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.
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