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

A more energetic clothier general might have forced through the practical improvements that eventually came in 1782 or at least have shaken the system into greater effectiveness. But what Wilkinson required was glory or at least public approval, and without it he simply lost interest. By March 1781, Washington confessed to such frustration—“I have so repeatedly without effect called upon you to attend to the business of your Department near Headquarters”— that he was forced to appeal to Congress to intervene: “I know not how necessary Mr. Wilkinson’s almost constant residence in Philadelphia may be, but should it not be deemed essential, I could wish that Congress would interpose their authority since mine has been ineffectual.”

According to the newspapers, Wilkinson had been distracted by social pleasures such as his noisy participation in a fashionable evening at Hart’s Tavern in Philadelphia, where he organized dances with names like Burgoyne’s Surrender and Clinton’s Retreat. At the same time, financial pressure diverted his energies into maximizing the income from Trevose. He placed advertisements offering the pasture for rent at “seven shillings and sixpence [about $1.25] per week”; he bred horses for sale in the markets at Philadelphia and Trenton and promoted the services of the stallions at his Godolphin stable for “four guineas the season.” He also contacted his old Maryland acquaintances and accepted a commission to sell their tobacco to French buyers. He even undertook to act as clothing agent for Maryland, effectively competing with himself as clothier general, and with apparent success if the 1780 report of the state’s congressmen is to be believed. They castigated the Board of War for its inability to provide enough uniforms for Maryland’s troops, but Wilkinson was lauded as “a native of Maryland a man of Honor and a good officer,” who could be relied on to look after the state’s interests.

Yet he was not alone in neglecting the needs of the Continental Army during this period. From early spring in 1778 when news began to spread that France and the United States had signed a treaty of alliance on February 6—the direct result of Saratoga—an irrational overconfidence seemed to grip the civilian population. When the British evacuated Philadelphia fearing that a French fleet might blockade them, gamblers in Lancaster offered bets at five to one on the war being over in six months. In October, Pennsylvania’s supreme executive council decided it would no longer pay a bounty for recruits because “the war would be shortly finished, and there was no need for throwing the State to farther expence.”

By 1779 Spain had also declared war against Britain, and the following year the fabulously wealthy Netherlands joined the alliance. The Revolution had become international, Britain was isolated, and independence appeared a foregone conclusion. Other state legislatures behaved like Pennsylvania’s, growing reluctant to help in the recruitment, feeding, and clothing of the Continental Army and thus making their own contribution to the mutinies in the winter of 1779–80. By the spring of 1780 General Jedidiah Huntington felt compelled to ask, “Is it not a possible Thing to revive the feelings which pervaded every Breast in the Commencement of the War, when every Man considered the Fate of his Country as depending on his own exertion?”

The mood of complacency was exploded in May 1780 when Henry Clinton’s army, shipped south from New York in December, besieged General Benjamin Lincoln in Charleston and forced an army of thirty-three hundred men to surrender. It was the most severe loss of the war, and two more hammer blows followed. In August, Horatio Gates fled in panic from the bloody defeat at Camden, South Carolina, where more than one thousand Americans were killed or wounded; then in September came the most pulverizing blow of all, Benedict Arnold’s treachery.

The Marquis de Lafayette was with Washington in an upstairs room at West Point when he opened a packet of letters taken from Major John André and realized that Arnold had planned not only to hand over West Point and with it control of the Hudson Valley to the British, but to let them capture the commander in chief. The enormity of the treachery—perhaps enough to defeat the Revolution at a stroke—physically shocked Washington. Lafayette noted that Washington’s head was down, and the papers in his hand trembled. “Arnold has betrayed me,” he whispered. “Whom can we trust now?”

A sense of horror rippled through the nation. In Philadelphia and Bucks County, Wilkinson drew up lists of suspected Loyalists, then called on patriotic Americans to boycott their homes and businesses. “Wilkinson is ready to burst with Indignation,” one of Joseph Reed’s friends reported. “[He] is drawing up Associations against any Intercourse with Tory & Suspicious Characters.” No one was immune from the wave of bitter recrimination. “We were all astonishment, each peeping at his next neighbor to see if any treason was hanging about him,” Alexander Scammell, Washington’s adjutant general remembered. “Nay, we even descended to a critical examination of ourselves.”

Reed himself, Pennsylvania’s chief executive, was targeted as a turncoat by Republicans, who alleged that contacts he had made with the British were preliminaries to his own switch of loyalties. In his new role of loyalty judge, Wilkinson drew up a flowery-worded “Address of Confidence” to Reed and cajoled his wide circle of military and fashionable friends to sign it. Although it did not silence the rumors, his action earned Reed’s gratitude.

This volatile environment gave birth to two astonishing developments. Congress at last yielded entirely to Washington’s demand for a professional army completely centralized in its structure, training, and supply. The states’ militia should be used simply “as light Troops to be scattered in the woods and plague rather than do serious injury to the Enemy,” he told Congress in September 1780. “The firmness requisite for the real business of fighting is only to be attained by a constant course of discipline and service.” In the last year of the war, General Greene’s southern army of Continentals and militia bore some resemblance to this model, but Washington’s vision of a fully professional force may ultimately have been beyond the resources of a near- bankrupt Congress.

Nevertheless, in the wake of Arnold’s treachery, the need to finance such an army gave rise to a still more surprising demand by the New York legislature in October 1780. It called for every state to be made to pay the requisition made upon it by Congress, and in the event of a default Congress should “Direct the Commander-in Chief . . . to march the Army . . . into such a state: and by a Military Force, compel it to furnish its deficiency.” This was the nightmare predicted by every opponent of a standing army, that it would be used by the government to coerce its own citizens. Yet so widespread was the panic that Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut adopted the same resolution in November.

In the event, no action was taken on their demand, and the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown a year later made further army reform irrelevant, but both initiatives threw long shadows down the years that followed. When peace came, no one was prepared to argue for more than the smallest possible military force to defend the United States.

ON MARCH 27, 1781, Wilkinson resigned as clothier general, citing with uncharacteristic honesty a lack of aptitude for the job. “I should be wanting in Personal Candour and in Public Justice,” he wrote in his letter of resgination, “if I did not profess that I find my Mercantile knowledge, on thorough examination, inadequate to the just Conduct of the Clothing Department, under the proposed establishment.” Behind this truth was another more compelling one. Washington’s criticism of Wilkinson’s incompetence had led Congress to cut his salary by half, and as Wilkinson belatedly recognized, he had no possibility of appealing against Washington’s judgment. Even to question it “would be esteemed a sort of impiety.” Still encumbered by loans taken out to pay for Trevose, he could not afford the loss of half his salary, and it was urgent to find some other way of earning a living.