James Edmonston House in New Windsor is set to host General Horatio Gates on Sunday, November 11th.
From 4 to 6 pm, visit the Revolutionary War headquarters and meet General Horatio Gates, who was none too happy to be in this house.
The home of James Edmonston has stood for over 250 years. Rescued in the 1960s by the National Temple Hill Association, the house by that point was a junkyard showroom filled with old car parts. Nicely restored, the house serves as the headquarters for this local historic organization.
When General Horatio Gates was assigned the Edmonston home as winter quarters for 1782-83, he wrote General George Washington: “Your Excellency’s Dog kennel at Mount Vernon, is as good a Quarter as that I am now in”. Eyeing the larger and far more refined Ellison House, he expected to be billeted at that nearby property. To please Gates, the senior ranking major general in the Continental Army, Quartermaster General Colonel Timothy Pickering had to evict Surgeon General John Cochran from the Ellison house. Angered by his removal, Cochran challenged the beleaguered Pickering to a duel.
Despite his defeat and flight from the battlefield of Camden, South Carolina, in 1780, he still remained as arrogant as ever. An intriguer and schemer, he used friends in Congress to wrest the command of the army that would eventually defeat and capture a British army at Saratoga, in 1777. Many of his contemporaries and later historians believed that the victory was the result of the efforts of the man he replaced – Philip Schuyler. He was implicated in a plot with the same Congressional partisans who helped him supersede Schuyler to supplant Washington as commander-in-chief. While at the Ellison house he was involved in a conspiracy in March 1783, which threatened the very freedoms the country had fought to achieve.
This is a cooperative program of the National Temple Hill Association and the New Windsor Cantonment State Historic Site. Admission is free.
The Edmonston House is located at 1042 Route 94 in New Windsor. For more information call (845) 561-1765 ext. 22.
Photo of the James Edmonston House c. 1755 provided.
Your analysis of General Horatio Gates, is with all due respect, completely off base. Gates was placed in charge of the American army at Saratoga in August 1777 at the behest of John Adams and the New Engalnd representatives in Congress, when the American army was badly divided because the New England militias refused to fight under Schuyler aand faced almost certain defeat to the British force coming down from Canada under General Burgoyne. Gates brilliantly pulled the divided army together ralllied the New England militias and in October 1777 won the most stunning American victory in the American Revolution. To say Schuyler was responsible for the victory is ridiculous and not supported by reputable historians.
Although there may later have been infighting between Gates and Washington partisans such as Alexander Hamilton, Gates, who was from a lower middle clas background, was hardly arrogant but was truly committed throughout his life to American independence and Democracy. Almost 25 years after the Revolutionary War, he played a critical role in the election of Thomas Jefferson, when he successfully ran for the New York State assembly from New York City in the critical New York elections of 1800.
See my article in this history blog on September 28 of this year “Gates, Hamilton and the Elections of 1800.”
You description of General Gates does a disservice to a great and underappreciated patriot of the American Revolution as well as to the history of this state during the American Revolution and in the period immediately thereafter.
James S. Kaplan
President, Lower Manhattan Historical Association