Horatio Gates - After The War

After The War

Gates' wife Elizabeth died in the summer of 1783. He retired in 1784 and again returned to his estate, Traveller's Rest, in Virginia (near present day Kearneysville, Jefferson County, West Virginia). Gates served as vice president of the Society of the Cincinnati, the organization of former Continental Army officers, and president of its Virginia chapter, and worked to rebuild his life. He proposed marriage to Janet Montgomery, the widow of General Richard Montgomery, but she refused. In 1786 he married Mary Valens, a wealthy woman from Liverpool who had come to the colonies in 1773 with her sister and Rev. Bartholomew Booth, to operate a boy's boarding school in Maryland. Booth had been the curate for the "Chapel in the Woods," later to become Saint John's Church at Hagerstown, Maryland. Gates sold Traveller's Rest in 1790 and freed his slaves at the urging of his friend John Adams. The aging couple retired to an estate on northern Manhattan Island. His later support for Jefferson's presidential candidacy ended his friendship with Adams. Gates and his wife remained active in New York City society, and he was elected to a single term in the New York State Legislature in 1800. He died on April 10, 1806, and was buried in the Trinity Church graveyard on Wall Street, though the exact location of his grave is unknown.