MORE TROUBLE ABOUT THE CONWAY LETTER—CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN LORD STIRLING AND WILKINSON—WILKINSON’S HONOR WOUNDED—HIS PASSAGE AT ARMS WITH GENERAL GATES—HIS SEAT AT THE BOARD OF WAR UNCOMFORTABLE—DETERMINES THAT LORD STIRLING SHALL BLEED—HIS WOUNDED HONOR HEALED—HIS INTERVIEW WITH WASHINGTON—SEES THE CORRESPONDENCE OF GATES—DENOUNCES GATES AND GIVES UP THE SECRETARYSHIP—IS THROWN OUT OF EMPLOY—CLOSING REMARKS ON THE CONWAY CABAL.
The Conway letter was destined to be a further source of trouble to the cabal. Lord Stirling, in whose presence, at Reading, Wilkinson had cited the letter, and who had sent information of it to Washington, was now told that Wilkinson, on being questioned by General Conway, had declared that no such words as those reported, nor any to the same effect, were in the letter.
His lordship immediately wrote to Wilkinson, reminding him of the conversation at Reading, and telling him of what he had recently heard.
“I well know,” writes his lordship, “that it is impossible you could have made any such declaration; but it will give great satisfaction to many of your friends to know whether Conway made such inquiry, and what was your answer; they would also be glad to know what were the words of the letter, and I should be very much obliged to you for a copy of it.”
Wilkinson found that his tongue had again brought him into difficulty; but he trusted to his rhetoric, rather than his logic, to get him out of it. He wrote in reply, that he perfectly remembered spending a social day with his lordship at Reading, in which the conversation became general, unreserved and copious; though the tenor of his lordship’s discourse, and the nature of their situation, made it confidential. “I cannot, therefore,” adds he, logically, “recapitulate particulars, or charge my memory with the circumstances you mention; but, my lord, I disdain low craft, subtlety and evasion, and will acknowledge it is possible, in the warmth of social intercourse, when the mind is relaxed and the heart is unguarded, that observations may have elapsed which have not since occurred to me. On my late arrival in camp, Brigadier-general Conway informed me that he had been charged by General Washington with writing a letter to Major-general Gates, which reflected on the general and the army. The particulars of this charge, which Brigadier-general Conway then repeated, I cannot now recollect. I had read the letter alluded to; I did not consider the information conveyed in his Excellency’s letter, as expressed by Brigadier-general Conway, to be literal, and well remember replying to that effect in dubious terms. I had no inducement to stain my veracity, were I ever so prone to that infamous vice, as Brigadier Conway informed me he had justified the charge.
“I can scarce credit my senses, when I read the paragraph in which you request an extract from a private letter, which had fallen under my observation. I have been indiscreet, my lord, but be assured I will not be dishonorable.”
This communication of Lord Stirling, Wilkinson gives as the first intimation he had received of his being implicated in the disclosure of Conway’s letter. When he was subsequently on his way to Yorktown to enter upon his duties as secretary of the Board of War, he learnt at Lancaster that General Gates had denounced him as the betrayer of that letter, and had spoken of him in the grossest language.
“I was shocked by this information,” writes he; “I had sacrificed my lineal rank at General Gates’s request; I had served him with zeal and fidelity, of which he possessed the strongest evidence; yet he had condemned me unheard for an act of which I was perfectly innocent, and against which every feeling of my soul revolted with horror. * * * * I worshipped honor as the jewel of my soul, and did not pause for the course to be pursued; but I owed it to disparity of years and rank, to former connection and the affections of my own breast, to drain the cup of conciliation and seek an explanation.”
The result of these, and other considerations, expressed with that grandiloquence on which Wilkinson evidently prided himself, was a letter to Gates, reminding him of the zeal and devotion with which he had uniformly asserted and maintained his cause; “but, sir,” adds he, “in spite of every consideration, you have wounded my honor, and must make acknowledgment or satisfaction for the injury.”
“In consideration of our past connection, I descend to that explanation with you which I should have denied any other man. The enclosed letters unmask the villain and evince my innocence. My lord shall bleed for his conduct, but it is proper I first see you.”
The letters enclosed were those between him and Lord Stirling, the exposition of which he alleges ought to acquit him of sinister intention, and stamp the report of his lordship to General Washington with palpable falsehood.
Gates writes briefly in reply. “Sir,—The following extract of a letter from General Washington to me will show you how your honor has been called in question; which is all the explanation necessary upon that matter; any other satisfaction you may command.”
Then followed the extracts giving the information communicated by Wilkinson to Major McWilliams, Lord Stirling’s aide-de-camp.
“After reading the whole of the above extract,” adds Gates, “I am astonished, if you really gave Major McWilliams such information, 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.”
According to Wilkinson’s story he now proceeded to Yorktown, purposely arriving in the twilight, to escape observation. There he met with an old comrade, Captain Stoddart, recounted to him his wrongs, and requested him to be the bearer of a message to General Gates. Stoddart refused; and warned him that he was running headlong to destruction: “but ruin,” observes Wilkinson, “had no terrors for an ardent young man, who prized his honor a thousand fold more than his life, and who was willing to hazard his eternal happiness in its defence.”
He accidentally met with another military friend, Lieutenant-colonel Ball, of the Virginia line, “whose spirit was as independent as his fortune.” He willingly became bearer of the following note from Wilkinson to General Gates:
“Sir,—I have discharged my duty to you, and to my conscience; meet me to-morrow morning behind the English church, and I will there stipulate the satisfaction which you have promised to grant,” &c.
Colonel Ball was received with complaisance by the general. The meeting was fixed for eight o’clock in the morning, with pistols.
At the appointed time Wilkinson and his second, having put their arms in order, were about to sally forth, when Captain Stoddart made his appearance, and informed Wilkinson that Gates desired to speak with him. Where?—In the street near the door.—“The surprise robbed me of circumspection,” continues Wilkinson. “I requested Colonel Ball to halt, and followed Captain Stoddart. I found General Gates unarmed and alone, and was received with tenderness but manifest embarrassment; he asked me to walk, turned into a back street, and we proceeded in silence till we passed the buildings, when he burst into tears, took me by the hand, and asked me ‘how I could think he wished to injure me?’ I was too deeply affected to speak, and he relieved my embarrassment by continuing: ‘I injure you! it is impossible. I should as soon think of injuring my own child.’ This language,” observes Wilkinson, “not only disarmed me, but awakened all my confidence and all my tenderness. I was silent; and he added, ‘Besides, there was no cause for injuring you, as Conway acknowledged his letter, and has since said much harder things to Washington’s face.’
“Such language left me nothing to require,” continues Wilkinson. “It was satisfactory beyond expectation, and rendered me more than content. I was flattered and pleased; and if a third person had doubted the sincerity of the explanation, I would have insulted him.”
A change soon came over the spirit of this maudlin scene. Wilkinson attended as secretary at the War Office. “My reception from the president, General Gates,” writes he, “did not correspond with his recent professions; he was civil, but barely so, and I was at a loss to account for his coldness, yet had no suspicion of his insincerity.”
Wilkinson soon found his situation at the Board of War uncomfortable; and after the lapse of a few days set out for Valley Forge. On his way thither he met Washington’s old friend, Dr. Craik, and learnt from him that his promotion to the rank of brigadier-general by brevet, had been remonstrated against to Congress by forty-seven colonels. He therefore sent in his resignation, not wishing, he said, to hold it, unless he could wear it to the honor and advantage of his country; “and this conduct,” adds he, “however repugnant to fashionable ambition, I find consistent with those principles in which I early drew my sword in the present contest.”
At Lancaster, Wilkinson, recollecting his resolve that Lord Stirling “should bleed for his conduct,” requested his friend, Colonel Moylan, to deliver a “peremptory message” to his lordship. The colonel considered the measure rather precipitate, and suggested that a suitable acknowledgment from his lordship would be a more satisfactory reparation of the wrong than a sacrifice of the life of either of the parties. “There is not in the whole range of my friends, acquaintance, and I might add, in the universe,” exclaims Wilkinson, “a man of more sublimated sentiment, or who combined with sound discretion a more punctilious sense of honor, than Colonel Moylan.” Taking the colonel’s advice, therefore, he moderated his peremptory message to the following note: “My Lord,—The propriety or impropriety of your communicating to his excellency any circumstance which passed at your lordship’s board at Reading, I leave to be determined by your own feelings and the judgment of the public; but as the affair has eventually induced reflections on my integrity, the sacred duty I owe my honor obliges me to request from your lordship’s hand, that the conversation which you have published passed in a private company during a convivial hour.”
His lordship accordingly gave it under his hand, that the words passed under such circumstances, but under no injunction of secrecy. Whereupon Wilkinson’s irritable but easily pacified honor was appeased, and his sword slept in its sheath.
At Valley Forge Wilkinson had an interview with Washington, in which the subject of General Conway’s letter was discussed, and the whole correspondence between Gates and the commander-in-chief laid before him.
“This exposition,” writes Wilkinson, “unfolded to me a scene of perfidy and duplicity of which I had no suspicion.” It drew from him the following letter to Washington, dated March 28th. “I beg you to receive the grateful homage of a sensible mind for your condescension in exposing to me General Gates’s letters, which unmask his artifices and efforts to ruin me. The authenticity of the information received through Lord Stirling I cannot confirm, as I solemnly assure your Excellency I do not remember the conversation which passed on that occasion, nor can I recollect particular passages of that letter, as I had but a cursory view of it at a late hour. However, I so well remember its general tenor, that, although General Gates has pledged his word it was a wicked and malicious forgery, I will stake my reputation, if the genuine letter is produced, that words to the same effect will appear.”
A few days afterwards, Wilkinson addressed the following letter to the President of Congress.
“Sir,—While I make my acknowledgments to Congress, for the appointment of secretary to the Board of War and Ordnance, I am sorry I should be constrained to resign that office; but, after the acts of treachery and falsehood in which I have detected Major-general Gates, the president of that board, it is impossible for me to reconcile it to my honor to serve with him.”[122]
After recording this letter in his Memoirs, Wilkinson adds: “I had previously resigned my brevet of brigadier-general, on grounds of patriotism; but I still retained my commission of colonel, which was never to my knowledge revoked; yet the dominant influence of General Gates, and the feuds, and factions, and intrigues which prevailed in Congress and in the army of that day, threw me out of employ.”—There we shall leave him; it was a kind of retirement which we apprehend he had richly merited, and we doubt whether his country would have been the loser had he been left to enjoy it for the remainder of his days.
Throughout all the intrigues and manœuvres of the cabal, a part of which we have laid before the reader, Washington had conducted himself with calmness and self-command, speaking on the subject to no one but a very few of his friends; lest a knowledge of those internal dissensions should injure the service.
In a letter to Patrick Henry he gives his closing observations concerning them. “I cannot precisely mark the extent of their views; but it appeared in general, that General Gates was to be exalted on the ruin of my reputation and influence. This I am authorized to say, from undeniable facts in my own possession, from publications, the evident scope of which could not be mistaken, and from private detractions industriously circulated. 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; but I have good reason to believe that their machinations have recoiled most sensibly upon themselves.”
An able and truthful historian, to whose researches we are indebted for most of the documents concerning the cabal, gives it as his opinion that there is not sufficient evidence to prove any concerted plan of action or any fixed design among the leaders: a few aspiring men like Gates and Mifflin, might have flattered themselves with indefinite hopes, and looked forward to a change as promising the best means of aiding their ambitious views; but that it was not probable they had united in any clear or fixed purpose.[123]
These observations are made with that author’s usual candor and judgment; yet, wanting as the intrigues of the cabal might be in plan or fixed design, they were fraught with mischief to the public service, inspiring doubts of its commanders and seeking to provoke them to desperate enterprises. They harassed Washington in the latter part of his campaign; contributed to the dark cloud that hung over his gloomy encampment at Valley Forge, and might have effected his downfall, had he been more irascible in his temper, more at the mercy of impulse, and less firmly fixed in the affections of the people. As it was, they only tended to show wherein lay his surest strength. Jealous rivals he might have in the army, bitter enemies in Congress, but the soldiers loved him, and the large heart of the nation always beat true to him.
The following anecdote of the late Governor Jay, one of our purest and most illustrious statesmen, is furnished to us by his son Judge Jay:—
“Shortly before the death of John Adams, I was sitting alone with my father, conversing about the American Revolution. Suddenly he remarked, ‘Ah, William! the history of that Revolution will never be known. Nobody now alive knows it but John Adams and myself.’ Surprised at such a declaration, I asked him to what he referred? He briefly replied, ‘The proceedings of the old Congress.’ Again I inquired, ‘What proceedings?’ He answered, ‘Those against Washington; from first to last there was a most bitter party against him.’” As the old Congress always sat with closed doors, the public knew no more of what passed within than what it was deemed expedient to disclose.