The Retirement of Horatio Gates

The government had become strong enough to honor its obligations. The men whose suffering had helped make it strong were not always the ones who benefited from that strength.

Horatio Gates sat at his writing desk at Traveller’s Rest, his Virginia plantation, in the spring of 1792. The letter before him was addressed to Thomas Jefferson, and every sentence required care. Gates had not seen Philadelphia since the war ended. He had held no federal office, had been consulted by no one in the new government about military matters or any other affairs. At sixty-five, a major general who had once commanded armies, he was now a gentleman farmer corresponding with the Secretary of State about the sale of some land. The letter contained no reference to March 1783. It contained no reference to the anonymous addresses that had circulated among the officers at Newburgh. It contained no defense of his conduct, no explanation of what he had known about the actions of his aide.

Gates had learned, in the nine years since the war’s end, that the safest course was silence. He wrote about crop prices and land titles, folded the letter, and sent it south toward Monticello.

The pattern had established itself early. When Elizabeth Gates died in the summer of 1783, her husband had already decided to leave the army. He resigned his commission the following year and returned to Virginia, to the estate he had named Traveller’s Rest. The name itself suggested what Gates wanted: an end to movement, a cessation of the campaigns that had carried him from London to Nova Scotia to New York to Saratoga to South Carolina and finally to Newburgh. Twenty-four years in the British Army before selling his commission and emigrating to America. Eight years in the Continental Army, winning the victory at Saratoga and suffering the defeat at Camden. For a brief and dangerous moment, he had been the officers’ champion. Now he wanted rest.

Rest was not the same thing as oblivion, and Gates found that oblivion was what many expected of him. The Society of the Cincinnati elected him vice president of its Virginia chapter and later president. The positions were honorary, carrying no real authority, and they placed him in the company of men who had served under him and men who had served over him. He attended meetings. He signed documents. He exchanged letters with former comrades. What he did not do, what he never did, was address the matter that everyone remembered and no one mentioned.

The anonymous addresses had circulated at Newburgh in March 1783. Major John Armstrong, Jr., who served on Gates’s staff, authored the two letters that called upon the officers to meet and consider their grievances against Congress. The first address argued that the army should take matters into its own hands if Congress failed to honor its promises. The second urged a meeting to decide on a course of action. On March 15, Washington entered uninvited, spoke to the assembled officers, pulled a letter from his pocket, put on his spectacles, and turned the room. The crisis passed. The conspiracy, if there had been one, failed.

But the question of Gates’s involvement had never been settled. Armstrong had written the addresses—that much was acknowledged. But Armstrong was Gates’s aide, working in Gates’s quarters, using Gates’s paper and Gates’s time. The addresses called for a meeting to be chaired by Gates himself, though they did not name him. When the officers gathered, Gates had presided until Washington arrived. Gates said nothing during the meeting. He offered no objection when Washington took the floor. He sat silently while Washington’s words carried the day. His silence afterward, his refusal to explain or defend or even acknowledge what had happened, left a void that others filled with suspicion.

The suspicion was not new. Gates had lived under suspicion before. The Conway Cabal of 1777-1778, that still-murky episode in which certain officers and politicians had supposedly sought to replace Washington with Gates as commander-in-chief, had attached to his name the first dark questions about his loyalty. Thomas Conway had written a letter criticizing Washington. The letter was intercepted. Washington’s supporters rallied, and the supposed conspiracy collapsed. Gates denied any involvement, demanded an inquiry, and was exonerated of any formal wrongdoing. But the stain remained. When the Newburgh addresses appeared five years later, written by Gates’s own aide, calling for a meeting over which Gates would preside, the pattern seemed too clear to ignore.

Historian Richard Kohn would later write that key details about the individuals and their motivations remain unknown. The intent of the nationalist politicians in Philadelphia, men like Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton, remains subject to interpretation. But Gates’s position—his proximity to Armstrong, his role in the meeting, his subsequent silence—placed him at the center of questions that could not be answered by documents alone.

Gates understood this. His correspondence in the years after 1783 reveals a man aware of his reputation and determined not to worsen it. He wrote to former comrades, to political figures, to friends. He discussed farming, land speculation, the small concerns of a retired life. Newburgh went unmentioned. Armstrong went unmentioned. He never offered the defense that might have cleared his name or the admission that might have explained his actions. He simply proceeded as if the matter did not exist.

This strategy required discipline. Gates had been a soldier for most of his adult life. He understood the value of holding position, of not revealing one’s intentions, of waiting for the enemy to make a mistake. But in this case there was no enemy, only a question that would not go away. Every time his name appeared in print, every time a former officer wrote a memoir or a historian compiled an account, the question of Newburgh arose. Gates had been there. Gates had presided. Gates had said nothing. What did he know?

The answer, if there was one, died with him. Gates never wrote a memoir. He never sat for an extensive interview. He never confided in a diary that has survived. What remains are the letters, the official records, the accounts of others, and the silence. The silence is itself a kind of evidence. A man with nothing to hide might have defended himself. A man with a story to tell might have told it. Gates did neither.

Instead, he farmed. Traveller’s Rest lay in the Shenandoah Valley, on land that Gates had acquired before the war. He owned 2, 315 acres by one accounting, a substantial holding that placed him among Virginia’s propertied class. He planted wheat and corn. He managed enslaved laborers. He corresponded with neighbors about crop yields and weather patterns. In 1790, the federal census recorded him as the head of a household that included, besides himself, twenty-three enslaved persons. By any reasonable measure, he was a successful planter, a man of standing in his community, a figure of substance in the new republic.

But the standing was not what it had been. Washington was now President of the United States. Henry Knox served as Secretary of War. Alexander Hamilton served as Secretary of the Treasury. Even John Armstrong would later serve as Minister to France and as a United States Senator from New York. Armstrong’s career had not been destroyed by Newburgh. Gates alone among the major figures of the affair had withdrawn entirely from public life.

The withdrawal was voluntary, but it was also necessary. Washington remembered. The officers who had remained loyal remembered. The politicians who had used the crisis for their own purposes remembered, though they had no interest in reviving the matter. A federal position would have raised questions, would have forced someone to ask what role he had played in those dangerous days at Newburgh. Better to remain in Virginia, to tend his farm, to let the years pass and hope that history would forget.

History did not forget. The early nineteenth century brought a flood of memoirs, histories, and biographies celebrating the Revolution and its heroes. Washington’s apotheosis was well underway. His birthday was celebrated as a holiday. His image appeared on prints and plates and coins. In this atmosphere, any suggestion that someone had plotted against him, that someone had tried to use the army to overturn civilian authority, took on a darker cast. Gates was not accused explicitly in most of these accounts. But his name appeared in connection with Newburgh, and the connection itself was damning.

The matter of authorship was settled early. Armstrong had written the addresses; he acknowledged as much later in life, though he claimed variously that Gates had known nothing about them or had known something but not everything or had approved in general terms without knowing specifics. The shifting explanations told their own story. Armstrong was protecting himself, or protecting Gates, or protecting both of them by obscuring the truth. But the fact that Armstrong was Gates’s aide, that the addresses had emerged from Gates’s quarters, that Gates had presided over the meeting—these facts could not be explained away. They formed a pattern that suggested complicity even if they did not prove it.

Gates’s response to this pattern was to ignore it. Letters continued to be written. Meetings of the Cincinnati continued to be attended. Visitors continued to be received at Traveller’s Rest. Thomas Jefferson corresponded with him occasionally. James Madison passed along news. The political leaders of Virginia treated Gates with the courtesy due a former major general. But none of them, as far as the record shows, ever asked him directly about Newburgh. The question hung in the air, unasked and unanswered.

This was perhaps the strangest aspect of Gates’s retirement: the conspiracy that bore his name was discussed everywhere except in his presence. Historians wrote about it. Politicians alluded to it. Former officers debated it in their letters. But no one seems to have confronted Gates directly, and Gates seems to have confronted no one. The silence was mutual, a conspiracy of its own kind. Everyone knew, or thought they knew, what had happened. No one wanted to force the question.

Why did Gates maintain his silence? The simplest explanation is that he had something to hide. If he had known about the addresses in advance, if he had approved them, if he had expected to lead a mutiny or a march on Philadelphia, then silence was his only protection. An admission would have destroyed his reputation entirely. A denial would have been challenged, would have required evidence, would have reopened wounds that Washington’s intervention had closed. Better to say nothing and hope that the matter would fade.

But there is another possibility. Gates may have believed that any response would be used against him. Even a truthful denial might have been dismissed as self-serving. Even an honest account of what he had known and not known might have been twisted by his enemies. In the political climate of the 1780s and 1790s, when Federalists and Republicans were beginning their long struggle, Gates’s name could have become a weapon. His silence, in this reading, was not an admission of guilt but a recognition of the futility of defense.

There is also the possibility that Gates himself did not know exactly what to say. Armstrong had written the addresses. But had Armstrong acted on his own? Had he been encouraged by others? Gates may have been unsure. He may have known that Armstrong was writing something, may have known that a meeting was being called, may have known that the officers’ grievances were being used for political purposes, without knowing the exact words or the exact plan. In the chaos of those final months of the war, with peace negotiations ongoing and the army waiting for news, information was incomplete and intentions were obscure. Gates may have been, like many others, a participant in events he did not fully control.

Whatever the truth, the consequence was clear. Gates’s career, which had included the greatest American victory of the war at Saratoga, ended in shadow. He had been the hero of 1777, the man whose victory had convinced France to enter the war, the man whose name was spoken in the same breath as Washington’s. After Newburgh, he was the general who had almost led a mutiny, the man who had presided over the meeting that might have destroyed the republic. The reality was more complicated than either of these extremes. But history prefers simplicity. Gates became the villain of Newburgh, or at least the most suspected architect of the conspiracy, and nothing he could say or do would change that.

He lived long enough to see the new century. In 1800, at seventy-three, still at Traveller’s Rest, still writing occasional letters, still watching from a distance as the republic struggled with the problems he had helped create. The election of 1800, that bitter contest between Federalists and Republicans, echoed in its way the tensions of Newburgh. The question of federal power, of taxation, of the relationship between the government and its creditors, had not been resolved in 1783. It had merely been postponed, managed, channeled into constitutional forms that allowed the struggle to continue in political rather than military terms. Gates watched from Virginia as Jefferson, his old correspondent, claimed the presidency.

Gates never remarried after Elizabeth’s death. No children came. His household was maintained by the labor of enslaved people, and his estate would pass to relatives after his death. In the last years of his life, he was alone with his memories and his silence. The letters he wrote were routine. The letters he received were polite. The matter that defined his historical reputation remained unaddressed.

On April 10, 1806, Horatio Gates died at Traveller’s Rest. He was seventy-eight years old. The death was noted in newspapers, but the obituaries were brief. He was remembered as a major general of the Continental Army, as the victor of Saratoga, as a soldier who had served his adopted country. The Newburgh conspiracy was mentioned in some accounts, passed over in others. The question of what he had known and what he had done was left for historians to debate.

The debate would continue for two centuries. Richard Kohn’s analysis, published in 1970, would summarize the problem: key details about the individuals and their motivations are not known. The documents do not provide a clear answer. Gates’s silence, Armstrong’s shifting explanations, the ambiguous role of the nationalist politicians, the officers’ genuine grievances—all of these elements form a picture that resists simple interpretation. But the absence of certainty has not prevented judgment. Gates remains, in most accounts, the figure most closely associated with the conspiracy, the man who would have led the army against Congress if Washington had not intervened.

This judgment may be unfair. It may be that Gates was a convenient target, a man whose previous history with the Conway Cabal made him an easy suspect, a man whose silence could be interpreted as guilt because no alternative interpretation was offered. But Gates had the power to offer an alternative interpretation. He could have explained. He could have defended himself. He could have told his story, whatever it was. He chose not to.

The choice was itself a kind of answer. In the years after Newburgh, Gates had watched Washington become a legend, had watched Hamilton build a financial system, had watched the army he had served become a memory. He had seen the certificates that the officers had held, the promises that Congress had made, become the basis for a national debt, a funded obligation that enriched speculators and established federal credit. The Funding Act of 1790, Hamilton’s great achievement, had redeemed those certificates at face value.

But Gates, like many former officers, had sold his certificates long before. He had not waited for the government to honor its promises. He had taken what he could get and retired to his farm. The men who benefited from Hamilton’s system were not the men who had suffered through the winter at Newburgh. They were the men who had bought the certificates at discount, who had bet on the government’s eventual ability to pay. Gates had made no such bet. He had simply withdrawn.

The withdrawal was complete. Public life never called him back. The memoir that might have answered his critics was never written. He lived out his days as a gentleman farmer, a figure of local consequence but national obscurity. The man who had once commanded armies, who had been mentioned as a possible replacement for Washington, who had presided over the most dangerous meeting in the army’s history, became a man who wrote letters about land and crops and waited for the end.

The contrast with Washington could not have been sharper. Washington had faced the same choice at Newburgh, had been offered the same opportunity to lead the army against Congress, had been tempted, if Hamilton’s correspondence is to be believed, by the prospect of using the crisis to strengthen the national government. But Washington chose differently. He entered the meeting uninvited, spoke against the addresses, put on his spectacles and asked the officers to remember what he had done for them. The gesture turned the room. The crisis passed. Washington emerged from Newburgh more respected than ever, the man who had saved the republic from its own army.

Gates had no such moment. He presided over the meeting, sat silently while Washington spoke, offered no words of his own. Whether he had planned to speak, whether he had been prevented by Washington’s arrival, whether he had simply been unsure what to say—none of this is known. What is known is that Gates left the meeting as he had entered it: a figure of suspicion, a man whose role in the conspiracy would be debated forever.

The debate is ultimately unresolvable. Gates took his knowledge to the grave. Armstrong outlived him by nearly four decades, but his accounts of the affair varied, and his credibility was compromised by his obvious interest in minimizing his own culpability. The politicians who had encouraged the crisis, men like Hamilton and Morris, had their own reasons to obscure their involvement. The officers who had supported the addresses, who had attended the meeting, who had listened to Washington and chosen to trust him—they were the only witnesses, and their testimony was filtered through years of hindsight and loyalty.

What remains is the silence. Gates’s silence, maintained for twenty-three years after the meeting at Newburgh, is the most eloquent evidence in the record. A man with nothing to hide might have spoken. A man with a clear conscience might have defended himself. Gates did neither. He simply withdrew, and in withdrawing, he allowed history to make its own judgment.

The judgment was harsh. In the pantheon of revolutionary heroes, Gates occupies a lower tier. Saratoga is remembered, but it is remembered as the victory that Benedict Arnold helped win, and Arnold’s later treason casts a shadow over everything associated with him. Gates’s role in the Conway Cabal, his presence at Newburgh, his failure to match Washington’s example of disinterested leadership—these things outweigh his military achievements. He is remembered not for what he did but for what he might have done, for the conspiracy that might have been, for the mutiny that might have occurred.

This is the personal cost of power, the human dimension of the political and financial maneuvering that shaped the new republic. Gates was not the only officer who suffered in the war’s aftermath. Many former soldiers struggled with debt, with disability, with the difficulty of transitioning from military to civilian life. The promises that Congress had made were honored late or not at all, and the men who had won independence found themselves competing for scraps in a system that seemed designed to reward speculators rather than veterans. But Gates’s suffering was of a different kind. He had not been denied payment. He had been denied honor. The suspicion that attached to his name, the questions that could not be answered, the silence that could not be broken—these were his burden, and he carried them to the grave.

The grave is at Trinity Churchyard in New York, where Gates was buried after his death. The marker is modest. The name and dates are inscribed, and the rank is noted: Major General. There is no mention of Saratoga, no mention of Newburgh, no mention of the conspiracy that shadowed his later years. The stone speaks of service, but the service it commemorates is complicated by what is not said.

In the end, Gates’s retirement is best understood as a kind of exile. He had not been banished, had not been forced to leave, had not been formally accused of anything. But he had been removed, by the weight of suspicion and the power of Washington’s legend, from the narrative of the managed crisis. The Newburgh conspiracy, if it was a conspiracy, had been designed to force a federal taxing power. The taxing power had been achieved. The funding system had been established. The national debt had been consolidated. But the men who had made it strong, the officers whose grievances had been the fuel for the political maneuvering, were not the ones who benefited. And among those officers, none suffered more in reputation than Horatio Gates.

The major general who had almost become the figurehead of a military uprising was buried in New York, far from Newburgh, far from Traveller’s Rest, far from the places where his reputation had been made and unmade. The grave remains, and the questions remain, and the silence that Gates maintained for so long has become, in the end, his most lasting monument.