Sea of Glory

denied a promotion, an officer he had placed under arrest had been awarded one that spring. “I said little in answer to him,” Adams wrote in his diary, “but must wait to hear the statements of the other side.”
    On June 20, just a week after his arrival in Washington, Wilkes spoke before a crowd of more than four hundred at a special meeting of the National Institute held in the hall of the new Patent Office Building. On hand was a who’s who of political dignitaries, including Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur. It was an unusual and challenging situation for a naval officer, but Wilkes claimed to have been “glad of the opportunity of giving a truthful account of the operations we had been engaged in.” He began in a typically combative manner, recounting how disheartening it had been for himself and his officers and men to discover how little was known of the Expedition’s achievements upon their return. Holding nothing back, he made sure “to throw the blame where it belonged on those who were there present & seated near me.” Wilkes now had the audience’s undivided attention, and he proceeded to tell them the story of the U.S. Ex. Ex. “Throughout the account,” he wrote, “there was a marked interest and an audible approval when I closed.”
    Once the applause had died down, Charles Wickliffe, Tyler’s post-master general, leapt to his feet and began to take Wilkes to task for his criticisms of the current administration. This brought the influential senator William Preston, a Democrat from South Carolina, into the fray, speaking in Wilkes’s defense. But it would be John Quincy Adams who would carry the day. Refusing to be drawn into the political sniping, he drew attention to the Expedition’s many remarkable accomplishments. Upshur, who was a trustee of the Institute, was politically astute enough to realize that he must act to contain the damage Wilkes had managed to inflict. Once Adams had finished, the secretary of the navy praised Wilkes’s speech and proposed that he provide a written synopsis of the voyage. A friend of Wilkes whispered in his ear that “I could desire nothing more gratifying,” particularly when Upshur concluded by saying “that the results of the Expedition were highly valuable and honorable, not to this country alone, but to the whole civilized world.” But Wilkes remained unconvinced. “I had seen enough of him to know what a deceitful rogue he was.”
    The very next day, Upshur went on the attack, informing Wilkes by letter that his request for a general court of inquiry had been denied and that “A court martial will be called at the earliest convenient time.” By this point Wilkes had submitted a report to Upshur on the Oregon territory. As might be expected, Wilkes took a militant position regarding a possible U.S.-Canadian boundary, insisting that it lie at 54°40’, far enough north to include not only the Strait of Juan de Fuca but also Vancouver Island. Fearing that this would have an incendiary effect on the ongoing negotiations with Britain, Upshur did everything he could to delay the report’s distribution to Congress, finally insisting that the report remain confidential and not, as Wilkes’s supporters had hoped, be published and distributed to the American people that summer.
    Even as Upshur worked to quash attempts to publicize the Expedition’s results, he moved to strengthen the government’s case against Wilkes, taking the extraordinary measure of ordering Dr. Charles Guillou to report to Washington on June 27. Upshur granted Guillou unrestricted access to the Navy Department’s files, and for five days the surgeon labored to expand and bolster his charges against the leader of the Ex. Ex. All this time, Wilkes waited impatiently for the court-martial he had been led to believe was imminent. Upshur, of course, was stalling until Guillou had finished assembling seven charges against his former commander. Now, with Pinkney offering an additional four, he informed Wilkes that he would have to wait another three weeks, when a general courts-martial would be convened in New York, where “[you] must take your chances with others whom it is contemplated to bring to trial.”
    But if Upshur was confident that he had built a strong case against him, Wilkes knew that the secretary was without a crucial source of information. Prior to his departure from the Vincennes, Wilkes had collected and boxed all his officers’ journals, as well as