Andro Linklater - An Artist in Treason - The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson

Meanwhile, Gates’s army was reinforced by five Continental regiments sent north by Washington, including Daniel Morgan’s Pennsylvania sharpshooters and Henry Dearborn’s light infantry— two units ideal for harassing the enemy in the forested Hudson Valley. Eventually about twenty-one thousand troops, more than twelve thousand of them militia, would be acting either directly under Gates’s command or supporting him by their harassment of British supply lines. Crucially, too, in the south General William Howe abandoned the strategy of advancing up the Hudson to meet with Burgoyne at Albany and, instead of threatening Gates from the rear, chose to direct his forces toward Philadelphia.

During this period of recuperation at Stillwater, Wilkinson’s role as chief of staff grew increasingly important. In early September, the volcanic Benedict Arnold arrived at headquarters, fresh from his victory in the Mohawk Valley, and anxious to act equally aggressively against Burgoyne’s main army. Gates remained reluctant to move and, confronted by a fractious subordinate and increasingly impatient commanders, found excuses either to leave to inspect militia detachments or to retreat to an inner room in the log cabin that served as his headquarters, where he was rumored to drink heavily. His effervescent young chief of staff, universally known as Wilky, had to act as go-between, smoothing relations among the generals and colonels.

“He has great merit,” commented General St. Clair, one of Wilkinson’s admirers, “and what is in my opinion more valuable, he has a warm, honest heart.” His role was something between jester—“jocose, volatile, convivial,” by his own description—and counselor. He advised Gates on what orders were necessary, then shaped, marketed, and occasionally overrode them, and where necessary filled in the gaps in his general’s laid-back leadership. His charm made his behavior both forgivable and lovable.

“His conduct during that memorable campaign endeared him to me,” Matthew Lyon, then a young colonel in the Vermont militia, remembered. “He seemed to be the life and soul of the head quarters of the army: he, in the capacity of Adjutant-general, governed at head quarters. He was a standing correction of the follies and irregularities, occasioned by the weakness and intemperance of the commanding general.”

According to Wilkinson, he personally took out the reconnaissance party that discovered Burgoyne’s slow advance down the west bank of the Hudson River. In response to his chief of staff’s urging, Gates at last moved north to seize the commanding hills known as Bemis Heights that lay in Burgoyne’s path. Under the direction of the Polish engineer Tadeusz Kosciuszko, trenches were dug and artillery placed so that the southern summit became a strong-point. In mid- September the two armies finally met a few miles below Saratoga, where a great bend in the Hudson changes the river’s direction from east to south. Burgoyne established his camp two miles north of the heights. On September 19, the British general led three columns of troops around the flank of the hills to attack the American position.

The crux of the battle was the part played by the light infantry and the sharpshooters on the left wing of the American army under Arnold’s direct command, who were operating in the woodland that covered the ground at the foot of the hills. Threatened with being outflanked by the British right wing, they responded at about noon with an aggressive attack directed by Arnold. “Such an explosion of fire I had never any idea of before,” William Digby, a British lieutenant, wrote in his journal, “and the heavy artillery joining in like great peals of thunder, assisted by the echoes of the woods, almost deafened us with the noise.” Through the afternoon, Arnold continued to push more of the lightly armed men into the battle, in which they drove back the British right and center columns, but as they reached the open ground known as Freeman’s Farm, they were “in turn obliged to retire,” according to Gates’s official dispatch, by a fierce counterattack.

To discover what was happening, Wilkinson left headquarters and at the base of the hill found apparent confusion. Scattered among the trees, commanders such as Daniel Morgan of the rifle corps and Henry Dearborn had to shout and call—Morgan used a hunter’s turkey call—to keep in touch with their troops. But the forest was bushwhacker terrain, ideal for an individual soldier’s sharpshooting skills. As the British attack overstretched, Morgan became aware of a gap in their line and urgently demanded fresh troops to give him the concentrated numbers to break through— concerted musket fire at close quarters was always the endgame of eighteenth- century warfare.

Promising to bring reinforcements, Wilkinson hurried back to headquarters, but could not persuade the nervous Gates to release more troops. At last Arnold, who was listening in growing exasperation, shouted, “By God I will soon put an end to it,” and stormed off to lead the reserves himself. At Gates’s order the chief of staff ran after him and told him to return to the log cabin. It says much for Wilkinson’s personal touch that he persuaded the explosive Arnold to come back with him. As a compromise, five regiments were committed to the battle, but led by a sickly Ebenezer Learned, they blundered into the British center and suffered numerous casualties without being able to help the riflemen.

When darkness ended the battle, both sides claimed victory. The British had suffered heavier losses— more than five hundred dead and wounded from a force barely seven thousand strong— but they occupied the battleground and the brunt of American casualties had fallen on the elite rifle corps. Had Burgoyne’s men been able to mount an attack the next day, Wilkinson decided somberly, they might have secured victory. As it was, he noted with relief, “The enemy have quietly licked their sores this day.”

THERE WAS NOTHING quiet about the scenes that took place in Gates’s cabin. Convinced that outright success had been thrown away, Arnold mutinously confronted his commander over the next few days, and his anger took on a sharper edge after he discovered that the official report omitted any mention of his part in the battle. Their quarrel illustrated why Gates valued Wilkinson so highly. Conscious no doubt of his inferiority to Arnold as a battle commander, Gates appeared unable to defend himself until rescued by his chief of staff. “I would have given my life for him,” Wilkinson once said of Gates, and he proved his devotion by the way he now neatly disposed of his former patron.

Arnold’s argument, he pointed out, centered on how best to exploit the deadly effects of the rifle corps and light infantry. Because they were specialist troops, Wilkinson suggested, they would be better placed under the direct control of the overall commander, General Horatio Gates. His general gratefully seized on this solution and, at their next meeting, informed Arnold that he had effectively been relieved of his command. Rubbing salt in the wound, Gates refused him permission to appeal to Congress.

This treatment produced such an explosion of anger from Arnold that Wilkinson declared he “behaved like a madman” and must have been drunk. “I was huffed,” Arnold protested, “in such a manner as must mortify a person with less pride than I.” But his former patron’s distress left Wilkinson unmoved. The real issue, he maintained, was about insubordination rather than the conduct of the battle; the conflict was between “official superiority on one side and an arrogant spirit and impatience of command on the other.”

History’s perspective shows clearly that Arnold and Gates needed each other’s talents, and a less partisan staff officer might have found a way for them to work together. Even at the time it hung in the air that Wilkinson had acted like a turncoat, abandoning an old friend instead of attempting to mediate. Richard Varick, formerly Arnold’s drinking companion but now his staff officer, blamed the chief of staff for being “at the bottom of the dispute.” Wilkinson’s hostility to Arnold had sharpened the quarrel instead of soothing it, and he had acted like someone who was “fundamentally a Sycophant.”