An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson

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LIEUTENANT COLONEL THOMAS CUSHING, commanding officer of the Second Regiment, could remember precisely the moment when his general held the fate of the country in his hands. “On the 8th of October 1806, I was sitting at the dining- table in my quarters at Natchitoches with general Wilkinson when a gentleman entered the room.” The newcomer was a young New Yorker named Samuel Swartwout. His ostensible purpose in coming to the tiny settlement, situated on what was then the southwestern border of the United States, was to volunteer to serve in the forthcoming war with Spain. Since the two officers had been deployed to Natchitoches together with a force of twelve hundred troops in anticipation of such a war, Cushing found, as he said, nothing in Swartwout’s explanation “which could excite a suspicion against him.”

The cause of the approaching hostilities was a dispute between the United States of America and His Catholic Majesty Carlos IV about the border between the Spanish province of Texas and the western extent of the Louisiana Purchase. Trouble had been brewing ever since France sold the vast territory to the United States in 1803. The quarrel now threatened to boil over. The Spanish had stationed more than one thousand troops in Nacogdoches in Texas and occupied positions on what the United States regarded as its territory. In response, President Thomas Jefferson’s administration had ordered General James Wilkinson, commander of the U.S. army, to “counteract the hostile views or obvious intentions of the invaders.” Already on its way to Washington was Wilkinson’s assurance that with the forces available “I shall be able to drive our opponents before me and take Nacodoches.”

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