An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (9 page)

Driven out of Philadelphia at the end of September by the approach of Howe’s army, they had fled first to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, before crossing the broad expanse of the Susquehanna River to find refuge in York in the foothills of the Alleghenies. Doggedly, the twenty or so delegates had labored to keep alive a semblance of government, acting as executive, legislature, and constitutional assembly. Meeting in York’s tiny courthouse, they issued orders to supply army commanders with food, munitions, and clothing, they assessed the financial obligations of the different states, and at the same time they haggled over the terms of a political confederation that would unite New Hampshire with Georgia and the eleven states in between.

Shrouded by fog and low- lying clouds that clung to the hillsides, York seemed cut off from the outside world, and its discomforts contributed to the delegates’ depression. They were crammed into overcrowded lodging houses and inns and forced to conduct business surrounded by a sullen, largely German population. “The Prospect is chilling on every Side, gloomy, dark, melancholy and dispiriting,” John Adams confessed in the privacy of his diary. “When and where will light come from?”

Symptomatic of their isolation, when rumors began to circulate in the middle of October that Washington had attacked Howe outside Philadelphia, and Gates was said to be closing in on Burgoyne at Saratoga, the delegates could not find out what was happening. The first hard news—that fog had denied Washington victory at Germantown by obscuring his view of the battlefield— was followed by the terrible storm. As the streets turned to mud, and the rain hammered on the roof of the courthouse, the delegates came closer to despair than at any other time in the Revolution. “We have been three days, soaking and poaching in the heavyest Rain that has been known for several Years,” John Adams wrote on the twenty- eighth to his wife, Abigail, in Boston, “and what adds to the Gloom is the Uncertainty in which We remain to this Moment, concerning the Fate of Gates and Burgoigne. We are out of Patience. It is impossible to bear this suspence, with any Temper.”

With the rain still bucketing down, Wilkinson waited another day in Reading and accepted an invitation to eat at the mess of Lord Alexander Stirling, a major general in Washington’s army. Despite his title, Stirling was American born and bred. He had fought with Washington in the New York campaign, and at Trenton and Brandywine, and was convinced of the need for a professional army.

At dinner, the two men discussed the progress of the war. Wilkinson remembered that the general spent much of the evening describing in excruciating detail his experiences at the Battle of Long Island in August 1776. Notorious for his heavy drinking— Rush dismissed him as “a proud, vain, lazy, ignorant drunkard”— Stirling apparently fell asleep, leaving his guest to be entertained by his aides, James Monroe and William McWilliams, both majors but older and wiser than the young colonel. Late at night, with a drink and an attentive audience at hand, the twenty- year-old began to boast and, by his own admission, indulged in “conversation too copious and diffuse for me to have charged my memory with particulars.” Otherwise all that he could recollect was that “we dined agreeably and I did not get away from his lordship before midnight, the rain continuing to pour down without intermission.” However, his audience, and in particular Major McWilliams, vividly recalled that Wilkinson had betrayed a confidence that General Horatio Gates had shared with him.

O
F ALL THE CONGRATULATORY LETTERS
he had received, Gates was proudest of the one sent by General Conway, a veteran of the French army, who had also served under Europe’s supreme military expert, Frederick II, king of Prussia. “What pity there is but one General Gates!” Conway wrote admiringly. “But the more I see of this Army the less I think it fit for general Action under its [present] Chiefs & discipline. I speak [to] you sincerely & wish I could serve under you.” Not surprisingly, Gates showed this flattering tribute to his young chief of staff.

What McWilliams remembered from his convivial talk with Wilkinson was a remark criticizing Washington that the young man claimed to have read in Conway’s letter: “Heaven has been determined to save your Country; or a weak General and bad Counsellers would have ruined it.” As a good staff officer, McWilliams duly reported this subversive comment to General Stirling when the general had sufficiently sobered to appreciate its importance.

The next day when the rain had eased and Colonel James Wilkinson was recovered from his carousing, he continued on his way, a young man at ease with the world. His self-confidence showed in his handwriting, the letters well- formed, forward-sloping with capitals extravagantly looped. It was evident too in the casual manner he conveyed his vital message to Congress.

Having broken his journey once, he did so again, spending two days with the Biddles in Easton, Pennsylvania. Since Nancy’s happpiness depended upon her Jimmy’s “wretched existence,” she must have been overjoyed to see him, with his dark, curly hair, bright black eyes, and amused expression, and no doubt was bewitched by his tales of valor and importance. Two days could hardly have been enough for what they had to say, and even John Adams, irritated beyond measure by the delay, acknowledged later, “Had I known that he had fallen in love with so fine a woman as his after wife really was, my rigorous heart would have somewhat relented.”

Even after he finally arrived in York, Wilkinson made the exasperated delegates wait yet another day while he assembled all Gates’s papers in the correct order. Impatiently Samuel Adams exclaimed that such a laggard should be presented with “a horsewhip and spurs.”

Despite the irritation caused by their late arrival, the documents dispelled the delegates’ gloom and despondency. Between September 19, Burgoyne’s first defeat at Freeman’s Farm, and the final surrender on October 17, almost nine thousand British and Hessian troops had been killed, captured, or rendered incapable of fighting. The total represented close to one quarter of all the British forces on American soil. Their weapons, 4,647 muskets, together with bayonets, cutlasses, and 72,000 rounds of ammunition, fell into American hands, as well as 42 cannon, more than 1,000 cannonballs, and dozens of barrels of gunpowder. For an army as starved of equipment as Gates’s, this feast was as welcome as the 5,791 enemy who were now their prisoners. But the wider implications of the victory made the news of Saratoga even more welcome.

Within hours of receiving Gates’s report, Congress sent off a summary to Benjamin Franklin and his fellow ambassadors in France saying, “We rely on your wisdom and care to make the best and most immediate use of this intelligence to depress our enemies and produce essential aid to our cause in Europe.” In particular, news of the British surrender was to be employed to secure the “public acknowledgment of the Independence of these United States,” and to remind France and her allies “how essential European Aid must be to the final establishment and security of American Freedom and Independence.” A similar message went to American negotiators attempting to borrow money in the Netherlands.

Franklin used the information well, but so, too, did the newspapers and a flood of private letters. Once news of Burgoyne’s capitulation reached Europe, neither French ministers nor Dutch bankers could mistake the fighting in North America for a short- lived rebellion. Within four months the conflict would be transformed into an international war.

To express the overwhelming significance of Saratoga, Congress called for a day of thanksgiving to be celebrated throughout the United States on December 18. “Your Name Sir,” Henry Laurens assured Gates, “will be written in the breasts of the grateful Americans of the present Age & sent down to Posterity in Characters which will remain indelible when the Gold shall have changed its appearance.”

In the elated atmosphere, it was impossible to deny General Gates anything. The delegates ordered a gold medal to be struck in his honor, and they passed a vote of thanks to him, to each of his two senior commanders, Benedict Arnold and Benjamin Lincoln, and to all the officers and men of his army. But one request stuck in the congressional craw, his wish to have his chief of staff, James Wilkinson, promoted to the brevet rank of brigadier general.

The idea of a twenty-year-old general was startling in itself, but it also offended the principle that promotion should take place strictly on grounds of seniority, with rare exceptions being made for outstanding bravery on the battlefield. Wilkinson was no more than a staff officer who had never actually led troops in battle, and scores of more senior colonels were desperate to be considered for the next opening as a general. Yet he had unmistakably earned Gates’s admiration and trust—“I have not met with a more promising military genius,” the general declared unequivocally, and Wilkinson’s services were “of the [highest] importance to this army.”

No one wanted to confront the Revolution’s savior head-on, but the question of Wilkinson’s promotion served as an excuse for Washington’s supporters, primarily from the south, to criticize Gates’s judgment on other matters. While they discussed the recommendation, Wilkinson was left to kick his heels in the narrow streets and crowded taverns of York. In a letter sent on November 1 to “My dear General and loved Friend,” he affected to be unconcerned by the delay to his promotion—“my hearty contempt of the follies of the world will shield me from such pitiful sensations”— but the rest of his message showed how closely he had been listening to the talk in Congress. Gates had failed to inform Washington of his victory, a deliberate breach of military protocol that amounted to insubordination, and this had aroused particular resentment among southerners. And Gates had left himself vulnerable through the lenient terms of surrender that he had offered to Burgoyne. “Excuse me,” Wilkinson ended, “had I loved you less, I should have been less free.”

The “treaty of convention” signed by Burgoyne had not technically amounted to a surrender, and it had stipulated that his men were not to be treated as prisoners, but repatriated to Britain on condition that they did not again take up arms to fight the United States. This last requirement, releasing prisoners on parole, was common practice—hundreds of captured American soldiers had been set free on an equivalent understanding— but the sheer numbers involved at Saratoga caused consternation. Besides, once home, Burgoyne’s men would be assigned duties that would release thousands of other troops for service in America. Gates seemed to have let an enemy who was at his mercy wriggle away almost unscathed. South Carolina’s Henry Laurens voiced the southerners’ concern by suggesting that Gates had become “a little flattered” by Burgoyne and been “too polite to make [him] and his troops prisoners.”

Colonel Wilkinson was summoned to explain how this had come about and, in doing so, demonstrated why Gates thought so highly of him. With the confidence of an officer who had seen the battlefield and conducted much of the negotiation in person, the young colonel pointed out that military necessity had dictated the terms offered by General Gates. Burgoyne’s forces were well entrenched in a strong defensive position, and another British army, four thousand strong, was approaching up the Hudson River threatening Gates’s supply lines. The situation made it essential to negotiate a quick surrender or to assault Burgoyne’s position. “Had an Attack been carried against Lt. General Burgoyne,” Wilkinson explained, “the dismemberment of our army must necessarily have been such as would have incapacitated it for further action [in] this Campaign. With our armies in Health, Vigour and Spirits, General Gates now awaits the commands of the Honourable Congress.”

The New Englanders seized on Wilkinson’s masterly presentation. Not only did it clear Gates of incompetence and show him instead to be the master of a dangerous military situation, it offered Congress a way of circumventing his promise to repatriate British troops. Since Gates was not acting freely but under pressure from British attack, the United States need not feel honorbound to abide by the spirit of the agreement. Once the letter of convention was examined, the lawyers in Congress easily picked it apart to prevent repatriation.

The next day, November 6, 1777, on the recommendation of the Board of War, the Continental Congress resolved, “That Colonel James Wilkinson, adjutant general in the northern army, in consideration of his services in that department, and being strongly recommended by General Gates as a gallant officer, and a promising military genius, and having brought the despatches to Congress giving an account of the surrender of Lieutenant General Burgoyne and his army on the 17 day of October last, be continued in his present employment, with a brevet of brigadier-general in the army of the United States.”

Thus, at the age of twenty, James Wilkinson became a general. Brevet rank was temporary and confined to a particular campaign, but for the moment he was the youngest American-born general in the Continental Army. The opportunities that awaited him were almost unlimited.

B
Y HORRIBLE SYMMETRY,
on the very day James Wilkinson was made a general, Stirling passed on to the commander in chief an account of Wilkinson’s dinner- table boasting on the night of the great storm. Three days later, on November 4, General Washington wrote a terse note to Thomas Conway with the information that he knew of Conway’s comment to Gates about the country being ruined by “a weak General or bad Counsellors.”

The new inspector general replied denying he had used the phrase, although the real one about the army not being “fit for general Action under its [present] Chiefs” was no better. Then with breathtaking arrogance, Conway observed patronizingly to Washington, “Your modesty is such that although your advice is
commonly
sound and proper, you have often been influenced by men who were not equal to you.” What might have remained a private quarrel became public when Conway sent Henry Laurens, president of Congress, both the original letter to Gates and this exchange with Washington. Alarmed by news that the Conway letter had been leaked to Washington, Mifflin begged Gates to keep his correspondence and the links between them secret, otherwise “your generosity and frank disposition . . . may injure your best friends.” Gates immediately began a furious search for the culprit—“No punishment is too severe for the wretch who betrayed me,” he declared, and subjected every member of his staff to questioning. Wilkinson had been delayed on his return from York by the need to see Nancy Biddle again, but in early December he was put through the same procedure. Wilkinson might have confessed at that point—Gates, he acknowledged, forgave people easily— but instead he professed utter outrage at the mere imputation of guilt.