Sunday, February 11, 2007

Cantonment Wilkinsonville, A 200 Year Old Secret Military Base in Southern Illinois Is Revealed

Lewis & Clark Expedition Members Were Posted There

In the winter of 1800-1801, the Commanding General of the United States Army, James Wilkinson, established a secret military camp near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers called Cantonment Wilkinsonville. Six or seven (or possibly more) future members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition were posted there over the next 18 months. The cantonment was located on the great crescent of the Ohio River, 25 miles northeast of Cairo, Illinois and 25 miles west of Metropolis, Illinois where the reconstructed Fort Massac is located. Approximately 1,200 -1,300 men, or about 1/3 of the entire military force of the US Army were present at its peak strength in the summer of 1801. The first 700 soldiers arrived on January 1, 1801.

Six weeks after their arrival, the greatest presidential election crisis in the nation’s history came to an end when Thomas Jefferson was elected the third President of the United States. Jefferson and Aaron Burr  had tied in the electoral college voting of 16 states in the first week of December, 1800. Because of the tie vote, the United States House of Representatives would cast votes to determine the winner. After 36 ballots, on Febuary 17, 1801, Thomas Jefferson was elected President. Through a law in effect at the time, Aaron Burr became the Vice-President.

During the "Quasi-War" with France (1798-1800), Congress had authorized a substantial increase in the number of U.S. soldiers. Alexander Hamilton served as second in command of the provisional army under George Washington. The provisional army was officially disbanded by Congress in June of 1800; but without the knowledge of President John Adams, Hamilton and Wilkinson went ahead with plans for establishing a secret military base on the lower Ohio River during the fall of 1800. (It should be noted that Hamilton, the first U S Secretary of the Treasury, opposed the election of Aaron Burr to the Presidency in 1800; and was killed in a duel with Burr in July, 1804.)

The Philip Nolan Expedition: Was An Invasion of Texas and Mexico Planned?

The unanswered question is: If Burr had been elected President of the United States, would the soldiers at the cantonment been used to invade Spanish Texas and Mexico? Burr and Wilkinson were charged with engaging in a conspiracy to do just that in 1805-1806, but both were acquitted in a trial for treason in 1807.

An indication of an earlier plot by Wilkinson and Burr to invade Spanish territory is the Philip Nolan Expedition. Nolan, raised in Wilkinson’s household, was a protege and associate of Wilkinson. It is known that Nolan planned to visit Thomas Jefferson at Monticello during the summer of 1800 to deliver a fine paint stallion; but he sold the horse in Lexington, Kentucky and returned to the western frontier to organize his fifth filibustering (irregular and unauthorized) expedition into Texas. An armed group of 24 men led by Nolan camped for almost five months (November, 1800 through March, 1801) in central Texas, near the modern town of Blum, southwest of Dallas. On March 21, 1801 Nolan and his men were surrounded by a Spanish military force and Nolan was the only man killed. Nolan is remembered as one of the early founders of the Texas Republic. Robert Ashley, another member of Nolan’s group, escaped capture at this time. In 1807 Ashley was Aaron Burr’s companion on his flight to avoid arrest while fleeing from Wilkinson’s men in Mississippi during the final days of the 1805-06 Burr-Wilkinson Conspiracy.

(The Google Earth Map has the historic 1814 Lewis and Clark Map from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection shown on it. See Google Earth Historic Maps in the Historic Campsites section of http://www.lewisandclarkroadtrips.com.)

Napoleon, Yellow Fever, and the Haiti Slave Revolution

An undeclared naval war, called the Quasi-War, between the United States and France was mostly fought in the Caribbean (1798-1800) over the right of American ships to do business with San Domingo (Haiti). San Domingo, a French colony on the island of Hispaniola, was in the midst of a successful slave revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. In 1804, Haiti became the second country in the Americas to achieve independence from a colonial ruler. Alexander Hamilton helped write its constitution. San Domingo provided the French Empire with great wealth from the exploitation of slave labor on its sugar and coffee plantations, which supplied two thirds of the sugar and coffee consumed in United States, and accounted for more than a third of France’s foreign trade. Historian C. L. R. James has written: “On no portion of the globe did its surface in proportion to its dimensions yield so much wealth as the colony of St. Domingue.” Until the slave revolt, all trade was conducted through France.

In December, 1801, Napoleon sent an army of 20,000 soldiers under the command of his brother-in-law, General LeClerc, to recapture the colony. Yellow fever, a virus carried by mosquitoes, caused the death of over 50,000 French soldiers within two years in Haiti; effectively ending Napoleon’s campaign in the Americas, and paving the way for Napoleon’s sale of Louisiana to the United States in 1803. Napoleon had secretly reacquired New Orleans and Louisiana from Spain in October, 1800,  intending to use Louisiana as an agricultural supply base for San Domingo. The combined threat of a French occupation of New Orleans and Louisiana and the potential spread of slave revolts were undoubtedly major reasons why Cantonment Wilkinsonville remained in existence through the fall of 1802.

Southern Illinois University Archeology Dig and The Search for Cantonment Wilkinsonville DVD

Over the years, historians who have written about the founding days of the early American Republic were unaware of this secret military base at Wilkinsonville. The official records had been deliberately obscured. Until Southern Illinois University faculty and students began doing research in 2001 the existence of Cantonment Wilkinsonville was almost lost to the historical record. University researchers have located military records and private correspondence scattered in archives throughout the eastern United States. They hope that other researchers and descendants of soldiers stationed on or near the Ohio River in 1801-1802 will turn up more records and correspondence.  SIU Archeologist Mark J. Wagner conducted digs in the summers of 2003-2004. Robert Swenson, Associate Professor of Architecture, and David Koch, Director of SIUC Morris Library Special Collections Research Center, led the Lewis and Clark Library of Congress grant research teams. An excellent DVD on the archaeology and history of the project, The Search for Cantonment Wilkinsonville, by Richard Kuenneke is available through  http://www.clickonhistory.com. To read more about the archeology and history of Cantonment Wilkinsonville see the report by Mark Wagner listed below in the website links. Mark Wagner supplied the military estimates in the first paragraph of this blog.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition and Cantonment Wilkinsonville

Military records show that members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition who were stationed at Cantonment Wilkinsonville included: Sergeant Patrick Gass, and Privates Thomas Proctor Howard, Hugh McNeal, John B.Thompson, Joseph Whitehouse, and Richard Windsor. In addition Private Silas Goodrich is believed to have been stationed there, but conclusive evidence is still lacking. Five out of the seven re-enlisted in the army after the Lewis and Clark Expedition. If some missing muster rolls are found, more names may be added to the list.

The only mention of Wilkinsonville in the Lewis and Clark Journals is a journal entry by Meriwether Lewis on November 14, 1803 after leaving Fort Massac:  "passed Wilkinson ville about 12 Oclock opposite to which is the first of great chain of rocks streching in a oblique manner across the Oho  this evening landed on the point at which the Ohio and Mississippi form there junchon."

Website Resources
This blog and a complete bibliography of books, journal articles, and websites are available as a PDF download in the Media section of www.lewisandclarkroadtrips.com

For further information contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). When referencing please give credit to Kira Gale and to http://www.lewisandclarktravel.com.  Links are encouraged.

Searching for Cantonment Wilkinsonville by Mark Wagner (archeology & history of cantonment)
http://www.shawneecc.edu/sihcc/cwsearching.html

Cantonment Wilkinsonville and Lewis and Clark (general website)
http://www.shawneecc.edu/sihcc/cantonwilks.html

Continuance Magazine (Lewis & Clark articles in Southern Illinois University-Carbondale magazine)

The Search for Cantonment Wilkinsonville, a DVD by Richard Kuenneke
http://www.clickonhistory.com

The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803: An Historical Essay in Four Parts by Bob Corbett
http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/ revolution/revolution1.htm

The Avalon Project at Yale Law School: The Quasi War with France, 1791-1800
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/quasi.html

The Napoleon Series: The Quasi War With France by Matthew Zarzeczny
http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/ diplomatic/c_quasi.html

Nolan Expedition Site Visit 1998
http://www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/nolanvisit.html

Philip Nolan Filibusters
http://www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/filibusters.htm#nolan

“Concerning Philip Nolan”, Volume 007, Number 4, Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/publications/journals/ shq/online/v007/n4/article_4.html

Insects, Disease, and Military History: The Napoleonic Campaigns and Historical Perspective by Robert K. D. Peterson
http://entomology.montana.edu/historybug/ napoleon/yellow_fever_haiti.htm

James Wilkinson: Wiki Encyclopedia Biography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wilkinson

James Wilkinson: National Park Service Museum Collections, American Revolutionary War
http://www.cr.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/revwar/image_gal/ indeimg/wilkinson.html

Posted by Kira Gale on 02/11/2007 at 05:12 AM

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