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

very argument Sutherland needed. He begged to be given the letter, promising he would use it to win Burgoyne round. While Wilkinson waited outside the British camp for a final answer, a messenger came from the impatient Gates telling him to break off negotiations at once, the extra two hours had expired and the truce was over. Refusing to give up, Wilkinson sent word back insisting on another thirty minutes. To his relief, a triumphant Sutherland appeared soon afterward with the surrender documents bearing the signature of Lieutenant General John Burgoyne.
    Wilkinson’s reward was to escort the British general when he came to make the formal surrender to Gates at the American camp the next day. The scene launched a thousand images printed in books, magazines, and newspapers across the young United States— Burgoyne in his gold-braided scarlet coat, General Friedrich von Riedesel, the Hessian commander in dark coat with gilded epaulets, and General Horatio Gates in his unadorned blue coat.
    Everywhere to the south, British armies were establishing control, from Clinton on the bluffs outside Albany to Howe in the streets of Philadelphia. But here on the hillside above the Hudson River, a reversal of such magnitude took place that all the enemy’s success was nullified, and every country in Europe from Spain to Russia was forced to take seriously the Americans’ declaration of their independence. With justifiable pride, Wilkinson remembered his own position in the scene: “A youth in plain blue frock without other military insignia than a cockade and a sword, I stood in the presence of three experienced European generals, soldiers before my birth . . . , yet the consciousness of my inexperience did not shake my purpose.”
    It was his job to introduce the two generals, then Burgoyne doffed his hat and spoke the momentous words “The fortune of war, General Gates, has made me your prisoner.” And Gates, pink and bespectacled, solemnly answered, “I shall always be ready to testify that it has not been through any fault of your excellency.” An hour later, the British soldiers marched out of camp to the beat of their drums and began to pile up their muskets.
    That was the public face, but privately it looked different. Burgoyne was so close to tears he could hardly speak. Marching out to surrender his weapon, a downcast Digby thought the drums “seemed almost ashamed to be heard on such an occasion.” Gates never stopped beaming with pride. And the moment the surrender ceremony was over, his chief of staff collapsed from nervous exhaustion as a result of “the strong excitements produced by the important scenes in which I had been engaged.”
    Much of what Wilkinson did was an act, but his reaction to the long weeks of stress he had undergone was real— an agonizing attack of colic that convulsed him so painfully he thought he would die. He was taken to Albany to recuperate, where a doctor eventually relieved his agony with a heavy dose of laudanum. For someone who always wanted to appear at ease and in control, the incident offered an oddly revealing glimpse of the turmoil beneath the guise. It helps to explain the humiliating experience that was about to follow his moment of triumph.

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B ETRAYING G ENERAL G ATES
     
    W HEN SIR JOHN BURGOYNE appeared before a parliamentary inquiry in London into the causes of his surrender, he claimed to have been defeated not by a militia but by a professional army. “The standing corps [i.e., the Continental Army] which I have seen are disciplined,” he stated. “I do not hazard the term [use it loosely], but apply it to the great fundamental points of military institution, sobriety, subordination, regularity, and courage.” This compliment to the training of the Continental soldiers, and particularly of the specialist units, was deserved, but in reality most of Gates’s army had consisted of part- time soldiers. Of almost twenty-one thousand men under his command, two thirds