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 Memoirs, he justified it in terms of emotional betrayaclass="underline" “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.