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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

The Conway Cabal


Thomas Conway
 The so-called "Great Conway Cabal" started in York Pennsylvania in the summer of 1777, when American General James Wilkinson stopped at a tavern in York, Pennsylvania and struck up a conversation with another officer.
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 MarĂ©chal-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.