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

BY HORRIBLE SYMMETRY, on the very day James Wilkinson was made a general, Stirling passed on to the commander in chief an account of Wilkinson’s dinner- table boasting on the night of the great storm. Three days later, on November 4, General Washington wrote a terse note to Thomas Conway with the information that he knew of Conway’s comment to Gates about the country being ruined by “a weak General or bad Counsellors.”

The new inspector general replied denying he had used the phrase, although the real one about the army not being “fit for general Action under its [present] Chiefs” was no better. Then with breathtaking arrogance, Conway observed patronizingly to Washington, “Your modesty is such that although your advice is commonly sound and proper, you have often been influenced by men who were not equal to you.” What might have remained a private quarrel became public when Conway sent Henry Laurens, president of Congress, both the original letter to Gates and this exchange with Washington. Alarmed by news that the Conway letter had been leaked to Washington, Mifflin begged Gates to keep his correspondence and the links between them secret, otherwise “your generosity and frank disposition . . . may injure your best friends.” Gates immediately began a furious search for the culprit—“No punishment is too severe for the wretch who betrayed me,” he declared, and subjected every member of his staff to questioning. Wilkinson had been delayed on his return from York by the need to see Nancy Biddle again, but in early December he was put through the same procedure. Wilkinson might have confessed at that point—Gates, he acknowledged, forgave people easily— but instead he professed utter outrage at the mere imputation of guilt.

“[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.