SO FAR AS General James Wilkinson was concerned, however, to forget what had happened was impossible. News of his indiscretion was spreading through the army. On the whole, his friends were forgiving. General Wayne mentioned something about “the very improper steps my old friend Wilkinson had made use of,” and a fellow staff officer, Walter Stewart, wrote to Gates, “I ever was sensible of Wilky’s volatility and open heartedness, and feared he might in an unguarded moment mention something of the affair to a person he looked upon as a friend . . . but his heart is truly good.”
But as Wilkinson rode toward York, he received a bitter note from Colonel Troup that read, “Your generous Conduct at Albany, in indeavouring to fix Genl. Gates’s Suspicions on me, will be duly remembered.” By rights Wilkinson should have felt contrite not just for ruining his patron’s plans but for falsely accusing his aide. His reaction was quite different. The imputation he drew from the letter was that he had deliberately leaked the contents of Conway’s letter. It enraged him to think “that General Gates had denounced me [to Troup] as the betrayer of Conway’s letter, and spoke of me in the grossest manner.” From Lancaster, Wilkinson dispatched a furious letter to Gates issuing a challenge to a duel—“in spite of every consideration, you have wounded my honor, and must make acknowledgement or satisfaction for the injury.”
His murderous reaction was so extreme as to require some explanation. In his Memoirs, he justified it in terms of emotional betrayal: “I was ready to have laid down my life for him, yet he had condemned me unheard for an act of which I was perfectly innocent.” Almost self- pityingly he pictured himself as “a boy of twenty without experience, without patronage . . . whose character remained to be established.” However unsure of what he should do, the imputation of deliberate betrayal left him with no choice. “Although my feelings and affections were outraged, my resolution was not appalled. I remembered the injunction of a dying father, I worshipped honor as the jewel of my soul.”
Already beaten down by Washington, Gates appeared crushed by this new attack. Feebly he pointed out that Wilkinson really had leaked the “weak General” passage, then deliberately misled him about the culprit. “I am astonished if you really gave McWilliams such information,” he protested, “how you could intimate to me, that it was possible Colonel Troup had conversed with Colonel Hamilton upon the subject of General Conway’s letter.”
Wilkinson brushed the objection aside. What mattered now was Gates’s failure to apologize for the original insult. No sooner had Wilkinson arrived in York than he sent a fellow officer to Gates with the challenge “Sir, I have discharged my duty to you and my conscience; meet me tomorrow morning behind the English church, and I will there stipulate the satisfaction which you have promised to grant.”
What happened next was described only by Wilkinson. At eight the next morning, he and Gates met as arranged. Pistols were the chosen weapon, but, as the seconds were loading them, Gates asked for a few words alone with his former friend. Then he clasped Wilkinson’s hand and burst into tears, exclaiming, “I injure you! It is impossible. I should as soon think of injuring my own child.” There was, Gates said, no need for a duel because Conway himself had acknowledged writing the letter and “has since said much harder things to Washington’s face.” Any suggestion that Wilkinson was responsible for stirring up dissension must therefore be without foundation. According to Wilkinson, this barely credible recital “left me nothing to require, it was satisfactory beyond explanation and rendered me more than content. I was flattered and pleased.” Wilkinson in turn promised Gates that he had never “done any thing with design to injure him.”
Some sort of reconciliation on these grounds undoubtedly took place because the duel was canceled and Wilkinson agreed to take up his position as secretary to the Board of War with Gates as president. Yet the account of how it occurred must have been embellished. Wilkinson’s triumph was too complete to be convincing, and Gates soon showed that he was quite prepared to injure his “child.”
AS THOUGH A DUEL with one major general were not enough, Wilkinson at once prepared to challenge another, General Stirling, in whose house he had originally blabbed about Conway’s letter. The supposed insult was again the suggestion that he had deliberately betrayed a secret—“My Lord shall bleed for his conduct,” he declared vaingloriously— but the quarrel lacked the emotional intensity of his challenge to Gates. In March he traveled to Valley Forge to exact revenge, but allowed himself to be distracted on the way by another visit with the delectable Nancy Biddle in Reading that lasted for a blissful fortnight, although in memory it “flitted away like a vision of the morn.”
On his arrival, he allowed Clement Biddle, her elder brother and one of Washington’s staff officers, to persuade him that the wiser course was to ask Stirling for a declaration that the reference to Conway’s letter had been “passed in a private company during a convivial Hour.” A letter from Stirling duly provided this assurance, with the qualification that Wilkinson had spoken “under no injunction of secrecy,” so that McWilliams was justified in passing on what he had said. With that, everyone should have been content, and Wilkinson should have gone back to his onerous and essential duty at the Board of War in equipping the army for another summer of fighting.
However, once Gates had ceased to be his patron, Wilkinson was left with only one general higher in rank to charm, and almost as a reflex he began to try to win over the unbending figure of George Washington. Although obviously a member of Gates’s entourage, Wilkinson took steps to show his loyalty to the commander in chief. In agreeing to resolve his quarrel with Stirling, he let Clement Biddle know that he was guided by Washington’s public disapproval of dueling among his officers. Then on March 3, he publicly renounced the promotion to brigadier general that Gates had procured for him.
His reward was to be summoned to an interview with the commander in chief, where he was able to demonstrate that, as Washington himself had believed, he “was rather doing an act of justice than committing an act of infidelity” in quoting from Conway’s letter. The difficulty was that he had not quoted it accurately. To demonstrate the point, Washington showed Wilkinson the entire file of correspondence concerning the cabal, including Gates’s letter accusing Wilkinson of “a wicked forgery” and demanding that he be “exemplarily punished” for a crime that amounted to “positive treason.”
“He seemed a good deal surprized at G[ate]s’s Letters,” Washington commented laconically to Stirling, “& was not at all sparing in his abuse of him & C[onwa]y.”
In fact, the discovery that Gates had turned so viciously against him overwhelmed Wilkinson. He hurried back to Reading to be consoled by Nancy and, while there, came to a momentous decision about his military career. In a short, cold letter sent from the Biddles’ house on March 29 to Henry Laurens, president of Congress, he peremptorily resigned from the Board of War, declaring, “After the act of treachery and falsehood in which I have detected Major General Gates, president of that board, it is impossible for me to reconcile it to my honor to serve with him.” Coolly, Laurens advised Congress to accept the resignation, but returned the letter as “improper to remain on the files of Congress.”
Had that been the end of the relationship, it would at least have been a clean break. But almost four months later, Wilkinson inadvertently encountered Gates as both men arrived in White Plains, New York, to give testimony on behalf of General Arthur St. Clair at his court-martial for the loss of Ticonderoga. The sight of the man who had termed him a forger ignited Wilkinson’s smoldering fury, and again his dying father’s words about honor sprang to mind. This time Gates accepted the challenge and fought the duel. Each was to fire three times, but when Gates’s pistol twice flashed in the pan and misfired, Wilkinson shot in the air, an action that should have satisfied honor on both sides. Gates refused to fire a third time and duly declared that Wilkinson had “behaved as a gentleman.”
By the conventions of dueling that was sufficient to satisfy honor
, but Wilkinson wanted more. He demanded to have the declaration in writing, and when it was given, refused to provide a similar certificate for Gates. Next day, both men with their seconds, the engineer Tadeusz Kosciuszko for Gates and John Barker Church for Wilkinson, assembled in the courthouse to settle the matter, and at that point Wilkinson exploded. To provide such a certificate, he shouted, would be “to prostitute my honor” because Gates was no better than “a rascal and a coward,” and in a frenzy of indignation he challenged the general to yet another duel.
Gates walked away from a man so clearly out of control, but now the seconds began to argue over the certificate and the quarrel rapidly descended into farce. Kosciuszko and Church were also supposed to appear for St. Clair’s defense, but pushed each other aside trying to enter the courtroom at the same time. In their fury they drew their swords and began to fight until driven off by guards. Despite the absence of his homicidal witnesses, St. Clair was cleared of all charges against him.
There was an edge of hysteria in James Wilkinson’s uncontrollable rage, as though what Gates had done to him was so unbearable he had to be blotted out. But the urge to destroy Gates had only succeeded in destroying his own desire for military glory. When he finally recovered his composure, his career as an officer in the Revolutionary War was at an end. He had neither command nor patron, and too much pride to seek either again.
He had trusted Gates and, in his own mind, been betrayed, and the experience had erased a small but curiously childlike innocence.
6
LOVE AND INDEPENDENCE
ON NOVEMBER 12, 1778, Colonel James Wilkinson married Miss Ann Biddle at an Episcopalian ceremony in Christ Church, Philadelphia’s most fashionable church. The place and the denomination signified that Nancy Biddle was prepared to be expelled from the Society of Friends for breaking its rule against marrying one of “the world’s people” rather than a Friend. Her brothers, Clement and Owen, both military officers, had suffered the same fate for flouting the Quaker doctrine of pacifism. Nevertheless, it cannot have been an easy decision for someone who, for all her high spirits, needed to be surrounded by familiar faces and close friends. Her parents and two sisters remained Quakers, while Owen secured readmission after the war. For years Nancy retained her Quaker speech with its thee and thy, even after she had left Philadelphia. But being married to “my beloved Jimmy” ensured a lifelong exile from the calm and quiet in which she had been reared.
The wedding also forced her nominally Episcopalian husband to enter a different world. Hitherto he had had to follow the spartan lifestyle of a U.S. army officer, and, before that, of the son of a near-bankrupt. By marrying into the Biddle family, James Wilkinson exchanged this pinched existence for a world of mouthwatering financial prospects.
The decision of the British general William Howe to withdraw from Philadelphia in June 1778 allowed the wedding to take place in the city. The British retreat also enabled John Biddle to regain ownership of his house and other enterprises in the city, including the badly damaged Indian King, renamed by the invaders the British Tavern. One of Wilkinson’s first civilian jobs was to help his father-in- law take control of his business once more. But the scope for making real money came from the fierce turf war that was fought for political control of the evacuated city.
It was won by the Constitutionalists, an egalitarian alliance of Presbyterians from western Pennsylvania and radical Whigs, who earned their name by their ideological commitment to the state’s one-man, one-vote constitution. Having spent the months of British occupation in hungry exile while others remained in the city and grew rich under enemy protection, the Constitutionalists returned to Philadelphia determined on both democracy and restitution. The program had broad appeal, not just to frontier farmers and politicians, but to mainstream families such as the Biddles, and to young professionals such as Wilkinson’s medical friend Dr. James Hutchinson.
The Constitutionalists’ leader, Joseph Reed, was elected president of the Pennsylvania supreme executive council in December. At once he began to hunt out Tory sympathizers, both among the large Loyalist population who had actively collaborated with the British, and among pacifist Quakers and moderate patriots who had simply accepted occupation. Acts of attainder were issued against almost five hundred people suspected of helping the British, requiring them to stand trial or risk confiscation of their property, and everyone holding public office was ordered to take an oath of loyalty to the Pennsylvania constitution.
There were dangers to this divisive strategy. Philadelphia’s powerful business community had numerous contacts with the British who controlled the coastline. To trade or do business on any scale was virtually impossible without negotiating some mutually beneficial arrangement with the enemy. Vulnerable to the Constitutionalists’ attack, Philadelphia’s merchants formed a rival party called the Republicans in March 1779, to fight for “the Happiness and Liberty of Pennsylvania” under the leadership of the financier Robert Morris and the lawyer James Wilson. They soon accused Reed himself of having contacts with the British and asked pointedly why it was that the most valuable estates confiscated from the Loyalists seemed to end up in the hands of prominent Constitutionalists. Among those favored in this fashion was Colonel Wilkinson. He owed his good fortune to the Biddle connection.
The family had not only suffered griveously from the British occupation— the Indian King never recovered its former opulence—but were friends of both Joseph Reed and his first wife, Esther. Reed and Clement Biddle were fellow officers on Washington’s staff, and the ties grew stronger when after Esther’s death Reed began courting Sarah, the eldest Biddle sister.
In May 1779, Wilkinson was given the chance to buy Trevose, the finest estate to be confiscated from any Tory in Pennsylvania. It comprised a distinguished one-hundred- year-old mansion, large stables, a substantial farmhouse and barns, and five thousand well- cultivated acres spread across Bucks County. According to Benjamin Franklin, writing barely three years later, land in Pennsylvania “could be sold for three pounds an acre [about $13.50],” suggesting that the Trevose farmland alone was worth at least fifteen thousand pounds, but Wilkinson was able to buy the entire property, once owned by Joseph Galloway, a president of the colonial assembly who had thrown in his lot with the British, for just forty- six hundred pounds. As a further concession, the price was payable in installments and with paper money rather than coins. This reduced Wilkinson’s outlay by more than one third because the reckless printing of bills by both state and central governments had drastically cut the value of paper money compared with that of silver and gold.
Such generosity had to be earned. Wilkinson’s contribution was to deliver a vicious attack on General Benedict Arnold, his old patron and army companion but now Reed’s adversary. Appointed military governor of Philadelphia by Congress on the recommendation of Washington, Arnold was expressly instructed to “take every prudent step in your power, to preserve tranquility and order in the city and give security to individuals of every class and description.” He interpreted this to mean extending military protection to those on the Constitutionalists’ hit list and made no secret of his intentions. He hosted a public dinner to which Quaker and Loyalist guests were invited; sent his carriage to help Grace Galloway, Joseph’s wife, when she was evicted from Trevose; and was soon seen in the company of Peggy Shippen, daughter of a judge strongly suspected of being a Loyalist.
The Constitutionalists responded by charging him in February 1779 with using army resources to aid his own business interests. Soon afterward Wilkinson weighed in with the specific and damaging accusation that Arnold had “borrowed a sum of money of the Commissaries [responsible for buying the army’s food], which was afterwards discounted on a Contract for Rum,” in other words, that the commissaries had advanced him money to buy rum at a price higher than the amount Arnold actually paid, and that he had pocketed the difference. Whether it was this blow that finally cracked him, or the influence of his newly married wife, Peg
gy, that April Arnold let it be known to the British through a Loyalist intermediary that he was open to offers.
“If your Excellency thinks me criminal,” he wrote Washington on May 5, “for heaven’s sake let me be immediately tried and, if found guilty, executed.” It was a curiously extreme reaction to the allegations of Reed and Wilkinson: their charges were, with one exception, eventually thrown out and might at worst have warranted his forcible retirement. But, as an unconscious warning of what he was contemplating, the reaction was not out of place. All the impulses to treachery were referred to in his letter. He was in debt, had not been paid for more than a year, and was alleged by Congress to owe the government three thousand dollars. He was under constant attack by the “artful and unprincipled men” who followed Reed. And he was in pain from his barely healed Saratoga wound that had left one leg two inches shorter than the other. “I have made every sacrifice of fortune and blood,” he wrote, “and become a cripple in the service of my country . . . I little expected to meet the ungrateful returns I have received from my countrymen.” Five days later he made direct contact with the British general Sir Henry Clinton.
AS ARNOLD HEADED TOWARD the act that defined his place in history, Wilkinson set out to live the life of a country gentleman, the beginning as it turned out of a more circuitous route to a similar destination. The Galloways’ mansion needed a dozen servants to run it; the stables held a score of horses with grooms to look after them; there was a distillery worked by stillmen; shepherds and cattlemen to care for the livestock; and farmhands to sow and harvest the wheat. Trevose was a small kingdom.
An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson Page 8