Secret.” To underline the seriousness of the charge, he declared that he intended to forward his letter to Congress so that with Washington’s help its members could discover the person responsible. “Crimes of that Magnitude ought not to remain unpunished,” he concluded sententiously.
Everything about this communication was calamitous for Gates. The plural “letters” told Washington, who had not realized it till then, that Conway had been in contact with Gates more than once. The demand for help in tracking down the perpetrator revealed that he did not know who was really responsible for leaking the “weak General” sentence, while Washington did. Worst of all, Gates’s decision to involve Congress required Washington to do the same—“I am under the disagreeable necessity of returning my answer through the same channel”—so making public the connection between Gates and Conway. Neither then nor forty years later when he came to write his
Washington’s reply must have come as a cold shock to Gates. No one had stolen the material, Washington wrote, it had been “communicated by Colonl. Wilkinson to Major McWilliams.” Furthermore, Wilkinson had passed it on so openly that “I considered the information as coming from yourself; and given with a friendly view to forewarn, and consequently forearm me, against a secret enemy [General Conway]. But in this, as in other matters of late, I found myself mistaken.”
This devastating letter did not arrive in Albany until January 22, 1778, but from the moment Gates caught his commander in chief’s tone of mockery, he must have guessed the cabal had lost any remote chance of achieving its object. The Washington who had come close to despair in December after learning of Conway’s appointment might have been hassled into resignation. The Washington with morale high enough to make fun of his challenger was not going to be moved.
The change was apparent from the groveling tone of Gates’s reply. He denied any friendship with Conway—“I never had any sort of intimacy, nor hardly the smallest acquaintance with him”; he claimed the “weak General” passage was “a wicked forgery . . . fabricated to answer the most selfish and wicked purposes”; and finally he declared that James Wilkinson was personally responsible for “sowing dissensions among the principal officers of the army, and rendering them odious to each other by false suggestions and forgeries.” It amounted, in Gates’s opinion, to “positive treason”—the first time the charge had been laid against Wilkinson, and unique in being the only occasion it was wholly unjustified.
Sensibly, Wilkinson found it necessary to spend January 1778 inspecting fortresses in the western hills of New York. On his return to Albany at the end of the month, he learned that Gates had left to take up his post as president of the Board of War in York Town, and that he himself had been appointed, early in January, secretary to the board. There was also a letter from Stirling asking him to confirm the “weak General” quotation, since Conway had denied using it. Realizing at last that he had been outed, Wilkinson replied, acknowledging, “It is possible in the warmth of social intercourse, when the mind is relaxed and the heart unguarded, that obsevations may have elapsed which had not since occurred to me.”
With what must have been a sense of foreboding, he then set off toward York, along the same path he had traveled in such glory in October. He reached York in the last week of February, and by then the Conway cabal was at an end—almost entirely as a result of Wilkinson’s disreputable behavior.
By definition, a cabal is a secret intrigue, and when the bitter exchanges of Washington, Gates, and Conway were made public, most members of Congress were shocked by the maneuverings and hostility that had gone on behind the scenes. “I always before heard [General Conway] mentioned as having great Military Abilities, and this was all I had ever heard concerning him,” Abraham Clark, a New Jersey delegate, confessed. “The kind of Correspondence he carried on with General G[ates] was not known at the Time of his promotion. His Letters to General Washington is of late date. Was the business now to be done Congress would probably Act otherwise.”
The Marquis de Lafayette liked to boast that at dinner on January 31 he had broken up the plot by forcing Gates and Mifflin to drink to Washington’s health, but in reality the publication of their letters in December and early January sealed their fate. Whatever their arguments about the effectiveness of the militia and the dangers of a standing army, the delegates all accepted that “dissention among the principle Officers of the Army must be very injurious to the Publick interest.” Combined with the protests delivered to Congress from nine generals against Conway’s promotion and from forty-seven colonels against Wilkinson’s, it rapidly destroyed all confidence in the ability of the cabal’s triumvirate to run the army.
By mid-February, when Dr. William Gordon asked whether he had ever contemplated resignation, Washington felt able to brush the suggestion away, denying that anyone had “ever heard me drop an expression that had a tendency to resignation.” Soon afterward, Gates hauled up the white flag.
“I earnestly hope no more of that time, so precious to the public, may be lost upon the subject of General Conway’s letter,” he wrote on February 19. “I solemnly declare that I am of no faction.” To which Washington replied magnanimously, “I am as averse to controversy as any Man,” and promised to bury the attempted coup “in silence and, as far as future events will permit, oblivion.”
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
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, “
