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

On June 15, Arnold sent his aide down the St. Lawrence Valley to make contact with General John Sullivan, overall commander of the Quebec army. But barely twenty miles from Montreal, the sinister sight of redcoats on the road ahead brought Wilkinson to a halt. Wheeling his horse around, he galloped back to warn Arnold, arriving at his camp shortly before dusk. Arnold quickly deduced that instead of falling back on Montreal, Sullivan must already have turned south from the St. Lawrence, leaving the garrison in danger of being cut off. Arnold ordered his own small force to evacuate Montreal and retreat back down the Richelieu River toward New York. Then he dispatched his aide to find Sullivan with an urgent request for reinforcements.

Night was falling and a storm had broken when Wilkinson came up with Sullivan’s retreating army just fifteeen miles away. Although the general issued an order to the rearguard commander to send five hundred men to help Arnold, in the darkness with the rain falling in torrents, and the army confused and demoralized, the officer could not be found. Exhausted by hours of hard riding, Wilkinson fell asleep in a cabin and at daybreak learned that the man he was looking for was missing and, according to those who knew him, probably drunk and unconscious. The only one likely to be able to help was a Colonel Anthony Wayne, farther back toward the enemy. Half an hour later, Wilkinson came upon a column of disciplined soldiers on the road under an officer who appeared “as much at his ease as if he was marching to a parade of exercise.”

This first meeting between two men destined to become venomous enemies could hardly have been friendlier. With the spontaneous boldness that would earn him the nickname Mad Anthony, Wayne promptly agreed to help, despite the obvious danger. He posted a guard at a bridge and forcibly enlisted every straggler who attempted to cross it until he had five hundred men, then marched them in the direction of Montreal and Arnold. They had barely covered two miles before they were intercepted by a message from Arnold to say the danger was past, but in that time Wayne grew to like Wilkinson so well that even several years later he could describe him as “a Gentleman who I have always esteemed as a friend, and who I know to be a brave and an experienced Officer.”

Complacently, the British allowed their enemy to escape across Lake Champlain, confident that the continuous accumulation of resources would allow them to crush the rebels before the end of the year. The last two Americans to leave Canadian soil were Arnold, once more in command of the rear guard, and Wilkinson. They were rowed away from shore in the same boat, and it is hard to picture them far out on the waters of the lake without speculating about the nature of the capacity for treachery lying latent in each.

Physically, they were not unalike, being short and thickset, and they shared two pronounced characteristics, a crippling incompetence about money and an almost theatrical vanity— each had, for example, wanted to be the last person to leave Canada. To Wilkinson’s irritation Arnold had won by taking advantage of his rank to insist on pushing off from shore with his own hand. So long as they were in the field, money became a secondary issue, and the esteem of fellow combatants kept both content. Only when they were away from the fighting, and cash and admiration were in short supply, did cracks begin to open. Yet what is striking about Arnold’s career is the way that his spirit was broken by Congress’s unremitting hostility to his claims for military recognition and by its persecution of him over his financial affairs. It is not too much to say that he was driven to treachery. Wilkinson’s loyalty, on the other hand, was always unreliable, as Arnold himself discovered soon after their boat came to shore.

DESPITE THE HUMILIATION of the retreat, Arnold felt that he at least had nothing to be ashamed of. At the end of June, when the remains of the Canadian invasion force had retired to Crown Point, south of Lake Champlain, to lick their wounds, he took Wilkinson with him to Albany, New York, to meet the new general who had been appointed to replace the disappointing Sullivan. This was Horatio Gates, who had made his reputation as Washington’s adjutant general, responsible for putting into effect the Continental Army’s disciplinary structure.

Gates arrived in Albany on June 27, 1776. Congress had appointed him to command a Canadian invasion force that no longer existed, and in its absence Gates felt entitled to regard himself as the senior officer in the Northern Department. Although that position had explicitly been given to Schuyler, it became Gates’s overriding priority to elbow his rival aside. In this task, he was soon to be joined by Arnold’s former protégé, James Wilkinson.

3

WOOING GENERAL GATES

THERE WAS SOMETHING of the seducer in the way James Wilkinson set about winning the hearts of his generals. With all of them, as his fellow staff officers noted, he was quick, compliant, amusing, and efficient. But he could also be histrionic, as in his letter to Nathanael Greene. Or genuinely courageous, as in his efforts to safeguard Benedict Arnold. Toward General Horatio Gates, however, he exhibited an affection too intense to be pretended. The depth of feeling suggested how much he missed his real father.

At the height of their relationship, Wilkinson would write in an official, if outspoken, report, “Pardon the freedom of my language, I speak to General Gates, but in him I hope I address a friend,” signing himself “my dear General’s affectionate friend.” Gates responded warmly, encouraging Wilkinson’s extravagant opinions and judgments. As Wilkinson himself admitted, the general won him “by his indulgence of my self- love.” The younger man responded by encouraging the older one’s taste for intrigue. It was a dangerous exchange.

As a former major in the British army, Horatio Gates possessed a professional understanding of military organization and training. Appointed adjutant general in the Continental Army, he had begun the gargantuan task of creating a single, uniform army from the manpower of thirteen different colonies each with its own militia. Short, pudgy, and bespectacled—“an old granny looking fellow” according to one of his soldiers— Gates’s kindly, conciliatory manner encouraged people to work together, and it was a considerable feat to have secured the collaboration of the colonies before they had agreed on any kind of unified constitutional government. His reputation consequently ranked high. In some people’s opinion, not least his own, it rivaled that of George Washington. Nevertheless, he had never exercised independent command in combat, and his limited military experience meant that he maneuvered through the corridors of power with more confidence than he ever displayed on the battlefield.

A relationship that was to prove profoundly destructive to both Gates and Wilkinson began formally enough in early July 1776 when Gates sent Arnold with Wilkinson to Crown Point to inspect the increasingly disease-ridden survivors of the Canadian disaster. Of fifty- two hundred men, they found almost half sick with typhoid fever, smallpox, and other illnesses. Gates decided, with Schuyler’s reluctant agreement, to move the stricken army farther south to the great fortress of Ticonderoga, which guarded the entrance to the head of the Hudson Valley. Arnold and Wilkinson were tasked with preparing Ticonderoga for their reception, a duty that fell largely to the junior officer after the general became embroiled in a feud over allegations of looting in Canada.

During this period when he was reporting directly to Gates, the young captain switched allegiance. It was not that Wilkinson turned against Arnold— he defended his former patron vigorously in the looting quarrel, saying, “[I] have always found Him the intrepid, generous, friendly, upright, Honest man”—rather that Gates could offer more. He was, Wilkinson declared, “a commander whom the entire army loved, feared and respected.”