What made Wilkinson’s accusation truly dangerous was that, for entirely different reasons, he had also made enemies of Thomas Power and Daniel Clark. To clear his name after the trial, he had published Power’s declaration that Wilkinson had not spied for Spain, and the Irishman, who had thought his certificate was only for Jefferson’s eyes, was mortified to be publicly revealed as a fool. Still more serious was Wilkinson’s indiscreet remark in November at an Annapolis party that Clark was so short of money one of his bills of exchange had been offered for payment at a third of its face value. Unfortunately this was overheard by wealthy Richard Caton of Baltimore, whose sixteen- year- old daughter, Louisa, was being wooed by Clark. The girl was promptly banned from seeing Clark again and sent abroad to Britain, where she eventually married Francis George Godolphin D’Arcy D’Arcy-Osborne, the seventh duke of Leeds. Socially it was an improvement on a New Orleans merchant who was short of money and already married, but Clark’s heart was broken. “The affair is forever ended,” he wrote sadly, and as Wilkinson acknowledged, a man who “had always been my professed friend and obsequious servant, as his correspondence will testify, was suddenly converted into a remorseless enemy.”
The result of his enmity became clear on the last day of 1807, when Randolph told his astonished colleagues in Congress that he intended to call for an inquiry to discover whether General Wilkinson “while in the service of the United States had corruptly received money from the government of Spain.” To substantiate his demand, he produced three documents given him by Clark— a note from Baron Carondelet in January 1796 referring to the payment to Wilkinson of $9,640; Wilkinson’s to Gayoso in September 1796 with its “let my name be never mentioned” demand for greater secrecy; and Thomas Power’s characterically effusive but damning explanation of why he had lied (or as he preferred to put it, descended to “tergiversation, captious logic and sophistical evasion”) on behalf of the general. The false certificate clearing Wilkinson was necessary, Power explained, because “I [was] a secret agent of the Spanish government and General Wilkinson was a pensioner of the said government,” and it was the agent’s duty to provide the general with cover.
Under pressure to explain his own involvement, Clark produced a hurried document that traced his long commercial connection with the general, and the firsthand knowledge he possessed of the general’s treachery. In growing excitement, Congress suspended discussion in January 1808 of the Embargo Act banning the export of United States goods to Europe and argued instead about the propriety of investigating General James Wilkinson. “Is it because this man assisted in the capture of General Burgoyne, the first step in securing the existence of our nation,” James Sloan of New Jersey angrily demanded, “and has now arrested an infernal band— a host of traitors— is it for these things that he is now charged?”
It was soon clear the general was not the only target. Kentucky’s John Rowan said that if the inquiry recommended Wilkinson’s removal and the president did not comply, Congresss “should try, not General Wilkinson, but the President of the United States.” From the Senate, Republican John Pope of Kentucky judged that “the object of [Randolph’s attack] is to injure the administration.” But the weight of Clark’s evidence overwhelmed personal and party considerations. On January 13, 1808, a large majority voted to set up an inquiry into reports that General Wilkinson had “corruptly received money from the Government of Spain.” They had, however, been preempted.
In response to Randolph’s opening assault, Wilkinson had demanded a court of inquiry, as he had twice before, in Washington’s and Adams’s administrations. This time it was granted. Like Pope, Jefferson understood the attack on Wilkinson to be an assault on his increasingly unpopular administration. He did not intend to abandon his general.
On January 2, the president announced that a three- man military board would investigate the general’s conduct. Since its membership consisted of three colonels whose careers could be made or broken by the general, and two of whom, Cushing and Jonathan Williams, the superintendent of West Point, were his close friends, it was widely criticized as inadequate. It sat for five months, with Wilkinson attending most of its hearings so that he could cross- examine witnesses and present testimony that vindicated his behavior. Many of the two thousand pages in his Memoirs were taken directly from his voluminous defense.
Daniel Clark refused to appear before the board, but in April, shortly before it was due to report, he presented Congress with more material from Power’s archives, this time relating to the agent’s two visits to Wilkinson, just before and after General Wayne’s death. Among the documents were Power’s letters to Carondelet and Gayoso telling in breathless prose of his narrow escape when Lieutenant Steele boarded his boat with the general’s dollars hidden in coffee barrels. To these allegations, Wilkinson offered the familiar defense that the money was payment for commercial transactions, and that far from favoring Spain, he had sent troops south to push them out of Natchez.
The effervescent Power, a self- confessed liar, could be swatted aside by the sheer weight of the general’s declaration, but the weighty testimony of Andrew Ellicott, the precise Quaker astronomer, presented a more formidable challenge. On January 20, Jefferson had bowed to Congress’s demand that he provide all the documents relevant to their inquiry. Determined to release as little as possible, the president warned Congress that fire had destroyed everything in the War Office prior to 1800, that other papers might have been lost or misfiled, and that one letter sent by Ellicott to the War Department in November 1798 had at his request to be kept secret, although its author might reveal its contents. Apart from that, Jefferson declared, with astonishing lack of candor, Clark’s evidence “is the first direct testimony ever made known to me charging General Wilkinson with the corrupt receipt of money.”
When one of Clark’s investigators approached Ellicott a few days later, he heard a different story. “To my knowledge,” Ellicott declared, “the present administration has been minutely informed of the conduct of General Wilkinson; and why he has been supported, and patronized, after this information, is to me an inexplicable paradox.” He duly provided Clark with an affidavit to be given to the board of inquiry that repeated the substance of the letter he had sent Jefferson in the first months of his administration. It detailed all the evidence he had received, from President Washington’s warning against Wilkinson in 1796 to the information from Tomás Portell, obtained in November 1799, that the $9,640 was the general’s “pension” from Spain. “I questioned [Portell] frequently whether this money was not on account of some mercantile transaction,” Ellicott testified, “he declared it was not.”
Had this testimony been given in person, it might well have swayed the board. But, unwilling to risk exposing Jefferson’s cover- up, Ellicott refused to apear in person, and without his presence and transparent honesty to support its allegations, his affidavit lost much of its force.
Nevertheless, Wilkinson went to extraordinary lengths to counter Ellicott’s evidence, beginning with the jocular aside that when he wrote his affidavit, “the celebrated astronomer must have been under the influence of the moon.” With growing indignation, he declared Ellicott to be a self-appointed spy, then whipping himself to a fury claimed, “This witness in his fondness for the marvellous, his propensity for defamation, and his sympathy for Mr Clark, has perjured himself, over and over again.” Finally in an uppercase frenzy of alliteration, he denounced “the pretended SPY, THE PERJURED, PROFLIGATE ELLICOTT [for] labouring to assassinate my humble, hard-earned reputation.”