mail: Bill Thayer

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The basic facts of General Wilkinson's life are fairly straightforward: poor boy born in 1757 on the East Coast, enlists in the rag-tag American revolutionary army and becomes a general at age 21. Finds Kentucky more to his liking, fights to get his new home a square deal, negotiating with Americans who controlled the influx of immigrants and with Spaniards who controlled the mouth of the Mississippi and thus the exports and economic life of the territory. Like Daniel Boone, a fellow Kentuckian originally from eastern Pennsylvania, he moves west again at the end of his life: Texas and more negotiating with Spaniards; dies in 1825 in Mexico City, where he is buried.

It is, however, the interpretation put on this life that divided his contemporaries; and continues now to divide historians, even more fiercely if that were possible. Was he involved in the so‑called Conway Cabal which sought to replace Washington by Gates as commander-in‑chief during the Revolutionary War? Did he sell himself to the Spanish, and was he their agent in any modern sense? Did he conspire with Aaron Burr to carve out a fief for him in the western territories of the fledgling United States?

Everyone agrees that his genius lay in plotting and dissimulation; the question is whether the man was a traitor to that new American republic. Details are very hard to come by as well as contradictory, and the cast of characters arrayed against Wilkinson are themselves an unsavory lot. My edition (1975) of the Encyclopedia Britannica calls him a double agent: it's a tempting solution, and certainly gives the feel of his life and that of those with whom he dealt.

The most puzzling thing by far is that a man later called by a historian "the most consummate artist of treason that the nation ever possessed" should have retained the unwavering support of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and should have held a series of prestigious posts in the government of the United States, with correspondingly heavy responsibilities, including that of Commander of the Army and Governor of the Louisiana Territory; and that, though tried in court several times, he was always completely cleared: this in the face of a very public, vociferous opposition with no shortage of people to accuse him of various crimes.

Here then are two basic contrasting views, for the reader to judge:

I'll very likely be adding a number of more specific items as I go; here for now is what the general was up to in the last years of his life: