Washington’s one expectation of Wilkinson was that, to sort out problems as they occurred, “you will employ as much of your time with the Army as will be consistent with the great Objects of your appointment.” In this, he was per sistent ly disappointed.
Within two months of Wilkinson’s appointment, the commander in chief was wearily writing to Congress, “I am again reduced to the necessity of acting the part of Clothier General.” During the next year, the tone of his requests for Wilkinson’s presence at headquarters grew steadily more acerbic as the official clothier general repeatedly found excuses to remain in Philadelphia, or to be absent on duties elsewhere. Even a direct order from Washington in October 1780—“I shall expect to see you with the army immediately after receipt of this letter”—was ignored for ten days before he received the casual reply “I expect this day to borrow a sufficient fund to carry me to your excellency’s quarters, and propose setting out tomorrow or the next day.”
Initially Wilkinson attempted to make an inefficient clothing system work, but lack of funds exacerbated its shortcomings. By early 1780, he had established three supply depots in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, but in June, when the depot in Massachusetts held “thirty-five waggons load of Summer Clothing that the army are most distressed for,” he had no means of transporting it to Pennsylvania where it was needed. In the fall of 1780, he warned that “the very scanty stock of clothing on hand” made winter shortages inevitable, but although material had been purchased in Boston, the Board of War was unable to have it made into uniforms, “for want of money to pay the workmen.” In October 1780, Wilkinson presented Congress with a plan to centralize both the procurement and issue of uniforms and blankets under his office, rather than continuing to have fourteen different departments— the thirteen states plus the clothier general— bid against each other for the same clothing, each working on commission and spending money provided by Congress. Nothing came of this seemingly rational proposal, however, because it depended on a central government with sufficient power to impose its wishes on the states that brought it into being.
A more energetic clothier general might have forced through the practical improvements that eventually came in 1782 or at least have shaken the system into greater effectiveness. But what Wilkinson required was glory or at least public approval, and without it he simply lost interest. By March 1781, Washington confessed to such frustration—“I have so repeatedly without effect called upon you to attend to the business of your Department near Headquarters”— that he was forced to appeal to Congress to intervene: “I know not how necessary Mr. Wilkinson’s almost constant residence in Philadelphia may be, but should it not be deemed essential, I could wish that Congress would interpose their authority since mine has been ineffectual.”
According to the newspapers, Wilkinson had been distracted by social pleasures such as his noisy participation in a fashionable evening at Hart’s Tavern in Philadelphia, where he organized dances with names like Burgoyne’s Surrender and Clinton’s Retreat. At the same time, financial pressure diverted his energies into maximizing the income from Trevose. He placed advertisements offering the pasture for rent at “seven shillings and sixpence [about $1.25] per week”; he bred horses for sale in the markets at Philadelphia and Trenton and promoted the services of the stallions at his Godolphin stable for “four guineas the season.” He also contacted his old Maryland acquaintances and accepted a commission to sell their tobacco to French buyers. He even undertook to act as clothing agent for Maryland, effectively competing with himself as clothier general, and with apparent success if the 1780 report of the state’s congressmen is to be believed. They castigated the Board of War for its inability to provide enough uniforms for Maryland’s troops, but Wilkinson was lauded as “a native of Maryland a man of Honor and a good officer,” who could be relied on to look after the state’s interests.
Yet he was not alone in neglecting the needs of the Continental Army during this period. From early spring in 1778 when news began to spread that France and the United States had signed a treaty of alliance on February 6—the direct result of Saratoga—an irrational overconfidence seemed to grip the civilian population. When the British evacuated Philadelphia fearing that a French fleet might blockade them, gamblers in Lancaster offered bets at five to one on the war being over in six months. In October, Pennsylvania’s supreme executive council decided it would no longer pay a bounty for recruits because “the war would be shortly finished, and there was no need for throwing the State to farther expence.”
By 1779 Spain had also declared war against Britain, and the following year the fabulously wealthy Netherlands joined the alliance. The Revolution had become international, Britain was isolated, and independence appeared a foregone conclusion. Other state legislatures behaved like Pennsylvania’s, growing reluctant to help in the recruitment, feeding, and clothing of the Continental Army and thus making their own contribution to the mutinies in the winter of 1779–80. By the spring of 1780 General Jedidiah Huntington felt compelled to ask, “Is it not a possible Thing to revive the feelings which pervaded every Breast in the Commencement of the War, when every Man considered the Fate of his Country as depending on his own exertion?”
The mood of complacency was exploded in May 1780 when Henry Clinton’s army, shipped south from New York in December, besieged General Benjamin Lincoln in Charleston and forced an army of thirty-three hundred men to surrender. It was the most severe loss of the war, and two more hammer blows followed. In August, Horatio Gates fled in panic from the bloody defeat at Camden, South Carolina, where more than one thousand Americans were killed or wounded; then in September came the most pulverizing blow of all, Benedict Arnold’s treachery.
The Marquis de Lafayette was with Washington in an upstairs room at West Point when he opened a packet of letters taken from Major John André and realized that Arnold had planned not only to hand over West Point and with it control of the Hudson Valley to the British, but to let them capture the commander in chief. The enormity of the treachery—perhaps enough to defeat the Revolution at a stroke—physically shocked Washington. Lafayette noted that Washington’s head was down, and the papers in his hand trembled. “Arnold has betrayed me,” he whispered. “Whom can we trust now?”
A sense of horror rippled through the nation. In Philadelphia and Bucks County, Wilkinson drew up lists of suspected Loyalists, then called on patriotic Americans to boycott their homes and businesses. “Wilkinson is ready to burst with Indignation,” one of Joseph Reed’s friends reported. “[He] is drawing up Associations against any Intercourse with Tory & Suspicious Characters.” No one was immune from the wave of bitter recrimination. “We were all astonishment, each peeping at his next neighbor to see if any treason was hanging about him,” Alexander Scammell, Washington’s adjutant general remembered. “Nay, we even descended to a critical examination of ourselves.”