Posted on 07/06/2010 7:23:40 AM PDT by Pharmboy
For a 14th straight year, James S. Kaplan spent the Fourth of July walking in the middle of the night among ghosts of the American Revolution.
... What Mr. Kaplan does every Independence Day, in recent years under the aegis of the Fraunces Tavern Museum, is guide several dozen people to sites in Lower Manhattan that have Revolutionary War significance.
Only his tour begins at 2 a.m..snip...
Perhaps another distinction is that Mr. Kaplan makes a point of stopping outside Trinity Church to note an injustice that he believes has been done to Horatio Gates, a Revolution-era general who commanded the American Army in northern New York. Those forces defeated the British in 1777 in the Battle of Saratoga... Gates died in 1806 and was buried in the Trinity Church cemetery. Lots of luck finding his grave. It is unmarked. snip...
Mr. Kaplan...feels that the general has been slighted for far too long.... Historians today are more likely to give Benedict Arnold — yes, that Benedict Arnold, before he became synonymous with treason — the credit for victory at Saratoga.
Arnold was a field commander. Gates wasn’t. “But the whole organization of the battle was really Gates’s,” Mr. Kaplan said after completing this year’s tour. What turned things around for faltering American forces, he said, was Gates’s ability to persuade New England militias to join up with the New York troops.
snip..
The issue for Mr. Kaplan is that the old soldier became history’s orphan, and deserved better.
snip...
Not that he expects everyone to share his passion. But he said, “To me, it’s almost a mystical experience to talk about General Gates and the Battle of Saratoga at 5 in the morning in front of Trinity Church, where you know he’s buried but no one else does.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
...and when the General rode up to him as Lee was retreating at Monmouth, a witness describes Washington as quite voluble in his reprimand, and that “...the trees shook.” It was one of the very rare occasions that Washington lost his temper (one other was at The Battle of Manhattan when the militia retreated from the Brits and Hessians—really not much of a battle).
Gates took all the credit in the dispatches after Saratoga for himself, never mentioning Arnold’s contribution at all.
Some think that Arnold’s subsequent change into a traitor was caused by this.
I think it was one factor. A big one. He was also severly wounded at Saratoga and that wound took him out of active duty and got him appointed as military governor of PA. That was a mistake...he met and fell in love with a beautiful young tory and got a severe reprimand from Washington for how he conducted his office...even though Washington felt sympathetic to Arnold’s side. Taken all together you can see how Arnold would fall.
Chinese proverb: A journey of 1000 li begins with one step.
Arnold’s entire career might have been changed had Gates not hogged the limelight over Saratoga.
But I agree there could have been other contributing factors—promises of preference or money, a perception that the war was lost, etc.
I’m not persuaded that his love life was a primary cause since he couldn’t tell her of his change of allegiance without jeopardizing his life and of course there was the question about how she would react to his dishonorable acts in a era when a man’s honor and reputation were all important.
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