An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson by Andro Linklater

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.”
    A S 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.
    However, once Gates had ceased to be his patron, Wilkinson was left with only one general higher in rank to charm, and almost as a reflex he began to try to win over the unbending figure of George Washington. Although obviously a member of Gates’s entourage, Wilkinson took steps to show his loyalty