The final fifteen specific charges concerned Terre aux Boeufs. Displaying a masterful command of the detail of military organization, Wilkinson concentrated on the culture of penny- pinching, begun by Dearborn and continued by Eustis, that left the army underequipped in such necessities as hospitals and mosquito nets. For the entire year of 1809, Eustis had allocated just $250,000 to pay for the wages, accommodation, transportation, medical care, and equipment of two thousand men sent to defend New Orleans. Unless directly authorized by Washington, no expenditure above fifty dollars was allowed, and the “military agent,” a civilian appointed by the War Department to buy supplies, was forbidden to pay for anything “except for articles actually received or for services performed.” This meant, Wilkinson carefully explained to the colonels and majors who made up the jury, that a civilian clerk could countermand any order given by a colonel or a major involving extra expense regardless of its military importance. The structure, designed for peacetime routine, made it impossible for a commander to respond to an emergency.
On the most serious charge of refusing to obey Eustis’s order to move upriver to Fort Adams, Wilkinson simply showed that the move downriver was in obedience to Dearborn’s earlier order to defend New Orleans. By the time he had presented weighty testimonials to his wisdom in choosing the site, to his efforts in caring for the sick, to the exceptional severity of the weather, and to the relatively small number of deaths while at Terre aux Boeufs, the prosecution’s case was in tatters. Then the general demanded the right to make a personal statement that occupied six more days. Disheartened, the judge advocate general started to stay away from court until ordered to return by the president.
On Christmas Day, the jury returned its verdict. It could not be publicly announced until scrutinized by the president, but onlookers were able to guess its import from the way the jurors “very politely waited upon General Wilkinson” when the court was adjourned. About seven hundred pages of transcripts and conclusions were sent to President Madison, who spent almost six weeks plowing through what must have been uncomfortable reading. The government was savagely criticized, for failing to realize Wilkinson was a civilian when he first went to New Orleans, and for presenting evidence “much of which is unessential as to matter, and incorrect as to form, and inadmissible in judicial proceedings.” On every count, the general was found not guilty, and the court concluded, “From a comparison of all the testimony, General Wilkinson appears to have performed his various and complicated duties with zeal and fidelity, and merits the approbation of his country.”
The court-martial’s judgment was not perverse. Wilkinson had transformed the case against him into a trial of the fundamental relationship between the army and the federal government since independence. In the range of testimonies that he brought to bear upon his conduct, from junior officers to heroes of the past such as George Washington, Henry Knox, and Anthony Wayne, the general provided a detailed picture of the political pressures that shaped the army during that period. In finding him not guilty, the jury implicitly placed the blame for the toleration of his ambivalent loyalties, and for the tragedy of Terre aux Boeufs, squarely upon the shoulders of his civilian masters.
For the president and his secretary of war, the verdict represented the utter failure of their two-year campaign to rid themselves of the general. On February 14, 1812, Madison commented grudgingly that although “there are instances in the Court, as well as in the conduct of the Officer on trial, which are evidently and justly objectionable, his acquittal of the several charges exhibited agst. him is approved, and his sword is accordingly ordered to be restored.”
AT ONE MOMENT DURING THE TRIAL, Thomas Power was challenged about the vindictive tone of his evidence and exclaimed emotionally that in the duplicitous world where Wilkinson operated, there was no choice, it was “stab or be stabbed.” Although Wilkinson pretended to be shocked by “the malice of his heart,” Power’s outburst was a fair assessment of the feral conditions in which the general operated. For more than five years, ever since Burr’s conspiracy had put a blade to Wilkinson’s throat by requiring him to collaborate or be revealed as a traitor, he had been knifing friends and enemies alike to keep his career alive. Now he alone remained standing surrounded by the corpses of his adversaries. Even James Madison and William Eustis, pursuing him with the full force of executive power and more enmity than Jefferson had brought to his vendetta against Burr, had been laid low. Having survived, the general might have felt a sense of triumph.
His military career, however, remained in the hands of the president and the secretary of war. Consequently Wilkinson’s first reaction was not to gloat but to send Madison a cringing letter to explain that his diatribes in court against “Corruption & Power” were not directed at the executive, as everyone thought, but at Burr, Clark, and the House of Representatives Going further, he proposed to amend any books that he had written, and the court-martial record if necessary, “to vary or expunge any rank Epithet or acrimonious expression which in an Agony of Mind may have escaped my Pen.” And he hoped that this would be acceptable because “the impending Crisis of our public Affairs requires harmony, concord & co-operation among the public Servants.”
For the first time in his career, his self- abasement was not an act. The long, bruising encounter with Madison and Eustis had brought the general close to bankruptcy, and something like depression replaced his customary ebullience. In a lengthy, rambling letter sent to Jefferson before his court-martial, he confessed to an unprecedented lack of confidence brought on by “the pressure of my persecution, the desolation of my fortunes, the abandonment of those who owed me support.” To his dying day, he hated Madison for bringing him so low. But “the impending crisis” offered an opportunity that no professional soldier could ignore. By February 1812, it was certain that, for reasons that were not entirely clear, the country was sliding toward war with Britain.
THE ORIGINAL CAUSE AROSE from the British policy of stopping and searching neutral vessels on the high seas to ensure that they were not carrying strategic goods to France, or any other country under Napoléon’s control. From the start of the Napoleonic wars, the United States had gradually taken the lion’s share of world trade as Britain and France imposed ever stricter blockades on each other’s shipping. Worth $43 million in 1792, the value of American cargoes rose inexorably to $138 million in 1807. American vessels not only carried American wheat, tobacco, and cotton to Europe, but West Indies sugar as well. As neutrals in the conflict, they also shipped British manufactured pottery, textiles, and brass lamps to Napoléon-dominated Europe, and French brandy to Britain. Consequently, the British blockade, and to a lesser extent the French blockade operated by privateers, fell most heavily on ships flying the stars and stripes.
Yet there was an anomaly. Outrages that most hurt the merchant communities in New York and New England triggered the most violent anger in the south and west. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Henry Clay of Kentucky, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, the young leaders of the Republican War Hawks, suffered no direct economic harm from the capture of a Boston ship, but took it as an incitement to war. By contrast, the Massachusetts legislature, representing shippers, merchants, insurers, and bankers who had lost fortunes to the British, petitioned Congress to negotiate a peaceful solution.