The offer in those final clauses might be accepted as arrogantly defiant or as patriotically subordinate. Washington was not concerned over alternative interpretations, but he was resolved to write the Frenchman a letter that would represent the issue as one of justice to American brigade commanders, whom the Inspector General now outranked. In words as formal as those of his reception of the ambitious Inspector General, Washington disposed of the essential matters of business and proceeded to assure Conway, “Your appointment of Inspector-General to the Army, I believe, has not given the least uneasiness to any officer in it.” Washington continued:
By consulting your own feelings upon the appointment of Baron de Kalb you may judge what must be the sensations of those Brigadiers who by your promotion are superseded. I am told they are determined to remonstrate against it; for my own part, I have nothing to do in the appointment of general officers and shall always afford every countenance and due respect to those appointed by Congress, taking it for granted that, prior to any resolve of that nature, they take a dispassionate view of the merits of the officer to be promoted, and considered every consequence that can result from such a procedure; nor have I any other wish on that head but that good attentive officers may be chosen, and no extraordinary promotion take place but where the merit of the officer is so generally acknowledged as to obviate every reasonable cause of dissatisfaction thereat.
At this point the exchange might have ended with tacit assumption by Conway that he possessed the special merit to justify advancement; but he apparently was as confident of his finesse in debate as of his skill in war and replied at once with a long letter, polite to the point of sarcasm. Four things in this angered Washington—manifest insincerity of the manner in which Conway linked his name with that of Frederick the Great, the insinuation that Conway had not been received properly at Headquarters, the assumption that nobody in the Army had thought previously of creating a system of inspection, and finally the statement that Conway could “expect no support” in the discharge of his official duties because of the Commander-in-Chief’s dislike for him personally.
Washington’s decision was instant and sharp: If, improbably, Congress so desired, it could make its choice between him and the Frenchman. As a soldier and a gentleman, his concern was to denounce the intimation that he would fail to support Conway—or anyone else—in the performance of duties assigned by Congress. On January 2 Washington transmitted to the Delegates in York his correspondence with Conway and in plainest words told Congress how he felt:
If General Conway means, by cool receptions . . . that I did not receive him in the language of a warm and cordial friend, I readily confess the charge. I did not, nor shall I ever, till I am capable of the arts of dissimulation. These I despise, and my feelings will not permit me to make professions of friendship to a man I deem my enemy, and whose system of conduct forbids it. At the same time, Truth authorizes me to say that he was received and treated with proper respect to his official character, and that he has had no cause to justify the assertion that he could not expect any support for fulfilling the duties of his appointment.
Before this was read in Congress, Washington received an excited communication of December 8 from Horatio Gates who had heard of Washington’s first letter to Conway, with the quotation Stirling had sent. Gates was much disturbed: Conway’s letters to him had been “stealingly copied,” he said, “but which of them, when, and by whom, is to me as yet an unfathomable secret.” Gates’s letter contained no denial of the accuracy of the quotation. Moreover, he twice mentioned “letters” from Conway as if they might have been sufficiently numerous to make it .difficult to determine from which the extract might have been taken. Gates wrote, also, of the possibility that the letter containing the offensive words might have been shown Washington by a member of Congress: did this mean that correspondence of Conway and Gates, critical of Washington, was being circulated among Delegates?
Washington faced the same sort of challenge he had read in Conway’s persiflage, a challenge of his integrity, because there was, he thought, an intimation in Gates’s letter that he had received in some discreditable manner an extract from a paper “stealingly copied.” Previously, Washington would have written directly to Gates about this; but now that the commander of the Northern Department had laid the indirect accusation before Congress by sending a copy of his letter to its President, Washington decided to send through the same tribunal a letter in which his statement of the facts would be his sufficient denial. In doing this, Washington could see no impropriety in saying that Gates’s own aide, James Wilkinson, had talked of Conway’s letter while on the way to York with Gates’s victory dispatch.
As it happened, perhaps fortuitously, both Conway and Wilkinson now became objects of attack. The Brigadiers had determined to protest the promotion of Conway to Major General; the colonels were preparing to direct a similar paper against Wilkinson who overnight was given the brevet of a Brigadier for bringing a paper from Saratoga to York, though many colonels who had shared in all Washington’s campaigns had been denied advancement. Nine of the Brigadiers joined in the “memorial” to Congress regarding the promotion of Conway and forwarded their paper to Washington with the request that it be transmitted to the Delegates at York as soon as convenient. Greene added a personal protest, deferential and at the same time firm in its warning that if regular promotion were denied “a sense of injury [would] mean a lessening of military service.” Congress received the memorial and the communication of Greene and defiantly laid them on the table. Members doubtless affirmed they would not permit soldiers to dictate to them; but as a matter of practical politics, they did not disdain the protest. Nor could they overlook the fact that most of the senior American officers disliked, if they did not actually distrust, Conway. Manifestly, Washington did not have to fight alone against forces that sought to displace him.
With his reply of January 4 to Gates’s letter Washington left the issue. Gates might answer, if he saw fit, and, meantime, might settle accounts with Wilkinson. The colonels’ protest against the promotion of that gentleman to Brigadier had not yet been received by Congress, but the rumble of their dissatisfaction already had been audible. “A plan is laid by sundry members of Congress, which I believe will be carried out, to remove him by the way of appointing him Secretary to the Board of War or by sending him to Georgia.” Appointment by the Board of War was made without waiting to ascertain whether it would please Wilkinson or placate the colonels over whom he had stepped.
Conway did not wait on Congress or on Gates or on anyone else. He informed Sullivan: “I depend upon my military promotion in rank for to increase my fortune and that of my family. I freely own to you it was partly with a view of obtaining sooner the rank of Brigadier in the French army that I have joined this.” In that unabashed pursuit of fortune, he again wrote Washington and asked if the Commander-in-Chief intended to order an inquisition because an officer wrote such a letter of criticism as any subaltern in Europe might indite without having the least notice taken of it by his superiors. Washington had decided to answer no more of Conway’s communications and did not waste time in analyzing this letter. From reports brought Washington, Conway wished a place in an expedition the Board of War was hoping to organize for an irruption into Canada. Washington did not believe this enterprise feasible but was reserved in passing judgment on the project because titular command was to be vested in his trusted young friend Lafayette.
Before the Canadian adventure took form, Conway had or thought he had, on January 19, the most powerful possible reenforcement. Gates arrived in York and brought with him the original of Conway’s letter, alleged to include the reference to a “weak General” and “bad counsellors.” Gates showed this paper to Conway and other friends and satisfied them it did not contain the sentence Stirling had quoted. Conway was anxious, he said, to have it printed, but he was discouraged by Henry Laurens to whom he spoke of the text, though he did not offer to let the President
see it. Laurens read a copy confided to other hands and wrote that some of the contents were “ten times worse in every way” than the alleged original. In a short time it became generally known that the letter was primarily a display of Conway’s military wisdom in a critique of the Battle of the Brandywine, for the loss of which the Frenchman assigned no less than thirteen reasons.
Not until January 22 did Gates receive Washington’s reply of the fourth. The next day Gates wrote a long answer that said of Conway: “The reasons which, in his judgment, deprived us of the success we could reasonably expect, were methodically explained by him; but neither the ’weakness’ of any of our Generals, nor ’bad counsellors’ were mentioned.” The communication closed with some words of regret that Washington had predicted—in a letter “which came to me unsealed through the channel of Congress”—that Conway would be proved an “incendiary.” Nowhere, among all Gates’s assurances of the “harmless” character of Conway’s critique, was there a single quotation from that paper or the hint of an offer to let Washington have a copy of it.
Gates’s letter was followed by one in which Conway made similar assertions and averred that only the arguments of Laurens and others had deterred him from publishing what he had written Gates, but he, too, failed to send a copy to prove what he affirmed. Washington had no intention of resuming personal relations with Conway and ignored the letter. The case with Gates was different. Conway was imposing on Gates, perhaps, but Gates must not be permitted to impose on Congress and the Army. It was of small importance to know what was in the critical letter, but it was a matter of duty to expose the duplicity that attended the circulation and then the suppression of it.
On February 9 an answer to Gates’s defence of January 23 was completed, an answer that wisely was hung on a few brief questions, especially: If the letter of Conway was so “harmless,” why was it not made public? Washington did not permit his letter to indicate that he merely differed with Conway on a question of strategy or tactics concerning which there could be two opinions. The issue was one of sincerity or its equivalent, military bona fides. He was determined to make that clear:
Notwithstanding the hopeful presages, you are pleased to figure to yourself of General Conway’s firm and constant friendship to America, I cannot persuade myself to retract the prediction concerning him; which you so emphatically wish had not been inserted in my Last. A better acquaintance with him, than I have reason to think you have had, from what you say, and a concurrence of circumstances oblige me to give him but little credit for the qualifications of his heart; of which, at least, I beg leave to assume the privilege of being a tolerable judge. Were it necessary, more instances than one might be adduced, from his behaviour and conversation, to manifest, that he is capable of all the malignity of detraction, and all the meanness of intrigue, to gratify the absurd resentment of disappointed vanity, or to answer the purposes of personal aggrandizement, and promote the interests of faction.
Before this was dispatched and probably before it was written, Henry Laurens informed his son at Headquarters that he thought Gates desired a reconciliation with Washington. The younger Laurens showed part of this letter to Washington, who remarked, in effect, that Gates was merely the instrument of dangerous men. Greene was not precisely of that mind. He thought Mifflin was at the head of the opposition to Washington and suspected that Gates was party to it. Whoever the men might be that supported Conway in his cabal against Washington, they were, Greene thought, in great discredit and were “prodigiously frightened.”
Washington scarcely cared whether they were aggressive or disheartened. He would scotch Conway; for the rest, he wished all friends of America to work amicably together. In this state of mind he received on February 23 Gates’s acknowledgment of his letter of the ninth, which apparently had not reached York until the eighteenth. Gates said:
. . . [I] earnestly hope no more of that time, so precious to the public, may be lost upon the subject of General Conway’s letter. . . . In regard to the parts of your Excellency’s letter addressed particularly to me, I solemnly declare that I am of no faction; and if any of my letters taken aggregately or by paragraphs convey any meaning, which in any construction is offensive to your Excellency, that was by no means the intention of the writer. After this, I cannot believe your Excellency will either suffer your suspicions or the prejudices of others to induce you to spend another moment upon this subject.
Washington replied the next day:
I am as averse to controversy, as any Man and had I not been forced into it, you never would have had occasion to impute to me, even the shadow of a disposition towards it. Your repeatedly and Solemnly disclaiming any offensive views, in those matters that have been the subject of our past correspondence, makes me willing to close with the desire, you express, of burying them hereafter in silence, and, as far as future events will permit, oblivion. My temper leads me to peace and harmony with all Men; and it is peculiarly my wish, to avoid any personal feuds with those, who are embarked in the same great National interest with myself, as every difference of this kind must in its consequences be very injurious.
Washington prudently made reservation in the words “as far as future events will permit.” He had reason for doing this because of a letter from Patrick Henry, who enclosed an anonymous missive that repeated most of the complaints against Washington. Not once was the name of Washington used, but the innuendo was that of his incompetence in command. The author took good pains to say that if his handwriting gave a hint of his identity, the name must not be mentioned. “Even the letter,” one anxious sentence ran, “must be thrown in the fire.” To Washington’s astonishment, the autograph unquestionably was that of Dr. Benjamin Rush, who, Washington wrote Henry, “has been elaborate and studied in his professions of regard for me, and long since the letter to you.” Nothing was to be gained by raising an issue over this, but it was enough to keep Washington on the alert.
Whether or not rivalry and backbiting were renewed, Washington thus far had profited by what now had come to be known as “Conway’s cabal.” If any ambitious officer or politician had been under the impression that amiability and politeness covered a compliant nature readily dominated by more positive minds, they discovered in the exchange with Gates that the head of the Army could be a vigorous, unflinching adversary—a man best left alone or treated with the deference he showed to others. He might not be invincible in controversy but, with the resources he commanded, personally and through his friends, he was not to be assailed by any who took their task lightly.
All the supporters of Washington felt sure that Conway arrogantly had conspired against him—and probably had hoped for larger pay and greater influence under a new head of the Army; but few could believe the Frenchman had either the finesse or the knowledge of America required to lead so complicated an enterprise as that of getting rid of a leader whose popularity still was greater than that of any other soldier or any Delegate.
Who, then, was prompting Conway or using him as a mouthpiece? Gates and Mifflin were the two men most widely suspected, and they were thought by some to have given indisputable proof of their purpose to supplant Washington. Their ambitious wish was taken for granted: their hostile acts could not be specified to the satisfaction of all of Washington’s supporters. Alexander McDougall wrote Greene, for example, “I have heard much of the machinations of a certain junta to intrigue our Chief out of command, but I want such proof of it as will bear the public eye.” In the case of Mifflin, even those most convinced of the Pennsylvanian’s leadership in the cabal were well nigh baffled in their attempts to draw a moral indictment of a man who fast was acquiring the arts of political equivocation.
Gates was in a category different from that of Conway and Mifflin. The victor of Saratoga was believed to be anxious to succeed Washington and was proved to have corresponded with Conway. Gates’s disregard of the channels of command was deliberate and must have been designed to establish independent relations with Congress.
In the same way, his early acts as President of the Board of War were not those of an official disposed to cooperate with the Commander-in-Chief. Washington believed Gates to be hostile, but from the time Gates was caught in the inconsistencies of refusal to make Conway’s letter public, Washington apparently felt that Gates would not again associate with the Frenchman or make another effort at an early date to win first place in army command. Even so, Washington kept up his guard.
It would have been miraculous if every influential officer at Valley Forge had remained uncritical of Washington throughout the hardships and hunger, the crowding and the shivering of the weeks-long torture in the wintry camp. Complainants may have been numerous; active sharers in the move to displace Washington were few. When the immediate exchange of correspondence and gossip had ended, he wrote:
That there was a scheme of this sort on foot, last fall, admits of no doubt; but it originated in another quarter . . . with three men who wanted to aggrandize themselves; but, finding no support, on the contrary that their conduct and views, when seen into, were likely to undergo severe reprehension, they slunk back, disavowed the measure, and professed themselves my warmest admirers. Thus stands the matter at present. Whether any members of Congress were privy to this scheme and inclined to aid and abet it, I shall not take upon me to say, but am well informed that no whisper of the kind was ever heard in Congress.
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