Exactly six weeks later, Brigadier General James Wilkinson, commanding general of the U.S. army, and his country’s military commissioner for the province of Louisiana, had a private interview in New Orleans with the visiting Spanish governor of West Florida, Don Vizente Folch. He suggested that he should be paid twenty thousand dollars, the arrears on his pension as a Spanish agent. In return he promised to pass on information vital to Spain, including Jefferson’s plans regarding Spanish America. “I know,” he boasted, “what is concealed in the President’s heart.”
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AGENT 13 REBORN
NEW ORLEANS WAS WHERE JAMES WILKINSON had first transferred his loyalties to Spain. Two years later, it was where he had returned to negotiate his transition from trader to Spanish agent. But despite the precedents, it could hardly have been imagined that he would behave there in the same way three times in a row. So much had changed since the 1780s. Even before the purchase of Louisiana, the balance of power in North America had clearly shifted from Spain to the United States. The Spanish Conspiracy was a distant memory. Most important, Wilkinson himself was in command of the U.S. army, the great prize for which he had cut off his original connection with Spain.
Nor did his public behavior suggest any secret agenda. Seen through the jaundiced eyes of Pierre de Laussat, he appeared as a loud buffoon. In a report to Paris, the French commissioner compared the performance of both Wilkinson and Claiborne unfavorably to his own suave efficiency and rated them below even the disorganized but self-possessed Spaniards:
“It was hardly possible that the Government of the United States should have a worse beginning, and that it should have sent two men more deficient in the proper requisites to conciliate the hearts of the Louisianians. The first, with estimable qualities as a private man, has little intellect, a good deal of awkwardness, and is extremely [inadequate to] the position in which he has been placed. The second, who has been long known here in the most unfavorable manner, is a rattle- headed fellow, full of odd fantasies. He is frequently drunk, and has committed a hundred inconsistent and impertinent acts. Neither the one nor the other understands one word of French, or Spanish. They have, on all occasions, and without the slightest circumspection, shocked the habits, the prejudices and the natural dispositions of the inhabitants of this country.”
The sort of incident Laussat had in mind occurred at a public ball on January 22, 1804, attended by American and French officers as well as New Orleans high society. Wilkinson noticed among the dancers in a quadrille a French official who had just returned from Saint Domingue and so should have been in quarantine for yellow fever. He plunged into the dancers and marched him off the floor. The French officers began to protest. Wilkinson jumped up on a bench and, with Claiborne standing loyally beside him, delivered a bombastic lecture on social responsibility in bad French and his own elaborate English. The French began to jeer, and their response provoked the general to launch into “Hail, Columbia,” the national anthem of the time, accompanied by Claiborne and members of their staffs. When this failed to silence the protests, Wilkinson inexplicably, unless to annoy the French, who had spent ten years at war with the British, decided to sing “God Save the King,” to which the French responded stridently with “La Marseillaise” amid a mounting storm of shouts and whistling. At that point, with scuffles breaking out and pandemonium descending, Wilkinson and Claiborne prudently abandoned the war of songs and withdrew.
None of this suggested the anonymity and self-control expected of a secret agent, but Wilkinson’s bluster was always a good disguise to his shrewdness. Despite the explosive mixture of nationalities in the city, the confusion arising from three different governments holding power in as many weeks, and the presence of armed soldiers from three separate armies, New Orleans avoided disorder. “The Prefect of France and the Spanish troops are still in town, and the magazines and storehouses still in their possession,” Wilkinson complained to Dearborn almost three months after the transfer of power, “while we are obliged to pay rent for our own accommodation.” Despite provocations from Spanish militia “which a state of war alone would justify,” as one of Wilkinson’s officers put it, the army’s presence kept the peace until April, when both Spanish and French forces sailed for home.
In his arrogance, Laussat failed to see that at least part of the credit for this orderly transition was due to Wilkinson’s shrewd disposition of his troops across the city, and his very public tours of inspection to ensure their good behavior. The punishments inflicted after he discovered the guard in Fort St. Louis dead drunk on the very first night ensured that the offense was never repeated, or at least not found out, while he was there. “I apprehend no Danger,” the general wrote dramatically to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn after a night on patrol with his men in the streets, “but the horrors of a sinister attempt make it my duty to prevent one.” French residents complained of heavy-handed policing, but not of laxness.
Wilkinson’s very public commitment makes the decision to betray his country again still more mysterious. Had it been his intention to sabotage the American takeover, an incident could easily have been allowed to blow up. French resentment remained especially fierce, and as Claiborne reported, they “seem determined to sour the Inhabitants as much as possible with the American government.” Yet the general clearly did everything he could to prevent such an explosion from taking place.
One immediate motive in approaching the Spanish again was, as always, financial. His salary as general was now $225 a month, and on top of that he received generous expenses, and a special allowance of $8 a day while negotiating Indian treaties. Wilkinson estimated that altogether he received something close to $4,000 a year from the army. But tighter regulations and constant travel clearly reduced the scope for payoffs from contractors, and he had received nothing from the Spaniards since the notorious $9,640 had arrived covered in sugar and coffee. Meanwhile, he had one son at Princeton— Ensign James Biddle Wilkinson having followed his father into the army—and a wife whose nervousness grew more pronounced the longer he was away from home, and whose demands he could not deny.
Psychology must also have played its part. For two years Wilkinson had been sidelined by Henry Dearborn, behavior guaranteed to wound his vanity and trigger a vicious urge to retaliate. Furthermore, he was in his late forties, a midlife point when unsatisfied men are prone to dreams of sudden transformation from routine to excitement. Finally there was Mexico. Ever since Philip Nolan’s first report of the road to Santa Fe, it had occupied his mind, and the key to his serpentine activities lay in the extraordinary, meteoric career of the young Irishman.
BORN IN BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND, in 1771 and destined to be buried in Texas before his thirty-first birthday, Nolan had at the age of twenty exchanged the imaginative bookkeeping practiced in Wilkinson’s Lexington store and in his shipping agency in New Orleans for the more daring life of a horse trader, rounding up wild mustangs in Texas and Chihuahua for sale in Louisiana and Natchez. Such activities required a passport from the governor of each region. Wilkinson, Nolan’s mentor, persuaded Miró to grant him his first permit to import horses for the Louisiana militia, but Nolan’s happy relish for adventure made it easy for him to procure these valuable documents—“He is,” said Carondelet, “a charming young man whom I regard very highly,” and the governors of Texas and New Mexico agreed. Nor was his appeal limited to European Americans.