On October 30 Washington handed Hamilton his marching orders, which stipulated that he should inform Gates of “the absolute necessity that there is for his detaching a very considerable part of the army at present under his command to the reinforcement of this.”21 When Hamilton arrived in Albany, Gates was predictably outraged to have to bargain with the youthful aide. That Hamilton regarded Gates as craven and inept didn’t help matters. In a letter drafted but never sent to Washington, Gates fumed, “Although it is customary and even absolutely necessary to direct implicit obedience to be paid to the verbal orders of aides-de-camp in action . . . yet I believe it is never practiced to delegate that dictatorial power to one aide-camp sent to an army 300 miles distant.”22 Gates, in a cantankerous mood, insisted to Hamilton that he needed all his troops in case Sir Henry Clinton moved up the Hudson River. He seemed emboldened by his newly won renown. To Washington, Hamilton reported, “I found insuperable inconveniences in acting diametrically opposite to the opinion of a gentleman whose successes have raised him to the highest importance.”23 In a masterly performance, however, and after much wrangling, Hamilton extracted two brigades from the reluctant Gates.

The juxtaposition of Gates’s victory and Washington’s defeats crystallized congressional discontent with the latter’s leadership. The rush of battles turned Congress into an assembly of would-be generals, determined to run the war by resolutions. There had always been sotto voce grumbling about Washington’s military ability, but now serious questions arose as to whether he was up to the job. Henry Laurens told his son John that the assembly buzzed with detractors saying that “our army is under no regulations or discipline” and that Washington had failed to stem desertions or adequately provision his men .24 Lafayette warned Washington of “stupid men” in Congress “who, without knowing a single word about war, undertake to judge you, to make ridiculous comparisons; they are infatuated with Gates.”25

The discontent crested in October when Washington got wind of the rumored promotion to major general of Brigadier Thomas Conway. An engraving of Conway shows a man with a cool, haughty air. His small chin, tightly pursed lips, and alert eyes give him a petulant expression. Born in Ireland, he had been an officer in the French Army but, unlike Lafayette, was a self-aggrandizing fortune hunter. For him, the Continental Army was a convenient rung to grasp in clambering up the military hierarchy in France. Nathanael Greene saw him as “a man of much intrigue and little judgment” who joined the Continental Army to cash in on the fight.26 “I freely own to you it was partly with a view of obtaining sooner the rank of brigadier in the French army that I have joined” the American army, Conway conceded to another officer that January.27 An excellent judge of men, Washington recoiled from this self-promoting braggart and may also have learned that the sharp-tongued Irishman had denigrated him after Brandywine. “No man was more a gentleman than General Washington or appeared to more advantage at his table . . . but as to his talents for the command of an army, they were miserable indeed” was Conway’s verdict.28 Some of those skeptical of Washington’s ability gravitated to Conway. “He seems to possess [General] Lee’s knowledge and experience without any of his oddities and vices,” Dr. Benjamin Rush declared. “He is, moreover, the idol of the whole army.”29

Washington was incensed to learn about Conway’s impending promotion, especially since he would be jumped over twenty more senior brigadiers. He had been dismayed by Conway’s behavior at Germantown, accusing him of deserting his men, and now he departed from his usual practice of staying aloof from congressional deliberations. He wrote to Richard Henry Lee that Conway’s promotion would “be as unfortunate a measure as ever was adopted.”30 Washington seldom spoke so brusquely, but there was more. “General Conway’s merit then as an officer, and his importance in this army, exists more in his own imagination than in reality. For it is a maxim with him to leave no service of his untold.”31 Most shocking of all, Washington seemed ready to tender his own resignation. “To sum up the whole, I have been a slave to the service . . . but it will be impossible for me to be of any further service, if such insuperable difficulties are thrown in my way.”32 Washington was showing how adroit he could be at infighting, how skillful in suppressing lurking challenges to his supremacy. In many ways, he was more sure-footed in contesting political than military threats. He knew that power held in reserve—power deployed firmly but reluctantly—was always the most effective form. On October 20 Richard Henry Lee assured Washington that Conway would never be bumped up to major general, but Lee, a secret critic of Washington himself, disclosed something else disturbing: Congress intended to overhaul the Board of War, switching it from a legislative committee to an executive agency, staffed by general officers who would supervise the military. This news came as a revelation to Washington, who could only regard it as a powerful rebuke.

Amid an atmosphere of rampant suspicion, Washington received fresh proof that enemies in high places conspired against him. As mentioned, Gates had assigned his young aide James Wilkinson to carry the news of Saratoga to Congress. Later described by Washington as “lively, sensible, pompous, and ambitious,” Wilkinson had a bombastic addiction to storytelling.33 En route to Congress, this indiscreet young man paused in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he met with an aide to Lord Stirling and regaled him with stories of Gates’s savage comments about Washington’s actions at Brandywine Creek. He also showed him an inflammatory line that General Conway had written to General Gates, indicting Washington’s leadership. “Heaven has been determined to save your country,” Conway wrote, “or a weak general and bad councillors would have ruined it.”34 Lord Stirling, loyal to Washington, passed along this offensive comment to him, remarking that “such wicked duplicity of conduct I shall always think it my duty to detect.”35 Washington was stunned to see the remark, which suggested blatant collusion between the two generals to blacken his name.

In meeting the threat, Washington reverted to his favorite technique, earlier used with Joseph Reed: sending an incriminating document to its author without comment. He would betray as little as possible of what he knew so as to let the guilty party incriminate himself. In sending Conway the line, Washington later said, he intended to convey “that I was not unapprised of his intriguing disposition.”36 Conway countered with a cagey note, telling Washington that he was “willing that my original letter to General Gates should be handed to you. This, I trust, will convince you of my way of thinking.”37 Of course, he didn’t specify what his way of thinking was. On November 16, while avoiding any mention of their feud, Conway sent Washington a curt announcement: “The hopes and appearance of a French war, along with some other reasons, have induc[e]d me to send my resignation to Congress.”38 Since the resignation wasn’t accepted, internecine warfare between the two men persisted.

When Washington confronted Gates about the letter, the latter described himself as “inexpressibly distressed” by the news, said he kept his papers closely guarded, and wondered about the identity of “the villain that has played me this treacherous trick.”39 Later on he contended the offending paragraph was a forgery. It didn’t seem to occur to him that his own careless aide had caused the leak. Turning the tables on Washington, Gates even came up with a far-fetched accusation: that Alexander Hamilton, during his recent diplomatic mission, had purloined the papers from his files. “Those letters have been stealingly copied,” Gates told Washington, turning himself into the injured party. “Crimes of that magnitude ought not to remain unpunished.”40 To Gates’s mortification, Washington revealed that the culprit was Gates’s own personal aide, the talkative James Wilkinson.