Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/667

Rh general's department, and was clothier-general from July 1779 to March 1781.

In common with many other army officers Wilkinson now turned toward the West, and in 1784 settled near the Falls of the Ohio (Louisville), where he speedily became a prominent merchant and farmer and a man of considerable influence. He began to take an active part in the movement for separate statehood for Kentucky, and in 1787 he entered into an irregular commercial agreement with the Spanish officials of Louisiana. At this time, as his own papers in the Spanish archives show, he took an oath of allegiance to Spain and began to intrigue with his fellow-Kentuckians to detach the western settlements from the Union and bring them under the influence of the Louisiana authorities. His commercial connections at New Orleans enabled him to hold out the lure of a ready market at that port for Kentucky products, and this added greatly to the strength of the separatist movement. He neutralized the intrigues of certain British agents who were then working in Kentucky. For these various services he received until 1800 a substantial pension from the Spanish authorities, being officially known in their correspondence as “Number Thirteen.” At the same time he worked actively against the Spanish authorities, especially through Philip Nolan. Wilkinson's ventures were not as lucrative as he hoped for, and in October 1791 he was given a lieut.-colonel's commission in the regular army, possibly, as a contemporary suggested, to keep him out of mischief. During this year he took an active part in the minor campaigns which preceded General Arthur St Clair's disastrous defeat by the Indians. As brigadier-general (from March 1792) and second in command, he served under General Anthony Wayne in the latter's successful campaign of 1794 against the Indians, and in this campaign he seems to have tried to arouse discontent against his superior among the Kentucky troops, and to have intrigued to supplant him upon the reduction of the army. Upon Wayne's death in 1796, Wilkinson became general in command of the regular army, retaining his rank as brigadier and likewise his Spanish pension. He seems to have tried to stir up both the Indians and the Spaniards to prevent the survey of the southern boundary of the United States in 1797 and 1798, and succeeded in delaying Commissioner Andrew Ellicott for several months in this important task. At the same time his protege, the filibusterer, Philip Nolan, was engaged in a reconnaissance for him west of the Mississippi. In 1803 Wilkinson was one of the commissioners to receive Louisiana from France, and in 1805 became governor of that portion of the Purchase above the 33rd parallel, with headquarters at St Louis. In his double capacity as governor of the Territory and commanding officer of the army, reasonably certain of his hold on Jefferson, and favourably situated upon the frontier remote from the centre of government, he attempted to realize his ambition to conquer the Mexican provinces of Spain. For this purpose in 1805 he entered into some sort of agreement with Aaron Burr, and in 1806 sent Z. M. Pike to explore the most favourable route for the conquest of the south-west. Before his agent returned, however, he had betrayed his colleague's plans to Jefferson, formed the Neutral Ground Agreement with the Spanish commander of the Texas frontier, placed New Orleans under martial law, and apprehended Burr and some of his alleged accomplices. In the ensuing trial at Richmond the prisoners were released for lack of sufficient evidence to convict, and Wilkinson himself emerged with a much damaged reputation. He was then subjected to a series of courts-martial and congressional investigations, but succeeded so well in hiding traces of his duplicity that in 1812 he resumed his military command at New Orleans, and in 1813 was promoted major-general and took possession of Mobile. Later in this year he made a most miserable fiasco of the campaign against Montreal, and this finally brought his military career to a dishonourable end. For a time he lived upon his plantation near New Orleans, but later appeared in Mexico City as an applicant for a land grant, incidentally acting as agent for the American Bible Society. Here on the 28th of December 1825 he succumbed to the combined effects of climate and of opium.

See Wilkinson's Memoirs of My Own Time (Philadelphia, 1816); untrustworthy and to be used with caution; W. R. Shepherd, “Wilkinson and the Beginning of the Spanish Conspiracy” in American Historical Review, vol. ix. (New York, 1904).

 WILKINSON, JAMES JOHN GARTH (1812-1899), Swedenborgian writer, the son of James John Wilkinson (died 1845), a writer on mercantile law and judge of the County Palatine of Durham, was born in London on the 3rd of June 1812. He studied medicine, and set up as a homoeopathic doctor in Wimpole Street in 1834. He was early attracted by the works of William Blake, whose Songs of Experience he endeavoured to interpret, and of Swedenborg, to the elucidation of whose writings he devoted the best energies of his life. Between 1840 and 1850 he edited Swedenborg's treatises on The Doctrine of Charity, The Animal Kingdom, Outlines of a Philosophic Argument on the Infinite, and Hieroglyphic Key to Natural and Spiritual Mysteries. Wilkinson's preliminary discourses to these translations and his criticisms of Coleridge's comments upon Swedenborg displayed a striking aptitude not only for mystical research, but also for original philosophic debate. The vigour of his thought won admiration from Henry James (father of the novelist) and from Emerson, through whom he became known to Carlyle and Froude; and his speculation further attracted Tennyson, the Oliphants and Edward Maitland. He wrote an able sketch of Swedenborg for the Penny Cyclopaedia, and a standard biography, Emanuel Swedenborg (published in 1849); but interest in this subject far from exhausted his intellectual energy, which was, indeed, multiform. He was a traveller, a linguist, well versed in Scandinavian literature and philology, the author of mystical poems entitled Improvisations from the Spirit (1857), a social and medical reformer, and a convinced opponent of vivisection and also of vaccination. He died at Finchley Road, South Hampstead, where he had resided for nearly fifty years, on 18th October 1899. He is commemorated by a bust and portrait in the rooms of the Swcdenborgian Society in Bloomsbury Street, London.  WILKINSON, JOHN (1728-1808), the great Staffordshire iron-master, was born in 1728 at Clifton, Cumberland, where his father had risen from day labourer to be overlooker in an iron furnace. A box-iron, patented by his father, but said to have been invented by the son, helping laundresses to gratify the frilled taste of the dandies of the day, was the beginning of their fortunes. This they made at Blackbarrow, near Furness. When he was about twenty, John moved to Staffordshire, and built, at Bilston, the first furnace there, and, after many experiments, succeeded in utilizing coal instead of wood-charcoal in puddling and smelting. The father, who now had works at Bersham, near Chester, was again joined by his son, who constructed a new boring machine, of an accuracy heretofore unequalled. James Watt found that the work of this machine exactly filled his requirements for his “fire-engine” for cylinders bored with greater precision. Wilkinson, who now owned the Bersham works, resolved to start the manufacture of wrought iron at Broseley on a larger scale, and the first engine made by Boulton and Watt was for him to blow the bellows there. Heretofore bellows were worked by a water wheel or, when power failed, by horses. His neighbours in the business, who were contemplating installing Newcomen engines, waited to see how his would turn out. Great care was taken in all its parts, and Watt himself set it up early in 1776. Its success made the reputation of Boulton and Watt in the Midland counties. Wilkinson now found he had the power alike for the nicest and the most stupendous operations. The steam cylinder suggested to him the plan of producing blast now in use. He was near coal; he surrounded himself with capable men, whom he fully trusted; he made a good article, and soon obtained large orders and prospered. In 1786 he was making 32-pounders, howitzers, swivels, mortars and shells for government. The difficulty of getting barges to carry his war material down the Severn led him, in 1787, to construct the first iron barge—creating a wonderful sensation among owners and builders. Wilkinson taught the French the art of boring cannon from the solid, and cast all the