Patriots (74 page)

“Do you remember the sequel of this story?” Tallmadge asked.

“Yes,” said André. “He was hanged as a spy, but you surely do not consider his case and mine alike?”

“Precisely similar,” said Tallmadge, “and similar will be your fate.”

For the first time, André understood the enormity of his offense. Benjamin Tallmadge had reason to gloat over André’s obvious agitation, but he had been as charmed by him as men and women always were, and he watched with nothing but sympathy.

General Washington selected Nathanael Greene to preside over André’s trial. Greene had been a Quaker once, but that was many battles ago. If John André was a spy—and he freely admitted that he had not gone to West Point under any legal protection—he must pay with his life. That was the finding of the board. The next day, October 1, 1780, George Washington endorsed it: “
The commander-in-chief directs the execution of the above sentence in the usual way this afternoon at 5 o’clock precisely.” The usual way was hanging.

In New York, Henry Clinton threatened to execute American prisoners of war if André was hanged, but Washington remained unmoved. He knew that his army held too many British prisoners for Clinton to embark on bloody reprisals. Alexander Hamilton, who felt sympathy for the prisoner, wrote an anonymous letter to Clinton suggesting that André be traded for Benedict Arnold. Since Hamilton regularly wrote George Washington’s letters, Clinton recognized his handwriting and assumed he was speaking on Washington’s behalf. Even so, Arnold was too great a prize to surrender. Other American officers also fell under André’s spell and suggested that Hamilton ask André to make the plea himself. Surely Clinton
would not refuse an appeal from his favorite young officer. But Hamilton refused even to pass along the idea, because he was sure André’s high sense of honor would force him to reject it.

When André saw that nothing would save him and that he would die before nightfall, he sent General Washington a message asking to be shot as a soldier rather than hanged as a spy. Washington did not reply. He had decided not to honor the request and thought it was a kindness to let André go on hoping until the final moment. When Hamilton made the same plea on André’s behalf, Washington continued to resist it. John André, for all his charm and good manners, had been convicted of spying, and spies were hanged.

As the hour approached, a vast crowd gathered at the field behind Maybie’s Tavern where the gibbet had been built. Then, at the last minute, Henry Clinton caused a cruel delay. In exchange for André’s life, Clinton offered any American prisoner he held. By the time Washington had rejected the proposal, the hanging had been delayed until noon of the next day.

As his admirers expected, John André behaved impeccably on the last day of his life. A servant was allowed through the lines to bring him a dress uniform, but when the man entered the room in tears André sent him away, saying, “Leave me until you show yourself more manly.”

Each morning since his arrest, André’s breakfast had come from George Washington’s own table, and this day was no different. After André ate, he was shaved and dressed in full uniform. Seated before a mirror, he made a pen-and-ink sketch of himself as a memento for one of his guards. He then rose and linked arms with the two men who were to escort him. “I am ready at any moment, gentlemen, to wait on you,” André said. The guards thought his mood seemed cheerful.

Again a crowd had turned out. Only General Washington and his staff were absent. Washington had ordered his shutters drawn against the sight of the execution. There was no glee in carrying out the sentence, only sadness. André walked out from his quarters, arm in arm with the American officers. He smiled as he bowed to members of the court that had condemned him, and he complimented the fifers of the military band on the excellence of their music. André expected to face a firing squad, and when he saw the gallows he gave a start and held back.

“Why this emotion, sir?” one of the guards chided him.

André recovered and continued walking. “I am reconciled to my death,” he said, “but I detest the mode.”

A wagon with his coffin had been drawn up directly under the gallows. André stepped upon the back of the wagon and, hands on hips, paced up and down the length of his coffin as he surveyed the audience that had come to see him die. Those nearby watched him look to the top of the gallows and say, “It will be but a momentary pang.”

The executioner appeared, his face and arms smeared with black grease. He was a Tory prisoner named Strickland, who would be paid for the day’s work with his freedom. When he tried to put the noose around André’s neck, André pulled back and said, “
Take your black hands off me.” Instead he did it himself, drawing the rope up snugly, with the knot under his right ear. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and tied it over his eyes. The commanding officer announced that his arms must also be bound, and André produced a second handkerchief and let himself be tied behind his back, just above the elbows.

The commander asked if he had any last words. Major André said, “Only bear witness that I died like a brave man.”

The rope was long, and when the wagon was suddenly pulled away John André’s body swung in a great arc. Gradually, the movement slowed until he hung still. The commander ordered a soldier to shorten André’s misery by pressing down hard on his shoulders. For almost half an hour, his body hung from the gallows amid silence from the crowd.

America was avenged, but George Washington had lost twice in the affair. Benedict Arnold, once his bravest general, was now his enemy. And Alexander Hamilton could not forgive Washington for his hardness of heart and began to look less worshipfully at his commander.

The battle of Yorktown, painted by an eyewitness, Louis van Blarenberghe

MUSÉE DE VERSAILLES

T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
had suffered a series of political defeats over the five years since the bright days of his Declaration of Independence. Serving in the Virginia assembly until June 1779, he had proposed a host of reform measures to redistribute the privileges held by the plantation owners and the Anglican clergy. Jefferson believed that for a strong society to arise, the community should consist of many farmers with small holdings, perhaps fifty acres,
rather than the same men working vast estates as tenants. Jefferson had also proposed tax-supported schools to give both boys and girls at least three years of education. He advocated revising the penal code so that only murder and treason remained punishable by death and argued for absolute separation of state and church. But after three years he had succeeded in passing only one major reform—a bill abolishing primogeniture, which had required that
upon a man’s death the bulk of his property go to his oldest son. For all his influence in Philadelphia, Jefferson had been no match for the conservative faction in the Virginia legislature. When he ran for the speaker’s post in 1778, he had been defeated by better than two to one.

Patrick Henry had nominated Jefferson as governor, a post Henry had held for three one-year terms. The Virginia assembly elected Jefferson by a six-vote margin in June 1779, but by the time he took office Virginia had become all but ungovernable. Henry, unable to curb his need for applause, had worked harder at being popular than at preparing Virginia for the war that was moving steadily south. And Jefferson, devoted to liberty and the virtue of reason, lacked the imperial qualities of a war governor. Behind the scenes, he and Patrick Henry often differed, and Jefferson suspected that Henry wanted to return to office, not as Virginia’s governor but as her despot. Both men still supported having a militia over the standing army that Washington considered essential. Yet Jefferson’s stewardship of the militia was uncertain. Troops would be called to duty to find that their arms and equipment had been sent halfway across the state. When the Congress gave the Continental Army’s quartermaster the right to confiscate provisions for the soldiers, Jefferson worked to limit his authority.

As governor, Jefferson did not always bring the full power of his unquestioned intellect to his public duty. Frail as she was, his wife continued to conceive, but the infants did not live. In their most recent loss, the boy died even before he could be given a name. Two of five children had survived, both daughters. During Jefferson’s second year as governor another baby daughter died in her fifth month, but by that time he had already decided to resign. Other politicians had been suggesting for years that Jefferson was on the easy path to premature retirement. They did not know how mortified Jefferson became whenever he faced a greater challenge than he thought he could meet. When, in the face of increasing threats from the British, the seat of government moved from Williamsburg to Richmond, Jefferson announced that he would quit the governorship on July 2, 1781.

His decision became unshakable when Britain’s newest general, Benedict Arnold, made an unexpected assault on Richmond. Although Arnold had failed to deliver West Point, Henry Clinton had paid him the full six thousand pounds John André had promised,
plus three hundred and fifteen pounds in expenses. Arnold was also commissioned as a provisional brigadier general, which gave him an annual salary of six hundred and fifty pounds, far more than his former pay in devalued Continental currency. Despite Clinton’s patronage, General Arnold quickly made himself so unpopular that many younger British officers refused to serve under him. Changing allegiances had left him neither less rough-edged and graceless nor less audacious. Burning and pillaging his way through Virginia, he showed his contempt for the state’s militia. Jefferson had ignored warnings of the coming attack and only at the last minute had appointed Baron von Steuben to defend Richmond. Finally Jefferson himself rode his horse to exhaustion as he tried to raise a resistance. His effort was ineffectual, and although he was not captured, Jefferson wrote candidly about the debacle to George Washington. The general sent back his sympathy, along with Lafayette and twelve hundred Continental troops to keep Benedict Arnold at bay.

It had seemed unlikely that there could be worse humiliation in store for Governor Jefferson, but in April Arnold returned as part of a new force led by Major General William Phillips, commander of the artillery at the battle of Minden, where Lafayette’s father had been killed. Avid for revenge but badly outnumbered, Lafayette protected Richmond and gave Jefferson the chance to move the capital again, this time to Charlottesville. Jefferson wrote another letter to Washington, pleading with him to come and save his native state. But Washington was developing a broader strategy, and though he answered Jefferson kindly, he stayed in the North.

Despair was leading Jefferson to a hatred of Benedict Arnold that calm reason could not purge. He hoped Arnold would be kidnapped and hauled around America, exhibited as a public display of infamy. Arnold knew how deeply his former countrymen longed for revenge. During this Virginia campaign, he had amused himself by asking a captured American officer what would happen to him if he were captured. The American said that Arnold’s left leg, wounded at Quebec and Saratoga, would be cut off and buried with full military honors. The rest of him would be hanged.

—

On July 1, 1781, the night before Jefferson was due to leave the governorship, a hulking American captain named
Jack Jouett rode
out on a mission that would have challenged the stamina of Paul Revere. Jouett left the Cuckoo Tavern, forty miles outside Charlottesville, with the same purpose for which Revere had ridden six years before—to warn a prominent patriot that the British were coming to seize him. This time their target was Thomas Jefferson. Jouett had stopped at the Cuckoo and found two hundred and fifty British dragoons and mounted infantrymen there. They were led by Banastre Tarleton, who had once vowed to cut off Charles Lee’s head. Earlier in the year, Tarleton had been defeated by Daniel Morgan in a South Carolina pasture called Hannah’s Cowpens. Now he was headed for Monticello to restore his reputation by taking Jefferson prisoner.

Jouett was a first-class horseman. Wrapped in a scarlet cloak, he rode over paths so thick with brush that when he reached Jefferson’s mansion before dawn his face was cut and bleeding. Governor Jefferson revived him with a glass of Madeira and told him to alert Virginia’s other officials in town.

Jefferson sent his wife, his daughters and their house guests to a neighboring estate. Building his mansion on a hill had seemed an impractical fancy during construction, but now its view of the surrounding countryside gave him a good start on any British soldiers coming to capture him.

Many stories sprang up later about Jefferson’s behavior in the face of the enemy. One of the few favorable ones had Jefferson riding up the slope behind Monticello until he reached Carter’s Mountain and turned a telescope toward Charlottesville. He saw no trace of the green-and-white uniforms worn by Tarleton’s men and decided that Jouett’s alarm had been mistaken and that he would not have to abandon his house. George Washington’s concern for Mount Vernon was evident in the long letters he wrote home, but when he heard that his caretaker had given food to a band of British troops to prevent them from destroying his house, Washington had sent a reprimand: Never again yield to blackmail. Jefferson’s feelings for his home were even more profound than Washington’s and now, with no enemy in sight, he turned his horse back to Monticello.