Last Years
In 1821 Wilkinson visited Mexico in pursuit of a Texas land grant. While awaiting government approval of his Texas scheme, Wilkinson died in Mexico City, where he was buried.
Wilkinson's involvement with the Spanish (Agent 13), although widely suspected in his own day, was not proven until 1854, with Louisiana historian Charles Gayarré's publication of the American general's correspondence with Rodríguez Miró, the Spanish governor of Louisiana. Other historians would subsequently add to the catalog of Wilkinson's treasonous activities. According to recent Burr biography by David O. Stewart, Wilkinson was severely condemned in print by then-New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt, some 65 years after the general's misdeeds, with this judgment: "In all our history, there is no more despicable character."
Read more about this topic: James Wilkinson
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“After us they’ll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they’ll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, “Oh! Life is so hard!” and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)