An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (10 page)

“[The situation] makes me the more unhappy,” an embarrassed Gates confided to Mifflin, “as a very valuable and polite officer was thrown into a situation which must increase his disgust.” But Wilkinson was not simply disgusted. To divert suspicions, he pointed the blame elsewhere. The bearer of Conway’s incriminating letter was Gates’s aide Lieutenant Colonel Robert Troup, and soon after it was delivered,Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s aide, had visited Gates’s camp. During this visit, Wilkinson suggested, Troup “might have incautiously conversed on the substance of General Conway’s letter with Colonel Hamilton.”

Gates’s fatal mistake was to believe Wilkinson. In high indignation, he at once wrote to Washington to remonstrate with him for having acquired access to Gates’s private correspondence illicitly. “Those letters have been stealingly copied,” he protested, “but, which of them, when, or by whom, is to me, as yet, an unfathomable Secret.” To underline the seriousness of the charge, he declared that he intended to forward his letter to Congress so that with Washington’s help its members could discover the person responsible. “Crimes of that Magnitude ought not to remain unpunished,” he concluded sententiously.

Everything about this communication was calamitous for Gates. The plural “letters” told Washington, who had not realized it till then, that Conway had been in contact with Gates more than once. The demand for help in tracking down the perpetrator revealed that he did not know who was really responsible for leaking the “weak General” sentence, while Washington did. Worst of all, Gates’s decision to involve Congress required Washington to do the same—“I am under the disagreeable necessity of returning my answer through the same channel”—so making public the connection between Gates and Conway. Neither then nor forty years later when he came to write his
Memoirs
did Wilkinson ever admit that he had done anything wrong. Instead he argued that he was justified in attempting to throw the blame elsewhere because Gates had “read [Conway’s] letter publicly in my presence.” Thus it was technically possible for either Troup or Hamilton to have overheard its contents.

Washington’s reply must have come as a cold shock to Gates. No one had stolen the material, Washington wrote, it had been “communicated by Colonl. Wilkinson to Major McWilliams.” Furthermore, Wilkinson had passed it on so openly that “I considered the information as coming from yourself; and given with a friendly view to forewarn, and consequently forearm me, against a secret enemy [General Conway]. But in this, as in other matters of late, I found myself mistaken.”

This devastating letter did not arrive in Albany until January 22, 1778, but from the moment Gates caught his commander in chief’s tone of mockery, he must have guessed the cabal had lost any remote chance of achieving its object. The Washington who had come close to despair in December after learning of Conway’s appointment might have been hassled into resignation. The Washington with morale high enough to make fun of his challenger was not going to be moved.

The change was apparent from the groveling tone of Gates’s reply. He denied any friendship with Conway—“I never had any sort of intimacy, nor hardly the smallest acquaintance with him”; he claimed the “weak General” passage was “a wicked forgery . . . fabricated to answer the most selfish and wicked purposes”; and finally he declared that James Wilkinson was personally responsible for “sowing dissensions among the principal officers of the army, and rendering them odious to each other by false suggestions and forgeries.” It amounted, in Gates’s opinion, to “positive treason”—the first time the charge had been laid against Wilkinson, and unique in being the only occasion it was wholly unjustified.

Sensibly, Wilkinson found it necessary to spend January 1778 inspecting fortresses in the western hills of New York. On his return to Albany at the end of the month, he learned that Gates had left to take up his post as president of the Board of War in York Town, and that he himself had been appointed, early in January, secretary to the board. There was also a letter from Stirling asking him to confirm the “weak General” quotation, since Conway had denied using it. Realizing at last that he had been outed, Wilkinson replied, acknowledging, “It is possible in the warmth of social intercourse, when the mind is relaxed and the heart unguarded, that obsevations may have elapsed which had not since occurred to me.”

With what must have been a sense of foreboding, he then set off toward York, along the same path he had traveled in such glory in October. He reached York in the last week of February, and by then the Conway cabal was at an end—almost entirely as a result of Wilkinson’s disreputable behavior.

By definition, a cabal is a secret intrigue, and when the bitter exchanges of Washington, Gates, and Conway were made public, most members of Congress were shocked by the maneuverings and hostility that had gone on behind the scenes. “I always before heard [General Conway] mentioned as having great Military Abilities, and this was all I had ever heard concerning him,” Abraham Clark, a New Jersey delegate, confessed. “The kind of Correspondence he carried on with General G[ates] was not known at the Time of his promotion. His Letters to General Washington is of late date. Was the business now to be done Congress would probably Act otherwise.”

The Marquis de Lafayette liked to boast that at dinner on January 31 he had broken up the plot by forcing Gates and Mifflin to drink to Washington’s health, but in reality the publication of their letters in December and early January sealed their fate. Whatever their arguments about the effectiveness of the militia and the dangers of a standing army, the delegates all accepted that “dissention among the principle Officers of the Army must be very injurious to the Publick interest.” Combined with the protests delivered to Congress from nine generals against Conway’s promotion and from forty-seven colonels against Wilkinson’s, it rapidly destroyed all confidence in the ability of the cabal’s triumvirate to run the army.

By mid-February, when Dr. William Gordon asked whether he had ever contemplated resignation, Washington felt able to brush the suggestion away, denying that anyone had “ever heard me drop an expression that had a tendency to resignation.” Soon afterward, Gates hauled up the white flag.

“I earnestly hope no more of that time, so precious to the public, may be lost upon the subject of General Conway’s letter,” he wrote on February 19. “I solemnly declare that I am of no faction.” To which Washington replied magnanimously, “I am as averse to controversy as any Man,” and promised to bury the attempted coup “in silence and, as far as future events will permit, oblivion.”

S
O FAR AS
General James Wilkinson was concerned, however, to forget what had happened was impossible. News of his indiscretion was spreading through the army. On the whole, his friends were forgiving. General Wayne mentioned something about “the very improper steps my old friend Wilkinson had made use of,” and a fellow staff officer, Walter Stewart, wrote to Gates, “I ever was sensible of Wilky’s volatility and open heartedness, and feared he might in an unguarded moment mention something of the affair to a person he looked upon as a friend . . . but his heart is truly good.”

But as Wilkinson rode toward York, he received a bitter note from Colonel Troup that read, “Your generous Conduct at Albany, in indeavouring to fix Genl. Gates’s Suspicions on me, will be duly remembered.” By rights Wilkinson should have felt contrite not just for ruining his patron’s plans but for falsely accusing his aide. His reaction was quite different. The imputation he drew from the letter was that he had deliberately leaked the contents of Conway’s letter. It enraged him to think “that General Gates had denounced me [to Troup] as the betrayer of Conway’s letter, and spoke of me in the grossest manner.” From Lancaster, Wilkinson dispatched a furious letter to Gates issuing a challenge to a duel—“in spite of every consideration, you have wounded my honor, and must make acknowledgement or satisfaction for the injury.”

His murderous reaction was so extreme as to require some explanation. In his
Memoirs
, he justified it in terms of emotional betrayal: “I was ready to have laid down my life for him, yet he had condemned me unheard for an act of which I was perfectly innocent.” Almost self- pityingly he pictured himself as “a boy of twenty without experience, without patronage . . . whose character remained to be established.” However unsure of what he should do, the imputation of deliberate betrayal left him with no choice. “Although my feelings and affections were outraged, my resolution was not appalled. I remembered the injunction of a dying father, I worshipped honor as the jewel of my soul.”

Already beaten down by Washington, Gates appeared crushed by this new attack. Feebly he pointed out that Wilkinson really had leaked the “weak General” passage, then deliberately misled him about the culprit. “I am astonished if you really gave McWilliams such information,” he protested, “how you could intimate to me, that it was possible Colonel Troup had conversed with Colonel Hamilton upon the subject of General Conway’s letter.”

Wilkinson brushed the objection aside. What mattered now was Gates’s failure to apologize for the original insult. No sooner had Wilkinson arrived in York than he sent a fellow officer to Gates with the challenge “Sir, I have discharged my duty to you and my conscience; meet me tomorrow morning behind the English church, and I will there stipulate the satisfaction which you have promised to grant.”

What happened next was described only by Wilkinson. At eight the next morning, he and Gates met as arranged. Pistols were the chosen weapon, but, as the seconds were loading them, Gates asked for a few words alone with his former friend. Then he clasped Wilkinson’s hand and burst into tears, exclaiming, “
I
injure you! It is impossible. I should as soon think of injuring my own child.” There was, Gates said, no need for a duel because Conway himself had acknowledged writing the letter and “has since said much harder things to Washington’s face.” Any suggestion that Wilkinson was responsible for stirring up dissension must therefore be without foundation. According to Wilkinson, this barely credible recital “left me nothing to require, it was satisfactory beyond explanation and rendered me more than content. I was flattered and pleased.” Wilkinson in turn promised Gates that he had never “done any thing with design to injure him.”

Some sort of reconciliation on these grounds undoubtedly took place because the duel was canceled and Wilkinson agreed to take up his position as secretary to the Board of War with Gates as president. Yet the account of how it occurred must have been embellished. Wilkinson’s triumph was too complete to be convincing, and Gates soon showed that he was quite prepared to injure his “child.”

A
S THOUGH A DUEL
with one major general were not enough, Wilkinson at once prepared to challenge another, General Stirling, in whose house he had originally blabbed about Conway’s letter. The supposed insult was again the suggestion that he had deliberately betrayed a secret—“My Lord shall bleed for his conduct,” he declared vaingloriously— but the quarrel lacked the emotional intensity of his challenge to Gates. In March he traveled to Valley Forge to exact revenge, but allowed himself to be distracted on the way by another visit with the delectable Nancy Biddle in Reading that lasted for a blissful fortnight, although in memory it “flitted away like a vision of the morn.”

On his arrival, he allowed Clement Biddle, her elder brother and one of Washington’s staff officers, to persuade him that the wiser course was to ask Stirling for a declaration that the reference to Conway’s letter had been “passed in a private company during a convivial Hour.” A letter from Stirling duly provided this assurance, with the qualification that Wilkinson had spoken “under no injunction of secrecy,” so that McWilliams was justified in passing on what he had said. With that, everyone should have been content, and Wilkinson should have gone back to his onerous and essential duty at the Board of War in equipping the army for another summer of fighting.

However, once Gates had ceased to be his patron, Wilkinson was left with only one general higher in rank to charm, and almost as a reflex he began to try to win over the unbending figure of George Washington. Although obviously a member of Gates’s entourage, Wilkinson took steps to show his loyalty to the commander in chief. In agreeing to resolve his quarrel with Stirling, he let Clement Biddle know that he was guided by Washington’s public disapproval of dueling among his officers. Then on March 3, he publicly renounced the promotion to brigadier general that Gates had procured for him.

His reward was to be summoned to an interview with the commander in chief, where he was able to demonstrate that, as Washington himself had believed, he “was rather doing an act of justice than committing an act of infidelity” in quoting from Conway’s letter. The difficulty was that he had not quoted it accurately. To demonstrate the point, Washington showed Wilkinson the entire file of correspondence concerning the cabal, including Gates’s letter accusing Wilkinson of “a wicked forgery” and demanding that he be “exemplarily punished” for a crime that amounted to “positive treason.”

“He seemed a good deal surprized at G[ate]s’s Letters,” Washington commented laconically to Stirling, “& was not at all sparing in his abuse of him & C[onwa]y.”

In fact, the discovery that Gates had turned so viciously against him overwhelmed Wilkinson. He hurried back to Reading to be consoled by Nancy and, while there, came to a momentous decision about his military career. In a short, cold letter sent from the Biddles’ house on March 29 to Henry Laurens, president of Congress, he peremptorily resigned from the Board of War, declaring, “After the act of
treachery
and
falsehood
in which I have detected Major General Gates, president of that board, it is impossible for me to reconcile it to my honor to serve with him.” Coolly, Laurens advised Congress to accept the resignation, but returned the letter as “improper to remain on the files of Congress.”