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.
John Biddle was in his fifties when Nancy and her younger sister, Lydia, were born, and perhaps because he was an elderly, doting father, he allowed them greater freedom than most Quaker girls enjoyed at the time. During the early months of 1777, they dressed more daringly, went to more parties, and each became attached to a man who was not a Quaker. After Wilkinson had begun to court Nancy, his friend and fellow medical student James Hutchinson, having returned from qualifying as a doctor in England, followed his example by wooing Lydia. Neither had achieved his object, however, by the time the snows melted in April and the new fighting season opened.
4
THE TRIUMPH OF SARATOGA
WITH CONFLICT LOOMING, Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkinson might have been expected to join his regiment at Morristown. Most ambitious officers would have welcomed the opportunity to command troops in battle. But his brief experience of regimental life only confirmed Wilkinson’s preference for the more genteel environment of a general’s staff. The chance to return to it came from his patron General Horatio Gates.
In March 1777, after a winter spent vigorously lobbying Congress, Gates was given command of the Northern Department in place of General Philip Schuyler. His appointment was a triumph for those New Englanders who, despite Washington’s supremacy, still clung to their faith in the militia. Gates remained their champion.
Once more in command, the general immediately invited Wilkinson to join him as chief of staff. “My young heart leaped with joy,” Wilkinson remembered, “so warmly had General Gates attached it to him, by his indulgence of my self- love.” Sooner or later, most of Wilkinson’s superiors recognized that his vanity, or self- love, was the key to his loyalty, but none secured it more firmly or indulged him more widely than Gates.
The decision to leave the main army for the Northern Department required the commander in chief’s permission. “I would to God, gentlemen could for once know their own minds,” Washington exclaimed in irritation, and although he allowed the move, he must have known that the young colonel was siding with the opposition.
The main weight of the British attack could be expected in the north. During the winter, Sir John Burgoyne
