Story

The Conway Cabal

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Authors: Preston Russell

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

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February/March 1995 | Volume 46, Issue 1

The English writer G. K. Chesterton once observed that journalism largely consists of saying “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive. So perhaps does telling the story of the Conway Cabal, a military-political convulsion of 1777 that might have sent George Washington home to Mount Vernon prematurely. It ended up accomplishing nothing, and historians tend to label the affair a nonevent. But a closer look at it provides, for those who find Washington not quite human, a visceral glimpse of him come down from Mount Rushmore as a wounded animal. And the episode has also brought out the beast in historians.

Thomas Conway came from an Irish-born Catholic family that had fled to France because of English oppression when he was six. He served for years in the French military and also under the legendary Prussian Frederick the Great before coming to America, “to increase my fortune and that of my family,” in 1777, when he was forty-two. He made a good first impression on Washington, who found him a “man of candor . . . infinitely better qualified to serve us than many who have been promoted, as he speaks our language.” Washington’s new aide, the Marquis de Lafayette, who barely had turned twenty, advised his commander, “General Conway is a so brave, intelligent and active officer that he schall, I am sure, justify more and more the esteem of the army and Your approbation.” On May 13,1777, Congress made Conway a brigadier general. He fought well at the battles of Brandywine and Germantown and became “the idol of the whole army,” in the words of Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia.

When General Washington sensed a conspiracy gathering to strip him of command of the Revolutionary army, it did not bring out the best in him.
 

But things soon soured. Washington was not impressed with Conway’s performance at Germantown and even considered courtmartialing him, according to another young aide, John Laurens, because Conway was “a considerable time separated from his brigade.” Conway further disenchanted his admirers by lecturing them on what the great Frederick would have done had he been in the untutored Americans’ place. Conway had an I-toldyou-so look, with bulging eyes, pursed lips, and pinched little chin perched on a long neck that loomed up from slumped shoulders, like a scolding Ichabod Crane.

 

The animosity simmered along until another ingredient was added: General Horatio Gates, who was on top of the world at the moment. In October 1777 Gates’s Continentals defeated and captured John Burgoyne’s entire British army at Saratoga. It was the greatest victory to date, hundreds of miles away from Washington and his string of unbroken defeats around Philadelphia and light-years away politically from Congress, which now sat in York, Pennsylvania, having fled there because Washington could not even keep the national capital out of British hands. Across the Atlantic