He was, above all, a man of modest abilities, but he thought otherwise.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 142.

In 1928 the distinguished military historian Hoffman Nickerson described Major General Horatio Gates as a “snob of the first water,” with an “unctuously pious way with him, not entirely unlike Dickens’s immortal Uriah Heep,” and such a “repellent personality” that “he still awaits his biographer.” Nickerson then administered the cruelest cut of all, maintaining that by the time of the Saratoga campaign Gates was “so empty of fighting spirit as to lay him open to suspicion of personal cowardice.” In 1952 the distinguished military historian Lynn Montross strongly defended Gates, maintaining that in 1778 there began “a campaign of character assassination that has few parallels in American history. From that time onward, Gates would be attacked at every opportunity, by fair means or foul, until few rags remained of his military reputation.” Gates’s character and career invite such extremes of opinion, and a valiant attempt at even-handed treatment, Paul David Nelson’s scholarly work of 1976, is less than convincing. For Horatio Gates does not lend himself to efforts to be eminently fair. He was, above all, a man of modest abilities, but he thought otherwise. That, I believe, and his origins, governed his actions throughout a long and tumultuous career.