by Ron Chernow
It irked Gates that he had to negotiate with this cocksure, headstrong aide. In a draft letter to Washington, Gates crossed out an allusion to Hamilton that showed just how much he seethed over the situation: “Although it is customary and even absolutely necessary to direct implicit obedience to be paid to the verbal orders of aides-de-camp in action, or while upon the spot, yet I believe it is never practiced to delegate that dictatorial power to one aide-de-camp sent to an army 300 miles distant.”77 In the end, Hamilton extracted a promise from Gates to surrender two of the brigades he wanted. It was a bravura performance by Hamilton, who had shown consummate political skill.
During the tense impasse with Gates, Hamilton tarried long enough in Albany to see his old friend Robert Troup and dine at the mansion of Philip Schuyler. Having preceded Gates as head of the Northern Department, General Schuyler felt cheated of the Saratoga triumph for which he had laid the groundwork. General Nathanael Greene seconded this appraisal, calling Gates “a mere child of fortune” and asserting that the “foundation of all the northern success was laid before his arrival there.”78 During this visit to Schuyler’s mansion, Hamilton met for the first time the general’s second daughter, twenty-year-old Eliza, a relationship that was to resume more than two years later.
After his exhausting talks with Gates, Hamilton headed back down the Hudson, only to discover that his mission was not over. Having stopped at the home of New York governor George Clinton in New Windsor, he was taken aback to find that two of the brigades promised by General Israel Putnam had been withheld. A bluff, jowly farmer and former tavern keeper from Connecticut, Putnam was much beloved by his aide, Aaron Burr, who referred to him as “My good old general.”79 It was Putnam who supposedly told his men at Bunker Hill, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes. Then, fire low.”80 When Hamilton saw that Putnam had reneged on his promise, he sent him a letter throbbing with anger. Hamilton cast aside the usual caution of an aide-de-camp and delivered a tongue-lashing to a veteran officer more than twice his age:
Sir, I cannot forbear confessing that I am astonished. And alarmed beyond measure to find that all his Excellency’s views have been hitherto frustrated and that no single step of those I mentioned to you has been taken to afford him the aid he absolutely stands in need of and by delaying which the cause of America is put to the utmost conceivable hazard....My expressions may perhaps have more warmth than is altogether proper. But they proceed from the overflowing of my heart in a matter where I conceive this continent essentially interested.81
Hamilton had to issue direct orders to Putnam to send all of his Continental Army troops (that is, minus state militias) to Washington immediately. The fault was not entirely Putnam’s, however, for the two brigades had not been paid in months and, mutinously, refused to march.
Having gone out on a limb, Hamilton expressed great trepidation in his reports to Washington that he might have exceeded his authority. It was therefore deeply gratifying when Washington sent him an unqualified endorsement of his work: “I approve entirely of all the steps you have taken and have only to wish that the exertions of those you have had to deal with had kept pace with your zeal and good intentions.”82 As in Philadelphia in September, Washington had given his wunderkind huge autonomy, and the gamble had paid off handsomely. The young aide-decamp was revealed as a forceful personality in his own right, not just a proxy for the general. For Hamilton, his encounters with the two obdurate generals strengthened his preference for strict hierarchy and centralized command as the only way to accomplish things—a view that was to find its political equivalent in his preference for concentrated federal power instead of authority dispersed among the states.
The frantic rides up and down the Hudson damaged Hamilton’s always fragile health. On November 12, he wrote to Washington from New Windsor to explain his delay in returning: “I have been detained here these two days by a fever and violent rheumatic pains throughout my body.”83 Despite his illness, Hamilton continued to direct the movement of troops slated to join Washington and went downriver to Peekskill to apply maximum pressure on Putnam’s brigades. There, in late November, a haggard Hamilton climbed into bed at the home of Dennis Kennedy. It seemed uncertain whether he would recover. In a letter to Governor Clinton, Captain I. Gibbs wrote that he feared that the combined fevers and chills might prove mortal. On November 25, he reported that Hamilton “seemed to have all the appearance of drawing nigh his last, being seized with a coldness in his extremities, and he remained so for a space of two hours, then survived.” On November 27, when the chill again invaded his legs from feet to knees, the attending physician thought he wouldn’t last. However, “he remained in this situation for near four hours, after which the fever abated very much and from that time he has been getting much better.” Hamilton had been so blistering in dealing with General Gates that not everyone welcomed his recovery. On December 5, Colonel Hugh Hughes wrote to his friend General Gates, “Colonel Hamilton, who has been very ill of a nervous disorder at Peekskill, is out of danger, unless it be from his own sweet temper.”84
Right before Christmas, Hamilton set out to rejoin Washington, only to collapse again near Morristown. He was taken back in a hired coach for further rest in Peekskill, where he was nourished on a hearty diet of mutton, oranges, potatoes, quail, and partridge. Not until January 20, 1778, did Hamilton rejoin his colleagues at winter quarters in Valley Forge, near Philadelphia—a bleak place that could scarcely have elevated the spirits of the convalescing colonel.
Such was the inimitable luster of Horatio Gates after Saratoga that it was whispered in certain quarters that he ought to supplant Washington as commander in chief. The unhappiness with Washington was understandable. His military performance in New York and Philadelphia had been lackluster, and his setbacks at Brandywine and Germantown were fresher in people’s memories than his spirited raids at Trenton and Princeton. The rivalry between Washington and Gates mirrored a political split in Congress. John and Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee, and others who wanted tighter congressional control over the war were sympathetic to Gates. In his diary that fall, John Adams had expressed dismay over Washington’s generalship: “Oh, Heaven! grant us one great soul!...One active, masterly capacity would bring order out of this confusion and save this country.”85 Though he did not endorse Gates outright, Adams fretted that idolatry of Washington might end in military rule, and he was glad when the Saratoga victory cast something of a cloud over the commander in chief. Meanwhile, John Jay, Robert R. Livingston, Robert Morris, and other conservatives wanted to invest great executive power in the commander in chief and stood solidly arrayed behind Washington.
One of Gates’s avid partisans was a moody Irishman named Thomas Conway, who had been educated in France, had served in the French Army, and had joined the Continental Army that spring. Hamilton made no secret of his contempt for the new brigadier general: “There does not exist a more villainous calumniator or incendiary,” he wrote.86 Conway aired freely to Gates his low opinion of General Washington’s military talents and wrote to him after Saratoga, “Heaven has been determined to save your country or a weak general and bad counsellors would have ruined it.”87 Gates did not muzzle such treacherous talk. When a copy of this letter came into Washington’s possession in November, he sent Gates a terse, angry note, quoting the line that referred to him and demanding an explanation.
Caught red-handed, Gates tried to deflect attention from his own disloyalty by searching out the culprit who had leaked the letter to Washington. His colleague Major James Wilkinson floated the idea that the conduit had been Robert Troup. Gates, recalling his testy exchanges with Hamilton, decided that Washington’s young aide was the blackguard. “Colonel Hamilton was left alone an hour in this room,” he told Wilkinson “during which time he took Conway’s letter out of that closet and copied it and the copy has been furnished to Washington.” Gates now embarked on a vendetta against Hamilton, still at this time recuperating in Peekskill. Gates sai
d that he had adopted a plan “which would compel General Washington to give [Hamilton] up” so that “the receiver and the thief would be alike disgraced.”88
On December 8, Gates wrote a tactless letter to Washington with a thinly veiled accusation against Hamilton. “I conjure your excellency to give me all the assistance you can in tracing out the author of the infidelity which put extracts from General Conway’s letters to me into your hands. Those letters have been stealingly copied,” Gates informed Washington, stating that it was in his power to “do me and the United States a very important service by detecting a wretch who may betray me and capitally injure the very operations under your immediate direction.”89
It turned out that Hamilton was blameless and that the source of the disclosure was the raffish James Wilkinson, who had fingered Troup and Hamilton. While carrying dispatches to Congress, Wilkinson—a flamboyant character with an incurable weakness for liquor, intrigue, and bombast—had paused for alcoholic refreshment in Reading, Pennsylvania, and told an aide to Lord Stirling about the Conway letter to Gates. Lord Stirling then relayed the news to his friend Washington. Hamilton never forgot Gates’s attempt to blacken his reputation: “I am his enemy personally,” he wrote two years later, “for unjust and unprovoked attacks upon my character.”90
Whether an actual conspiracy—the so-called Conway Cabal—ever existed with an explicit intention to displace Washington has long been fodder for historians. There was clearly some movement afoot, a loose network of critics, who wanted to replace Washington with Gates, even if they never entered into a formal pact. At first, it looked as if the cabal might succeed. In late November, Congress had appointed Horatio Gates president of the Board of War, which acquired new powers to supervise Washington. In mid-December, over Washington’s protest, Conway was promoted to inspector general. Hamilton now believed that malevolent conspirators menaced Washington. “Since I saw you,” he wrote to George Clinton, “I have discovered such convincing traits of the monster that I cannot doubt its reality in the most extensive sense.”91
Countervailing forces had already begun to rein in the Conway conspirators. In early January 1778, Hamilton’s dear friend John Laurens alerted his father to a design against Washington. Henry Laurens, now president of Congress, assured his son, “I will attend to all their movements and have set my face against every wicked attempt, however specious.”92 In the last analysis, Washington’s popularity was unassailable, and the blatant scheming of his foes only solidified his reputation for integrity. By April 1778, Congress gladly accepted Conway’s resignation as inspector general; Horatio Gates gradually lost his reputation on the battlefield. In the aftermath of the cabal, both Conway and Gates faced challenges to duels. James Wilkinson turned on his mentor and challenged Gates, but when the latter broke down and cried apologetically, the duel was called off. Because Conway persisted in maligning Washington, he was summoned to the dueling ground by General John Cadwalader, who fired a ball through Conway’s mouth that came out the back of his head. Cadwalader showed no regret. “I have stopped the damned rascal’s lying tongue at any rate,” he observed as his opponent lay in agony on the ground.93 Somehow, Conway managed to survive, but his career in the Continental Army was definitely over.
SIX
A FRENZY OF VALOR
When Hamilton, debilitated from illness, rejoined his comrades at Valley Forge in January 1778, he must have shuddered at the mud and log huts and the slovenly state of the men who shivered around the
campfires. There was a dearth of gunpowder, tents, uniforms, and blankets. Hideous sights abounded: snow stained with blood from bare, bruised feet; the carcasses of hundreds of decomposing horses; troops gaunt from smallpox, typhus, and scurvy. Washington’s staff was not exempt from the misery and had to bolt down cornmeal mush for breakfast. “For some days past there has been little less than a famine in the camp,” Washington said in mid-February. Before winter’s end, some 2,500 men, almost a quarter of the army, perished from disease, famine, or the cold.1 To endure such suffering required stoicism reminiscent of the ancient Romans, so Washington had his favorite play, Addison’s Cato, the story of a self-sacrificing Roman statesman, staged at Valley Forge to buck up his weary men.
That winter, Hamilton worked alongside Washington in the stone house of Isaac Potts, whose iron forge gave the area its name. Snappish and depressed over the Conway Cabal and unsettled by the wretched state of his men, Washington was more temperamental than usual. “The General is well but much worn with fatigue and anxiety,” Martha Washington told a friend. “I never knew him to be so anxious as now.”2 Washington sometimes vented his rage at Hamilton, and tensions crept into their relationship. Hamilton yearned for a field command, but Washington could not afford to sacrifice his most valuable aide. It was Hamilton, after all, who wrote many of the pointed pleas to Congress asking for urgently needed provisions, and the young aide shared Washington’s frustration. “For God’s sake, my dear sir,” Hamilton wrote to one colonel when authorizing him to collect wagons, “exert yourself upon this occasion. Our distress is infinite.”3
Hamilton began to meditate on the deeper causes of the surrounding misery. Because the colonies had been forced to rely on England for textiles, the patriots lacked clothing. Because the colonies had relied on England for munitions, they lacked weapons. Hamilton also saw in graphic terms the inflationary dangers of printing too much paper money. Forced to accept at face value the depreciated paper issued by Congress and the states, farmers and merchants balked at selling food and clothing to the army and often ended up hawking their wares instead to the well-fed, well-clad redcoats carousing in Philadelphia. The situation at Valley Forge was scandalous: American soldiers were starving in the midst of fertile American farmland. Hamilton was also sickened by the bungling Commissary Department. He wrote to New York governor George Clinton in mid-February:
At this very day, there are complaints from the whole line of having been three or four days without provisions. Desertions have been immense and strong features of mutiny begin to show themselves. It is indeed to be wondered at that the soldiers have manifested so unparalleled a degree of patience as they have. If effectual measures are not speedily adopted, I know not how we shall keep the army together or make another campaign.4
Hamilton cast a critical eye on the whole revolutionary effort. However upset by profiteering, he knew that the central weakness of the continental cause was political in nature. In his letter to Clinton, he scoffed at the rank favoritism shown by Congress in showering promotions on “every petty rascal who comes armed with ostentatious pretensions of military merit and experience.”5 Unable to enforce its requests for money and troops, an impotent Congress was reduced to begging from the states, which selfishly hoarded soldiers for their own home guards. The only way the Continental Army could lure soldiers was through expensive cash bounties and promises of future land. The republican partiality for state militias in lieu of a strong central army threatened to undermine the entire Revolution.
The disillusioned Hamilton also struggled to fathom why a Congress that had once boasted such distinguished figures was now glutted with mediocrities. Where had the competent members gone? Hamilton concluded that the talent had been drained off by state governments. “However important it is to give form and efficiency to your interior [i.e., state] constitutions and police,” he told Clinton, “it is infinitely more important to have a wise general council....You should not beggar the councils of the United States to enrich the administration of the several members.”6 Such statements presaged Hamilton’s later nationalism. Ironically, George Clinton became his bête noire, exemplifying the very parochial state power against which he inveighed.
Hamilton, just turned twenty-three, was already spouting civics lessons to state governors. His views were also solicited by his commander in chief. When Washington had to report to a congressional committee about a proposed army reorganization, he sought his aide’s advice, and Hamilton enumerated a
long list of abuses to be curbed. He urged that officers who overstayed their furloughs by ten days be court-martialed, recommended surprise inspections to keep sentries alert, and even prescribed the manner in which they should sleep: “Every man must have his haversack under his head and, if the post is dangerous, his arms in his hand.” Hamilton also displayed an unbending sense of military discipline and seemed something of a martinet. Any dragoon who allowed another person to ride his horse without first notifying the inspector general should “receive one hundred lashes for such neglect.”7
That Hamilton already contemplated America’s political future was evident in March, when Washington assigned him to negotiate a prisoner exchange with the British. Having already questioned many British and Hessian deserters, Hamilton was a natural choice for the job and was joined by his former Elizabethtown mentor, Elias Boudinot, now the commissary general of prisoners. Some in Congress not only opposed negotiations but wanted them to fail so that Britain could be blamed. Shocked by this duplicity, Hamilton wrote to George Clinton, “It is thought to be bad policy to go into an exchange. But admitting this to be true, it is much worse policy to commit such frequent breaches of faith and ruin our national character.”8 Hamilton saw America’s essential nature being forged in the throes of battle, and that made honest action imperative.
Shortly after Hamilton penned his report on army reorganization, a Prussian soldier with a drooping face and ample double chin appeared at Valley Forge. He billed himself as a German baron and acted the part with almost comical pomposity. Although the baron and the honorific “von” were likely fictitious, Frederick William August von Steuben came from a military family and had served as an aide to Frederick the Great. He came to America at his own expense and waived all pay unless the patriots triumphed. Washington appointed him a provisional inspector general, with a mandate to instill discipline in the army. Since Steuben’s English was tentative at best, he relied on French as his lingua franca, bringing him into immediate contact with the bilingual Hamilton and John Laurens, who acted as interpreters. Though Steuben was forty-eight and Hamilton twenty-three, they became fast friends, united by French and their fondness for military lore and service.