bloodshed. Keep your sword with a good Edge & be quiet.”
As Livingston and Monroe’s negotations with François Barbé- Marbois, Napoléon’s minister of finance, dragged on through the spring, Dearborn sent the army’s senior general to negotiate more Indian treaties, this time with Creek communities, to release land for the benefit of Georgia settlers. In 1802 and 1803, Wilkinson reckoned he covered more than sixteen thousand miles by land and sea in pursuit of unmartial duties. He took the opportunity to explore “every critical pass, every direct route & every devious way between the Mexican Gulph & the Tennessee river” so that American forces would have the opportunity to seize not just New Orleans but the Floridas as well. But his knowledge was never called upon.
In July 1803 a near- desperate Wilkinson was back in Fort Adams. In an anguished letter to Dearborn, he complained that although he had enough troops to seize the city at any time, he could make no detailed plans because he was still being kept in the dark about the government’s intentions. “If anything professional is to be done which may imply trust & hazard—I hope you may confide the execution to me,” he declared, “or give an order to someone to knock me on the head.”
Writing to Alexander Hamilton, Wilkinson revealed his growing impatience: “I have extended my capacities for utility but not my sphere of action & in the present moment my destination is extremely precarious. To divorce my sword is to rend a strong ligament of my affections & to wear it without active service is becoming disreputable.” His use of this allusive, overelaborate language, enabling him to hint at possibilities rather than reveal intentions, was a sure sign that he was looking for more rewarding opportunities than those allowed by Dearborn.
Given Ellicott’s warning, Dearborn’s desire to restrain his general’s room for maneuver was understandable, but it seriously underestimated his capacity for usefulness as well as resentment and intrigue. Hamilton, who understood him well, advised that where Wilkinson was concerned “to act towards him so as to convince him that he is not trusted . . . is the most effectual way that can be adopted to make him unfaithful.” In his memoirs, the general not only quoted that advice, but capitalized the words to give them extra emphasis.
Not until July 1803 did the news finally arrive in Washington of Livingston and Monroe’s agreement to purchase not just New Orleans but the entire vulnerable province of Louisiana that Miró, Carondelet, and Gayoso had struggled so hard to keep out of American hands. What precipitated the deal was the decimation of Leclerc’s army in Saint Domingue by disease and warfare. Once the dream of an American empire had gone, Napoléon abruptly cut his losses and, to finance his planned invasion of Britain, accepted Monroe and Livingston’s offer of fifteen million dollars for the 885,000 square miles of territory.
At once, Jefferson’s administration set about finding a suitable commissioner to take charge of the massive new province it had acquired. Unfortunately the ideal candidate, General Thomas Sumter of South Carolina, refused to leave the Senate, then the Marquis de Lafayette declined, as did James Monroe. Rumors that Spain was protesting the validity of the sale, and that France was having second thoughts, made any long delay dangerous.
In October, with time running out for the handover in December, Jefferson reluctantly selected as civil commissioner twenty- nine- year-old William C. Claiborne, governor of Mississippi Territory, and, as his military counterpart, forty-six- year-old Brigadier General James Wilkinson. Dearborn’s opinion was not recorded, but Wilkinson’s length of service was strictly limited. The moment the last fort in Louisiana was handed over, his power as commissioner would end.
NOTHING IN THE GENERAL’S BEHAVIOR could have aroused any doubt about his loyalty. Within weeks of receiving his orders and a copy of the Paris agreement, he had embarked a force of 450 regulars and 100 militia with all their equipment on a fleet of seventeen flatboats and two baggage barges at Fort Adams. To ensure a smooth handover, he privately visited New Orleans to make the necessary arrangements beforehand with Pierre de Laussat, the designated French governor of Louisiana. On December 10, after Claiborne had joined him from Natchez, Wilkinson sailed down to New Orleans and a week later pitched camp on the outskirts of the city.
There Wilkinson issued a grandiloquent but necessary reminder to the soldiers of the delicate nature of their mission, and the need for toleration of foreign customs: “We behold a polished people (strangers to our manners, our laws and our language) cast into our arms. Be it our pride and our glory to receive them into the great family of our happy country with cordial embraces.” On December 20, the two commissioners marched at the head of the U.S. troops along the levees on the riverfront, and into the huge central square, the Place d’Armes, in front of the City Hall of New Orleans.
In a bittersweet mood Laussat, who had received the keys of New Orleans from the Spanish only three weeks before, noted in his journal, “The day was beautiful and the temperature as balmy as a day in May. Lovely ladies and city dandies graced all the balconies on the Place d’Armes. The Spanish officers could be distinguished in the crowd by their plumage . . . The American troops appeared and, with drums beating, marched by platoons, and placed themselves on the river side of the square. Facing them, on the other side were the [French] militia.”
To his chagrin, Laussat now had to repeat the earlier ceremony in which he had formally received Louisiana from Spain’s two commissioners, the ancient Manuel de Salcedo—“an impotent old man in his dotage,” the forty- two-year- old Laussat noted—and the aristocratic Marqués de Casa Calvo, “a violent man who hated the French.” But this time Laussat had to give away a third of a continent. In the conference chamber, he greeted the two commissioners. Claiborne, Laussat wrote, was “tall and erect with an American complexion,” while Wilkinson was “short, also erect, of handsome though pompous mien.” Having proclaimed that he was “transferring the country to the United States,” Laussat presented the general with the keys to the city, tied with a tricolor ribbon; then all three signed the documents that officially conveyed ownership of Louisiana to the United States. Finally they went out on the balcony, where “the French colors were lowered and the American flag was raised,” and a salvo of cannon fire signaled that the United States had almost doubled in size.