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the Hessians. He was then exchanged for a British officer and was able to rejoin General Lee’s command.
    As far as we can gather, Lee looked at the few houses available around Vealtown and rejected all of them as “pious holes.” The plain fact of the matter is that they were houses of Methodist and Lutheran families, and thus without liquor; and Lee wanted desperately to get drunk. He wanted to be away from righteous Americans.
    Therefore he left his troops, taking with him only a guard of six mounted men, and rode to Baskingridge, three miles away, where he took up his quarters at the local inn. The amiable innkeeper at Baskingridge agreed that while General Lee could have a room upstairs, his six troopers must make their beds on the floor in the main room by the fireplace, a practice not unusual in those days and infinitely preferable to the open field.
    Only minutes after Lee and his escort had left the encampment of the two thousand Continental soldiers at Vealtown, Major Wilkinson arrived with messages from General Horatio Gates to General Washington. Major Wilkinson was then nineteen or twenty years old—like other facets of Wilkinson, his age was hard to pin down—and from what others had to say about him, which was never laudatory, he was not an extremely trustworthy person. So far as one can put the pieces of his character together, he was a young man of opportunist tendencies and quick intelligence. As so often with men of that type, his ambition outran his store of common sense, and he all too frequently mounted the wrong horse at the wrong time.
    On the other hand, he did subsequently write a journal of experiences in the Revolution, and the journal does provide a good deal of information that cannot be found elsewhere. Unfortunately the information, like the man, is not wholly to be trusted, and the central hero of whatever event described is always Major Wilkinson.
    Wilkinson had been dispatched by General Horatio Gates who, with an army of between eight and nine hundred men, had been detained from joining Washington by an unseasonable snowstorm near the Wallpack River in New Jersey. His orders were to find Washington. It would appear that he had also been instructed by Gates to interview General Charles Lee and have an off-the-record discussion with him before he, Wilkinson, found the commander in chief.
    Wilkinson rode from Gates’s camp to Morristown, where he certainly had little expectation of finding General Washington but every expectation of finding Charles Lee. There he learned that Lee had gone on to Vealtown. Wilkinson rode there and spoke to General Sullivan and was now informed that Lee was spending the night at the inn at Baskingridge.
    When Wilkinson got to Baskingridge, the inn was asleep. But he felt that his mission was important enough to awaken everyone in the house, and he hammered at the door. A sleepy innkeeper guided Wilkinson to Lee’s bedroom. The night before Lee had had too much to drink, and now his response to being awakened was a furious outpouring, well-spiced with four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. It was the second time Lee had been disturbed that night. Earlier, a Tory had come to the inn to complain to Lee that a horse of his had been stolen from him by Continental army deserters. When Lee had cursed out the Tory roundly and thrown him out of the inn, the Tory swore he would get even.
    Wilkinson, knowing nothing of the Tory incident, bore the abuse and delivered to Lee General Gates’s letter, which had been intended for Washington. Apparently Lee was pleased to have a letter addressed to the commander in chief, and he read it immediately, without ever questioning the propriety of either Wilkinson’s action or his own. Lee refused to comment on the letter or to say anything about his own circumstances at the inn. Instead he told Wilkinson that he would see him in the morning light and that he should get the devil out of his room.
    Wilkinson