General gates

Despite his successes on the battlefield, it has been said that General Horatio Gates was suspected of having very little personal courage when it came to fighting. He is perhaps most noted for being in regular competion with General George Washington and hatching a plan to have him removed as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. It has been alleged, that while the other officers fighting beside him were getting bloodied in the fight, he would be trying to find a way to retreat.

We do not know if that is actually true, though.

Where did horatio gates live

His opposition to General Washington may have made his biographers less than fair. On the positive side, he was also known as an affectionate husband, father, and generous land owner who set his slaves free before his death. His parents were, by some reports, housekeeper and butler to the Duke of Leeds though this seems uncertain, and alternate parentage has been advanced.

When he reached the age of 22, he joined the British army and fought at Nova Scotia for the protection of Edward Cornwallis until It was during this time that he advanced in the ranks until he became a major.

3 important facts about horatio gates

Not long after, he was with General Edward Braddock when Braddock was defeated in the French and Indian War, where Gates was badly wounded and disabled for a long time afterward. He married Elizabeth Phillips in and they had a son named Robert. After the war was finished, he bought an estate in Berkeley County, Virginia. Gates remained there for some time cultivating the land and being a father and husband.

When the beginning of the Revolutionary War put a stop to his work with his estate in Virginia, Horatio decided to fight alongside the Americans and joined the army, where he was commissioned by Congress as a Brigadier General and the first Adjutant General of the U. Army on July 17, The congress sided with Schuyler, and Gates had to settle for a lesser command under Schuyler.

The next year he met Schuyler once more when they were to fight the battle of Ticonderoga together, before General John Burgoyne advanced.