Cap returned to us, reeking of rum after a visit to the Arundel men in Brewer’s regiment, and taught us one of these songs. It was rhymeless and tuneless, but it was easy to learn and the men seemed to like to sit and sing it interminably. One who wished to start it needed only to sing

“Where was the Old Woman

 When Arnold was fighting—

 Fighting the battle of Quebec!”

On this everybody would bellow

“She was under the sink
 She was under the sink
 She was under the sink
 With her fingers in her ears!”

or they would roar

“She was out in the cow-shed
 She was out in the cow-shed
 She was out in the cow-shed
 Hiding behind a cow.”

In countless verses the singers asked how the Old Woman had occupied herself when Arnold was fighting at the Cedars, at Valcour, at Ridgefield, at Fort Stanwix, at Freeman’s Farm; and they thought up singular places, none of them creditable, where Gates might have been hidden.

As a result of all this uproar, the higher officers of the army composed a letter to Arnold, begging him to stay. The army needed him, they said: the men wanted him. The letter was signed by all the higher officers, barring only Gates, Wilkinson and the fat Lincoln. Because of this, Arnold stayed. But such was Gates’s animosity to him—such was Gates’s determination not to permit himself to be dwarfed by Arnold’s leadership and popularity—that he deprived Arnold of his command. Arnold stayed with the army; but to no part of it was he allowed to issue orders.

Because I have never ceased to resent the shameful injustices so brazenly inflicted by Gates to further his own selfish designs, I wish to set down what I believe to be the simple truth about him. To my way of thinking no man had fewer redeeming qualities, or came closer to bringing about our overwhelming defeat than Horatio Gates. He was commonplace, vain, sly, jealous, inconsiderate, unfair, unjust. He was slow, incompetent, narrow-minded, ungenerous, unresourceful, petty, boorish and untruthful. He instinctively resented talent, genius and impetuous bravery. He ousted Schuyler and Arnold, and stole the credit for the work they did; he plotted to supersede Washington, as a buzzard might plot to supersede an eagle. All his faults were mirrored in his insufferable satellite James Wilkinson; and while Gates was doing all he could to destroy Arnold, Schuyler, Washington and Daniel Morgan, he was begging Congress to make Wilkinson a general. That was the sort of justice meted out by Gates. He fawned on Congress to obtain a generalcy for the twenty-one-year-old Wilkinson; but for Morgan, who was still a colonel, and had played a giant’s part in the battle of Freeman’s Farm, he had nothing but contemptuous silence, though Morgan was a thousand times more deserving of being a general than was Gates himself.