ON SEPTEMBER 19, 1787, James Wilkinson left New Orleans by ship bound for Charleston, South Carolina. Miró and Navarro reported that before sailing he had set up “one of the most complex ciphers to give us the news which this delicate subject may call forth.” Although often taken to be suspicious in itself, the use of a cipher was common in an era when letters were frequently opened by inquisitive postmasters, political opponents, and commercial competitors. What made Wilkinson’s ciphering exceptional was that he took to its use so readily. Whole swaths of his massive correspondence—a single communication might be thirty pages long— would eventually consist of numbers, symbols, or seemingly randomly selected letters. He expected congressional allies and friends such as Aaron Burr to decipher these, as well as his Spanish handlers.
Since he wrote in English, his reports not only had to be transcribed, but translated into Spanish. Replies went through the same process in reverse.
Miró never doubted that Wilkinson was worth the trouble. The Spanish cipher, using as its key an English- Spanish dictionary, was known within Spain’s colonial service as Number 13. Over time, and to preserve his anonymity, Miró and Navarro came to ascribe the name to Wilkinson himself, Agent 13. Eventually he insisted on being known by that pseudonym alone.
Miró and Navarro’s satisfaction in the outcome of that climactic summer was reflected in their recommendation to Madrid that as well as his commercial monopoly the American brigadier “be rewarded generously for his services if he succeeds in the first and principal object [Kentucky’s admission into the Spanish empire] or brings all his influence to bear in the accomplishment of the second [bringing American settlers to Louisiana].” They had exceeded their authority by allowing him to break the ban on American traders using the Mississippi, but promised that the value of imported goods would be capped at about thirty-five thousand dollars, and that the money would remain in New Orleans until Madrid had given its approval. From their point of view, it represented an important first step toward free trade. For Wilkinson, the move possessed far greater significance.
Up to this point, his betrayals had been small and personal. The agreement with Miró and Navarro had a different quality. It was the first tentative step toward leading a double life.
NOT UNTIL FEBRUARY 1788 did Wilkinson get home, and his delay in completing the last part of his journey after so long away almost broke Nancy’s nerves. “I have look’d for my Wilkinson this several Months with the utmost impatience, & now know not where he is,” she wrote her father. “The last letter I had from my Belov’d Wilkinson was dated at Richmond.
In that he assures me he will be Home by the 15th or 20th of Jan., & now it is the middle of Feb. I am sorry to express the feelings of my Heart so much— but indeed I am too wretched at the Long Absence of a dear Husband to feign a composure I do not feel at Present. I am almost distracted.”
Their son Joseph had been born in December 1785, her third child in three years. To add to the pressure of looking after three boys under the age of seven, just before her husband left for New Orleans, he had moved the family from the relative comfort of the frame house in Lexington that was also the store and taken them to land he owned in the wilderness of Frankfort. Although strategically placed near the center of the state, on the Kentucky River and at the edge of the bluegrass prairie, the isolated location had nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the empty, rolling landscape, except that in October 1786 the Virginia assembly had given Wilkinson permission to lay out a town on his property and operate a ferry across the river. To attract more inhabitants, he had a large, two- story house built in Frankfort and went to live there with his family.
While he was in New Orleans, however, Nancy was effectively marooned with her three small children, deprived of company and the comforts that were a necessity to her. Her eighty-one-year- old father sent her blankets and a barrel of sugar, whose sweetness she and the children adored, but she also needed new shoes for them and herself, scrubbing brushes, brooms, china cups, two hundred black sewing pins, and “a Pattern of a Black Sattin Cloak as I must make me one & wish to have it fashionable & let me know how they trim them [back in Philadelphia].” Most of all she yearned for contact with people who loved her, with her family—“It is impossible to say how much good perusing thy dear letter does me,” she ended one letter to her father—and with her absent husband.
Her emotional hunger matched his, and in the absence of Wilkinson’s letters to her, it must be presumed that this neediness was important to the warmth of their marriage. They were like each other, too, in the delight they took in clothes and luxuries, and in their lively talk and sociability. Usually their homes were filled with friends, and when Wilkinson had a regular income, the parties she gave were locally famous—and in the sparse society of the frontier that counted for much. But neither possessed the sort of practical skills to make the most of their demanding environment and between them were unable to cook, preserve, make do, add accounts, or save. Thus shortage of money to satisfy their wants constantly drove Wilkinson to ever more dubious ways of making it.
HIS GROWING POLITICAL STATUS had delayed his return to Frankfort. In his absence, the convention in Philadelphia had agreed on a constitution for a new federal government that the states now had to ratify. In Virginia, the outcome was close enough to make the votes of western settlers vital, and from Charleston, where he landed, through Philadelphia, Wilkinson’s views were sought and listened to by politicians at every level. Even Washington showed himself ready to set aside memories of Wilkinson’s behavior as clothier general and wrote expressing regret that “your business was so pressing as to deprive me of the pleasure of seeing you at this place.”
Back in Kentucky, his daring voyage and successful commercial arrangement with New Orleans marked him as a hero. Within weeks of his return, he had assembled a fleet of twenty- five large flatboats to take unprecedented quantities of tobacco, flour, and ham down the Mississippi. That summer, tobacco worth $2 a hundredweight in Kentucky sold for $9.50 in New Orleans; flour went for $7 a barrel, three times the price in Kentucky. Because the demand from New Orleans pushed up prices for those products across Kentucky, all growers benefited, small farmers and large- plantation owners alike.
The fleet was sent away under the direction of Wilkinson’s partner in the Lexington store, Isaac Dunn, and a young, high- spirited assistant, Philip Nolan. They traveled with letters of recommendation to Miró whose affectionate tone— Miró was “my dear friend” and “the friend of my bosom”— suggests that Wilkinson felt, or pretended to feel, the sort of affection that he had lavished on Gates. The salutation of a letter sent to Miró in February 1789 echoed the warmest of those he addressed to his generaclass="underline" “My much esteemed and honored friend, having written to you on the 12th instant, with all the formality and respect due to the Governor of Louisiana as the representative of his Sovereign, I will now address the man I love and the friend I can trust, without ceremony or reserve.”
With the seventeen-year-old Nolan, who worked as a bookkeeper in the Lexington store, the roles were reversed. Wilkinson was the patron, and the object of the younger man’s devotion. Indeed, Nolan must have reminded Wilkinson of himself at the same age—he commended the youth to Miró as “a child of my own raising”— although, as events were to prove, Nolan would turn out even wilder, more carefree, and less moral than his mentor.
That spring of 1788 New Orleans suffered the worst disaster in its history when fire swept across the city, destroying almost nine hundred buildings, and transforming three quarters of the city “into an arid and horrible desert,” as Miró’s official report put it. But a measure of his and Navarro’s efficiency was that they immediately provided public funds, organized building materials, and offered tax breaks to owners who rebuilt, so that by June when the Kentucky goods arrived, the vigorous rebirth of the city was under way. Navarro had retired in May, leaving the double burden of finance and government on Miró’s shoulders. Yet he seemed to thrive under the pressure, and Madrid rewarded him with promotion to the rank of brigadier “in testimony of the Royal satisfaction in his zeal.”