An Artist in Treason: the Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson
“They floated past Natchez, to the last curve in the river before it cut through the thirty-first parallel. At a point where the ground rose to a small hill above the east bank, known locally as Loftus Heights, the general ordered several acres of canebrake and prickly thorn to be cleared for the construction of a fort. In honor of his unexpected benefactor, he named it Fort Adams. A year earlier, Fort Massac, five hundred miles to the north, had marked the extent of U.S. power. Now New Orleans lay tantalizingly close.
That dramatic change owed nothing to the efforts of the U.S. army under its commander in chief, but much to Andrew Ellicott’s success in guiding American loyalties toward independence in the face of Gayoso’s refusal to implement the treaty. When he saw the Spanish troops begin to evacuate the Natchez fort in February 1798, Ellicott wrote in understandable triumph to his wife, Sally, “My Love,—I have at length worried the Spaniards out.” By the time Wilkinson made his lat...e arrival, Winthrop Sargent, former secretary of the Northwest Territory, had been installed as governor of Natchez, and Ellicott was deep in the wilderness east of the Mississippi cutting a trail through the matted undergrowth along the line of the thirty-first parallel with a team of American and Spanish astronomers, surveyors, and axmen.MoreLess
That dramatic change owed nothing to the efforts of the U.S. army under its commander in chief, but much to Andrew Ellicott’s success in guiding American loyalties toward independence in the face of Gayoso’s refusal to implement the treaty. When he saw the Spanish troops begin to evacuate the Natchez fort in February 1798, Ellicott wrote in understandable triumph to his wife, Sally, “My Love,—I have at length worried the Spaniards out.” By the time Wilkinson made his lat...e arrival, Winthrop Sargent, former secretary of the Northwest Territory, had been installed as governor of Natchez, and Ellicott was deep in the wilderness east of the Mississippi cutting a trail through the matted undergrowth along the line of the thirty-first parallel with a team of American and Spanish astronomers, surveyors, and axmen.MoreLess
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