Frances Hunter
blog of the author To the Ends of the Earth
Frances Hunter's Journal
December 2005
December 21, 2005: Forged in Conspiracy, Part VIII
Writing about a Bad Leader
While the purpose of this "Forged in Conspiracy" series has been to share some of the interesting research that we used as the basis for the conspiracy swirling around Meriwether Lewis in our forthcoming novel, today I wanted to share a little about how that research helped us in our characterization of the villain, James Wilkinson.
As the previous entries have shown, Wilkinson had a shady and treacherous past stretching from his youth through his ascension as commanding general of the United States Army. Much of this past is brought out in the memory of William Clark, whose brother was destroyed by one of Wilkinson's many schemes.
But we didn't just want to refer to acts Wilkinson committed in the past. We needed some way to show in real time, concurrent with the events of the novel, what a skunk Wilkinson was.
Fortunately for us, history provided, and we didn't even have to take artistic license.
In the fall of 1809, at the same time as Meriwether Lewis entered upon his final, desperate journey, James Wilkinson was involved in a journey of his own. Wilkinson commanded the southern frontier from New Orleans, where he had recently moved his army from the city to a new camp site at Terre aux Boeufs (in modern-day St. Bernard Parish).
One of the great forgotten tragedies of American history began here. Wilkinson's troops got sick due to the foul sanitation, mosquitos, and rancid food at the camp, supplied by a corrupt supplier who was giving kickbacks to Wilkinson.
Under the orders of Secretary of War William Eustis, Wilkinson was ordered to move the army to a supposedly healthier site near Natchez, Mississippi. All 1500 men who were able to travel were crowded onto boats which became hell ships. Between the disgusting conditions at Terre aux Boeufs and the passage to Natchez, at least 500 and perhaps as many as 1000 died out of a total force of 2036 men.
In the novel as in real life, the death march of the army under Wilkinson is interwoven with the flight of Meriwether Lewis, enabling us to "show not tell" the story of Wilkinson's blundering and callousness.
An interesting history of the Army medical department contains some good details of the disaster.
I suppose this isn't a very "Christmas-y" post. Posting will resume on this site first week of January. Merry Christmas everyone!
December 19, 2005: Forged in Conspiracy, Part VII
The Burr Conspiracy
The most serious, or at least the most famous, of all the early American conspiracies came after the Louisiana Purchase, as conspirators turned their eyes southwest towards the barely-defended Spanish territories.
For the purposes of governance, President Jefferson split the enormous Louisiana Purchase into two districts: Orleans, which consisted of the port of New Orleans and surrounding territory; and Louisiana, which included everything else and was headquartered in St. Louis. Probably as a favor to vice-president Aaron Burr, Jefferson named General James Wilkinson as governor of the vast Louisiana territory. An excellent account of Wilkinson's time in St. Louis can be found in St. Louis: An Informal History of the City and its People, 1764-1865, by Charles van Ravenswaay.
In 1804, Burr fell from grace spectacularly when he killed former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Needless to say, he was not chosen again as Jefferson's running mate. Burr decided to travel west in search of new adventures.
As he had done earlier with George Rogers Clark, Wilkinson entered into a treasonous conspiracy with Aaron Burr. To what extent Burr originated the intrigue that followed and to what extent he was entrapped by Wilkinson is still pretty obscure. The best guess is that Burr and Wilkinson entered into a plan to seize Spanish territory in the area that later became Texas, with the aim of setting up an independent republic with Burr in charge. Burr himself later claimed that he simply wanted to set up a small utopian colony to live out his days in peace. In any case, he raised the money to acquire some land for a base of operations and gathered about 60 well-armed followers to head west.
As he had earlier with Clark, Wilkinson egged Burr on, then betrayed him. When Burr made his move towards Mexico, he expected Wilkinson to join him with army support. Instead, Wilkinson sent messages both to Jefferson and to the Mexican viceroy warning them of Burr's plans. He then took his troops to New Orleans and spread panic, warning that the banks were about to be robbed and that insurrection was imminent. Burr was arrested and tried near Natchez. No evidence was presented, and his popularity soared with his acquital.
Jefferson was not about to let the matter drop. He had Burr pursued, arrested, and brought back to Washington on a federal treason charge. Wilkinson gave dramatic testimony against Burr in a spectacular trial. However, on cross examinination, Wilkinson repeatedly had to take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.
Burr was acquitted of treason, though he was through politically (which was perhaps Jefferson's goal in holding the trial in the first place). Meriwether Lewis, just back from the Expedition, attended the trial as Jefferson's observer. Another attendee was Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee militia general and friend of Burr's who laid the blame for the debacle at Wilkinson's feet. He lambasted Wilkinson as a "double traitor," and said, "Pity the sword that dangles from his felon's belt, for it is doubtless of honest steel."
After his brush with perjury, Wilkinson underwent a military court of inquiry, but managed to escape by lying through his teeth about his involvement with Burr. A House investigation came close to uncovering Wilkinson's treasonous involvement with the Spanish, but petered out for political reasons before anything stuck to the general.
In the wake of all the scandal, Jefferson stripped Wilkinson of the Louisiana governorship but allowed him to remain as army commander on the southern frontier. Jefferson's protege, the newly-minted hero Meriwether Lewis, was made governor in Wilkinson's place. It is upon this plot point that the opening of our novel turns.
December 15, 2005: Forged in Conspiracy, Part VI
The Lewis & Clark Expedition
The Louisiana Purchase ended the quest for New Orleans and added much more territory to the United States than early American conspirators could have ever dreamed. But it didn't put an end to the scheming for more Spanish territory in North America.
One of the premier schemers, General James Wilkinson, was present at the transfer ceremony of Louisiana at the Cabildo in New Orleans in December 1803, and President Jefferson appointed Wilkinson as one of the commissioners of the new territory. (In March, Meriwether Lewis, just weeks away from departing on his historic expedition, represented Jefferson's government at the ceremony that took place in St. Louis.)
Wilkinson, who had been a spy in the pay of the Spanish for more than ten years, saw no reason not to continue to act as an agent for Spain in his new capacity. At this time, the Spanish were actually several years in arrears to Wilkinson for services rendered and owed him a large amount of money. In exchange for a payment of $12,000, Wilkinson wrote a document entitled "Reflections," in which he offered advice for the Spanish about holding on to their crumbling North American empire.
In this document, Wilkinson betrayed the route of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, suggesting that the Spanish hunt down and, if necessary, kill Lewis and Clark. He also suggested that the Spanish capture the pathfinder Daniel Boone, by then a 70-year-old man living in Missouri, and drive him back east of the Mississippi.
Isaac Joslin Cox, who published the best scholarship on this back in the nineteen-teens, said it best: “It is difficult to find language properly to characterize this proposal.”
The subject of Lewis and Clark and the Spanish has been too little explored in recent times, but those who want to learn more can now read Cox's great old articles in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly online. All of these articles are fascinating!
The
Louisiana-Texas Frontier, Part 1 (The Franco-Spanish Regime)
The
Louisiana-Texas Frontier, Part 2 (The American Occupation of the Louisiana-Texas
Frontier - this is the one that tells about Wilkinson's betrayal of Lewis
and Clark)
The
Louisiana-Texas Frontier, Part 3 (The American Occupation of the Louisiana-Texas
Frontier, continued)
December 13, 2005: Forged in Conspiracy, Part V
The Louisiana Purchase
Around 1800, the master French diplomat Talleyrand became concerned about Spain's weakness in North America. It was easy to see that the Americans were a rising people and would eventually overrun the Spanish territory, with or without their government's consent. Talleyrand negotiated the cession of Louisiana back to France, though for the most part it continued to be administered by Spanish officials.
Talleyrand and his boss, Napoleon, had big dreams for reestablishing a true French colonial presence in Louisiana. However, their plans collapsed in the face of an unexpectedly bloody and costly uprising in Santo Domingo (Haiti). To the surprise of almost everyone, including the Americans, Napoleon unloaded Louisiana at a bargain price.
The Louisiana Purchase closed a chapter in the history of frontier conspiracy in America. No longer did frontiersmen scheme about seizing New Orleans and securing American access to the Mississippi. But neither did they stop scheming. Instead, they turned their eyes west.
An excellent book about the diplomacy of the Louisiana Purchase is A Wilderness So Immense, by Jon Kukla.
December 6, 2005: 80 Million Eyes
Just finished reading 80 Million Eyes (1966), one of the great entries in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series. This installment featured two cases. Carella and Meyer investigate the murder on live television of a popular comic (clearly based on Jackie Gleason). At the same time, Bert Kling is assigned to protect a young woman being harassed by a stalker.
It's hard to overstate how enjoyable this series of books is. I was really sad when Ed McBain died of cancer this past summer. I've read many of his books, but I always had the feeling that I would never catch up with McBain; there would always be more books to read. He was incredibly prolific, usually publishing at least one 87th Precinct novel a year along with other works such as screenplays and literary novels under his other name, Evan Hunter.
It's a lonely feeling to know that McBain's gritty, wry, and perceptive voice has been silenced. I think the thousands of pages he wrote about the "boys of the 87th" will be read and remembered long after the work of many of his contemporaries has been consigned to pulp.
They put it all together afterward in the squadroom. They left the three suspects in the lieutenant's office with a patrolman watching over them and sat around Carella's desk and compared their answers. They were not particularly pleased with the results, but neither were they surprised by them. They had all been cops for a good many years and nothing human beings perpetrated against each other ever surprised them. They were perhaps a little saddened each and every time, but never surprised.
December 1, 2005: Forged in Conspiracy, Part IV
James Wilkinson and Meriwether Lewis
As our novel opens, Meriwether Lewis, then governor of the Louisiana Territory, is invited to a secret meeting by James Wilkinson, the treasonous general who has been the subject of the last several posts. Although this 1809 meeting between Lewis and Wilkinson is fictional speculation, the two men would have been well-acquainted.
Lewis and Wilkinson may have crossed paths as early as 1795, when Lewis went to the Ohio country as a very junior officer. By 1796, Lewis was stationed at Chickasaw Bluffs (present-day Memphis). Somehow, Lewis, then 22 years old, was identified by Wilkinson as siding with Andrew Ellicott, the U.S. border commissioner who vainly tried to warn President Washington about Wilkinson's treachery. In his campaign to destroy Ellicott, Wilkinson cast a wide net, writing that young Lewis headed "a select corps of incomparable rascals."
(Note: This is according to the Wilkinson biography Tarnished Warrior by James Ripley Jacobs; there's nothing about this in Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage. Ambrose places Lewis around Detroit and Pittsburgh at this time and does not mention anything about Lewis spending time at Chickasaw Bluffs. Both Jacobs and Ambrose were meticulous historians, so some more digging into the primary sources would be needed to straighten out this discrepancy.
As another aside, Andrew Ellicott was an astronomer who would later tutor Lewis in celestial observations for the Lewis & Clark Expedition. The link above is a great biography of Ellicott and details his interesting scientific and political career as well as how his clash with Wilkinson dogged him his entire life.)
In 1801, Thomas Jefferson became president and Meriwether Lewis was detached from the army to become Jefferson's executive secretary. Lewis did far more than run errands and take down letters for Jefferson. Indeed, one of his first duties in this era of extreme partisanship was to identify for Jefferson those officers with Federalist leanings. To his credit, Jefferson was interested in the officers' competence as well as their politics; he purged some but not all of the Federalists from the Army. Wilkinson, ever a survivor, began a zealous effort to prove himself a good Republican.
For reasons that even now remain cloudy to history, Jefferson found Wilkinson useful. He assigned Wilkinson to build a real road along the Natchez Trace, the infamously dangerous land route between New Orleans and Nashville. Thus it was Wilkinson who began the effort to civilize the road along which Meriwether Lewis would later die. The Trace was mapped and some improvements made, though it remained a scary place known to travelers as "The Devil's Backbone."
A more comical way in which Wilkinson attempted to show his devotion to Jeffersonian principles was his passion for enforcing the new Army edict requiring short haircuts for officers and men. Federalists in the Army continued to wear their hair long as a way of defying Jefferson. Wilkinson ordered the arrest and trial of Colonel Thomas Butler, an ardent Federalist who could afford to be defiant; he was dying of cancer. Before he died, Butler proclaimed the wish that his family bore a hole in his coffin so his queue could hang through it, and "the damned rascal [Wilkinson] see that, even when dead, I refuse to obey his orders."
The silly season came in an end in 1802-03. The Spanish once more suspended all American trading rights at New Orleans, bringing the two countries to the brink of war. Events moved in dizzying succession, with France acquiring the Louisiana Territory back from Spain and then just as quickly selling it to the United States. The Louisiana Purchase would change everything on the frontier and present opportunities ripe for the taking by ambitious men.