Alexander Hamilton’s first assignment as confidential writing aide to George Washington came March 3, 1777. It dealt with the treatment of prisoners of war, which was to be one of his major endeavors over the next four years. Gradually, Washington virtually put Hamilton in charge of coordinating all prisoner exchanges. Hamilton showed deep personal interest in the subject: after all, his two closest friends, Robert Troup and Hercules Mulligan, had been captured at Brooklyn Heights. While they were alive and unhurt, both were on their parole of honor not to leave New York City until they were exchanged for British prisoners of equal rank or until the war was over.
Hamilton’s duties as prisoner negotiator assumed added urgency when British dragoons captured Major General Charles Lee, the American second in command. Returning from the South, he was supposed to lead troops from the New York Highlands to reinforce Washington during his retreat across New Jersey. Pausing at a tavern at Basking Ridge, New Jersey, he was breakfasting leisurely when British dragoons surrounded the tavern. The British refused to release him on parole, contending he was not a prisoner of war but, as a former British officer, a traitor, to be hanged.
The Continental Congress still had no fixed policy for the treatment of prisoners and the British commander, unwilling to accord the Americans legal status, had no authority from London to deal with rebels. A captured British officer who was also a member of Parliament, Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell of the Seventy-first Regiment, complained that he and five Hessian officers taken at Trenton were being treated harshly. Congress refused to ameliorate their treatment despite the fact that, while the Americans held only fifty British officers, the British held three thousand Americans. Setting to work on the knotty problem in his first letter as a staff officer, Hamilton wrote compassionately to Colonel Campbell, “I shall always be happy to manifest my disinclination to any undue severities towards those whom the fortunes of war may chance to throw into my hands.” In time, Hamilton would help negotiate a general agreement for the exchange of prisoners, working with his old Eliza-bethtown mentor, Elias Boudinot, the American commissary of prisoners and the man who saw they were supplied with food and clothing.1
Working from a few hasty notes he scrawled in a brief meeting with Washington conveying his tone, Hamilton tackled each delicate assignment. Washington ordered him to upbraid Major General Horatio Gates for failing to keep track of the number of troops receiving recruiting bonuses and bounties and deserting from the army, only to “enlist” again. He next dealt with the flamboyant General Benedict Arnold, who was itching to attack the British garrison of Newport, Rhode Island. Washington did not like to second-guess field officers on the scene but he approved what Hamilton wrote:
Unless your strength and circumstances be such that you can reasonably promise a moral certainty of succeeding…relinquish the undertaking and confine yourself, in the main, to a defensive operation.
Over the next few years, Hamilton would have the delicate task of dealing repeatedly with the feisty Arnold. Congress for the second time had passed over Arnold for promotion. Hamilton assured Arnold that Washington was working to remedy the “error” and that, in a typical Hamiltonian flourish, “My endeavors to that end shall not be wanting.” In consoling the disgruntled Arnold when Congress promoted two former subordinates over him, Hamilton wrote Arnold a self-revealing letter:
If smaller matters do not yield to greater, if trifles, light as air in comparison of what we are contending for, can withdraw or withhold gentlemen from service when our all is at stake and a single cast of the die may turn the tables, what are we to expect? It is not a common contest we are engaged in. Success depends upon a steady and vigorous exertion.2
Another sensitive matter at headquarters was the Continental Army’s relationship to state legislatures, which were jealous of their authority over their own militias. Hamilton’s former New York artillery company was now so under strength, behind in pay, and destitute of qualified officers that, Hamilton argued, it could no longer be of any use to New York State. He recommended that it be transferred intact to the Continental service. The New York Congress sent a delegate, Gouverneur Morris, with a resolution that followed Hamilton’s advice. Morris, witty, cynical, aristocratic scion of a wealthy New York family, was deeply impressed with Hamilton at this first meeting. The two men, both French speakers with Huguenot mothers, hit it off instantly. Morris returned to the New York Congress and recommended that Hamilton become the state’s confidential military liaison between headquarters and its own Committee of Correspondence. The New York Congress agreed. This time writing for himself, Hamilton said that he was pleased, even if it meant extra duty without pay:
With cheerfulness, I embrace the proposal of corresponding with your convention…and shall from time to time as far as my leisure will permit and my duty warrant, communicate such pieces of intelligence as shall be received and such comments upon them as shall convey a true idea of what is going on in the military line.
Hamilton was stepping for the second time into the New York political arena—and deciding what the state’s politicians should be told of Continental military affairs. But he was not seduced by the compliment. He never allowed his attachment to his adopted state to take precedence over his primary loyalty to the national interests. Born outside any of the American states, from this early time he gave his principal allegiance to the Continental cause. He was also careful to write that he was speaking only for himself. His opinions were “to be considered merely as my private sentiments.” They were “never to be interpreted as an echo” of Washington’s, which, of course, as everyone knew, they were.3
Giving New York the benefit of his first military analysis, Hamilton wrote that the British couldn’t attack until at least May 1: the roads were too muddy, their reinforcements from England too tardy. They would probably try to capture Philadelphia in a combined land and sea campaign. They would follow the “well-grounded rule in war to strike first at the capital towns and cities.” Hamilton’s intelligence sources had proved amazingly accurate.4
Yet as Hamilton gradually widened his correspondence with New York leaders to include politicians in other states, it became clear that he did not agree with Washington on everything. He worried about the British attack on Philadelphia, “a place of infinite importance,” while Washington was opposed to allowing Pennsylvania to form its own army to defend itself. Hamilton also disagreed on how harshly Loyalists should be treated. Washington dealt severely with all suspected Loyalists. When New Jersey Revolutionaries rounded up leading Loyalists and herded them to headquarters at Morristown for questioning, Hamilton played a prominent part in their interrogation. He had tried to ascertain
Who of them were subject to a military jurisdiction and who came properly under the civil power; also, to discriminate those who were innocent or guilty of trivial offenses from those whose crimes were of a capital or heinous nature.
In part because of Hamilton’s influence, the board of inquiry persuaded Washington to release passive Loyalists and only send “daring offenders” to Governor Livingston for punishment, leaving to the civil authority their disposition. Hamilton wrote he wanted to keep clear of “the least encroachment either upon the rights of the citizen or of the magistrate.”
This time, the sentiment as well as the words were more Hamilton’s than Washington’s. He went even further. Confiscation of the estates of Loyalists “is not cognizable by martial law.” Instead of wholesale arrests and confiscations, Hamilton urged the New York Congress to carry out “an execution or two, by way of example,” that would “strike terror and powerfully discourage” other Loyalists while not encouraging “wicked practices” such as public whippings. “Corporal punishment,” he warned, would only create sympathy among fence-sitting citizens and was “apt to excite compassion and breed disgust.” When the New Jersey Loyalists were still held in irons at Morristown without trials, Hamilton wrote to his schooldays mentor, now New Jersey Governor Livingston, to caution him not to be unduly severe. “Private pique and resentment” had caused the arrests of “some innocent persons.” Hamilton knew that he was reflecting public opinion in New Jersey when he so boldly lectured Livingston on the dangers of appearing to persecute innocent citizens.5
Offering advice that the New York Congress did not solicit, the twenty-two-year-old aide-de-camp provided that august body with a brilliant analysis of New York’s new constitution. There was “a want of vigor” in the office of governor. The choice of a chief executive “cannot be safely lodged with the people at large,” but there could be stable government if there was a truly representative democracy:
When the deliberative or judicial powers are vested wholly or partly in the collective body of the people, you must expect error, confusion and instability. But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well-secured and regulated, and the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities is vested in select persons, chosen really and nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.
Hamilton worried that New York’s two-house legislature would result in “delay and dilatoriness”:
Your senate, from the very name and from the mere circumstance of its being a separate member of the legislature, will be liable to degenerate into a body purely aristocratical. And I think the danger of an abuse of power from a simple legislature would not be very great in a government where the equality and fullness of popular representation is so widely provided for as in yours.6
As everyone waited for the 1777 spring campaign to open, New York’s politicians sought Hamilton’s expert opinion of cannon produced from iron manufactured by a fellow New Yorker, Colonel Robert Livingston. Hamilton responded that one cannon, weighing precisely 227 pounds, had been fired as fast as possible twenty times and that that had satisfied Washington. But Hamilton felt it should have been fired fifty times for a truly adequate field trial that, if passed, would prove “beyond a doubt” her value to be “immense.”7
Not all of Hamilton’s letter writing was official. He found time to write to Hugh Knox in St. Croix, who had become a staunch admirer of the Revolution. Knox was helping to edit the island’s newspaper. He wrote back to praise Hamilton’s now-missing letter as “a more true” account of the Revolution “than all the public and private intelligence we had received here.” Ever cheering his protégé on, the schoolmaster-cum-preacher urged him to become
the analyst and biographer as well as the aide-de-camp of General Washington and the [historian] of the American war! I hope you will take minutes and keep a journal! This may be a new and strange thought to you but if you survive the current troubles, I aver few men will be as well qualified to write the history of the present glorious struggle!8
ON AUGUST 26, 1777, on a hill a few miles south of Newark, Delaware, Alexander Hamilton sat on his horse beside Generals Washington and Greene and the Marquis de Lafayette, and gazed down at the sprawling white canvas bivouac of Sir William Howe’s seventeen-thousand-man invasion force. In the last two weeks, it had become plain that the British fleet that had left New York early in August was heading for the Chesapeake to land an army to attack the capital at Philadelphia from the south. Hamilton’s intelligence sources inside New York City had never been more valuable. His contacts in the New York Assembly, alarmed at the new British invasion from Canada, were certain that the British Army in New York City intended to sail north up the Hudson and link up with the British Northern Army at Albany in a giant pincers movement that would sever rebellious New England and probably end the Revolution. Indeed, this had been the British ministry’s plan. But Hamilton’s sources inside New York City, undoubtedly funneling reports from Long Island and from spies in Manhattan through Hercules Mulligan by boat to New Jersey, told him otherwise. Details came from scores of sources. American wives of Loyalist officers transmitted their observations of unusual boat-building activity on Long Island. At his tavern on Pearl Street, Samuel Fraunces eavesdropped on British officers’ meetings. Orders for provisions, tackle, and fodder for a large number of horses coursed from the East River waterfront to Hercules Mulligan, who sent coded messages across the Hudson from the Fulton Street ferry landing to the New Jersey shore. Mulligan’s slave Cato made countless nighttime crossings through the British naval patrols. Hamilton constantly updated Washington as, in makeshift lookout towers in coastal saltworks all along the New Jersey shoreline, American telescopes watched for the British fleet. First feinting northward toward the Hudson to confuse the Americans, the British fleet came about and sailed out to sea, disappearing for six days. While it was still at sea, Washington, deciding to depend on his spies, made one of his greatest gambles. Keeping his army split instead of marching north to reinforce Gates against the British assault from Canada, Washington shifted the bulk of his army south through Philadelphia to defend against a British attack from the south. Never had the fledgling American intelligence network scored so vital a coup. A sixteen-thousand-man American army had marched south from Morristown, New Jersey, through Philadelphia to oppose the invasion.
Hamilton and other American officers had ridden out, as he wrote to Gouverneur Morris, his New York correspondent, to reconnoiter “Howe’s coming into Chesapeake Bay”:
He still lies there in a state of inactivity, in a great measure, I believe, from the want of horses to transport his baggage and stores. It seems he sailed with only about three weeks’ provender and was six at sea. This has occasioned the death of a great number of his horses and has made skeletons of the rest. He will be obliged to collect a supply from the neighboring country before he can move.9
Based on information he had received from Hercules Mulligan and other New York operatives over the past few months, Hamilton had correctly assumed that Howe would follow a classical military formula and attack city after city instead of following the wiser course of sailing up the Hudson to link up with a second British army that was slow-marching south from Canada. When the British feinted an attack up the Hudson, Hamilton knew from Mulligan’s network that the ships were destined for a more southerly climate. He had urged Washington to race south, not north, to the horror of New York Revolutionaries who still believed the British were heading north and that all of Washington’s army should be joining in their defense. Now Hamilton was ready to reassure them. The danger from an intercepted message was past.
There was something almost mocking of Howe in the tone of Hamilton’s confidential report, sped by courier to the infinitely relieved New York Congress. The “enemy will have Philadelphia if they dare make a bold push for it,” Hamilton predicted, “unless we fight them a pretty general action.” Washington had adopted a Fabian policy of trying to wear down the British by arm’s-length resistance and deprivation of supplies. Hamilton disagreed with his policy. He thought the American army should put up a fight for Philadelphia even if it meant risking all-out battle: “I opine we ought do it,” Hamilton wrote Morris, “and that we shall beat them soundly if we do” while the army was “in high health and spirits.” While Hamilton played the dutiful sycophant around the commander-in-chief, in his secret correspondence with Morris, once again he disagreed with Washington.10
Washington tried to halt the British advance at Brandywine, the border between present-day Delaware and Pennsylvania. The opposing forces at Brandywine were about even. As soon as Washington retreated behind prepared earthworks at Chadd’s Ford the morning of September 11, 1777, Howe sent five thousand Hessians against the center of the American lines while seventy-five hundred redcoats marched around the American right flank. Amazingly, once again the British blew their chance for total victory by hesitating for a late lunch, giving the Americans a chance to reinforce their right wing. With Hamilton and Lafayette and two regiments of reinforcements, Washington arrived in time to line up behind a stone wall as the English wiped off their chins. Hamilton was directing the unlimber-ing of field artillery when the British lunch hour ended. The Americans now absorbed a terrible pounding from heavier British guns and withstood bayonet charges for more than an hour. Washington, Hamilton, and Lafayette trotted up and down the line, swinging their swords and cheering on the men. Lafayette fell from his horse, shot through the thigh; Hamilton helped to drag him to safety.
Hamilton was eager for another fight to erase the embarrassment of the Americans’ technical defeat at Brandywine. He was busy for days in mid-September at temporary headquarters set up at Yellow Springs, Pennsylvania, writing orders requesting reinforcements from the northern army. Typically, Congress, instead of sending blankets for Washington’s shivering soldiers, provided rum to warm them. As the nights grew chill, he grew disgusted with the Continental Congress. The supply problem only worsened as winter approached, consuming Hamilton’s efforts as the British seized or destroyed one American depot after another abandoned by the retreating Continental Army. One British raid on Valley Forge yielded “3800 barrels of flour, soap and candles, 25 barrels of horse shoes, several thousand kettles and entrenching tools,” Hamilton reported. To keep even more supplies out of British hands, Washington assigned Hamilton the odious duty of destroying flour mills at Deviser’s Ferry on the Schuylkill River. Hamilton rode out with Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee and his Virginia cavalry to carry out the scorched-earth mission. Hamilton’s detachment had barely set fire to the mills before guards they had left on a hilltop fired shots warning of approaching British dragoons. Fortuitously, Hamilton had brought ashore a flat-bottomed boat: with four men and their horses, Hamilton shoved off just as the dragoons galloped up and opened fire. The British volley killed one of Hamilton’s oarsmen, wounded another, and crippled Hamilton’s horse.
A breathless Hamilton returned to headquarters, picked up his quill, and dashed off a warning to John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress inside Philadelphia:
If Congress have not yet left Philadelphia, they ought to do it immediately,…without fail, for the enemy have the means of throwing a party this night into the city.
In his hasty escape, Hamilton had been forced to abandon another boat that could make it possible for the British to ferry fifty men at a time across the Schuylkill to carry out a raid on Congress. “In a few hours,” he warned Hancock, they may have forded dragoons “perhaps sufficient to overmatch the militia who may be between them and the city.” Hamilton was not forgetting General Lee’s capture by dragoons. “This renders the situation of Congress extremely precarious.” Congress, heeding Hamilton’s warning, fled Philadelphia.11
But the British, instead of marching directly into Philadelphia, marched up the Schuylkill and away from the city. Congressman John Adams, shaken out of his bed, cursed Hamilton for a false alarm and wrote to Abigail that “Philadelphia will be no loss to us.” When Howe did not cross the Schuylkill, Hamilton, in effect, was called on the congressional carpet. A few days later, Hamilton’s warning did prove correct when Howe suddenly laid pontoon bridges across the Schuylkill at its lower fords at night and, eluding Washington, marched the entire British Army across the river and on toward Philadelphia.12
In the last few days before the British took control of the capital, Hamilton went on a dangerous mission inside Philadelphia trying to commandeer blankets, clothing, shoes, and horses, all badly needed if the remaining American soldiers were to survive winter outside the city. A Virginia officer with Washington, John Marshall, reported that, in Hamilton’s attempts to garner goods from Philadelphia merchants, “this very active officer could not obtain a supply, in any degree, adequate to the wants of the army.” Yet Hamilton managed to round up enough military stores and send them by boat up the Delaware River and out of British reach “with so much vigilance that very little public property fell, with the city, into [British] hands.” Hamilton had carried out his breathless raid on the city’s munitions in only two days under the noses of Cornwallis’s battalions as they took up positions in the capital.13
Increasingly, Washington drew on Hamilton for assistance and advice in coordinating the Philadelphia campaign in the winter of 1777-78. The next American objective was a lightning strike on the British at Germantown before the British could consolidate their hold on Philadelphia. Only three weeks after his failure at Brandywine, the Americans counterattacked. There were only eighty-five hundred unsuspecting British at the main British encampment at German-town, eight miles north of Philadelphia. At five-thirty the morning of October 4, the lead American regiment, the Sixth Pennsylvania, trotted with bayonets fixed into a British outpost. In bloody hand-to-hand fighting, the Pennsylvanians pushed back the British. For the first time in the Revolution, Americans heard a British bugler sound retreat.
Through his spyglass, Hamilton could dimly make out Cliveden, a fortresslike stone house surrounded by broad lawns. By this time the Americans were firing volley after volley into a ground fog thickened by gunsmoke. As an aide, Colonel Timothy Pickering, rode back from delivering a message, he came under fire from Cliveden. He found Colonel Thomas Proctor, an artillery officer, and told him to bombard the house, then hurried to inform Washington. The main American attack had already swept past Cliveden. A heated debate ensued inside Washington’s headquarters. Hamilton and Colonel Pickering wanted to surround the house with a regiment of reserves to keep the British from escaping and press onward with the main army. Artillery chief Henry Knox objected: a castle in the rear was a real threat. By the logic of European warfare, it must be reduced by artillery. Washington accepted Knox’s argument, as he did so often, over Hamilton’s objection, insisting on sending an officer with a flag of truce. But a sharpshooter inside Cliveden only saw a soldier’s moving form and shot him. The American artillery bombardment of Cliveden merely shattered the shutters and doors. Deadly fire from inside the stone mansion tore into infantry Washington ordered into the siege. Eighteen New Jersey Brigade troops storming the massive oak front door were bayoneted. Another seventy-five Jersey men lay dead or dying on the grounds as American artillery opened fire from the opposite side of the house. American gunners blasted away at each other, the cannonballs passing through the house and striking more Americans than Englishmen. The sounds of heavy artillery fire halted the American advance corps, which marched back to Cliveden and opened fire from the south. Now American guns blazed away at Cliveden from all four sides. In the smog of war, Virginians and Pennsylvanians blasted away at each other until they were out of ammunition. Yelling for more ammunition, they gave away their positions to the British. Hamilton, his advice to bypass the fortified house ignored, watched in horror as the Americans retreated pell-mell, throwing away their victory.
IN LATE November 1777, Washington finally began an eleven-day march, safely moving his army into winter quarters at Valley Forge, twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia. The British made no attempt to follow. In the six months between September 1777 and March 1778, fully one half of Washington’s troops were killed, captured, or wounded, froze to death on patrols, died of camp contagions, deserted, or resigned. An estimated three thousand men died of typhoid or smallpox in American field hospitals, while two thousand more died as prisoners of war inside unheated buildings in Philadelphia. The Continental Congress, on the run first to Lancaster and then to York, 140 miles west of Philadelphia, was able to provide very little in the way of shoes, bread, meat, blankets, or pay for the freezing, starving American soldiers at Valley Forge. The army’s privations did not so much result from shortages in the land, but reflected inefficiency in arranging supplies and the outright meddling of politicians. That winter, Congress’s ineptitude nearly wrecked the Revolution.
A crisis over who should command the American army had been developing since early autumn 1777. A deep schism within American ranks developed after the British advanced down Lake Champlain, forcing the abandonment of woefully undermanned Fort Ticonderoga. As regional jealousies flared, New Englanders blamed a New York general, Philip Schuyler, commander of the Northern Department, for the loss of the fortress, which left the New England backcountry dangerously exposed. He then incurred the wrath of Samuel and John Adams of Massachusetts for siphoning off troops from Massachusetts to defend New York. Hamilton had tried, with Washington’s approval, to bind the wounds among Revolutionaries, but, uniquely, the Northern Department came under the direct jurisdiction of Congress.
There was little Hamilton could do. When Congress demanded an investigation of the fall of Ticonderoga, it stripped Schuyler of his Northern command and ordered Washington to choose a successor, but Washington insisted the choice, like the responsibility, must be Congress’s. Samuel Adams promptly nominated Horatio Gates, a former British officer. In a pair of major battles near Saratoga in the autumn of 1777, Gates had stayed in camp safely behind his defense lines and ordered Benedict Arnold, his most experienced field commander, to stay in his tent. After a bitter quarrel, Gates had taken away Arnold’s command. Arnold had defied Gates’s orders and led a successful assault on a key Hessian redoubt and was severely wounded. Gates claimed full credit for the victory, not even mentioning Arnold in his official report to Congress.
When news of the victory reached Washington’s camp at Whitemarsh on October 29 shortly after the fiasco at Germantown, a council of war decided to draw down twenty regiments from Gates at Albany for an all-out attack on Philadelphia. Hamilton wrote to Congress that the council of war could not “conceive that there is any other object now remaining that demands our most rigorous efforts so much as the destruction of the enemy in this quarter [Philadelphia].” Hamilton left unwritten the delicate position Washington was now in: in the eyes of Congress and many American and European observers, he had not done enough to defend Philadelphia, while Gates had scored a major victory.14
ON OCTOBER 28, 1777, James Wilkinson, a twenty-one-year-old aide to Gates, stopped at Reading, Pennsylvania, en route to Philadelphia from Saratoga with the official report for the Continental Congress of the great victory at Saratoga. Wilkinson repeated to one of Lord Stirling’s aides a cutting remark about Washington that he had heard before he left Gates’s headquarters in Albany. The mere fact that Wilkinson was heading for Congress before delivering Gates’s report to the commander-in-chief at Washington’s headquarters suggested that Gates was deliberately snubbing his commanding officer. Wilkinson revealed to Stirling’s aide that Brigadier General Thomas Conway, while serving under Washington in Pennsylvania, had been secretly corresponding with Gates at Albany. Lord Stirling, loyal to Washington, wrote immediately to him: “In a letter from General Conway to General Gates, he said, ‘Heaven has been determined to save your country, or a weak general and bad councilors would have ruined it.’“ Washington had little regard for Conway. An Irish soldier of fortune married to a French countess, Conway had lobbied Congress over Washington’s head to be promoted to major general over all the more senior brigadiers. The tone and intended confidentiality of the letter suggested that Conway believed Gates agreed with him.15
When he received Stirling’s note, Washington immediately had Hamilton send Conway a stiff rebuke. By dispatching his letter to Conway through normal channels in his headquarters, Washington was guaranteeing that all his officers knew its contents. Even in peacetime, Washington did not take criticism easily. But in wartime, such a written comment about the commander-in-chief by one of his own subordinate generals smacked of mutiny. That Gates had remained safely behind the lines at Saratoga while Benedict Arnold fought the battle and that Gates had wrongly taken full credit were facts that Washington and his staff had only just learned from New York Governor George Clinton. To the outraged Washington, trained, like Gates, as a British officer, the note Lord Stirling sent him gave Washington what he considered evidence that at least two of his generals were plotting to overthrow him, something he considered not only disloyal but possibly treasonous. Even worse, Gates had kept a large army intact around him. By not reporting his troop strengths to the commander-in-chief as part of his official dispatches, for two weeks he had been hampering Washington’s efforts to consolidate the American victory by combining forces and driving Howe out of Philadelphia.
Immediately after confronting Conway, Washington summoned a council of war in the oak-paneled library at Emlen House in Whitemarsh. Now, what would be the appropriate follow-up strategy to Saratoga? The generals agreed that Gates should send twenty regiments of his best troops at once to reinforce Washington. Washington summoned Hamilton the next morning and told him to draw up his own orders. Hamilton was to ride as fast as possible to Gates’s headquarters at Albany and persuade him as delicately as possible to forward the reinforcements as quickly as possible.
Washington gave Hamilton extraordinary discretionary as well as diplomatic powers. He was to act as Washington’s proxy. He was to assess the military situation in New York and to gauge whether Gates had a feasible plan for using his troops or was merely stalling and withholding aid to Washington for some other motive. Hamilton wrote in his own orders that he was to
Lay before him the state of this army and the situation of the enemy…Point out to him the many happy consequences that will accrue from an immediate reinforcement being sent from the Northern Army…in the clearest and fullest manner…[This] will in all probability [defeat] General Howe…
If Gates had in mind “some expedition” that would more greatly benefit “the common cause,” Hamilton was not to interfere with it. But if his plan was vague or insignificant, Hamilton must insist he reinforce Washington with most of his troops. It would be up to Hamilton to decide what strategy was more appropriate. Washington had so much confidence in Hamilton, a twenty-two-year-old member of his staff for only eight months, that he made it clear by signing the orders that he trusted Hamilton more than Gates.16
With a bodyguard, Captain Caleb Gibbs of Washington’s Life Guards, Hamilton rode an incredible 150 miles in three days. Reaching New Windsor on the Hudson the second day, Hamilton met General Daniel Morgan, who was already marching south from Saratoga with his riflemen to reinforce Washington. He assured Hamilton “that all the Northern Army were marching down.” Hamilton, relaying this happy news to Washington, wondered if there was any reason for “going any farther.” But at Fishkill a few hours later they learned from a former aide that Gates was sending no one. In fact, he was keeping all four Continental brigades at Albany and building barracks for them. Arriving in Albany, Hamilton found his old college roommate, Major Robert Troup, who had recently been released in a prisoner exchange and was now an aide to Gates. Troup told Hamilton confidentially that General Putnam at Peekskill also refused to release his Continentals to Washington. Invoking Washington’s authority, Hamilton ordered Putnam to send several regiments of New York militia with only a month left on their enlistments south to Washington at once, even if, he wrote Washington, his orders did not include any militia. Hamilton took this bold step “because of accounts here that most of Clinton’s, [the British commander at New York City] troops” had gone to reinforce Howe at Philadelphia. “As so large a proportion of the Continental troops have been detained [by Gates] at Albany, I concluded you would not disapprove.” Taking the initiative when Hamilton found Putnam was also disregarding Washington’s plea for help, Hamilton again cut his own orders. He sent New York and New Jersey troops south and asked Washington to second his orders in writing to the troops’ commanders.17
By November 5, Hamilton was back at Albany and ready to confront Gates, who was basking in his newfound glory. Each day seemed to bring Gates fresh laurels. Congress called for a national day of thanksgiving to honor him and ordered a gold medal struck for him. Some generals and congressmen were writing him congratulatory notes that contrasted his victory to Washington’s failures. In a bid to replace Washington with Gates, Congressman James Lovell of Massachusetts declared, “Thousands of lives and millions of property are yearly sacrificed to the inefficiency of the commander-in-chief. Two battles he has lost for us by two such blunders as might have disgraced a soldier of three months’ standing. Our [hope] springs all from the northward, and about all [of] our confidence.” In a congressional vote of confidence, Washington retained his command by only a single vote. There were foreign critics. Washington was “too slow, even indolent,” opined the recently arrived French Baron de Kalb.18
In Albany, meanwhile, Horatio Gates, twice Hamilton’s age, certainly was unprepared for the cool, analytical, probing questions by Washington’s young proxy, Hamilton. When Hamilton presented Washington’s request for reinforcements, Gates was, Hamilton reported on November 6 to Washington, “inflexible” that the two brigades Washington had requisitioned should remain at Albany. Clinton might come up the Hudson and raid Albany’s arsenals, Gates argued. And until the roads froze, Gates argued, it was impossible to move artillery. Weakening his force could make it impossible to retake Ticonderoga. Hamilton was “infinitely embarrassed” to report that Gates would release only one brigade. For the moment, Hamilton accepted Gates’s terms and gave the appearance of preparing to leave.19
In his confidential report, Hamilton cautioned Washington that he was finding that “General Gates has won the entire confidence of the [New England] states.” He has “influence and interest elsewhere [in Congress]; he might use it, if he pleased, to discredit the order to reinforce Washington.” Hamilton stopped off for four days at Philip Schuyler’s house at Albany, where the old general, a stout Washington defender, filled him in on the political as well as the military ramifications of the plotting at Gates’s headquarters. In his expense report to Washington, there is a four-day gap when he may have been staying with Schuyler. Here, too, once again, he encountered Schuyler’s twenty-year-old daughter, Betsy. Catherine Schuyler, the youngest of five daughters, insisted in her unpublished memoir, A God-Child of Washington, that this visit was the first time Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler met. But it may have been the first time the Schuyler sisters noticed Hamilton, a teenage boy the last time they had met during Hamilton’s Elizabethtown school days. Catherine, not yet born when Hamilton appeared in the winter of 1777 on his intelligence-gathering mission, wrote years later, probably after collecting family memories into a composite family portrait:
Shortly after the surrender of Burgoyne, a young officer wearing the uniform of Washington’s military family, accompanied by an orderly, left the ferryboat. [He] exhibited a natural yet unassuming superiority; his features gave evidence of thought, intellectual strength and a determined mind. [His] high expansive forehead, a nose of the Grecian mold, a dark bright eye and the lines of a mouth expressing decision and courage completed the contour of a face never to be forgotten. His figure of the middling height strongly framed and muscular gave the appearance of strength and activity.20
Philip Schuyler was famous for his hospitality: he had recently entertained Burgoyne and twenty of his top officers before the defeated British were packed off to Boston to be shipped home. After days on the road and in rough taverns, an exhausted Hamilton welcomed a reason to visit The Pastures, the Schuyler mansion, a large rose-red house bookended between tall Dutch chimneys, a distinctive balustrade wrapped around white-trimmed third floor dormer windows.
After a series of huddles with the general, refreshing meals with the large family, and restorative nights of sleep, Hamilton had to rush off. He soon learned, probably from his confidant Troup, that Gates, instead of sending a fighting-trim brigade of some fourteen hundred men, was releasing only an anemic understrength brigade with only six hundred men fit for duty, “by far the weakest here.” Reversing his acceptance of Gates’s terms, Hamilton refused in writing in his most courteous prose while making clear his authority:
I cannot consider it either as compatible with the good of the service or my instructions from His Excellency General Washington, to consent, that that brigade be selected from the three, to go to him; but I am under the necessity of requiring, by virtue of my orders from him, that one of the others be substituted…and that you will be pleased to give immediate orders for its embarkation.
After his first meeting with Gates, Hamilton had learned from other officers at Albany that Gates had no good reason to retain the Continental brigades Washington needed. Again, Hamilton demanded the stronger corps. This time, Gates caved in. Over the next two days, twenty-two hundred Continentals headed south. An exuberant Hamilton wrote to Washington that he had “finally prevailed” after “having given General Gates a little more time to recollect himself.”21
An angry Gates the same day wrote two letters to Washington—and decided not to send the first. Hamilton’s demands had “astonished” him. He was dejected “that all hopes of ever possessing Canada vanishes with the troops taken from hence.” But Gates decided not to tell Washington of his secret plan to invade Canada. Instead, he accused Washington of ruining “every good effect” of his victory over Burgoyne. He also decided not to question Washington’s requirement that a general give “direct implicit obedience to the verbal orders of aides-de-camp in action.” To Gates, Hamilton seemed arrogant. Gates was dumbfounded at Hamilton’s pertinacious insistence on all of Washington’s demands. “I believe it is never practiced to delegate that dictatorial power to one aide-de-camp sent to an army 300 miles distant,” he wrote in a first draft. But Gates eliminated this slap at Washington. He knew he had failed to follow protocol when he notified Congress before Washington of his victory at Saratoga and his own plans, making it necessary for the commander-in-chief to dispatch an aide to carry out talks before he gave a direct order. To Gates, it was insulting that Washington sent an aide-de-camp: he might have sent a higher-ranking officer. But there was little Gates could do, eventually, except accede to Hamilton’s terms. It was Hamilton’s whipsaw authoritative tone that had offended him. In his final-drafted face-saving letter, a chastened Gates wrote Washington that “Colonel Hamilton will report everything that I wish to have you acquainted with.” But there might have been a darker motive for Gates’s pique at Hamilton. Later, he would insist that Hamilton had secretly been ushered into his office by an aide (Troup?), had rifled Gates’s files, and had found Conway’s original letter to him, a charge that Hamilton vehemently denied but that probably was true.22
Beginning his return trip to Valley Forge, Hamilton, to his disgust, found at New Windsor that Israel Putnam had not honored his pledge to rush reinforcements to Washington:
I am astonished and alarmed beyond measure to find that all his Excellency’s [Washington’s] views have been hitherto frustrated and that no single step of those I mentioned to you has been taken to afford him the aid he absolutely stands in need of…by delaying which the cause of America is put to the utmost conceivable hazard…I speak freely and emphatically because I tremble at the consequences of the delay.23
Emboldened by his success with Gates, Hamilton tongue-lashed the sluggish “Old Put,” three times his age and a French and Indian Wars hero: “How [your] noncompliance can be answered to General Washington you can best determine.” Ignoring his own youth, invoking Washington’s authority, Hamilton gave a written “positive order” to march “all the Continental troops under your command” immediately to reinforce Washington. Then Hamilton covered his tracks by writing Washington that he was “pained beyond expression” to find all his earlier arrangements “deranged by General Putnam.” The old Indian fighter had argued that he planned to attack New York City. Hamilton called this Putnam’s “hobby horse,” adding that Putnam had paid “not the least attention” to his earlier orders “in your name” because “everything is sacrificed to the whim of taking New York.”
Having cleared his throat, Hamilton took control, arranging with Governor George Clinton to borrow money to pay Connecticut troops who, in a “nigh mutiny,” refused to march any farther on Putnam’s “farcical parade against New York.” Hamilton pleaded with Washington to recall Putnam from command: his “blunders and caprices are endless.” (He could not know that Congress had already relieved Putnam and ordered him to report to Washington.) But Hamilton was making enemies, especially among New England officers close to Gates and Putnam who, from habit, distrusted New Yorkers almost as much as Virginians. It may have been at this time that whispers of Hamilton’s illegitimacy began to spread among Puritan New England officers who were looking for a reason to bring the cocky little colonel down a peg.24
Two exhausting weeks in the saddle and in anxiety over his confrontations with unreliable senior officers had taken their toll on Hamilton. He reported to Washington that he was “very unwell” with “a fever and violent rheumatic pains” all over his body. After two days’ bed rest in an inn during which he insisted on firing off a long report to his commander, Hamilton crossed the Hudson on November 13 and became seriously ill. He did not have the strength to write again for fully five weeks. Never was he so ill as he was as a result of this grueling mission in the winter of 1777 in the Hudson Valley. He was apparently suffering from a severe attack of rheumatic fever that for several days, according to a physician rushed to his bedside by Governor Clinton, made it seem Hamilton was “drawing nigh his last.” Was this a recurrence of the fever that had felled him as a boy in St. Croix as his mother lay dying? Nursing him through his long illness, Washington’s bodyguard, Captain Gibbs, keeping track of his expenses, bought Hamilton a bed and provided the best foods he could find: mutton, chicken, eggs, quail, partridge, and fruit juice laced with liquor. It undoubtedly helped Hamilton’s recovery when he received a letter from Washington:
I approve entirely all the steps you have taken and have only to wish that the exertions of those you have had to deal with had kept pace with your zeal and good intentions.25
Hamilton railed at his own inability to speed along reinforcements but he was far too weak to travel. The frail Hamilton, Colonel Hugh Hughes wrote to Gates sarcastically on December 5, “who has been very ill of a nervous disorder at Peekskill, is out of danger, unless it be from his own sweet temper.”26
BY THE time Hamilton was well enough for the long winter ride to Valley Forge, the Conway Cabal had come to a head. On November 14, 1777, while Hamilton was carrying out his probe in Albany, Conway had sent his resignation to Congress. The affair would have ended there but Congress referred it to its newly coined Board of War, whose chairman, Thomas Mifflin, a former aide to Washington, was an active partner in the Conway plot to depose the commander-in-chief. With secret guidance by Mifflin, several members of Congress now began to beat the drums to promote Conway to inspector general of the army. Pennsylvania radicals joined congressional critics in denouncing Washington. Washington’s congressional critics wanted Gates to take over the army and have Washington shunted to a lesser command. Hamilton and other Washington supporters countered by lobbying Congress to make Conway a staff officer with no authority to give orders to other officers.
As the cabal coalesced in Congress, Mifflin, on information supplied by Gates, had accused Hamilton, still ailing at Peekskill, of having rifled Gates’s files. Gates believed he could discredit Washington by disgracing his aide Hamilton. After all, Washington had sent Hamilton north with extraordinary powers. To Conway, Gates anxiously wrote, “I intreat you to let me know which of the letters was copied off. It is of the greatest importance that I should discover the person who has been guilty of that act of fidelity. I cannot trace him out unless I have your assistance.” When his own aide, Wilkinson, returned to Albany, Gates told him, “I have had a spy in my camp since you left me.” Hamilton, Gates said,
purloined the copy of a letter out of that closet…Colonel Hamilton was left alone an hour in this room during which time he took Conway’s letter out of that closet and copied it, and the copy has been furnished to Washington.
In early December, Gates wrote Washington that Conway’s letter had been “stealingly copied.” Washington brushed aside Gates’s attempt to smear Hamilton. He responded that Gates’s admission in a letter to Mifflin that he knew about the note from Washington to Conway was a serious breach of security. It suggested that he had known all along that the disclosure had come from his own office before Washington told him where it had come from. Gates feigned surprise at Washington’s reaction. Then he accused his own former aide, Wilkinson, of stealing the letter and leaking it to Hamilton.27
Horrified, Wilkinson challenged Gates to a duel. Their aides intervened to stop the duel just as nine brigadier generals sent a written protest about Conway’s incompetence to Congress. In an attempt to absolve himself of complicity in the plot, Gates rode all the way from Albany, New York, to the temporary American capital at York, Pennsylvania, in the pit of winter to appeal to influential friends in Congress, especially the delegates from New England who had lionized Gates as the hero of Saratoga. Gates made the mistake of showing Conway’s original letter to the new president of Congress, Henry Laurens. Laurens promptly wrote to headquarters at Valley Forge that it was “ten times worse” than the small quote Wilkinson had leaked. The Conway Cabal collapsed like a soufflé in a winter wind.28
Hamilton’s value to Washington had only grown from his success in flushing out the Conway circle. He returned to Valley Forge just in time to help revamp the bickering army and to help whip it into readiness to counterattack the British inside Philadelphia. Washington’s generals could not forgive Conway for making a bad winter at Valley Forge so much worse. Pennsylvania’s militia commander General John Cadwalader challenged him to a duel and shot him in the face. Conway survived, but he resigned and returned to France. Hamilton emerged from the episode firmly identified as Washington’s indispensable intelligence officer and stout defender of his continuance as commander-in-chief. He also became the enemy of Gates’s friends and Washington’s critics. Save for Hamilton’s intelligence gathering, Washington could well have fallen from power. The consequences for the Revolutionary cause could not have been more grim.