GATES UNDERTAKES TO EXPLAIN THE CONWAY CORRESPONDENCE—WASHINGTON’S
SEARCHING ANALYSIS OF THE EXPLANATION—CLOSE OF THE
CORRESPONDENCE—SPURIOUS LETTERS PUBLISHED—LAFAYETTE AND THE CANADA
EXPEDITION—HIS PERPLEXITIES—COUNSELS OF WASHINGTON.
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 23d 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. “Particular actions rather than persons were blamed, but
with impartiality, and I am convinced he did not aim at lessening, in my
opinion, the merit of any person. His letter was perfectly harmless;
however, now that various reports have been circulated concerning its
contents, they ought not to be submitted to the solemn inspection of
those who stand most high in the public esteem.
“Anxiety and jealousy would arise in the breast of very respectable
officers, who, sensible of faults which inexperience, and that alone,
may have led them into, would be unnecessarily disgusted, if they
perceived a probability of such errors being recorded.
“Honor forbids it, and patriotism demands that I should return the
letter into the hands of the writer. I will do it; but, at the same
time, I declare that the paragraph conveyed to your Excellency as a
genuine part of it, was, in words as well as in substance, a wicked
forgery.
“About the beginning of December, I was informed that letter had
occasioned an explanation between your Excellency and that gentleman.
Not knowing whether the whole letter or a part of it had been stealingly
copied, but fearing malice had altered its original texture, I own, sir,
that a dread of the mischiefs which might attend the forgery, I
suspected would be made, put me some time in a most painful situation.
When I communicated to the officers in my family the intelligence which
I had received, they all entreated me to rescue their characters from
the suspicions they justly conceived themselves liable to, until the
guilty person should be known. To facilitate the discovery, I wrote to
your Excellency; but, unable to learn whether General Conway’s letter
had been transmitted to you by a member of Congress, or a gentleman in
the army, I was afraid much time would be lost in the course of the
inquiry, and that the States might receive some capital injury from the
infidelity of the person who I thought had stolen a copy of the
obnoxious letter. Was it not probable that the secrets of the army might
be obtained and betrayed through the same means to the enemy? For this
reason, sir, not doubting that Congress would most cheerfully concur
with you in tracing out the criminal, I wrote to the president, and
enclosed to him a copy of my letter to your Excellency.
“About the time I was forwarding those letters, Brigadier-general
Wilkinson returned to Albany. I informed him of the treachery which had
been committed, but I concealed from him the measures I was pursuing to
unmask the author. Wilkinson answered, he was assured it never would
come to light; and endeavored to fix my suspicions on Lieutenant-colonel
Troup,[117] who, he said, might have incautiously conversed on the
substance of General Conway’s letter with Colonel Hamilton, whom you had
sent not long before to Albany. I did not listen to this insinuation
against your aide-de-camp and mine.”
In the original draft of this letter, which we have seen among the
papers of General Gates, he adds, as a reason for not listening to the
insinuation, that he considered it even as ungenerous “But,” pursues he,
“the light your Excellency has just assisted me with, exhibiting the
many qualifications which are necessarily blended together in the head
and heart of General Wilkinson, I would not omit this fact; it will
enable your Excellency to judge whether or not he would scruple to make
such a forgery as that which he now stands charged with, and ought to be
exemplarily punished.” This, with considerable more to the same purport,
intended to make Wilkinson the scape-goat, stands cancelled in the
draft, and was omitted in the letter sent to Washington, but by some
means, fair or foul, it came to the knowledge of Wilkinson, who has
published it at length in his Memoirs, and who, it will be found,
resented the imputation thus conveyed.
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 any thing 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? The propriety of the objections suggested against
submitting them to inspection may very well be questioned. ‘The various
reports circulated concerning their contents,’ were perhaps so many
arguments for making them speak for themselves, to place the matter upon
the footing of certainty. Concealment in an affair which had made so
much noise, though not by _my_ means, will naturally lead men to
conjecture the worst, and it will be a subject of speculation even to
candor itself. The anxiety and jealousy you apprehend from revealing the
letter, will be very apt to be increased by suppressing it.”
We forbear to follow Washington through his stern analysis, but we
cannot omit the concluding paragraph of his strictures on the character
of Conway.
“Notwithstanding the hopeful presages you are pleased to figure to
yourself of General Conway’s firm and constant friendship to America, I
cannot persuade myself to retract the prediction concerning him, which
you so emphatically wish had not been inserted in my last. A better
acquaintance with him, than I have reason to think you have had, from
what you say, and a concurrence of circumstances, oblige me to give him
but little credit for the qualifications of his heart, of which, at
least, I beg leave to assume the privilege of being a tolerable judge.
Were it necessary, more instances than one might be adduced from his
behavior and conversation, to manifest that he is capable of all the
malignity of detraction, and all the meanness of intrigue, to gratify
the absurd resentment of disappointed vanity or to answer the purposes
of personal aggrandizement, and promote the interest of faction.”
Gates evidently quailed beneath this letter. In his reply February 19th,
he earnestly hoped that no more of that time, so precious to the public,
might be lost upon the subject of General Conway’s letter.
“Whether that gentleman,” says he, “does or does not deserve the
suspicions you express, would be entirely indifferent to me, did he not
possess an office of high rank in the army of the United States. As to
the gentleman, I have no personal connection with him, nor had I any
correspondence previous to his writing the letter which has given
offence, nor have I since written to him, save to certify what I know to
be the contents of that letter. He, therefore, must be responsible; as I
heartily dislike controversy, even upon my own account, and much more in
a matter wherein I was only accidentally concerned,” &c. &c.
The following was the dignified but freezing note with which Washington
closed this correspondence.
“Valley Forge, 24th Feb. 1778.
“SIR:—I yesterday received your favor of the 19th instant. I am as
averse to controversy as any man; and, had I not been forced into it,
you never would have had occasion to impute to me even the shadow of a
disposition towards it. Your repeatedly and solemnly disclaiming any
offensive views in those matters which have been the subject of our
past correspondence, makes me willing to close with the desire you
express of burying them hereafter in silence, and, as far as future
events will permit, oblivion. My temper leads me to peace and harmony
with all men; and it is peculiarly my wish to avoid any personal feuds
or dissensions with those who are embarked in the same great national
interest with myself, as every difference of this kind must, in its
consequences, be very injurious. I am, sir,” &c.
Among the various insidious artifices resorted to about this time to
injure the character of Washington, and destroy public confidence in his
sincerity, was the publication of a series of letters purporting to be
from him to some members of his family, and to his agent, Mr. Lund
Washington, which, if genuine, would prove him to be hollow-hearted and
faithless to the cause he was pretending to uphold. They had appeared in
England in a pamphlet form, as if printed from originals and drafts
found in possession of a black servant of Washington, who had been left
behind ill, at Fort Lee, when it was evacuated. They had recently been
reprinted at New York in Rivington’s Royal Gazette; the first letter
making its appearance on the 14th of February. It had also been printed
at New York in a handbill, and extracts published in a Philadelphia
paper.
Washington took no public notice of this publication at the time, but in
private correspondence with his friends, he observes: “These letters are
written with a great deal of art. The intermixture of so many family
circumstances (which, by the by, want foundation in truth) gives an air
of plausibility, which renders the villainy greater; as the whole is a
contrivance to answer the most diabolical purposes. Who the author of
them is, I know not. From information or acquaintance he must have had
some knowledge of the component parts of my family; but he has most
egregiously mistaken facts in several instances. The design of his
labors is as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness.”[118] And in
another letter, he observes, “They were written to show that I was an
enemy to independence, and with a view to create distrust and jealousy.
It is no easy matter to decide whether the villainy or the artifice of
these letters is greatest.”[119]
The author of these letters was never discovered. He entirely failed in
his object; the letters were known at once to be forgeries.[120]
Letters received at this juncture from Lafayette, gave Washington
tidings concerning the expedition against Canada, set on foot without
consulting him. General Conway had arrived at Albany three days before
the marquis, and his first word when they met was that the expedition
was quite impossible. Generals Schuyler, Lincoln and Arnold, had written
to Conway to that effect. The marquis at first was inclined to hope the
contrary, but his hope was soon demolished. Instead of the two thousand
five hundred men that had been promised him, not twelve hundred in all
were to be found fit for duty, and most part of these were “naked even
for a summer’s campaign;” all shrank from a winter incursion into so
cold a country. As to General Stark and his legion of Green Mountain
Boys, who, according to the gasconade of Gates, might have burnt the
fleet before Lafayette’s arrival, the marquis received at Albany a
letter from the veteran, “who wishes to know,” says he, “_what number of
men, for what time, and for what rendezvous, I desire him to raise_.”
Another officer, who was to have enlisted men, would have done so, _had
he received money_. “One asks what encouragement his people will have;
the other has no clothes; not one of them has received a dollar of what
was due to them. I have applied to every body, I have begged at every
door I could, these two days, and I see that I could do something were
the expedition to be begun in five weeks. But you know we have not an
hour to lose; and, indeed, it is now rather too late had we every thing
in readiness.”
The poor marquis was in despair—but what most distressed him was the
dread of ridicule. He had written to his friends that he had the command
of the expedition; it would be known throughout Europe. “I am afraid,”
says he, “that it will reflect on my reputation, and I shall be laughed
at. My fears upon that subject are so strong, that I would choose to
become again only a volunteer, unless Congress offers the means of
mending this ugly business by some glorious operation.”
A subsequent letter is in the same vein. The poor marquis, in his
perplexity, lays his whole heart open to Washington with childlike
simplicity. “I have written lately to you my distressing, ridiculous,
foolish, and indeed nameless situation. I am sent, with a great noise,
at the head of an army for doing great things; the whole continent,
France and Europe herself, and, what is worse, the British army, are in
great expectations. How far they will be deceived, how far we shall be
ridiculed, you may judge by the candid account you have got of the state
of our affairs.—I confess, my dear general, that I find myself of very
quick feelings whenever my reputation and glory are concerned in any
thing. It is very hard that such a part of my happiness, without which I
cannot live, should depend upon schemes which I never knew of but when
there was no time to put them in execution. I assure you, my most dear
and respected friend, that I am more unhappy than I ever was. * * * * I
should be very happy if you were here, to give me some advice; but I
have nobody to consult with.”
Washington, with his considerate, paternal counsels, hastened to calm
the perturbation of his youthful friend, and dispel those fears
respecting his reputation, excited only, as he observed, “by an uncommon
degree of sensibility.” “It will be no disadvantage to you to have it
known in Europe,” writes he, “that you have received so manifest a proof
of the good opinion and confidence of Congress as an important detached
command. * * * * * However sensibly your ardor for glory may make you
feel this disappointment, you may be assured that your character stands
as fair as ever it did, and that no new enterprise is necessary to wipe
off this imaginary stain.”
The project of an irruption into Canada was at length formally suspended
by a resolve of Congress; and Washington was directed to recall the
marquis and the Baron de Kalb, the presence of the latter being deemed
absolutely necessary to the army at Valley Forge. Lafayette at the same
time received assurance of the high sense entertained by Congress of his
prudence, activity and zeal, and that nothing was wanting on his part to
give the expedition the utmost possible effect.
Gladly the young marquis hastened back to Valley Forge, to enjoy the
companionship and find himself once more under the paternal eye of
Washington; leaving Conway for the time in command at Albany, “where
there would be nothing, perhaps, to be attended to but some disputes of
Indians and tories.”
Washington, in a letter to General Armstrong, writes, “I shall say no
more of the Canada expedition than that it is at an end. I never was
made acquainted with a single circumstance relating to it.”[121]