and family, he was well educated
and widely read for the times. With a brilliant and versatile
intellectuality and ready gifts as a speaker, he swayed men easily. He
was a bold soldier and was endowed with physical courage, though when
engaged in personal contests he seldom exerted it--preferring the red
tongue of slander or the hired assassin's shot from behind cover. His
record fails to disclose one commendable trait. He was inordinately
avaricious, but love of money was not his whole motive force: he had a
spirit so jealous and malignant that he hated to the death another man's
good. He seemed to divine instantly wherein other men were weak and to
understand the speediest and best means of suborning them to his own
interests--or of destroying them.

Wilkinson was able to lure a number of Kentuckians into the separatist
movement. George Rogers Clark seriously disturbed the arch plotter by
seizing a Spanish trader's store wherewith to pay his soldiers, whom
Virginia had omitted to recompense. This act aroused the suspicions of
the Spanish, either as to Number Thirteen's perfect loyalty or as to
his ability to deliver the western country. In 1786, when Clark led
two thousand men against the Ohio Indians in his last and his only
unsuccessful campaign, Wilkinson had already settled himself near the
Falls (Louisville) and had looked about for mischief which he might do
for profit. Whether his influence had anything to do with what amounted
virtually to a mutiny among Clark's forces is not ascertainable; but,
for a disinterested onlooker, he was overswift to spread the news of
Clark's debacle and to declare gleefully that Clark's sun of military
glory had now forever set. It is also known that he later served other
generals treacherously in Indian expeditions and that he intrigued with
Mad Anthony Wayne's Kentucky troops against their commander.

Spain did not wish to see the Indians crushed; and Wilkinson himself
both hated and feared any other officer's prestige. How long he had
been in foreign pay we can only conjecture, for, several years before
he transplanted his activities to Kentucky, he had been one of a
cabal against Washington. Not only his ambitions but his nature must
inevitably have brought him to the death-battle with George Rogers
Clark. As a military leader, Clark had genius, and soldiering was his
passion. In nature, he was open, frank, and bold to make foes if he
scorned a man's way as ignoble or dishone