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.”
Gates made his appreciation known on July 20 by promoting Wilkinson to brigade major, and appointing him to the staff of his own favorite general, Arthur St. Clair. Soon afterward Wilkinson fell sick with typhoid fever himself and was sent back to the army’s headquarters in Albany, where he almost died. Later he used to claim that he came so close to death he could hear the planks being sawed in the yard outside to make his coffin. Fortunately he came under the care of the army’s senior medical officer, who had orders from Gates to keep the young officer alive at any cost.
By the time he was again fit for duty, St. Clair’s brigade had moved south to join Washington, and so Gates attached Wilkinson to his own staff. When the general marched south in December with four regiments from Albany in response to Washington’s urgent request for reinforcements, Wilkinson went with him. The next tumultuous month altered the course of many careers, not least those of the general and the new major.
HAVING DRIVEN WASHINGTON out of New York during the early fall of 1776, General William Howe had unexpectedly followed him into New Jersey instead of going into winter quarters. Taken by surprise, with part of his force under General Charles Lee still in Westchester, New York, and many of his militia anxious to return home at the end of the year, Washington himself was in acute danger of being overwhelmed by pursuing British forces. Unsure where the commander in chief had retreated to, Gates sent his newly recovered aide ahead to find Washington.
Scouting for clues in the confusion of war, Wilkinson rode through northern New Jersey and eventually learned that Washington and most of his troops had crossed the Delaware River farther south into Pennsylvania. With swarms of British troops roaming the area, he decided to consult General Lee, Washington’s second-in- command, who had moved his headquarters close to Morristown, New Jersey. Lee was a fighting general, and an exponent of small-scale warfare. During a period of his life when he’d lived as a Native American with a Seneca wife, his aggressive behavior earned him the nickname Boiling Water. He had learned his trade in the British army, then left to become a mercenary, participating in any European war he could find. As a result, he was, in Washington’s estimation, “the first officer in Military knowledge and experience we have in the whole army.”
At nightfall on December 12, Wilkinson found Lee at an inn outside Morristown, apparently unperturbed that the Connecticut militia guarding him had just decided to return to their homes. Not until the following morning did Lee draft a letter to Gates. Its message was unrelievedly gloomy. Lee believed that, to make best use of his untrained militia troops, Washington should be conducting a guerrilla campaign rather than trying to confront in open battle a professional army that could bring devastating firepower to bear on its enemy through parade- ground maneuvers.
“Entre nous a certain great man is damnably deficient,” Lee told Gates. Washington’s mistaken strategy had left Philadelphia defenseless and the army on the verge of defeat. “Unless something turns up which I do not expect, our cause is lost. Our counsels have been weak to the last degree.”
Lee intended to remain in Morristown, despite Washington’s repeated requests that Lee move his forces west of the Delaware. However, Lee advised Gates to join their chief as soon as possible, with the implication that he would be needed as a replacement before long.
Lee was still eating breakfast in his dressing gown and slippers when Wilkinson heard hoofbeats on the road and looking out of the window saw a troop of British dragoons gallop up to the inn. Too late, Lee realized that he was the target of an enemy raid carried out virtually within sight of his army. He attempted to hide in the chimney, but, when Wilkinson appeared at the window, the horsemen swore they would shoot and set fire to the building unless Lee surrendered. Convinced it was not a bluff, the general gave himself up and was hustled away, still in his bedroom slippers, leaving Wilkinson to deliver his letter to Gates.
Lee was not only Gates’s friend, but an authority in the area where Gates was weakest, the command of troops in battle. His message crystallized Gates’s opposition to Washington. From then on, he, too, espoused the use of guerrilla warfare relying on militia forces. Following Lee’s advice, however, Gates hurried to join Washington west of the Delaware River. He arrived on December 20, and with the addition of more than two thousand troops Washington at once began to plan a counterstroke against a Hessian brigade stationed across the river in Trenton, New Jersey.
Believing the attack would fail, Gates refused to take part. With the excuse that he was ill, he left for Philadelphia, intending to travel on to Baltimore, where Congress had retreated to escape the threat of British marauders. Wilkinson loyally went with him until they reached Philadelphia. There he decided he could not miss the battle. In a testimony to their friendship Gates gave him an excuse to return in the form of a letter for Washington.
On Christmas morning, Wilkinson galloped back from Philadelphia, arriving toward nightfall as the long lines of American troops were getting ready to be ferried over the icy Delaware for Washington’s surprise attack. So poorly shod were the soldiers that Wilkinson later recalled the trail from their barracks to McKonky’s Ferry was “easily traced, for there was a little snow on the ground which was tinged here and there with blood from the feet of the men with broken shoes.” To transport them with their heavy packs across the water was a dangerous operation made more hazardous by swirling ice floes and a high wind that drove snow in the ferrymen’s faces. When Wilkinson came up with Washington to deliver Gates’s letter, the commander in chief was about to ride out to inspect this first, critical phase of his plan. The encounter remained etched in the young man’s memory.
“What a time is this to hand me letters!” Washington exclaimed. Wilkinson replied that the dispatch was from General Gates, and Washington’s response showed that he was not even aware that his senior general had gone.
“Where is General Gates?” he demanded.
Wilkinson answered that Gates was in Philadelphia,
to which Washington angrily asked why he had gone there.
“I understood him that he was on his way to Congress,” Wilkinson replied.
“On his way to Congress!” Washington burst out, and the depth of pent- up exasperation in his voice betrayed his tension. Coupled with Lee’s refusal to obey orders, Gates’s blatant decision to ignore his wishes in order to lobby Congress must have made plain to Washington that after a year of defeats his authority was slipping away. His future, and that of the cause he served, depended on the surprise attack he had planned. As Wilkinson himself admitted, he was so shaken by his commander in chief’s anger that he could say nothing, but “made my bow and left.”
The details of Trenton, Wilkinson’s first experience of battle, never faded, but he recalled with particular clarity the river crossing. A flotilla of boats had been assembled, and almost three thousand men had to be assigned, marshaled, and marched aboard in the midst of a snowstorm, an operation supervised by Henry Knox, whose “stentorian lungs and extraordinary exertions” were in Wilkinson’s view essential to the proceedings. Out on the water, the difficulties only grew more severe as “the force of the current, the sharpness of the frost, the darkness of the night, the ice which made during the operation and the high wind, rendered the passage of the river extremely difficult.”
In these extreme conditions the operation fell more than two hours behind schedule. Once across, however, Washington’s force divided into two columns and marched south, the right column hugging the riverbank while, two miles inland, the left advanced directly into Trenton. General St. Clair’s brigade was closest to the river, and as Brigade Major Wilkinson marched with them, they circled round the town to block the exit on the far side. By now the operation was so late that what had been planned as a night attack became a daylight assault, but it was still unexpected because the defenders of Trenton never imagined that the Delaware could be crossed in such a storm.
On the north side of town, cannon were placed to fire down the two main streets, preventing the highly trained Hessians from forming up to deliver the concerted volleys of shot that made them so effective. With superior numbers and firepower, the attackers quickly took control of the street battle that developed. Those who attempted to escape were shot or captured by the river column as it encircled the town. In midmorning on December 26, Wilkinson delivered a second message to Washington. This one, from St. Clair, reported that on the south side his brigade not only had Trenton surrounded, but had driven one of the three Hessian regiments in the garrison into the open where the survivors were forced to surrender. The trap had closed. From his vantage point at the north end of town, Washington had seen the other two regiments bombarded into capitulation. Wilkinson’s report confirmed that the surprise attack had won a complete victory.
As he delivered St. Clair’s news to Washington, Wilkinson remembered “his countenance beaming with complacency,” the frustrations of the previous evening wiped away. “Major Wilkinson,” Washington exclaimed, shaking the young officer’s hand, “this is a glorious day for our country.”
More than one thousand Germans had been captured, together with cannon, shot, and gunpowder, and another hundred had been killed. Of wider significance, the victory restored morale in the army, and as news of it rippled out through the country, it transformed the mood of despair that had begun to be felt ever more widely. “The minds of the people are much altered,” Nicholas Cresswell, a Tory Virginian, admitted less than a week after the battle. “A few days ago they had given up the cause as lost. Their late successes have turned the scale and now they are all liberty- mad again.”
To reinforce the impact of his victory, Washington launched a second surprise attack on the British garrison in Princeton a week later. This was a bloodier battle, with casualties of almost four hundred on the enemy side, but it ended in the rout of three battalions of regular infantry who had occupied the town. In the space of seven days, Washington’s two victories had won back control of New Jersey and, as Wilkinson declared, “the American community began to feel and act like a nation determined to be free.”
TRENTON ALSO OPENED UP a road that promised military glory for James Wilkinson personally. He had already risen fast in the army thanks to the patronage of his generals, but by leaving Gates to take part in the battle, he had taken a first step toward establishing his own independent career. Recognition of his qualities came in January 1777 when he was promoted to lieutenant colonel, this time on the recommendation of Washington himself, and given a commission in a new regiment. This was the ultimate proving ground for an ambitious officer, and Wilkinson had been given the opportunity when Congress had at last decided what the shape of the army should be after eighteen months of vacillation between militia and regulars.
Through the dreadful fall of 1776 when military disaster threatened to wipe out the ideals asserted in the Declaration of Independence, the case against the militia had been stated with growing force by Washington’s generals. “No operation can be safely planned in which they are to take a part,” Nathanael Greene declared after the retreat from New York. “I must repeat the Militia are not be depended upon,” Schuyler wrote following the defeat in Canada. On the very day that he began planning the attack on Trenton, Washington found time to complain to Congress that militia troops “come in, you cannot tell how; go you cannot tell when; and act you cannot tell where; consume your provisions, exhaust your stores and leave you at last at a critical moment.” The irritation of working with such undisciplined soldiers was revealed in a furious outburst from Wayne. “To say anything severe to them has just as much effect as if you were to cut up a Butcher’s Chopping block with a razor,” he fulminated. “By G-d, they feel nothing but down Right blows which, with the dread of being whipt thro’ the Small Guts, keeps them in some Awe.”
Under this weight of criticism, and with the evidence before them of Trenton, where four fifths of the troops had been Continental regulars, Congress finally accepted the need for a completely modern army. In January 1777, it recommended establishing a force of 110 infantry regiments, and with them three other components essential to fighting a late-eighteenth-century war: five regiments of artillery, a corps of engineers, and three thousand cavalry. As a sign of Congress’s “perfect reliance on the wisdom, vigour, and uprightness of General Washington,” their recruitment, training, and pay were to be placed under his direct control. The soldiers would serve for up to three years, or for the duration of the war.
Politically as well as militarily, Washington had won, and the newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Wilkinson, still not twenty years old, seemed likely to be one of the brightest stars in the new Continental Army. His regiment was one of Washington’s extras, and its colonel, Thomas Hartley, an efficient officer Wilkinson had known in Canada. Taking a personal interest in Wilkinson’s career, the commander in chief told him he would benefit from the experience of direct command, as opposed to staff work, because it would help “to remedy his polite manners.” For a young officer aspiring to behave like an aristocrat, this was useful advice, but it went unheeded. In January 1777, instead of roughing it in camp at Morristown where the new troops were beginning their training, he persuaded Hartley to send him on a recruiting drive to Pennsylvania and Maryland. It turned out to be less enjoyable than he had anticipated.
In Wilkinson’s hierarchical world, it was natural for him to charm those above him, and to discipline those below him, but to persuade his fellow citizens as equals that they should join the army was impossible. After a few weeks he reacted much as he had in Canada when Arnold had sent him out to forage for supplies and simply gave up.
Instead of returning to Morristown, he stayed in Philadelphia, where many of the friends he had made as a medical student, especially among “the most accomplished and respectable of the fair sex,” still lived. One girl in particular, Ann Biddle, always known as Nancy, attracted him. Her portrait, painted by Charles Willson Peale, suggests why she caught his eye. Everything
about her is fashionable: her hair is piled in ringlets on her head, her eyebrows are plucked, her eyes are darkened, her lips are painted, and, compared to the settled expressions adopted by the other Philadelphia ladies who sat for Peale, her look is lively and seductive. That she was also a Quaker and should thus have been demurely dressed and modestly behaved can only have added to the excitement she aroused.
In his memoirs, Wilkinson claimed that Nancy Biddle aroused “a courting Distemper” in every young man who knew her. As an expert in the use of charm, he responded at once, recognizing in her a kindred spirit. Although his description of his “sprightly Quakeress” is too stilted to convey anything of the light, teasing, demanding character that emerges from her letters, his conduct is more eloquent. From this time on he devoted himself to winning her, and they would eventually share more than twenty years of life together. During that time, no one, not even those who charged him with the most despicable treachery to his country, ever accused him of infidelity to his Nancy.
The Biddles were an old, established family—the first of them had come to America in 1681 with the earliest wave of Quakers— and by the time the Revolution broke out they had established themselves at the heart of Philadelphia society. Nancy’s parents, John and Sarah Biddle, owned the Indian King, a large, three- story hotel, one of the finest in Philadelphia, with eighteen comfortable bedrooms, each boasting plastered walls and a fireplace. One of Nancy’s brothers, Owen, was chairman of Philadelphia’s committee of safety; another, Clement, had enough influence to raise a regiment of volunteers; while Benjamin Franklin appointed her cousin Charles Biddle to be chief executive of Pennsylvania’s supreme council.
An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson Page 4