An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson

by Andro Linklater

MANY YEARS LATER, Matthew Lyon told Thomas Jefferson that, having observed Wilkinson’s conduct during the campaign, he had thought him “the likeliest young man I ever saw.” General Horatio Gates certainly shared that opinion. Not only had his youthful chief of staff deftly stabbed Arnold in the back at a critical moment, he had proved a reliable link to the demanding and difficult subordinates, and, at least by Wilkinson’s account, in the second battle at Bemis Heights he had saved the general by countermanding an order that would have sent General Poor into direct view of British artillery.

  That Gates trusted his twenty-year- old protégé unreservedly was made clear on October 14 when Burgoyne sent his emissary, Major Kingston— “a well-formed, ruddy, handsome man,” as Wilkinson remembered— to the American camp to request a cease-fire and ask for terms of surrender. Wilkinson met him and acted as his general’s representative throughout the subsequent negotiations.

  For three days, helped by an officer with legal training, William Whipple, Wilkinson hammered out the details of the surrender with two British officers, Captain James Craig and Colonel Nicholas Sutherland, in a tent pitched midway between the two armies. With news coming in that British troops from New York under General Henry Clinton were approaching Albany, Gates wanted a speedy settlement. He offered major concessions, including free passage to Britain on condition that the soldiers did not again take up arms against the United States, and authorized Wilkinson to accept minor points such as the British insistence that they be allowed to pile their weapons “on the word of command of their own officers” rather than to ground them on the orders of the Americans. What Gates required in return was agreement within twenty-four hours, meaning by two P.M. on October 15.

  Hoping that the threat from Clinton might offer a way out, Burgoyne spun out talks past the deadline. In this tense situation, where more than twenty thousand soldiers continued to face each other, armed and ready, as Burgoyne put it, to “rush on the enemy, determined to take no quarter,” Wilkinson’s ability to create instant friendships took on unexpected significance. With Kingston he discussed the delights of the Hudson Valley, the fall colors and “the beauty of the season,” and to Sutherland he talked of guns and hunting, promising he would personally look after the British officer’s favorite fusee or shotgun when it had to be surrendered.

  An amicable agreement among the four negotiators was eventually reached at about eight P.M. on October 15, and the articles were sent back to the generals to be signed. Before midnight, Wilkinson received a message from Sutherland saying that Burgoyne had accepted every condition, but wanted the terms of capitulation to be called a “convention” between himself and Gates. With his general’s agreement, Wilkinson agreed to the change. The following morning, however, he discovered that Burgoyne wanted to back off, having heard a rumor that Clinton had reached Albany. To hold matters up, the British commander even demanded to count the size of the American army, on the grounds that it had to be four times the size of his to justify his surrender. Gates dismissed this as an absurdity and sent Wilkinson to demand “an immediate and decisive reply.”

  This time he went directly to Burgoyne’s headquarters, where he found the gambler surrounded by his negotiators but in desperate form. Curtly Burgoyne refused Gates’s ultimatum and told Wilkinson that the truce would end in one hour precisely, insisting that they both set their watches. As he marched off, Wilkinson turned to Sutherland and warned him that if fighting started again, “You will lose your fusée—and your entire baggage.” Then he, too, walked away with, he admitted, “the most uncomfortable sensations,” because he doubted whether a new attack could be mounted, let alone be successful: “Our troops were much scattered . . . the men had got the treaty into their heads and lost their passion for combat.” Besides, the latest news of Clinton was that he had taken Fort Montgomery above West Point and now controlled the highlands close to Albany. Burgoyne was not the only one bluffing on a weak hand.

  The British negotiators, Sutherland and Kingston, were less inclined to gamble. They hurried after Burgoyne and insisted that he must first consult his senior officers before rejecting the agreement. The general allowed himself to be persuaded, and Kingston ran back to catch up with Wilkinson, pleading to have the truce extended for two hours while the consultation took place. On his own intitiative, Wilkinson granted the extension, sending word back to Gates of what he had done. Just before the time was up, a disconsolate Sutherland arrived with the news that Burgoyne still refused to accept the terms of surrender. At this point, a curious kind of collusion arose from Sutherland and Wilkinson’s friendship.

  Wilkinson pulled out the letter in which Burgoyne had accepted the original agreement, asking only that convention should replace the word capitulation. While Sutherland listened, Wilkinson read aloud the relevant passages that showed the general’s agreement to every other condition. Had Burgoyne gone back on his word? Wilkinson asked dramatically. Was this the behavior of a gentleman? It was the very argument Sutherland needed. He begged to be given the letter, promising he would use it to win Burgoyne round. While Wilkinson waited outside the British camp for a final answer, a messenger came from the impatient Gates telling him to break off negotiations at once, the extra two hours had expired and the truce was over. Refusing to give up, Wilkinson sent word back insisting on another thirty minutes. To his relief, a triumphant Sutherland appeared soon afterward with the surrender documents bearing the signature of Lieutenant General John Burgoyne.

  Wilkinson’s reward was to escort the British general when he came to make the formal surrender to Gates at the American camp the next day. The scene launched a thousand images printed in books, magazines, and newspapers across the young United States— Burgoyne in his gold-braided scarlet coat, General Friedrich von Riedesel, the Hessian commander in dark coat with gilded epaulets, and General Horatio Gates in his unadorned blue coat.

  Everywhere to the south, British armies were establishing control, from Clinton on the bluffs outside Albany to Howe in the streets of Philadelphia. But here on the hillside above the Hudson River, a reversal of such magnitude took place that all the enemy’s success was nullified, and every country in Europe from Spain to Russia was forced to take seriously the Americans’ declaration of their independence. With justifiable pride, Wilkinson remembered his own position in the scene: “A youth in plain blue frock without other military insignia than a cockade and a sword, I stood in the presence of three experienced European generals, soldiers before my birth . . . , yet the consciousness of my inexperience did not shake my purpose.”

  It was his job to introduce the two generals, then Burgoyne doffed his hat and spoke the momentous words “The fortune of war, General Gates, has made me your prisoner.” And Gates, pink and bespectacled, solemnly answered, “I shall always be ready to testify that it has not been through any fault of your excellency.” An hour later, the British soldiers marched out of camp to the beat of their drums and began to pile up their muskets.

  That was the public face, but privately it looked different. Burgoyne was so close to tears he could hardly speak. Marching out to surrender his weapon, a downcast Digby thought the drums “seemed almost ashamed to be heard on such an occasion.” Gates never stopped beaming with pride. And the moment the surrender ceremony was over, his chief of staff collapsed from nervous exhaustion as a result of “the strong excitements produced by the important scenes in which I had been engaged.”

  Much of what Wilkinson did was an act, but his reaction to the long weeks of stress he had undergone was real— an agonizing attack of colic that convulsed him so painfully he thought he would die. He was taken to Albany to recuperate, where a doctor eventually relieved his agony with a heavy dose of laudanum. For someone who always wanted to appear at ease and in control, the incident offered an oddly revealing glimpse of the turmoil beneath the guise. It helps to explain the humiliating experience that was about to follow his moment of triumph.

  5

  BETRAYING GENERAL GA
TES

  WHEN SIR JOHN BURGOYNE appeared before a parliamentary inquiry in London into the causes of his surrender, he claimed to have been defeated not by a militia but by a professional army. “The standing corps [i.e., the Continental Army] which I have seen are disciplined,” he stated. “I do not hazard the term [use it loosely], but apply it to the great fundamental points of military institution, sobriety, subordination, regularity, and courage.” This compliment to the training of the Continental soldiers, and particularly of the specialist units, was deserved, but in reality most of Gates’s army had consisted of part- time soldiers. Of almost twenty-one thousand men under his command, two thirds belonged to the militia, the very troops whose “Disregard of Discipline, Confusion & Inattention” had forced their previous commander, General Schuyler, to the painful extremity of having “to Coax, to wheedle and even to Lye, to carry on the Service.” Saratoga was a defeat not just for the British, but for critics of the militia.

  Since its creation in 1775, the Continental Army had consumed four fifths of the revenues raised by Congress, and General Washington had insisted on ever greater control over its expenditure, not simply in battle but in military organization. Even John Adams, the Massachusetts delegate who had actually proposed Washington as commander, felt that too much power had been channeled into the hands of one man. “Now We can allow a certain Citizen to be wise, virtuous, and good,” he confided to his wife, Abigail, “without thinking him a Deity or a saviour.”

  Saratoga revived the belief of the New Englanders in the merits of the citizen soldier, the quintessential American fighter, and their doubts about a standing army. “From a well-regulated militia we have nothing to fear,” Boston’s John Hancock insisted, “their interest is the same with that of the state . . . they do not jeopard[ize] their lives for a master who considers them only as the instruments of his ambition.”

  Inevitably, therefore, the generalship of Horatio Gates was compared to that of George Washington, the advocate of a professional soldiery, who had failed to prevent the capture of Philadelphia and, since Trenton, had been defeated at Brandywine and Germantown and was now preparing to retreat to winter quarters at Valley Forge, apparently incapable of inflicting harm on the enemy.

  In a fan letter to Gates, the Massachusetts delegate James Lovell told him, “We want you in different places . . . We want you most near Germantown. Good God! What a Situation are we in!” Excitably, Dr. Benjamin Rush spelled out the full significance of Saratoga. “The northern army has shown us what Americans are capable of with a GENERAL at their head,” he wrote. “The spirit of the southern army is no ways inferior to the spirit of the north. A Gates . . . would in a few weeks render them an irresistible body of men.”

  That sentiment was given practical effect by Congress within weeks of receiving the news of Saratoga. General Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania, once Washington’s quartermaster general and close friend of his former adjutant general Horatio Gates, was authorized to select a new military Board of War to replace the original civilian version under John Adams. The board was responsible for organization of the army’s entire infrastructure, its recruitment, staffing, pay, and equipment. It occupied more of Adams’s time than any other activity, and its complex requirements convinced Congress that its members needed to be soldiers.

  On November 28, 1777, Congress confirmed Mifflin’s choice of Gates as president of the board with himself as its senior member. In early December, they appointed the newly promoted Major General Thomas Conway to the post of inspector general of the army with a duty to improve its efficiency from the newest recruit to the commander in chief. Dr. James Craik, Washington’s physician and an assiduous collector of information, passed on to him the rumors flying around Congress “that the new Board of War is Composed of Such leading men as will throw such obstacles and difficulties in your way as to force you to Resign.”

  What became known as the Conway cabal was inseparable from the ideological conflict between the claims of the militia and the regulars. But the quarrel reached beyond military concerns. In a telling incident during the winter at Valley Forge, New Jersey troops reporting for duty initially refused to swear allegiance to the “United States of America” because, as they said, “New Jersey is our country.” In later years, Washington himself never doubted that the forging of a genuine Continental Army that winter represented a vital stage toward the creation of a single United States. Immense consequences hung on the move to limit his power.

  Some questioned whether such an unthinkable project ever really existed—“If he has an Enemy, a fact which I am in doubt of,” wrote Henry Laurens, Hancock’s successor as president of Congress, “the whole amounts to little more than tittle tattle.” But Washington was certain that “a malignant faction had been for some time forming to my prejudice” and later named its three leading members: “General Gates was to be exalted, on the ruin of my reputation and influence. This I am authorised to say, from undeniable facts in my own possession . . . General Mifflin, it is commonly supposed, bore the second part in the Cabal; and General Conway, I know was a very Active and malignant Partisan.”

  Out on the snowy hillsides of Valley Forge, with dozens of desertions reported every day, a score of officers resigning their commissions every week, Washington came close to despair on hearing of Conway’s appointment. It was, he told Richard Henry Lee, “as unfortunate a measure as was ever adopted,” and the despondent sentence that followed had a hint of the resignation that the cabal aimed at: “I have been a Slave to the service: I have undergone more than most Men are aware of to harmonize so many discordant parts; but it will be impossible for me to be of any further service, if such insuperable difficulties are thrown in my way.” Watching him with growing concern, his loyal aide, Tench Tilghman, observed, “I have never seen any stroke of ill fortune affect the General in the manner that this dirty underhand dealing has done.”

  WHAT UNDERMINED THE PLANS of the cabal, together with the larger campaign on behalf of the militia, were the indiscretions of James Wilkinson. They were brought about by an immense storm that swept across the coast of New England on October 26, 1777. Quite suddenly a fall that had been warm and foggy, too damp to count as a real Indian summer, too still to dispel the mists and the palls of smoke that rose above battlefields from New York to Pennsylvania, gave way to high winds driving torrents of freezing rain and sleet out of the northeast.

  A Brunswick officer marching his defeated troops through the Berkshires in western Massachusettts, “the American Caucasus” as he called them, recorded three nights of “rain, hail and snow” and a fierce gale “so piercing, that, no matter how warmly we wrapped ourselves in our cloaks, it penetrated to the very marrow.” On the same day the extreme conditions caught up with twenty- year- old Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkinson in Reading, Pennsylvania, as he rode south carrying General Horatio Gates’s official account of Saratoga to the Continental Congress. “This evening,” he recorded, “it began to rain and the next day in torrents.” He had set out seven days earlier. With hard riding, he might have kept ahead of the weather and have already arrived in York Town, Pennsylvania, where delegates to the Second Continental Congress desperately awaited his arrival.

  Driven out of Philadelphia at the end of September by the approach of Howe’s army, they had fled first to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, before crossing the broad expanse of the Susquehanna River to find refuge in York in the foothills of the Alleghenies. Doggedly, the twenty or so delegates had labored to keep alive a semblance of government, acting as executive, legislature, and constitutional assembly. Meeting in York’s tiny courthouse, they issued orders to supply army commanders with food, munitions, and clothing, they assessed the financial obligations of the different states, and at the same time they haggled over the terms of a political confederation that would unite New Hampshire with Georgia and the eleven states in between.

  Shrouded by fog and low- lying clouds that clung to the hillsides, York seemed cut off from
the outside world, and its discomforts contributed to the delegates’ depression. They were crammed into overcrowded lodging houses and inns and forced to conduct business surrounded by a sullen, largely German population. “The Prospect is chilling on every Side, gloomy, dark, melancholy and dispiriting,” John Adams confessed in the privacy of his diary. “When and where will light come from?”

  Symptomatic of their isolation, when rumors began to circulate in the middle of October that Washington had attacked Howe outside Philadelphia, and Gates was said to be closing in on Burgoyne at Saratoga, the delegates could not find out what was happening. The first hard news—that fog had denied Washington victory at Germantown by obscuring his view of the battlefield— was followed by the terrible storm. As the streets turned to mud, and the rain hammered on the roof of the courthouse, the delegates came closer to despair than at any other time in the Revolution. “We have been three days, soaking and poaching in the heavyest Rain that has been known for several Years,” John Adams wrote on the twenty- eighth to his wife, Abigail, in Boston, “and what adds to the Gloom is the Uncertainty in which We remain to this Moment, concerning the Fate of Gates and Burgoigne. We are out of Patience. It is impossible to bear this suspence, with any Temper.”

  With the rain still bucketing down, Wilkinson waited another day in Reading and accepted an invitation to eat at the mess of Lord Alexander Stirling, a major general in Washington’s army. Despite his title, Stirling was American born and bred. He had fought with Washington in the New York campaign, and at Trenton and Brandywine, and was convinced of the need for a professional army.

  At dinner, the two men discussed the progress of the war. Wilkinson remembered that the general spent much of the evening describing in excruciating detail his experiences at the Battle of Long Island in August 1776. Notorious for his heavy drinking— Rush dismissed him as “a proud, vain, lazy, ignorant drunkard”— Stirling apparently fell asleep, leaving his guest to be entertained by his aides, James Monroe and William McWilliams, both majors but older and wiser than the young colonel. Late at night, with a drink and an attentive audience at hand, the twenty- year-old began to boast and, by his own admission, indulged in “conversation too copious and diffuse for me to have charged my memory with particulars.” Otherwise all that he could recollect was that “we dined agreeably and I did not get away from his lordship before midnight, the rain continuing to pour down without intermission.” However, his audience, and in particular Major McWilliams, vividly recalled that Wilkinson had betrayed a confidence that General Horatio Gates had shared with him.