Read An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson Online
Authors: Andro Linklater
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.
O
N 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, Peggy, 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.
A
S 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.
Wilkinson reveled in its possibilities. He and Nancy organized balls elegant enough to be reported in the Philadelphia press and visited neighbors in a carriage drawn by four horses with two footmen at the back. He took an interest in farming, admired his cattle, gave lavishly to charity, and joined the Freemasons. All this was expensive, and the Biddle family fortune was not unlimited. But, according to the shrewdest advice, Trevose could hardly fail to be a good investment. As the population increased, the value of land would rise, too. Even a financier as astute as Silas Deane, whose deals were too sharp for conventional tastes, agreed that land was the best investment. “If we review the rise and progress of private fortunes in America,” he wrote in 1781, “we shall find that a very small proportion of them has arisen or been acquired by commerce, compared with those made by prudent purchases and management of lands.”
Lacking capital of his own, Wilkinson had paid the deposit of £1,160 on Trevose with Nancy’s money, and it was owned in both their names. But he needed an income to pay the remainder of the purchase price, so on July 29, 1779, he accepted Congress’s offer of the post of clothier general to the army at a salary of $5,000 a year.
It might lack the glory of Saratoga, but next to food and weapons no item was more crucial to Washington’s Continental Army than the supply of uniforms. Only the clothier general could prevent a repetition of the scenes at Valley Forge—“Men without Cloathes to cover their nakedness, without Blankets to lay on, without Shoes, by which their Marches might be traced by the Blood from their feet,” in Washington’s vivid words. Between the purchase of blankets, clothes, and shoes and their issue to the troops stood a system of paralyzing complexity.
Most clothing was imported from Europe through Boston with up to a year’s delay between order and delivery, although shoes and blankets were produced in the United States. They were paid for by Congress, but responsibility for their purchase and allocation was divided between the Continental Army and the thirteen individual states. The clothier general’s specific duty was to procure and distribute clothes, shoes, and blankets for the Continental Army, but he was answerable not to the commander in chief but to the Board of War, and the board kept him permanently short of money and wagons.
“The clothing department has occasioned more trouble to me and has given more distrust to the officers than [any] one thing in the army,” Washington testified to Congress, admitting that he had been forced to act as his own clothier general even to the point of sending out officers on house-to-house searches for garments to wear. A year after Valley Forge, with the morale of the 25,000- strong Continental Army hardened by its experience, and its drill and training molded by Friedrich von Steuben’s Blue Book of discipline, Washington deemed uniforms more essential than ever to reflect the soldiers’ new professionalism. Lack of them created “an ill Appearance” and made good order harder to maintain, Washington explained to the civilians in Congress. “For when a Soldier is convinced that it will be known by his dress to what Corps he belongs, he is hindered from committing many faults for fear of detection.”