Thomas Conway
Wilkinson (March 24, 1757 –
December 28, 1825) was a slippery fellow who would be tired into several
scandals and controversies in his lifetime. During the American Revolutionary
War, he was compelled to resign…..twice.
He was a highly paid spy in the service
of the Spanish Empire. (Which only recently came to light)
As an aide to General Horatio
Gates he was sent to Congress with official dispatches about the victory at the
Battle of Saratoga in 1777. Military custom called for Gates to send an official
report about the victory to General Washington, Gates immediate superior, and
not to the congress which he did anyway when he sent General James Wilkinson to
report to the Congress.
General Gates
Not only did the 20-year old Wilkinson
keep Congress waiting while he attended to personal affairs, when he showed up
he lied about his role in the victory, and lied so well, that he was brevetted
as a brigadier general and was appointed to the newly created Board of War
which caused a major uproar among Continental officers.
During the conversation, the
General relayed a story about a letter he had seen at headquarters which was
addressed to his commander, General Horatio Gage, from General Thomas Conway.
The officer said the letter
praised General Gage at George Washington's expense saying in part "Heaven
has determined to save your country or a weak General and bad counselors would
have ruined it"
The Officer who was told the
story hurried back to his camp and relied the tale to his commander and eventually
the story found its way back to General George Washington. The man who made the
remarks, General Thomas Conway, wanted George Washington's job as commander and
chief of the American forces. Although born in Ireland, Conway immigrated to
France with his parents as a teen and enrolled in the Irish Brigade of the
French Army and rose rapidly to colonel by 1772. Following the outbreak of the
American Revolution he volunteered to the Congress for service in 1777. Based
on an introduction from Silas Deane, the Congress appointed him a brigadier
general on May 13, and sent him on to George Washington.
An outspoken and ambitious,
Conway had fought brilliantly at the battle of Brandywine, under the command of
General John Sullivan, with such courage and skill was promoted (after
pestering John Hancock for weeks) to the rank of full Major General. However, George
Washington opposed his promotion to major general because he felt it would be
bad for moral that his American born officers with longer service records deserved
the rank. Conway saw it as a slap.
Conway told the members of the
American Congress that when he served with General George Washington at the
battle of Germantown, that Washington seemed befuddled and indecisive, a man
who let his junior officers over rule his almost every command, and, for good
measure, said that Washington's friend, General Lord Stirling, was ignorant and
of no use to anyone unless he was drunk.
There were some members of the
Congress who took the blowhard Conway seriously. Washington, to many in
Congress saw Washington as cold, stand-offish type, arrogant and condescending.
And he had made several military
blunders against the mightiest army on earth during the war and some of those
Congressmen wanted him gone. (Those loses included losing Philadelphia, the
seat of the Second Continental Congress, to the British in the fall of 1777 )
There was already a group in the Congress that
was pushing for Horatio Gates as commander-in-chief, so Conway, seeing an
opening pushed himself as Congresses kind of general and his supporters agreed,
seeing him as a man of great military insight, proven courage, experience and
what's more, he would tell them what they wanted to hear.
Conway was careful to leave the
Congress with his own personnel cheering section in the hands of Doctor
Benjamin Rush, the chief Surgeon General of the Army, who assured the Congressmen
that Conway was "the idol of his army" and that it was Conway, not
Washington, who saved the day at the Battle of Germantown.
Benjamin Rush, a signer of the United States Declaration of
Independence and a civic powerhouse in Philadelphia, was a wise choice for
Conway. Rush was a leader of the American Enlightenment, a reformer in
education, a known radical for American
independence. (He was a leader in Pennsylvania's ratification of the
Constitution in 1788) When Rush took
over the Army Medical Service it was in
near complete disarray. He turned around and his general order "Directions
for preserving the health of soldiers" became one of the foundations of
preventive military medicine and was repeatedly republished, including as late
as 1908.
Rush was a near constant critic
of George Washington who had penned two handwritten but unsigned letters that
badly criticized George Washington saying that if “not for God's grace the
ongoing war would have been lost” by Washington and his weak counselors, he
also repeated General John Sullivan's criticism that forces directly under
Washington were undisciplined and mob-like, and contrasted Gates' army as
"a well-regulated family". Rush also wrote a letter to influential John
Adams relaying complaints inside Washington's army, including about "bad
bread, no order, universal disgust" and praising Conway.
Up to this time, Washington had
kept himself above the fray of political back biting, considering it below the
dignity of a gentleman to respond to such scuttlebutt. But this time, Washington
felt obligated to respond to Conway's charges that the great man was not
capable of controlling his junior officers.
Washington composed a carefully
worded letter to the Congress outlining the fact that Conway's boasts of having
saved the battle of Germantown lived more in the imagination of Conway then in
reality and that any promotions for Conway that the Congress was considering
would be "as unfortunate a measure as was ever adapted"
The Congress answered
Washington's letter by promoting Conway to the rank of inspector General, thus
making both Washington and Conway happy, or so they thought. Conway saw the
promotion as an insult and tendered his resignation to Washington, in turn
Washington, in what only be described as an act of heavenly restraint, refused
to accept the Irishmen's resignation, on the shaky grounds that since the
Congress had promoted him, only the Congress could accept his resignation.
Congress too, refused the
resignation, citing the fact that Conway was a close personnel friend of
Frances Louis XVI, and should Conway return to France in a huff, the powerful
French Emperor might in turn take the resignation as an insult. At the same
time they could promote Conway as he had wished since this would have been a
slap in the face of General Washington who was venerated by his army and adored
by the public. The best they could hope for was that Conway would be killed in
action or captured.
In his new role as Inspector
General, Conway twice called on Washington and found his reception to be a cold
one. Conway complained to the Congress and added that the Officers throughout
the Army could not stand the sight of him. Washington did not deny the charges
that he had been unwelcoming to Conway but denied that he had instructed his
men to treat the General with anything other than the utmost respect. The
officers, Washington explained, were simply emulating their Generals point of
view.
Conway offered to resign again,
and this time the Congress gladly accepted the offer. Before he left for Europe,
Conway challenged General John Cadwalder,
a strong supporter of George Washington, to a duel, stating that Cadwalder had
insulted his honor. Cadwalder accepted Conway’s challenge and upon the field of
honor, shot the Irishmen through the mouth. The bullet exited through his head.
"I have stopped the damned rascal's lying
tongue at any rate" Cadwalder said.
Assuming that he was on his death
bed, Conway wrote a letter to Washington offering an apology for his past
behavior and called the General "a good and a great man"
But Conway did recover and in
1787 returned to France, joined their army was promoted to Maréchal-de-camp
(Major General) and an appointment as Governor of French colonies in India. In
1793 he fought with royalist forces in opposition to French Revolution in
southern France. The rebels later captured him and condemned him to death, but he somehow managed to flee to his
native Ireland, where British intelligence reported that he was living in dire straits.
He died there in or about 1800.
As for Doctor Rush, who would
eventually become known as the Father of American Psychiatry, his staff
reported to Congress that Rush rarely if ever toured the hospital under his
command, that there was enormous misappropriation of food and other supplies
intended for the wounded and pressure on the hospital staff to under-report
patient deaths. The Congress forced Rush to resign in 1778.