An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (5 page)

Complacently, the British allowed their enemy to escape across Lake Champlain, confident that the continuous accumulation of resources would allow them to crush the rebels before the end of the year. The last two Americans to leave Canadian soil were Arnold, once more in command of the rear guard, and Wilkinson. They were rowed away from shore in the same boat, and it is hard to picture them far out on the waters of the lake without speculating about the nature of the capacity for treachery lying latent in each.

Physically, they were not unalike, being short and thickset, and they shared two pronounced characteristics, a crippling incompetence about money and an almost theatrical vanity— each had, for example, wanted to be the last person to leave Canada. To Wilkinson’s irritation Arnold had won by taking advantage of his rank to insist on pushing off from shore with his own hand. So long as they were in the field, money became a secondary issue, and the esteem of fellow combatants kept both content. Only when they were away from the fighting, and cash and admiration were in short supply, did cracks begin to open. Yet what is striking about Arnold’s career is the way that his spirit was broken by Congress’s unremitting hostility to his claims for military recognition and by its persecution of him over his financial affairs. It is not too much to say that he was driven to treachery. Wilkinson’s loyalty, on the other hand, was always unreliable, as Arnold himself discovered soon after their boat came to shore.

D
ESPITE THE HUMILIATION
of the retreat, Arnold felt that he at least had nothing to be ashamed of. At the end of June, when the remains of the Canadian invasion force had retired to Crown Point, south of Lake Champlain, to lick their wounds, he took Wilkinson with him to Albany, New York, to meet the new general who had been appointed to replace the disappointing Sullivan. This was Horatio Gates, who had made his reputation as Washington’s adjutant general, responsible for putting into effect the Continental Army’s disciplinary structure.

Gates arrived in Albany on June 27, 1776. Congress had appointed him to command a Canadian invasion force that no longer existed, and in its absence Gates felt entitled to regard himself as the senior officer in the Northern Department. Although that position had explicitly been given to Schuyler, it became Gates’s overriding priority to elbow his rival aside. In this task, he was soon to be joined by Arnold’s former protégé, James Wilkinson.

3
W
OOING
G
ENERAL
G
ATES

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING
of the seducer in the way James Wilkinson set about winning the hearts of his generals. With all of them, as his fellow staff officers noted, he was quick, compliant, amusing, and efficient. But he could also be histrionic, as in his letter to Nathanael Greene. Or genuinely courageous, as in his efforts to safeguard Benedict Arnold. Toward General Horatio Gates, however, he exhibited an affection too intense to be pretended. The depth of feeling suggested how much he missed his real father.

At the height of their relationship, Wilkinson would write in an official, if outspoken, report, “Pardon the freedom of my language, I speak to General Gates, but in him I hope I address a friend,” signing himself “my dear General’s affectionate friend.” Gates responded warmly, encouraging Wilkinson’s extravagant opinions and judgments. As Wilkinson himself admitted, the general won him “by his indulgence of my self- love.” The younger man responded by encouraging the older one’s taste for intrigue. It was a dangerous exchange.

As a former major in the British army, Horatio Gates possessed a professional understanding of military organization and training. Appointed adjutant general in the Continental Army, he had begun the gargantuan task of creating a single, uniform army from the manpower of thirteen different colonies each with its own militia. Short, pudgy, and bespectacled—“an old granny looking fellow” according to one of his soldiers— Gates’s kindly, conciliatory manner encouraged people to work together, and it was a considerable feat to have secured the collaboration of the colonies before they had agreed on any kind of unified constitutional government. His reputation consequently ranked high. In some people’s opinion, not least his own, it rivaled that of George Washington. Nevertheless, he had never exercised independent command in combat, and his limited military experience meant that he maneuvered through the corridors of power with more confidence than he ever displayed on the battlefield.

A relationship that was to prove profoundly destructive to both Gates and Wilkinson began formally enough in early July 1776 when Gates sent Arnold with Wilkinson to Crown Point to inspect the increasingly disease-ridden survivors of the Canadian disaster. Of fifty- two hundred men, they found almost half sick with typhoid fever, smallpox, and other illnesses. Gates decided, with Schuyler’s reluctant agreement, to move the stricken army farther south to the great fortress of Ticonderoga, which guarded the entrance to the head of the Hudson Valley. Arnold and Wilkinson were tasked with preparing Ticonderoga for their reception, a duty that fell largely to the junior officer after the general became embroiled in a feud over allegations of looting in Canada.

During this period when he was reporting directly to Gates, the young captain switched allegiance. It was not that Wilkinson turned against Arnold— he defended his former patron vigorously in the looting quarrel, saying, “[I] have always found Him the intrepid, generous, friendly, upright, Honest man”—rather that Gates could offer more. He was, Wilkinson declared, “a commander whom the entire army loved, feared and respected.”

Gates made his appreciation known on July 20 by promoting Wilkinson to brigade major, and appointing him to the staff of his own favorite general, Arthur St. Clair. Soon afterward Wilkinson fell sick with typhoid fever himself and was sent back to the army’s headquarters in Albany, where he almost died. Later he used to claim that he came so close to death he could hear the planks being sawed in the yard outside to make his coffin. Fortunately he came under the care of the army’s senior medical officer, who had orders from Gates to keep the young officer alive at any cost.

By the time he was again fit for duty, St. Clair’s brigade had moved south to join Washington, and so Gates attached Wilkinson to his own staff. When the general marched south in December with four regiments from Albany in response to Washington’s urgent request for reinforcements, Wilkinson went with him. The next tumultuous month altered the course of many careers, not least those of the general and the new major.

H
AVING DRIVEN
W
ASHINGTON
out of New York during the early fall of 1776, General William Howe had unexpectedly followed him into New Jersey instead of going into winter quarters. Taken by surprise, with part of his force under General Charles Lee still in Westchester, New York, and many of his militia anxious to return home at the end of the year, Washington himself was in acute danger of being overwhelmed by pursuing British forces. Unsure where the commander in chief had retreated to, Gates sent his newly recovered aide ahead to find Washington.

Scouting for clues in the confusion of war, Wilkinson rode through northern New Jersey and eventually learned that Washington and most of his troops had crossed the Delaware River farther south into Pennsylvania. With swarms of British troops roaming the area, he decided to consult General Lee, Washington’s second-in- command, who had moved his headquarters close to Morristown, New Jersey. Lee was a fighting general, and an exponent of small-scale warfare. During a period of his life when he’d lived as a Native American with a Seneca wife, his aggressive behavior earned him the nickname Boiling Water. He had learned his trade in the British army, then left to become a mercenary, participating in any European war he could find. As a result, he was, in Washington’s estimation, “the first officer in Military knowledge and experience we have in the whole army.”

At nightfall on December 12, Wilkinson found Lee at an inn outside Morristown, apparently unperturbed that the Connecticut militia guarding him had just decided to return to their homes. Not until the following morning did Lee draft a letter to Gates. Its message was unrelievedly gloomy. Lee believed that, to make best use of his untrained militia troops, Washington should be conducting a guerrilla campaign rather than trying to confront in open battle a professional army that could bring devastating firepower to bear on its enemy through parade- ground maneuvers.

“
Entre nous
a certain great man is damnably deficient,” Lee told Gates. Washington’s mistaken strategy had left Philadelphia defenseless and the army on the verge of defeat. “Unless something turns up which I do not expect, our cause is lost. Our counsels have been weak to the last degree.”

Lee intended to remain in Morristown, despite Washington’s repeated requests that Lee move his forces west of the Delaware. However, Lee advised Gates to join their chief as soon as possible, with the implication that he would be needed as a replacement before long.

Lee was still eating breakfast in his dressing gown and slippers when Wilkinson heard hoofbeats on the road and looking out of the window saw a troop of British dragoons gallop up to the inn. Too late, Lee realized that he was the target of an enemy raid carried out virtually within sight of his army. He attempted to hide in the chimney, but, when Wilkinson appeared at the window, the horsemen swore they would shoot and set fire to the building unless Lee surrendered. Convinced it was not a bluff, the general gave himself up and was hustled away, still in his bedroom slippers, leaving Wilkinson to deliver his letter to Gates.

Lee was not only Gates’s friend, but an authority in the area where Gates was weakest, the command of troops in battle. His message crystallized Gates’s opposition to Washington. From then on, he, too, espoused the use of guerrilla warfare relying on militia forces. Following Lee’s advice, however, Gates hurried to join Washington west of the Delaware River. He arrived on December 20, and with the addition of more than two thousand troops Washington at once began to plan a counterstroke against a Hessian brigade stationed across the river in Trenton, New Jersey.

Believing the attack would fail, Gates refused to take part. With the excuse that he was ill, he left for Philadelphia, intending to travel on to Baltimore, where Congress had retreated to escape the threat of British marauders. Wilkinson loyally went with him until they reached Philadelphia. There he decided he could not miss the battle. In a testimony to their friendship Gates gave him an excuse to return in the form of a letter for Washington.

On Christmas morning, Wilkinson galloped back from Philadelphia, arriving toward nightfall as the long lines of American troops were getting ready to be ferried over the icy Delaware for Washington’s surprise attack. So poorly shod were the soldiers that Wilkinson later recalled the trail from their barracks to McKonky’s Ferry was “easily traced, for there was a little snow on the ground which was tinged here and there with blood from the feet of the men with broken shoes.” To transport them with their heavy packs across the water was a dangerous operation made more hazardous by swirling ice floes and a high wind that drove snow in the ferrymen’s faces. When Wilkinson came up with Washington to deliver Gates’s letter, the commander in chief was about to ride out to inspect this first, critical phase of his plan. The encounter remained etched in the young man’s memory.

“What a time is this to hand me letters!” Washington exclaimed. Wilkinson replied that the dispatch was from General Gates, and Washington’s response showed that he was not even aware that his senior general had gone.

“Where is General Gates?” he demanded.

Wilkinson answered that Gates was in Philadelphia, to which Washington angrily asked why he had gone there.

“I understood him that he was on his way to Congress,” Wilkinson replied.

“On his way to Congress!” Washington burst out, and the depth of pent- up exasperation in his voice betrayed his tension. Coupled with Lee’s refusal to obey orders, Gates’s blatant decision to ignore his wishes in order to lobby Congress must have made plain to Washington that after a year of defeats his authority was slipping away. His future, and that of the cause he served, depended on the surprise attack he had planned. As Wilkinson himself admitted, he was so shaken by his commander in chief’s anger that he could say nothing, but “made my bow and left.”

The details of Trenton, Wilkinson’s first experience of battle, never faded, but he recalled with particular clarity the river crossing. A flotilla of boats had been assembled, and almost three thousand men had to be assigned, marshaled, and marched aboard in the midst of a snowstorm, an operation supervised by Henry Knox, whose “stentorian lungs and extraordinary exertions” were in Wilkinson’s view essential to the proceedings. Out on the water, the difficulties only grew more severe as “the force of the current, the sharpness of the frost, the darkness of the night, the ice which made during the operation and the high wind, rendered the passage of the river extremely difficult.”

In these extreme conditions the operation fell more than two hours behind schedule. Once across, however, Washington’s force divided into two columns and marched south, the right column hugging the riverbank while, two miles inland, the left advanced directly into Trenton. General St. Clair’s brigade was closest to the river, and as Brigade Major Wilkinson marched with them, they circled round the town to block the exit on the far side. By now the operation was so late that what had been planned as a night attack became a daylight assault, but it was still unexpected because the defenders of Trenton never imagined that the Delaware could be crossed in such a storm.