An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (6 page)

On the north side of town, cannon were placed to fire down the two main streets, preventing the highly trained Hessians from forming up to deliver the concerted volleys of shot that made them so effective. With superior numbers and firepower, the attackers quickly took control of the street battle that developed. Those who attempted to escape were shot or captured by the river column as it encircled the town. In midmorning on December 26, Wilkinson delivered a second message to Washington. This one, from St. Clair, reported that on the south side his brigade not only had Trenton surrounded, but had driven one of the three Hessian regiments in the garrison into the open where the survivors were forced to surrender. The trap had closed. From his vantage point at the north end of town, Washington had seen the other two regiments bombarded into capitulation. Wilkinson’s report confirmed that the surprise attack had won a complete victory.

As he delivered St. Clair’s news to Washington, Wilkinson remembered “his countenance beaming with complacency,” the frustrations of the previous evening wiped away. “Major Wilkinson,” Washington exclaimed, shaking the young officer’s hand, “this is a glorious day for our country.”

More than one thousand Germans had been captured, together with cannon, shot, and gunpowder, and another hundred had been killed. Of wider significance, the victory restored morale in the army, and as news of it rippled out through the country, it transformed the mood of despair that had begun to be felt ever more widely. “The minds of the people are much altered,” Nicholas Cresswell, a Tory Virginian, admitted less than a week after the battle. “A few days ago they had given up the cause as lost. Their late successes have turned the scale and now they are all liberty- mad again.”

To reinforce the impact of his victory, Washington launched a second surprise attack on the British garrison in Princeton a week later. This was a bloodier battle, with casualties of almost four hundred on the enemy side, but it ended in the rout of three battalions of regular infantry who had occupied the town. In the space of seven days, Washington’s two victories had won back control of New Jersey and, as Wilkinson declared, “the American community began to feel and act like a nation determined to be free.”

T
RENTON ALSO OPENED UP
a road that promised military glory for James Wilkinson personally. He had already risen fast in the army thanks to the patronage of his generals, but by leaving Gates to take part in the battle, he had taken a first step toward establishing his own independent career. Recognition of his qualities came in January 1777 when he was promoted to lieutenant colonel, this time on the recommendation of Washington himself, and given a commission in a new regiment. This was the ultimate proving ground for an ambitious officer, and Wilkinson had been given the opportunity when Congress had at last decided what the shape of the army should be after eighteen months of vacillation between militia and regulars.

Through the dreadful fall of 1776 when military disaster threatened to wipe out the ideals asserted in the Declaration of Independence, the case against the militia had been stated with growing force by Washington’s generals. “No operation can be safely planned in which they are to take a part,” Nathanael Greene declared after the retreat from New York. “I must repeat the Militia are not be depended upon,” Schuyler wrote following the defeat in Canada. On the very day that he began planning the attack on Trenton, Washington found time to complain to Congress that militia troops “come in, you cannot tell how; go you cannot tell when; and act you cannot tell where; consume your provisions, exhaust your stores and leave you at last at a critical moment.” The irritation of working with such undisciplined soldiers was revealed in a furious outburst from Wayne. “To say anything severe to them has just as much effect as if you were to cut up a Butcher’s Chopping block with a razor,” he fulminated. “By G-d, they feel nothing but down Right blows which, with the dread of being whipt thro’ the Small Guts, keeps them in some Awe.”

Under this weight of criticism, and with the evidence before them of Trenton, where four fifths of the troops had been Continental regulars, Congress finally accepted the need for a completely modern army. In January 1777, it recommended establishing a force of 110 infantry regiments, and with them three other components essential to fighting a late-eighteenth-century war: five regiments of artillery, a corps of engineers, and three thousand cavalry. As a sign of Congress’s “perfect reliance on the wisdom, vigour, and uprightness of General Washington,” their recruitment, training, and pay were to be placed under his direct control. The soldiers would serve for up to three years, or for the duration of the war.

Politically as well as militarily, Washington had won, and the newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Wilkinson, still not twenty years old, seemed likely to be one of the brightest stars in the new Continental Army. His regiment was one of Washington’s extras, and its colonel, Thomas Hartley, an efficient officer Wilkinson had known in Canada. Taking a personal interest in Wilkinson’s career, the commander in chief told him he would benefit from the experience of direct command, as opposed to staff work, because it would help “to remedy his polite manners.” For a young officer aspiring to behave like an aristocrat, this was useful advice, but it went unheeded. In January 1777, instead of roughing it in camp at Morristown where the new troops were beginning their training, he persuaded Hartley to send him on a recruiting drive to Pennsylvania and Maryland. It turned out to be less enjoyable than he had anticipated.

In Wilkinson’s hierarchical world, it was natural for him to charm those above him, and to discipline those below him, but to persuade his fellow citizens as equals that they should join the army was impossible. After a few weeks he reacted much as he had in Canada when Arnold had sent him out to forage for supplies and simply gave up.

Instead of returning to Morristown, he stayed in Philadelphia, where many of the friends he had made as a medical student, especially among “the most accomplished and respectable of the fair sex,” still lived. One girl in particular, Ann Biddle, always known as Nancy, attracted him. Her portrait, painted by Charles Willson Peale, suggests why she caught his eye. Everything about her is fashionable: her hair is piled in ringlets on her head, her eyebrows are plucked, her eyes are darkened, her lips are painted, and, compared to the settled expressions adopted by the other Philadelphia ladies who sat for Peale, her look is lively and seductive. That she was also a Quaker and should thus have been demurely dressed and modestly behaved can only have added to the excitement she aroused.

In his memoirs, Wilkinson claimed that Nancy Biddle aroused “a courting Distemper” in every young man who knew her. As an expert in the use of charm, he responded at once, recognizing in her a kindred spirit. Although his description of his “sprightly Quakeress” is too stilted to convey anything of the light, teasing, demanding character that emerges from her letters, his conduct is more eloquent. From this time on he devoted himself to winning her, and they would eventually share more than twenty years of life together. During that time, no one, not even those who charged him with the most despicable treachery to his country, ever accused him of infidelity to his Nancy.

The Biddles were an old, established family—the first of them had come to America in 1681 with the earliest wave of Quakers— and by the time the Revolution broke out they had established themselves at the heart of Philadelphia society. Nancy’s parents, John and Sarah Biddle, owned the Indian King, a large, three- story hotel, one of the finest in Philadelphia, with eighteen comfortable bedrooms, each boasting plastered walls and a fireplace. One of Nancy’s brothers, Owen, was chairman of Philadelphia’s committee of safety; another, Clement, had enough influence to raise a regiment of volunteers; while Benjamin Franklin appointed her cousin Charles Biddle to be chief executive of Pennsylvania’s supreme council.

John Biddle was in his fifties when Nancy and her younger sister, Lydia, were born, and perhaps because he was an elderly, doting father, he allowed them greater freedom than most Quaker girls enjoyed at the time. During the early months of 1777, they dressed more daringly, went to more parties, and each became attached to a man who was not a Quaker. After Wilkinson had begun to court Nancy, his friend and fellow medical student James Hutchinson, having returned from qualifying as a doctor in England, followed his example by wooing Lydia. Neither had achieved his object, however, by the time the snows melted in April and the new fighting season opened.

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HE
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RIUMPH
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ARATOGA

W
ITH
CONFLICT LOOMING,
Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkinson might have been expected to join his regiment at Morristown. Most ambitious officers would have welcomed the opportunity to command troops in battle. But his brief experience of regimental life only confirmed Wilkinson’s preference for the more genteel environment of a general’s staff. The chance to return to it came from his patron General Horatio Gates.

In March 1777, after a winter spent vigorously lobbying Congress, Gates was given command of the Northern Department in place of General Philip Schuyler. His appointment was a triumph for those New Englanders who, despite Washington’s supremacy, still clung to their faith in the militia. Gates remained their champion.

Once more in command, the general immediately invited Wilkinson to join him as chief of staff. “My young heart leaped with joy,” Wilkinson remembered, “so warmly had General Gates attached it to him, by his indulgence of my self- love.” Sooner or later, most of Wilkinson’s superiors recognized that his vanity, or self- love, was the key to his loyalty, but none secured it more firmly or indulged him more widely than Gates.

The decision to leave the main army for the Northern Department required the commander in chief’s permission. “I would to God, gentlemen could for once know their own minds,” Washington exclaimed in irritation, and although he allowed the move, he must have known that the young colonel was siding with the opposition.

The main weight of the British attack could be expected in the north. During the winter, Sir John Burgoyne had persuaded Secretary for the Colonies Lord George Germain to approve his strategy to isolate New England with its supply of money and manpower from the rest of the colonies. Their plan required a three- pronged advance on Albany, with the main thrust from almost nine thousand blue-coated Hessians and red- coated British troops under Burgoyne himself heading south for the Hudson Valley. An inveterate gambler, Gentleman Johnny’s confidence in the outcome was clear from an entry in Brooks’s club wagering book: “John Burgoyne wagers Charles Fox one pony [fifty guineas] that he will be home victorious from America by Christmas Day, 1777.”

To everyone, both American and British, it was obvious that the first line of defense would be the fortress of Ticonderoga, which commanded access to Lake George and the Hudson Valley. Gates, therefore, immediately sent Wilkinson to inspect its ability to withstand attack. Wilkinson’s report revealed a near-derelict fortress garrisoned by twenty-five hundred men, poorly led, laid low by illness and lacking in ammunition, uniforms, and morale. He recommended that either it be evacuated or its defense be put in the charge of a senior officer such as Arthur St. Clair, his brigadier at Trenton. But any attempt to prepare the fort for either defense or evacuation was aborted by the political generalship of Congress. At the beginning of June, it abruptly decided that, after all, General Schuyler should have command of the Northern Department, with Gates as his subordinate.

Wilkinson responded furiously. “They have injured themselves, they have insulted you, and by so doing have been guilty of the foulest ingratitude,” he told Gates on June 7. “The perfidy of mankind truly disgusts me with Life, and if the happiness of an amiable lady [Nancy Biddle] was not unfortunately too dependent upon my wretched existence, I should think I had lived long enough, nor would I want to breathe the air with Ingrates, assassins, and double- faced Villains.”

Even before this effusive tribute to their friendship arrived, Gates had rewarded his loyal aide by appointing him deputy adjutant general for the northern army, a post that required even senior officers to obey his commands. Wilkinson was overcome. “I am this day honoured by your affectionate letter with the inclosed commission,” he informed his general. “It wrung my heart and I dropped a tear upon it.”

Congress’s interference froze any decision about the defense of Ticon-deroga until Schuyler was again in charge. Although he confirmed St. Clair’s command, the weeks of inaction made certain that the fortress would fall for virtually nothing at all. In early July, British artillery occupied positions overlooking Ticonderoga, and St. Clair decided to evacuate the doomed position without further delay. Hundreds were captured on the lake and on land, but about two thousand troops escaped. With bleak ineptitude, Congress voted to court- martial both St. Clair and Schuyler for allowing the capture of a position it had rendered indefensible. By default Gates was once more put in charge of the Northern Department, the third change of command in five months.

Unaware of the vital role Congress had played in his victory, Burgoyne paused to celebrate before pushing slowly southward, “flushed with victory,” Schuyler reported, “plentifully provided with provisions, cannon and every warlike store.” His army of almost nine thousand professional soldiers was accompanied by more than fifty cannon and a baggage train of ammunition and food wagons, as well as officers’ wives with their tents, servants, and wardrobes. This was the classic European army, a gigantic concentration of firepower designed to smash an enemy in open ground. Meanwhile, it all had to be transported through forested, often marshy terrain blocked by trees felled by the retreating Americans.