An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (58 page)

43 JW blamed his illness on “the strong excitements produced by the important scenes in which I had been engaged”: Ibid., 1:321.

C
HAPTER 5:
B
ETRAYING
G
ENERAL
G
ATES

Necessarily JW’s private quarrel with Gates is told without corroboration. But his role in the betrayal of the Conway cabal was very public, fully documented in the George Washington Papers, and both the
Journals of the Continental Congress
and the
Letters of
Delegates to Congress.

44 “The standing corps which I have seen are disciplined”: John Burgoyne,
A State
of the Expedition from Canada
(London, 1780).

44 “to Coax, to wheedle and even to Lye”: Schuyler to Washington, November 22, 1776, quoted in Randall,
Benedict Arnold, Patriot and Traitor
.

44 “We can allow a certain Citizen to be wise”: John Adams to Abigail Adams, October 26, 1777, AFP.

44 “From a well-regulated militia we have nothing to fear”: John Hancock, 1774, quoted in Kohn,
Eagle and Sword
.

45 “We want you in different places”: James Lovell to Gates, November 22, 1777, quoted in June Lloyd’s “BeWare of Your Board of War,” Pennsylvania Historical Society,
Pennsylvania Legacies
, November 2008.

45 “The northern army has shown us”: Benjamin Rush (anonymously) to Patrick Henry, January 12, 1778,
Letters of Benjamin Rush
, vol. 1, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951).

45 “the new Board of War is Composed”: James Craik to Washington, January 6, 1778, GWP.

46 “New Jersey is
our
country”: Quoted in Warren Burger, “Obstacles to the Constitution,” Supreme Court Historical Society, 1977.

46 “If he
has
an Enemy”: Henry Laurens to the Marquis de Lafayette, January 12, 1778, LCC.

46 “General Gates was to be exalted”: Washington to Patrick Henry, March 28, 1778, GWP.

46 “I have been a Slave to the service”: Washington to Richard Henry Lee, October 17, 1777, GWP.

46 “I have never seen any stroke of ill fortune”: Tench Tilghman to Robert Morris, October 21, 1777, quoted in Preston Russell, “The Conway Cabal,”
American Heritage
Magazine
, March/April 1995.

46 The great storm that held up JW in Reading, see
Memoirs
, 1:338–40, and froze the defeated Brunswickers, see
Letters of Brunswick and Hessian Officers during the
American Revolution
, translated by William Stone, but drove others landing on Staten Island to think of deserting and swamped the huts of Washington’s drenched troops.

47 “The Prospect is chilling”: John Adams diary, September 16, 1777, AFP. Crammed into a small, German-speaking town, other delegates voiced equally depressed comments, for example, Cornelius Harnett of North Carolina: “It is the most Inhospitable Scandalous place I ever was in.”

47 “and poaching in the heavyest Rain”: John Adams to Abigail Adams, October 28, 1777, AFP.

48 JW’s account of the dinner party with Stirling is studiously vague—“conversation too copious and diffuse for me to have charged my memory,”
Memoirs
, 1:331–32— so it is not entirely clear whether he or McWilliams misquoted Conway’s letter to Gates.

49 “Had I known that he had fallen in love”: Adams to Thomas McKean, November 26, 1815, AFP.

49 The figures for British armaments captured at Saratoga are taken from the official returns to Congress, October 31, 1777, JCC.

49 “make the best and most immediate use of this intelligence”: Letter by Richard Henry Lee and James Lovell to the U.S. representatives in France, October 31, 1777.

50 “Your Name Sir will be written”: Henry Laurens to Horatio Gates, November 5, 1777, JCC.

50 “I have not met with a more promising military genius”: Gates to John Hancock, October 20, 1777, JCC. On November 6, 1777, the Continental Congress meeting in the courthouse of York, Pennsylvania, passed the following resolution: “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 . . .” JCC.

50 “My dear General and loved Friend” JW to Gates, November 1, 1777,
Memoirs
, 1:335. JW also referred to his discomfort at finding Congress had already heard unofficially from the general: “Through the industry of your friends, whom you indulged with copies the articles of the treaty (with their diabolical comments I suppose) reached the grand army before I did the Congress.”

51 Gates “was too polite to make the Lieut. General and his troops prisoners of discretion”: Quoted in David Duncan Wallace,
The Life of Henry Laurens
(New York, 1915), 247.

51 “Had an Attack been carried”: JW to Congress, November 3, 1777, manuscript letter in Papers of the Continental Congress.

52 “a weak General or bad Counsellors”: Washington to Conway, November 4, 1777, GWP.

52 “Your modesty is such”: Conway to Washington, November 5, 1777, GWP.

52 “your generosity and frank disposition”: General Thomas Mifflin to Gates, November 28, 1777,
Memoirs
, 1:371.

52 “No punishment is too severe”: Gates to Mifflin, December 4, 1777, PCC.

53 “Those letters have been stealingly copied”: Gates to Washington, December 8, 1777, GWP.

53 “I am under the disagreeable necessity”: Washington to Gates, January 4, 1778, GWP.

53 “read [Conway’s] letter publicly in my presence”:
Memoirs
, 1:372–73. JW’s full self-exculpation was wonderfully sinuous: “Conscious as I was that I had never spoken of that letter with evil intentions, or at all except when it was mentioned to me; and considering it, as it really was, nothing more than the vehicle of the opinions of an individual . . . which General Gates himself had not treated confidentially because he had read it publicly in my presence as matter of information from the grand army; I felt no personal solicitude about it, nor could I ascribe to it the importance which was subsequently given to it; and therefore I did not dream of the foul imputations it was destined to draw down upon me, and the strife and trouble it would occasion me.”

53 “communicated by Colonl. Wilkinson to Major McWilliams”: Washington to Gates, January 4, 1778, GWP.

54 “I never had any sort of intimacy”: Gates to Washington, January 23, 1778, GWP.

54 In an attempt to clear up the inconsistency between Conway’s letter and JW’s misremembered version, Stirling asked him to produce the original letter. Stirling to Wilkinson, January 6, 1778,
Memoirs
, 1:382–83. JW replied angrily, “I may have been indiscreet, my Lord, but be assured I am not dishonourable.”

54 “I always before heard”: Abraham Clark to William Alexander, January 15, 1778, PCC. In this letter Clark voiced an oddly prescient suspicion: “If he betrayed the Confidence of his Pattron he may do the same by his Country.”

55 “dissention among the principle Officers of the Army”: Ibid.

55 “I earnestly hope no more of that time”: Gates to Washington, February 19, 1778, GWP.

55 “I am as averse to controversy”: Washington to Gates, February 22, 1778, GWP.

55 “the very improper steps”: Anthony Wayne to Colonel Walter Stewart, quoted in Stewart’s letter to Gates,
Memoirs
, 1:390. JW also quoted General Charles Lee’s comment to Gates, March 29, 1779: “With respect to Wilkinson, I really think he had been a man more sinned against than any.”

55 “I ever was sensible of Wilky’s volatility”: Ibid.

55 “Your generous Conduct at Albany”: Colonel Robert Troup to JW, quoted in JW’s letter to Washington, March 28, 1778, GWP.

55 “General Gates had denounced me”:
Memoirs
, 1:385. The version of what happened between him and Gates is inescapably JW’s. It can be partially confirmed by Gates’s reply, quoted in full in the
Memoirs
, and by JW’s letter of March 28, 1778, to Washington, in which he recounted substantially the same sequence of events.

57 “My Lord shall bleed for his conduct”: JW to Gates, February 22, 1778,
Memoirs
, 1:385–86.

57 “flitted away like a vision of the morn”: Ibid., 1:391.

57 “passed in a private company during a convivial Hour”: JW to Stirling, March 18, 1778, ibid., 1:391–92.

57 “under no injunction of secrecy”: Stirling to JW, ibid., 1:392.

58 “he seemed a good deal surprized”: Washington to Stirling, March 21, 1778, GWP.

58 “after the act of
treachery
”: JW to Laurens, March 29, 1778,
Memoirs
, 1:409–10.

58 “improper to remain on the files of Congress”: Quoted in Jacobs,
Tarnished Warrior
, 47.

58 JW passes over the second duel, but Jacobs’s description in
Tarnished Warrior
is taken from contemporary accounts:
New York Packet
(Fishkill, NY), September 17, 24, October 8, 1778; and
Continental Journal and Weekly Advertiser
, November 12, 1778.

C
HAPTER 6:
L
OVE AND
I
NDEPENDENCE

JW’s recollections skip over the period between his leaving the army and his arriving in Kentucky almost six years later. However, his period as clothier general is well documented in the War Department Papers, as well as the
Papers of George Washington
and Papers of the Continental Congress. The Biddle family connections are based on Radbill, “The Leadership of Owen Biddle and John Lacey,” and Hay, “The Letters of Mrs. Ann Biddle Wilkinson.” The main sources for Pennsylvania politics are Wood,
Creation of the American Republic
; Reed
, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed
; William S. Hanna,
Benjamin Franklin and Pennsylvania Politics
(Stanford, CA: 1964); and Ireland, “The Ethnic- Religious Dimension of Pennsylvania Politics, 1778–1779.”

62 JW’s ownership of Trevose: Jacobs,
Tarnished Warrior
, 55–59.

62 land “sold for three pounds an acre”: Benjamin Franklin, “Information to those who would remove to America,” September 1782,
Writings
, 8:603–14.

62 For Arnold’s time in Philadelphia, see Randall,
Benedict Arnold
.

62 “borrowed a sum of money of the Commissaries”: JW to Joseph Reed, May 1779, quoted in Hay,
Admirable Trumpeter
, 45.

63 “If your Excellency thinks me criminal”: Arnold to Washington, May 5, 1779, quoted in Randall,
Benedict Arnold
.

63 “If we review the rise and progress”: Silas Deane to Robert Morris, quoted in Linklater,
Measuring America
, 166.

64 “Men without Cloathes to cover their nakedness”: Washington to John Bannister, April 21, 1778, GWP.

64 The duties of the clothier general were a work in progress until the last years of the war. For their changing nature, see Wright,
Continental Army.

64 “The clothing department has occasioned more trouble to me”: Quoted in Hay,
Admirable Trumpeter
, 48.

64 “For when a Soldier is convinced”: Washington to James Mease, April 17, 1777, quoted in Wright,
Continental Army.

64 “I am again reduced”: Washington to General William Heath, November 18, 1779, quoted in Erna Risch, “Supplying Washington’s Army,”
Special Studies Series
, ed. Maurice Matloff (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1981).

65 “I shall expect to see you”: Washington’s correspondence with JW is quoted in Hay,
Admirable Trumpeter
, 50–52.