For his part, Jefferson responded to Wilkinson’s desperate appeal for help with his legal costs—“for half or even a third of the sum, my necessities being extreme”—by allowing the money to be paid in the form of recompense for extra rations the general must have bought during his time in New Orleans. The president also overlooked the fifty barrels of flour that the general took for sale in Cuba in breach of the Embargo Act. Nevertheless in February 1809, when Wilkinson was still on the high seas to Havana, the president also approved the appointment of two new brigadiers, Wade Hampton and Peter Gansevoort, both staunch Republicans. In the very last days of his administration, Jefferson was making sure that the general would never again have a monopoly of influence within the army.
WHEN WILKINSON SAILED FROM ANNAPOLIS on January 24, 1809, he was ostensibly making for New Orleans. Seven weeks earlier, responding to reports of British military preparations for an attack on the city, Dearborn had ordered him to assemble “as large a proportion of our regular troops at New Orleans and its vicinity as circumstances will permit.” Although intended for the defense of the city, the presence of two thousand troops concentrated so close to Baton Rouge and West Florida, also constituted a diplomatic move and was, in Spanish eyes, seen as encouragement to potential rebels in the colonies. Consequently Wilkinson’s mission to Havana caused a flurry of concerned messages along the borderland that was the commander in chief’s natural home.
From Pensacola, Vizente Folch sent Someruelos a message that although Wilkinson had been “sincerely attached” to the Spanish cause and remained a personal friend, he was not to be trusted. The captain general replied in similar tone, observing that “His Majesty had some relations [with] No. 13” in the past, but Folch was to be wary of him now. These anxieties about Wilkinson’s intentions were only increased by news from Norfolk, the first port at which he called, that at the end of a magnificent banquet given in his honor, he had proposed a toast to “the New World governed by itself and independent of the Old.”
Unfortunately for Wilkinson’s ambition to regain public confidence, Someruelos remained loyal to the Spanish royal family and, angered by the “New World” speech, refused to see him. Next, the general tried to visit Folch in Pensacola, but was again frustrated, this time by the governor’s pressing need to be in Baton Rouge. When Wilkinson eventually arrived in New Orleans in April, his public diplomatic mission appeared to have failed. Nevertheless, his public support for the revolutionaries whose aims, he confessed to Dearborn, “excite in my Breast the Strangest Solicitude to participate in the glorious Atchievement” did have some effect.
Encouraged by the general’s remarks and the nearby presence of U.S. troops, a force of American rebels seized Baton Rouge and proclaimed “the free and independent” republic of West Florida. Although swiftly annexed by the United States, this fragment of West Florida was the first district within the Spanish empire to achieve its independence—six months before Venezuela’s more famous declaration— and could claim to be the precursor of the liberationist avalanche that would sweep Spanish rule away.
THE GENERAL WAS RECEIVED with surprising warmth on his return to New Orleans. Many turned out to cheer, and the merchant community who had come to hate Daniel Clark gave a dinner in his honor. But the popularity of a satirical pamphlet depicting him as “the Grand Pensioner” showed that the past was not entirely forgotten.
“Sweet was the song sung on Monday evening,” the pamphlet, The Pensioner’s Mirror, declared, “when it was announced by a herald from headquarters, that his Serene Highness, the Grand Pensioner de Godoy, was approaching the city and that he was to make his triumphal entry yesterday . . . When his serene highness entered the city, the bells they rung, The pensioner is come, um, um, um, and the drums re-echoed the joyful tidings. How grand the spectacle! What terror did it carry to the hearts of traitors!”
The barbs of a pamphlet might be ignored. Wilkinson’s immediate concern was the situation of the two thousand troops sent to New Orleans in December. Taken from garrisons primarily on the Atlantic coast, and containing a high proportion of hastily trained recruits, both officers and soldiers, they had arrived in a city already overflowing with French refugees fleeing the anti-Napoleonic backlash in Cuba. Some had been billeted in the city, the remainder had been housed in tents and temporary wooden barracks across the river. For young men, the pleasures of New Orleans were ruinous, as Wilkinson put it, to “health, morals and discipline,” and their largely untried, politically correct officers could not cope. By March 24, barely a month after their arrival, almost a quarter of the total force were on the sick list, others were not fit to bear arms, and desertion rates were soaring. When the general at last appeared on April 19, close to a third of his command were unfit for duty.
Within three days, he announced his intention to move the troops away from the city as soon as arrangements could be made, and that meanwhile mosquito nets were to be provided for all the tents. On May 12, three weeks after his arrival, he sent a long, angry letter to William Eustis, secretary of war in James Madison’s new administration: “You will observe, Sir, we have an army without a general staff; and an hospital without surgeon, purveyor, matron, or nurse . . . The troops are without bunks or births to repose on, or musquitoe nets to protect them against that pestiferous insect with which this country abounds.”
This crossed with a message from Eustis sent on April 29 in response to the sickness figures, urging Wilkinson to get the men out of New Orleans. “It will be desirable,” he declared, “that [they] should be transported either to the high ground in the rear of Fort Adams or in the rear of Natchez.” Since the first troops left the city only in early June, six weeks after Wilkinson discovered the situation, it is probable, although he denied it, that Wilkinson received this message before the men moved and deliberately ignored it.
The ostensible reason was that New Orleans wisdom insisted that in summer the heat and “effluvia” from the water made river journeys dangerously unhealthy, and a voyage upriver to Natchez would take at least a month. But it was also clear that Wilkinson wanted to teach Eustis, the sixth secretary of war he had dealt with, who was master in their relationship. As he informed his court-martial, “peremptory, unqualified orders, at a thousand miles distance, evince an excess of temerity, which no military man will justify.”
The general was also distracted by the sort of intoxication that overtakes a fifty-two- year- old man when he falls in love with a twenty- two-year- old girl. Since Celestine Laveau Trudeau was the daughter of Louisiana’s surveyor general, and one of the city’s leading citizens, the courtship could not be rushed.
The place he chose for a new camp was Terre aux Boeufs, seven miles downriver from New Orleans where a defense could be mounted against a naval force coming up the Mississippi. Although three feet below the level of the river on the other side of the levee, Wilkinson assured Eustis that “it was perfectly dry” and in a later description made it sound idyllic with cattle grazing in lush clover fields and “a charming shade along the front . . furnished by a grove of majestic live oak trees.”
Once the ground had been cleared by a work party under the indefatigable Major Zebulon Pike, a tented encampment was set up for a force that had by then reached about 2,300 men. As the troops arrived, the sickness rate fell rapidly from its May peak of 600 with 53 further losses from death and desertion, to 442 at the end of June and only 13 other losses.