(This training in outdoorsmanship in the American wilderness would one day save Eaton’s life and the lives of his men in the Libyan desert.)
No episode of Eaton’s life, however brief—his stint with Wayne lasted less than two years—could unfold without some personal conflict. Despite all his talents, Eaton’s personal combativeness repeatedly undermined his chances for advancement. A superior officer, Captain Butler, gave Eaton what Eaton perceived as conflicting orders for drilling the infantry. He refused to obey certain commands on the parade ground with a thousand men and General Wayne in attendance. Captain Butler on horseback, sword raised, charged Eaton, who grabbed an espontoon, a military half-pike, and awaited the attack. General Wayne personally halted the fight, shouting, “Gentlemen, this is neither the time nor the place.”
Eaton issued an immediate challenge to Butler, who in the calm of the barracks decided to submit the altercation to a committee of friends to rule on it. All was eventually patched up without bloodshed, and one senses that Captain Butler wanted no part of ten paces and firing pistols with Eaton. (Dueling was then common among officers in the American military, especially in the navy.)
Eaton soon returned to New England (and yes, he impregnated Eliza) before shipping out to his next assignment: the Georgia border, north of Spanish Florida. Sometime during his travels, Eaton met his next Federalist patron, the secretary of war, Thomas Pickering. (An ultra Federalist, Pickering would help found West Point Academy, and his disappointment with Thomas Jefferson would mount so high that he would lead the almost forgotten New England secession movement during the president’s second term.)
In Georgia the main mission of the federal troops was to overawe the Indians into friendly relations with American settlers. However, sharp practices by American land speculators (and well-placed bribes by authorities in Spanish Florida wanting a buffer zone) complicated the situation. Eaton, with 160 men under his command, erected a fort at Colerain on St. Mary’s River. He wrote to the secretary of war and told him that he had called it “Fort Pickering” . . . but “not however, that I might satirize a good man by erecting his monument in mud.”
Eaton, scouting again and learning Indian dialects, acted as a spy for Pickering. He sent him secret reports on the dangerous situation at the border, and he named names of the worst land speculators and fearlessly included his own commanding officer on that list. Land speculation—much of it corrupt, with false property descriptions—fulfilled the financial gambling needs of many early Americans, much as the stock market does today. Fortunes hinged on the validity of a title.
Eaton said that Colonel Henry Gaither had offered him a shady land deal for 500,000 acres of dubious title at $35,000 but that he had turned it down. Eaton also pointed out that Gaither had selected a swampy, unhealthy site for the key Georgia trading post because it suited his holdings. Colonel Gaither ordered Eaton to cease making reports to Pickering; Eaton refused.
Not long afterward, Gaither had Eaton court-martialed on charges ranging from profiteering by selling jackets to the troops, to pocketing sign-up bounties, to disobeying orders and hoarding rations. A fellow officer wrote supportively to Eaton, saying: “[Gaither] is an ignorant, debauched, unprincipled, old batchelor . . . willing to sacrifice the purest character to gratify the spleen of his soul.”
The five-member army jury during the two-week-long court-martial rejected most of their commanding officer’s accusations, but Gaither nonetheless ordered Eaton suspended from command and jailed for a month inside Fort Pickering. More than two dozen heads of family in Georgia signed a letter in Eaton’s favor, thanking him for preserving them from plunder by undisciplined federal troops.
Eventually bowing to pressure, Gaither allowed Eaton to go to Philadelphia to deliver the court-martial findings personally to Secretary of War Pickering. Eaton’s Federalist patron immediately overturned the verdict and reinstated Eaton as captain in good standing. His entire army unit, however, was disbanded soon after.
Eaton now found himself unemployed long enough to spend almost six entire months in and around Brimfield (daughter Almira would arrive from this visit). Pickering, whom President Adams had appointed secretary of state, gave Eaton a confidential mission to investigate a conspiracy by three influential men, including Governor William Blount of the Southwest Territory, to mount a private paramilitary force of Indians and frontiersmen to drive the Spanish from Louisiana and Florida. This was almost a decade before Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, and while many Americans hungered for the departure of the Spanish, the administration chose not to pursue it with an unlicensed band of adventurers. (Aaron Burr about a decade later would launch a similar conspiracy to drive out the Spanish and would try to recruit William Eaton.)