Again the royal council failed to provide a speedy response. To its members, it must have seemed clear that the bribery proposal was designed for Wilkinson’s own benefit, an inference reinforced by his request for a loan of seven thousand dollars. But as a soldier, Miró would have understood the significance of Wilkinson’s request for a Spanish commission. Armies required oaths of loyalty. There were no gray areas about service in a foreign force. It was not like politics. His friend had crossed a line. He was prepared for treachery.
James Wilkinson’s long absence in New Orleans left Nancy distraught once more. “My anxiety about him is so great that I scarce have Composure enough to write,” she told her elderly father that fall, “not a foot steps quick into the House but agitates me, his Continual absence keeps my Mind on the rack.” In 1788 the family had moved from the wilderness back to the comparative civilization of Lexington, whose population was 834 in the 1790 census. “I like living in Lexington far better than in the Country,” she wrote soon after the move. “The Society is much better.” Being close to the store made it easier to receive the bags of tea, coffee, and sugar that were sent from Philadelphia—“I really think I could do better without my dinner than my Tea & Coffee,” she declared—and goods such as earthenware cups and saucers could be bought to replace all the ones the family broke, although she still had to ask her father to send the delicate chinaware that she preferred.
Yet the taste of these comforts only made her hungrier to see her family in Pennsylvania again. “I can’t help wishing more and more every day to Visit you, & my dear children seem to join me most ardently in my wish.” Loyal to her husband, she did not allow herself to write of her deepest feelings about life on the frontier, but her children became her mouthpiece. In revealing asides, she wrote of her eldest son, John, exclaiming that “if he ever gets out of Kentucky he never will return if he can prevent it,” and of two- year- old Joseph crying bitterly for the grandfather he had never seen.
Her health remained delicate. A baby had been stillborn in early 1789 while Wilkinson was absent in Frankfort loading tobacco in the boats, and Nancy was slow to recover. A doctor had suggested that the fresher river air by the Ohio might do her good, and just before he departed for New Orleans, Wilkinson bought a half- acre lot in Louisville from an unreliable French- born speculator named Michael La Cassagne. Louisville was only a quarter of the size of Lexington, but from Nancy’s point of view it had the advantage of being on the Ohio, the main line of communication with the east. But like her hopes of seeing her family back in Philadelphia, the move would happen only if they had the money. In September 1789 when she began to expect her husband back, she wrote optimistically, “I think it Probable we shall spend Part of this Winter at the falls [Louisville], however it will depend greatly on My Jimmy’s Business.”
When Wilkinson returned at the end of October, they did indeed move to Louisville, but not because his business was thriving. Much of his most valuable real estate was put up for sale, “a valuable tract of land of 10,000 acres, together or in small parcels,” along with the livestock he kept on it, and “several houses and lots in this town [Lexington],” including the store. It was not quite a fire sale, but all of it was “to be sold for cash or exchanged for merchandise” as soon as possible.
10
ENSHACKLED BY DEBT
JAMES WILKINSON HAD TWO WEAKNESSES as a businessman— his readiness to mistake his gross profit for net gain, and his reluctance to prepare for the worst. On his 1787 voyage, when he had stayed so long in New Orleans, expenses ate up all but $377 of the $10,185 his cargo earned. The following year, tobacco sales brought in $16,372, but expenses, including almost $1,000 for boatmen’s wages, left only $6,251 in silver Mexican dollars for Abner Dunn, brother of his partner, to bring north. In 1789, Wilkinson sent down 342 hogsheads of tobacco, and although almost one third was found to be so rotten it could not be brought to market, the remainder sold for $18,131. Yet once Clark, an investor in the cargo, had been paid his share, Miró had taken his $3,000 cut, and Nolan had paid out other sums, just $49 was left in the Wilkinson and Dunn account. There was nothing to invest in next season’s trade. Whatever credit Wilkinson still had in Kentucky absolutely depended on the goodwill of New Orleans. Without Miró he could not survive.
Recognizing the situation, Miró had immediately authorized the seven-thousand-dollar loan without waiting for Madrid’s approval, even though both he and Wilkinson were aware that the drive had gone out of the separatist movement. “On my arrival here,” Wilkinson wrote from Louisville in early 1790, “I discovered a great change in those who had been so far our warmest friends. Many, who loudly repudiated all connection with the Union, now remain silent . . . At present, all our politicians seem to have fallen asleep. Buoyed up by the privilege of trade which has been granted to them on the Mississippi, the people think of nothing else than cultivating their lands and increasing their plantations.”
With the cool insight that characterized his dealings with Wilkinson, Miró commented to Valdes that while secession had certainly lost its impetus, the real problem was with Wilkinson. Faced with growing hostility to his views, he had simply backed down or avoided the subject. “The great falling off which I observe in his last letter,” Miró wrote, “induces me to believe that, full of good will and zeal, and persuaded, from the experience of past years, that he could bring round to his own opinions the chief men of Kentucky, he declared in anticipation that he had won over many of them, when he had never approached them on the main question.”
Under acute financial strain, with his popularity draining away, Wilkinson had in fact lost his political nerve. “I am justified in saying that Congress strongly suspects my connection with you,” he told Miró in February 1790, “and that it spies my movements in this section of the country . . . I am narrowly watched by the servants of General Washington.” When Manuel Gayoso de Lemos replaced Grand-Pré as governor of Natchez in 1789, Wilkinson at once sent him two dictionaries, so that he and “our Friend below,” meaning Miró, could communicate more safely; “I dare not hazard a word on politics but in Cypher.”
Looking for a way out of the mountain of debt that threatened to engulf him, Wilkinson reverted to the idea that had surfaced in his second memorial, of openly declaring his change of loyalties. “My situation is mortally painful,” he told Miró, “because, whilst I abhor all duplicity, I am obliged to dissemble. This makes me extremely desirous of resorting to some contrivance that will put me in a position, in which I flatter myself to be able to profess myself publicly the vassal of his Catholic Majesty, and therefore to claim his protection, in whatever public or private measures I may devise to promote the interest of the Crown.”
This posed a potentially awkward question: what should Spain do with a client politician who had lost his confidence, who no longer dared advocate secession, and who wanted to come clean about his past? Miró’s reply in April 1790 showed how well he understood his friend’s instinct for duplicity. “I much regret that General Washington and Congress suspect your connection with me,” he wrote coolly, “but it does not appear to me opportune that you declare yourself a Spaniard for the reasons which you state. I am of opinion that this idea of yours is not convenient, and that, on the contrary, it might have prejudicial results. Therefore, continue to dissemble . . .”