Reed himself, Pennsylvania’s chief executive, was targeted as a turncoat by Republicans, who alleged that contacts he had made with the British were preliminaries to his own switch of loyalties. In his new role of loyalty judge, Wilkinson drew up a flowery-worded “Address of Confidence” to Reed and cajoled his wide circle of military and fashionable friends to sign it. Although it did not silence the rumors, his action earned Reed’s gratitude.
This volatile environment gave birth to two astonishing developments. Congress at last yielded entirely to Washington’s demand for a professional army completely centralized in its structure, training, and supply. The states’ militia should be used simply “as light Troops to be scattered in the woods and plague rather than do serious injury to the Enemy,” he told Congress in September 1780. “The firmness requisite for the real business of fighting is only to be attained by a constant course of discipline and service.” In the last year of the war, General Greene’s southern army of Continentals and militia bore some resemblance to this model, but Washington’s vision of a fully professional force may ultimately have been beyond the resources of a near- bankrupt Congress.
Nevertheless, in the wake of Arnold’s treachery, the need to finance such an army gave rise to a still more surprising demand by the New York legislature in October 1780. It called for every state to be made to pay the requisition made upon it by Congress, and in the event of a default Congress should “Direct the Commander-in Chief . . . to march the Army . . . into such a state: and by a Military Force, compel it to furnish its deficiency.” This was the nightmare predicted by every opponent of a standing army, that it would be used by the government to coerce its own citizens. Yet so widespread was the panic that Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut adopted the same resolution in November.
In the event, no action was taken on their demand, and the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown a year later made further army reform irrelevant, but both initiatives threw long shadows down the years that followed. When peace came, no one was prepared to argue for more than the smallest possible military force to defend the United States.
ON MARCH 27, 1781, Wilkinson resigned as clothier general, citing with uncharacteristic honesty a lack of aptitude for the job. “I should be wanting in Personal Candour and in Public Justice,” he wrote in his letter of resgination, “if I did not profess that I find my Mercantile knowledge, on thorough examination, inadequate to the just Conduct of the Clothing Department, under the proposed establishment.” Behind this truth was another more compelling one. Washington’s criticism of Wilkinson’s incompetence had led Congress to cut his salary by half, and as Wilkinson belatedly recognized, he had no possibility of appealing against Washington’s judgment. Even to question it “would be esteemed a sort of impiety.” Still encumbered by loans taken out to pay for Trevose, he could not afford the loss of half his salary, and it was urgent to find some other way of earning a living.
In October 1781, Reed repaid a favor by appointing Wilkinson a general in the Pennsylvania militia and helping him win election to the Pennsylvania assembly representing Bucks County. Such influential positions should have been profitable, but in the wake of Cornwallis’s surrender on October 19, 1781, the wartime economy began winding down, and Wilkinson’s lack of “mercantile knowledge” was a handicap in making money in a falling market.
Through the remaining months of the war, he cobbled together earnings from Trevose with what he made from Maryland’s tobacco deals and uniforms, but the income was not enough to meet his needs. Shortly before Yorktown, his natural optimism abruptly gave way to deep gloom that expressed itself in forebodings about the war. Since General Nathanael Greene had won a series of victories in the early part of 1781, helping to drive Cornwallis back to the coast, there was little justification for his dark mood. “I think General Wilkinson too desponding,” Reed protested with a hint of exasperation. Yet, the very success of his old patron may have contributed to Wilkinson’s despondency.
By chance he had visited Greene in June 1780 at his then headquarters in Springfield, New Jersey, arriving as a British and Hessian column from Staten Island was advancing into the New Jersey hills to threaten the American position. Wilkinson at once led out a vigorous reconnaissance patrol that provided Greene with intelligence about enemy movements, and in the aftermath of the victorious skirmish that turned back the British force, the general wrote appreciatively to Clement Biddle, “General Wilkinson was with me the other day in the action of Springfield; and was very active in discovering the enemy’s motions. It is a pity so good an officer is lost to the service.” Whatever Wilkinson’s other shortcomings, none of his generals doubted his tactical sense and energy. At least part of the twenty- four-year-old’s dark mood must have sprung from the realization that he had thrown away a career for which he possessed a natural talent.
In the months following Yorktown, it became clear that the conflict was effectively over, and diplomatic contacts began to move toward peace negotiations. By the end of 1782, Wilkinson was by his own account without “cash or credit,” and, with the birth of his first child, John, faced the added expense of fatherhood. Ownership of Trevose had become a burden, but it created an ambition that never left him of making a fortune from land speculation. As he aged, his hunger for it grew larger until he dreamed of possessing an empire comprising much of Texas. The ambition gave shape to the rest of his career and to his treachery. And before the war was over, he took the first step to achieving it.
In the spring of 1783, he sold Trevose, and Nancy moved with one-year- old John, and his newborn brother, James, into her father’s house. By September 3, 1783, when the Treaty of Paris was signed, James Wilkinson had crossed the Appalachians to join the flood of Americans hoping to buy cheap land on the western frontier.
7
THE KENTUCKY PIONEER
KENTUCKY WAS DESTINED to be bought. So thought the first Euro pe ans who found a way through the mountains and were stunned by the natural wonderland on the other side. “The vallies are of the richest soil, equal to manure itself, impossible in appearance ever to wear out,” the Dutch-born, South Carolina–based explorer John William de Brahm reported in 1756. “This country seems longing for the hands of industry to receive its hidden treasures, which nature has been collecting and toiling since the beginning ready to deliver them up.” Watered by innumerable clear streams, forested with gigantic trees that three men with outstretched arms could not circle, its woodland provided a haven to “innumerable deer,” elk, and beaver, and the grasslands fed buffalo that arrived at salt licks in their thousands and stood belly deep in the blue grass “more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements,” according to Daniel Boone, “browzing on the leaves of the cane, cropping the herbage on those extensive plains.”
In 1775 Judge Richard Henderson of North Carolina gave voice to the inner dream that Kentucky inspired. “The country might invite a prince from his palace merely for the pleasure of contemplating its beauty and excellence,” he declared, “but only add the rapturous idea of property and what allurements can the world offer for the loss of so glorious a prospect?” Most of the land was owned and occupied by the Cherokees, but Henderson’s Transylvania Land Company had purchased twenty million acres— reduced to two hundred thousand acres by the Virginia assembly, which reserved to itself the right to buy land from Native Americans—and he was ready to offer the rapture of property to anyone determined enough to take a train of horses through the Cumberland Gap or ride a flatboat down the Ohio River. During the next eight years, while the war of independence was being fought, thirty thousand settlers heeded his advice and crossed the mountains to buy land in the west.