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

Out on the snowy hillsides of Valley Forge, with dozens of desertions reported every day, a score of officers resigning their commissions every week, Washington came close to despair on hearing of Conway’s appointment. It was, he told Richard Henry Lee, “as unfortunate a measure as was ever adopted,” and the despondent sentence that followed had a hint of the resignation that the cabal aimed at: “I have been a Slave to the service: I have undergone more than most Men are aware of to harmonize so many discordant parts; but it will be impossible for me to be of any further service , if such insuperable difficulties are thrown in my way.” Watching him with growing concern, his loyal aide, Tench Tilghman, observed, “I have never seen any stroke of ill fortune affect the General in the manner that this dirty underhand dealing has done.”

WHAT UNDERMINED THE PLANS of the cabal, together with the larger campaign on behalf of the militia, were the indiscretions of James Wilkinson. They were brought about by an immense storm that swept across the coast of New England on October 26, 1777. Quite suddenly a fall that had been warm and foggy, too damp to count as a real Indian summer, too still to dispel the mists and the palls of smoke that rose above battlefields from New York to Pennsylvania, gave way to high winds driving torrents of freezing rain and sleet out of the northeast.

A Brunswick officer marching his defeated troops through the Berkshires in western Massachusettts, “the American Caucasus” as he called them, recorded three nights of “rain, hail and snow” and a fierce gale “so piercing, that, no matter how warmly we wrapped ourselves in our cloaks, it penetrated to the very marrow.” On the same day the extreme conditions caught up with twenty- year- old Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkinson in Reading, Pennsylvania, as he rode south carrying General Horatio Gates’s official account of Saratoga to the Continental Congress. “This evening,” he recorded, “it began to rain and the next day in torrents.” He had set out seven days earlier. With hard riding, he might have kept ahead of the weather and have already arrived in York Town, Pennsylvania, where delegates to the Second Continental Congress desperately awaited his arrival.

Driven out of Philadelphia at the end of September by the approach of Howe’s army, they had fled first to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, before crossing the broad expanse of the Susquehanna River to find refuge in York in the foothills of the Alleghenies. Doggedly, the twenty or so delegates had labored to keep alive a semblance of government, acting as executive, legislature, and constitutional assembly. Meeting in York’s tiny courthouse, they issued orders to supply army commanders with food, munitions, and clothing, they assessed the financial obligations of the different states, and at the same time they haggled over the terms of a political confederation that would unite New Hampshire with Georgia and the eleven states in between.

Shrouded by fog and low- lying clouds that clung to the hillsides, York seemed cut off from the outside world, and its discomforts contributed to the delegates’ depression. They were crammed into overcrowded lodging houses and inns and forced to conduct business surrounded by a sullen, largely German population. “The Prospect is chilling on every Side, gloomy, dark, melancholy and dispiriting,” John Adams confessed in the privacy of his diary. “When and where will light come from?”

Symptomatic of their isolation, when rumors began to circulate in the middle of October that Washington had attacked Howe outside Philadelphia, and Gates was said to be closing in on Burgoyne at Saratoga, the delegates could not find out what was happening. The first hard news—that fog had denied Washington victory at Germantown by obscuring his view of the battlefield— was followed by the terrible storm. As the streets turned to mud, and the rain hammered on the roof of the courthouse, the delegates came closer to despair than at any other time in the Revolution. “We have been three days, soaking and poaching in the heavyest Rain that has been known for several Years,” John Adams wrote on the twenty- eighth to his wife, Abigail, in Boston, “and what adds to the Gloom is the Uncertainty in which We remain to this Moment, concerning the Fate of Gates and Burgoigne. We are out of Patience. It is impossible to bear this suspence, with any Temper.”

With the rain still bucketing down, Wilkinson waited another day in Reading and accepted an invitation to eat at the mess of Lord Alexander Stirling, a major general in Washington’s army. Despite his title, Stirling was American born and bred. He had fought with Washington in the New York campaign, and at Trenton and Brandywine, and was convinced of the need for a professional army.

At dinner, the two men discussed the progress of the war. Wilkinson remembered that the general spent much of the evening describing in excruciating detail his experiences at the Battle of Long Island in August 1776. Notorious for his heavy drinking— Rush dismissed him as “a proud, vain, lazy, ignorant drunkard”— Stirling apparently fell asleep, leaving his guest to be entertained by his aides, James Monroe and William McWilliams, both majors but older and wiser than the young colonel. Late at night, with a drink and an attentive audience at hand, the twenty- year-old began to boast and, by his own admission, indulged in “conversation too copious and diffuse for me to have charged my memory with particulars.” Otherwise all that he could recollect was that “we dined agreeably and I did not get away from his lordship before midnight, the rain continuing to pour down without intermission.” However, his audience, and in particular Major McWilliams, vividly recalled that Wilkinson had betrayed a confidence that General Horatio Gates had shared with him.

OF ALL THE CONGRATULATORY LETTERS he had received, Gates was proudest of the one sent by General Conway, a veteran of the French army, who had also served under Europe’s supreme military expert, Frederick II, king of Prussia. “What pity there is but one General Gates!” Conway wrote admiringly. “But the more I see of this Army the less I think it fit for general Action under its [present] Chiefs & discipline. I speak [to] you sincerely & wish I could serve under you.” Not surprisingly, Gates showed this flattering tribute to his young chief of staff.

What McWilliams remembered from his convivial talk with Wilkinson was a remark criticizing Washington that the young man claimed to have read in Conway’s letter: “Heaven has been determined to save your Country; or a weak General and bad Counsellers would have ruined it.” As a good staff officer, McWilliams duly reported this subversive comment to General Stirling when the general had sufficiently sobered to appreciate its importance.

The next day when the rain had eased and Colonel James Wilkinson was recovered from his carousing, he continued on his way, a young man at ease with the world. His self-confidence showed in his handwriting, the letters well- formed, forward-sloping with capitals extravagantly looped. It was evident too in the casual manner he conveyed his vital message to Congress.

Having broken his journey once, he did so again, spending two days with the Biddles in Easton, Pennsylvania. Since Nancy’s happpiness depended upon her Jimmy’s “wretched existence,” she must have been overjoyed to see him, with his dark, curly hair, bright black eyes, and amused expression, and no doubt was bewitched by his tales of valor and importance. Two days could hardly have been enough for what they had to say, and even John Adams, irritated beyond measure by the delay, acknowledged later, “Had I known that he had fallen in love with so fine a woman as his after wife really was, my rigorous heart would have somewhat relented.”