Washington's reply was characterized with his usual dignity and candor. After expressing his surprise that a copy of Gates' letter should have been sent to Congress, and asserting that he was thereby laid under the necessity of returning his answer through the same body, he proceeds to state that Colonel Wilkinson, in the month of October last, fell in with Major McWilliams, aide-de-camp to Lord Stirling, and informed him, not in confidence, that General Conway had written to Gates as follows: "Heaven has been determined to save your country, or a weak general and bad counsellors would have ruined it." Washington then adds that this circumstance had not been communicated to any officer in the army except Lafayette, to whom it was shown under injunctions of secrecy, so desirous was he of concealing every matter that "could interrupt the tranquillity of the army, or afford a gleam of hope to the enemy by dissensions therein." He concludes by declaring that he considered the information as coming from Gates, given with a view to forewarn and forearm him against a dangerous incendiary, "in which character sooner or later this country will know General Conway.">[
Gates was disposed to mark his advent to power by a striking operation. A notable project had been concerted by him and the Board of War for a winter irruption into Canada. An expedition was to proceed from Albany, cross Lake Champlain on the ice, burn the British shipping at St. Johns, and press forward to Montreal. Washington was not consulted in the matter: the project was submitted to Congress, and sanctioned by them without his privity. One object of the scheme was to detach the Marquis de Lafayette from Washington, to whom he was devotedly attached, and bring him into the interests of the cabal. For this purpose he was to have the command of the expedition; an appointment which it was thought would tempt his military ambition. Conway was to be second in command, and it was trusted that his address and superior intelligence would virtually make him the leader.
The first notice that Washington received of the project was in a letter from Gates, enclosing one to Lafayette, informing the latter of his appointment, and requiring his attendance at Yorktown to receive his instructions. Gates, in his letter to Washington, asked his opinion and advice; evidently as a matter of form. The latter expressed himself obliged by the "polite request," but observed that, as he neither knew the extent of the objects in view, nor the means to be employed to effect them, it was not in his power to pass any judgment upon the subject. The cabal overshot their mark. Lafayette, who was aware of their intrigues, was so disgusted by the want of deference and respect to the commander-in-chief evinced in the whole proceeding, that he would at once have declined the appointment had not Washington himself advised him strongly to accept it. [The project was never carried out. Lafayette, still having a favorable opinion of Conway's military talents, was aware of the game he was playing, and succeeded in getting De Kalb appointed to the expedition, whose commission being of older date, would give him the precedence of that officer. When Lafayette arrived at Albany it was soon found that the contemplated irruption was not practicable. Schuyler, Lincoln, and Arnold all opposed it. Instead of twenty-five hundred men which had been promised Lafayette, not twelve hundred in all were found to be fit for duty, and these shrinking from a winter incursion into so cold a country. Stark, who was to have joined the expedition, was disinclined. Enlistments could not be made for want of money, or the means of offering other inducements. The project, in view of the numerous discouragements and difficulties, was at length formally suspended by a resolve of Congress.]
Washington's letter of the 4th of January, on the subject of the Conway correspondence, had not reached General Gates until the 22d of January, after his arrival at Yorktown. No sooner did Gates learn from its context that all Washington's knowledge of that correspondence was confined to a single paragraph of a letter, and that merely as quoted in conversation by Wilkinson, than the whole matter appeared easily to be explained or shuffled off. He accordingly took pen in hand, and addressed Washington as follows, on the 22d of January: "The letter which I had the honor to receive yesterday from your Excellency, has relieved me from unspeakable uneasiness. I now anticipate the pleasure it will give you when you discover that what has been conveyed to you for an extract of General Conway's letter to me, was not an information which friendly motives induced a man of honor to give, that injured virtue might be forearmed against secret enemies. The paragraph which your Excellency has condescended to transcribe, is spurious. It was certainly fabricated to answer the most selfish and wicked purposes." He then goes on to declare that the genuine letter of Conway was perfectly harmless, containing judicious remarks upon the want of discipline in the army, but making no mention of weak generals or bad counsellors.
General Conway, also, in a letter to Washington (dated January 27th), informs him that the letter had been returned to him by Gates, and that he found with great satisfaction that "the paragraph so much spoken of did not exist in the said letter, nor anything like it." He had intended, he adds, to publish the letter, but had been dissuaded by President Laurens and two or three members of Congress, to whom he had shown it, lest it should inform the enemy of a misunderstanding among the American generals. He therefore depended upon the justice, candor, and generosity of General Washington to put a stop to the forgery.
On the 9th of February, Washington wrote Gates a long and searching reply to his letters of the 8th and 23d of January, analyzing them, and showing how, in spirit and import, they contradicted each other; and how sometimes the same letter contradicted itself. How, in the first letter, the reality of the extracts was by implication allowed, and the only solicitude shown was to find out the person who brought them to light; while, in the second letter, the whole was pronounced, "in word as well as in substance, a wicked forgery." "It is not my intention," observes Washington, "to contradict this assertion, but only to intimate some considerations which tend to induce a supposition that, though none of General Conway's letters to you contained the offensive passage mentioned, there might have been something in them too nearly related to it, that could give such an extraordinary alarm. If this were not the case, how easy in the first instance to have declared there was nothing exceptionable in them, and to have produced the letters themselves in support of it?"1
1 [The Conway letter proved a further source of trouble to the cabal. Wilkinson learning that Gates had denounced him as the betrayer of the letter, and spoken of him in the grossest language, wrote to Gates demanding honorable reparation. They met, however, and the explanations of Gates appeased Wilkinson for the time, who now turned to Lord Stirling as the betrayer of his confidence, asserting that he should "bleed for his conduct." But in this case, as in the other, Wilkinson's irritable honor was easily pacified. Lord Stirling having admitted, according to Wilkinson's request, that the disclosure in question "occurred in a private company during a convivial hour." Subsequently Wilkinson was shown, by Washington, Gates' letter, in which the extract from Conway's letter was pronounced a forgery. Wilkinson, who was secretary of the Board of War, of which Gates was president, now resigned his office, compelled to it, as he said, "by the acts of treachery and falsehood in which he had detected Major-general Gates." Wilkinson, as bearer of the news of the capture of Burgoyne to Congress, had been rewarded by promotion to the rank of brigadier-general. This was protested against by a large number of colonels, whereupon Wilkinson resigned, and withdrew from the army.]
CHAPTER XLIX.
EXPLOITS OF LEE AND LAFAYETTE.—BRITISH COMMISSIONERS.