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

through— concerted musket fire at close quarters was always the endgame of eighteenth- century warfare.
    Promising to bring reinforcements, Wilkinson hurried back to headquarters, but could not persuade the nervous Gates to release more troops. At last Arnold, who was listening in growing exasperation, shouted, “By God I will soon put an end to it,” and stormed off to lead the reserves himself. At Gates’s order the chief of staff ran after him and told him to return to the log cabin. It says much for Wilkinson’s personal touch that he persuaded the explosive Arnold to come back with him. As a compromise, five regiments were committed to the battle, but led by a sickly Ebenezer Learned, they blundered into the British center and suffered numerous casualties without being able to help the riflemen.
    When darkness ended the battle, both sides claimed victory. The British had suffered heavier losses— more than five hundred dead and wounded from a force barely seven thousand strong— but they occupied the battleground and the brunt of American casualties had fallen on the elite rifle corps. Had Burgoyne’s men been able to mount an attack the next day, Wilkinson decided somberly, they might have secured victory. As it was, he noted with relief, “The enemy have quietly licked their sores this day.”
    T HERE WAS NOTHING quiet about the scenes that took place in Gates’s cabin. Convinced that outright success had been thrown away, Arnold mutinously confronted his commander over the next few days, and his anger took on a sharper edge after he discovered that the official report omitted any mention of his part in the battle. Their quarrel illustrated why Gates valued Wilkinson so highly. Conscious no doubt of his inferiority to Arnold as a battle commander, Gates appeared unable to defend himself until rescued by his chief of staff. “I would have given my life for him,” Wilkinson once said of Gates, and he proved his devotion by the way he now neatly disposed of his former patron.
    Arnold’s argument, he pointed out, centered on how best to exploit the deadly effects of the rifle corps and light infantry. Because they were specialist troops, Wilkinson suggested, they would be better placed under the direct control of the overall commander, General Horatio Gates. His general gratefully seized on this solution and, at their next meeting, informed Arnold that he had effectively been relieved of his command. Rubbing salt in the wound, Gates refused him permission to appeal to Congress.
    This treatment produced such an explosion of anger from Arnold that Wilkinson declared he “behaved like a madman” and must have been drunk. “I was huffed,” Arnold protested, “in such a manner as must mortify a person with less pride than I.” But his former patron’s distress left Wilkinson unmoved. The real issue, he maintained, was about insubordination rather than the conduct of the battle; the conflict was between “official superiority on one side and an arrogant spirit and impatience of command on the other.”
    History’s perspective shows clearly that Arnold and Gates needed each other’s talents, and a less partisan staff officer might have found a way for them to work together. Even at the time it hung in the air that Wilkinson had acted like a turncoat, abandoning an old friend instead of attempting to mediate. Richard Varick, formerly Arnold’s drinking companion but now his staff officer, blamed the chief of staff for being “at the bottom of the dispute.” Wilkinson’s hostility to Arnold had sharpened the quarrel instead of soothing it, and he had acted like someone who was “fundamentally a Sycophant.”
    While the argument still raged, the outcome of the fighting at Freeman’s Farm was being decided by the steady flow of militia into the American camp, and the trickle of deserters from Burgoyne’s. Even with his enemy trapped, Gates still feared some unexpected move. “Perhaps [Burgoyne’s]