An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (4 page)

Thus from the start of his military career, Wilkinson was caught up in the struggle between supporters of the regulars and the militia. In military terms, the argument turned on matters of discipline, pay, and length of enlistment, but the implications of creating a professional soldiery reached beyond the army. In the minds of most independent-minded Americans, the militia represented the true spirit of the Revolution, men who took up arms, not for pay or promotion, but for sheer patriotic commitment to their country and to the ideals it reperesented.

“Our troops are animated with the Love of Freedom,” New England delegates to Congress declared in February 1776. “We confess that they have not the Advantages arising from Experience and Discipline. But Facts have shewn that native Courage warmed with Patriotism is sufficient to counterbalance these Advantages.”

That belief lay at the heart of the battle for liberty. Just as independent citizens were superior to obedient subjects, so soldiers fighting for democracy and freedom must prevail over those serving the dictates of a distant monarch. “We must succeed in a Cause so manifestly just,” Samuel Adams insisted, “if we are Virtuous.”

Washington, by contrast, held that Americans, like everyone else, fought better and for longer when they had “a prospect of Interest or some reward.” With grim realism he wrote, “Men may speculate as they will, they may talk of patriotism; they may draw a few examples from ancient story, of great atchievements [
sic
] performed by its influence; but whoever builds upon it, as a sufficient Basis for conducting a long and [bloody] War, will find themselves deceived in the end.” To win their liberty, Americans needed something more than idealism; they needed to create a more efficient fighting machine than the enemy’s.

Wilkinson’s rapid promotion in this new force would owe much to his enthusiastic support for the changes that Washington and his senior officers introduced. The Continental Army’s soldiers were enlisted for a minimum of twelve months as opposed to the militia’s variable terms of three to nine months. A uniform line of command was created that led up from the platoon lieutenant and company captain through the lieutenant colonel at the head of a regiment and the brigadier general commanding a brigade of several regiments to the dizzy heights of a major general in charge of a division of infantry, artillery, and cavalry units.

A revised and more severe disciplinary code, the Articles of War, was introduced, and a provost marshal was appointed to jail and, if necessary, flog offenders up to a maximum of thirty- nine lashes. The list of offenses for which soldiers could be executed was extended to include desertion and, for the first time, treason. “An Army without Order, Regularity and Discipline,”

Washington announced on January 1, 1776, when these changes came into effect, “is no better than a Commission’d Mob.” With new powers at their back, junior officers were ordered to exert greater control over their men, a command that Wilkinson obeyed in his own fashion when he met his company for the first time in March 1776.

“The regiment was ordered for muster the day I entered on duty,” he recalled, “the company was paraded, and I presented myself to take the command; but when I gave the order to shoulder firelocks the men remained motionless, and the lieutenant, stepping up to me, inquired where I was going to march the men. I answered that he should presently see but in the meantime he must consider himself in arrest for mutiny and ‘March to his room,’ which he did without hesitation. I then addressed myself to the company, pointed out to them my right of command and the necessity for their obedience; I informed them that I should repeat the order, and if it was not instantly obeyed, I should run the man nearest to me through the body, and would proceed on right to left, so long as they continued refractory and my strength would support me. I had no further trouble, but joined the regiment and marched to the parade of general muster.”

As news of the incident spread, it became a test of the new discipline. Wilkinson’s men were originally militia from New Hampshire, who had reenlisted as regulars expecting to be commanded by their popular lieutenant, Thomas Grover. In the circumstances, a court-martial decided merely to fine Grover for “insulting Capt. Wilkinson, disobeying his orders and insulting language,” a verdict that astonished Washington. He wrote at once to Congress demanding the lieutenant be dismissed considering “the Enormity of his Offence & [its] dangerous and pernicious tendency.” An abject apology secured Grover’s pardon, but the young captain’s stern attitude was noted. Soon afterward he was rewarded by being appointed an aide to General Nathanael Greene, Washington’s most promising commander and an unyielding disciplinarian.

In March 1776, General Gage’s redcoats were evacuated from Boston, marking the end of the first triumphant phase of the war. The nineteen-year-old Wilkinson celebrated by walking over the battleground of Bunker Hill with two of Greene’s staff officers, to absorb its lessons. “Our men were more than a match for the enemy in disorderly skirmishes or behind breastworks and other impediments,” Wilkinson concluded, “but when brought into regular action in open space would have been overwhelmed by their own confusion.”

What the militia needed, the captain decided, was more training and discipline. This was precisely what his general believed. In Nathanael Greene, Wilkinson had found not just a commander he believed in but, as he would soon embarrassingly reveal, a man he could almost regard as a father.

S
IX WEEKS AFTER
that leisurely stroll across the battlefield, Wilkinson encountered the enemy for the first time, close to Montreal on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. His presence there was the result of Congress’s strategy to persuade Canada to become the fourteenth colony in rebellion against the mother country. A Northern Department was created on the same day in June 1775 as the Continental Army, and an invasion force of three thousand men under General Philip Schuyler was sent to attack Quebec. The assault failed on the last day of the year, and by the early summer of 1776 disease had killed so many men in Schuyler’s army that Washington had to send reinforcements north from Boston, five regiments of militia, and eight of the new Continentals.

Among the fresh arrivals was Captain Wilkinson, who led his New Hampshire company up the Hudson from New York, then by boat across Lake Champlain, and along the Richelieu River in Canada to the banks of the St. Lawrence, opposite Montreal. It was no small feat for a young southerner to lead almost eighty Yankee frontiersmen through country they must have known better than he, sweeping up a score of deserters along the way, and to deliver them all to the officer in command at Montreal, Major General Benedict Arnold.

However black his later reputation, Arnold was the first military hero of the Revolution and, next to Greene, Washington’s favorite general. Nobody better epitomized the
rage militaire
that gripped Americans than this fierce, dynamic commander who hated retreat and sought to bring the British to battle at every opportunity. In May 1775, within days of the outbreak of war, he had with Ethan Allen led the surprise raid that captured the great fort of Ticonderoga guarding upstate New York and seized almost a hundred cannon and mortars to provide the Continental Army with its first artillery. During the summer, Arnold had gone on to capture a cluster of forts controlling northern New York and the entrance to the Hudson Valley. At the end of the year, he had led an independent column to attack Quebec and been shot in the leg during the assault. Undaunted, he had taken over command and maintained the siege until in April 1776 the approach of a new British army under General Sir John Burgoyne forced the besiegers to withdraw.

The appearance of Burgoyne’s force was the result of the massive buildup of troops undertaken by Britain during the spring and summer of 1776 in response to the Boston defeat. The strategic plan was to encircle the rebels in New England, regarded as the source of the Revolution, in a massive pincer movement. The main army under General Sir William Howe quickly achieved the first part of the plan in August by defeating Washington on Long Island and driving him from New York. Meanwhile in the north, Burgoyne at the head of nine thousand well- trained regulars intended to clear the St. Lawrence Valley, then hook south from Canada toward the Hudson River and eventually meet up with Howe’s troops. Together they would then crush New England into submission.

As the Quebec besiegers retreated up the St. Lawrence, Arnold was sent ahead to hold Montreal, 170 miles to the west, to keep open a line of retreat to upstate New York. In this perilous situation, the arrival of a confident young officer with obvious powers of leadership must have been as welcome as the reinforcements he brought with him. Wilkinson and his company were immediately ordered to dig defensive positions on the banks of the St. Lawrence against British attack.

For all his bravado in taking command, Wilkinson was only nineteen and had seen no action. The tiny garrison of 450 men faced an enemy 1,000 strong, outlying posts had been cut off, ammunition and food were running low, no reinforcements were available, and the British were said to be close at hand. Understandly, on May 24, Wilkinson wanted to send a last letter, but for reasons apparent only to him, it was addressed to General Greene.

“We are now in a sweet situation,” he began bravely, and went on to describe his desperate circumstances with a British attack expected in six hours. “The morning dawns,” he ended, “—that morn big with the fate of a few, a handful of brave fellows. I shall do my part— but remember, if I fall I am sacrificed. May God Bless you equal to your merits.
Vale!
”

The message was delivered, and its melodramatic summary of the military position so shocked Greene that he forwarded it, minus the valedictory ending, to Washington. Horrified by what seemed like the impending annihilation of American forces in Canada, Washington promptly sent it on to Congress with the comment that “the Intelligence from [Canada] contained in a letter from Captn Wilkinson . . . is truly alarming.”

But Wilkinson had confused theater with truth, a mistake that would in time become a habit. In reality, the nearest British troops were three days’ march away. Hobbled by indecisive leadership and internal feuding between Burgoyne and the Quebec commander, Sir Guy Carleton, they were moving too slowly to pose any immediate threat. Besides, almost as soon as the letter to Greene had been sent, five hundred fresh troops marched into Arnold’s camp, and in characteristically bold fashion, the general at once began to plan a counterattack against his lumbering foe. Sent to check out the situation, General Schuyler reported to the commander in chief on June 10, “I am happy that Captn Wilkinson’s Conjectures were not realized.”

By then the captain had already transferred his affections from Greene to Arnold and, as he put it, was trying to secure “the preference of an officer, who at that period acquired great celebrity.” To belong to a general’s “family,” his immediate entourage of officers, was a privilege that always attracted ambitious young subalterns. That Arnold, like Greene, should quickly have selected Wilkinson to be his aide indicates the good impression his enthusiasm and intelligence created.

In a revealing incident, however, the young officer failed at one of the first tasks that Arnold set him. Detailed to take a platoon of soldiers to requisition supplies from the local farmers, Wilkinson abruptly lost his nerve when met by a stream of abuse from the outraged owner of a cask of Madeira he had attempted to seize. Returning almost tearfully to Arnold, he demanded to be relieved of the detail. It says much for Wilkinson’s puppyish appeal that the abrasive general, who normally chewed up unsatis-factory subordinates, simply dismissed him with the comment that he was “more nice than wise.” His next duty, however, revealed steelier qualities.

On June 15, Arnold sent his aide down the St. Lawrence Valley to make contact with General John Sullivan, overall commander of the Quebec army. But barely twenty miles from Montreal, the sinister sight of redcoats on the road ahead brought Wilkinson to a halt. Wheeling his horse around, he galloped back to warn Arnold, arriving at his camp shortly before dusk. Arnold quickly deduced that instead of falling back on Montreal, Sullivan must already have turned south from the St. Lawrence, leaving the garrison in danger of being cut off. Arnold ordered his own small force to evacuate Montreal and retreat back down the Richelieu River toward New York. Then he dispatched his aide to find Sullivan with an urgent request for reinforcements.

Night was falling and a storm had broken when Wilkinson came up with Sullivan’s retreating army just fifteeen miles away. Although the general issued an order to the rearguard commander to send five hundred men to help Arnold, in the darkness with the rain falling in torrents, and the army confused and demoralized, the officer could not be found. Exhausted by hours of hard riding, Wilkinson fell asleep in a cabin and at daybreak learned that the man he was looking for was missing and, according to those who knew him, probably drunk and unconscious. The only one likely to be able to help was a Colonel Anthony Wayne, farther back toward the enemy. Half an hour later, Wilkinson came upon a column of disciplined soldiers on the road under an officer who appeared “as much at his ease as if he was marching to a parade of exercise.”

This first meeting between two men destined to become venomous enemies could hardly have been friendlier. With the spontaneous boldness that would earn him the nickname Mad Anthony, Wayne promptly agreed to help, despite the obvious danger. He posted a guard at a bridge and forcibly enlisted every straggler who attempted to cross it until he had five hundred men, then marched them in the direction of Montreal and Arnold. They had barely covered two miles before they were intercepted by a message from Arnold to say the danger was past, but in that time Wayne grew to like Wilkinson so well that even several years later he could describe him as “a Gentleman who I have always esteemed as a friend, and who I know to be a brave and an experienced Officer.”