Washington: A Life (75 page)

At this point Washington learned of an episode that made sense of his enigmatic day. At breakfast that morning Arnold had been given some papers, had grown agitated, said goodbye to his wife, left the house abruptly, and disappeared. The papers had alerted him to André’s arrest, prompting him to flee down the Hudson to the safety of the
Vulture
. Although Washington sent Hamilton and McHenry in hot pursuit, Arnold had long since hopped on board a barge and found asylum with his British masters.

It was Arnold’s aide, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Varick, who notified Washington of the delirious behavior of Peggy Arnold upstairs. He had found her roaming the halls in a state of partial undress and coaxed her back into bed, where she insisted that “there was a hot iron on her head and no one but General Washington could take it off.”
⁵¹
In a drawing of Peggy Arnold done by John André, she looks cool-eyed and cunning, with just a hint of a smirk, her tall beehive hairdo towering above a small, pretty face. When Washington went upstairs to calm her, he found her hugging her baby to her breast, her abundant blond curls tumbling across her face and her dressing gown thrown open for easy viewing. She didn’t seem to recognize Washington. “There is General Washington,” Varick urged her gently, but she assured him he was wrong. “No, that is not General Washington! That is the man who was a-going to assist Colonel Varick in killing my child.”
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Peggy Arnold seemed too wildly distracted to participate in anything so methodical as a plot. “General Arnold will never return,” she informed her gullible male audience. “He is gone forever,
there, there, there
.” She motioned toward the ceiling. “The spirits have carried him up there. They have put hot irons in his head.”
⁵³

In cahoots with her husband, Peggy Arnold played her mad scene to perfection. Blinded by chivalry, Washington, Hamilton, and Lafayette were duped by her lunatic ravings, if not aroused by her immodest getup. They assumed that Arnold had confessed his guilt to her before fleeing and that she was still reeling from the shock. Lafayette wrote tenderly about Peggy Arnold, “whose face and whose youthfulness make her so interesting.”
⁵⁴
Hamilton proved especially susceptible to her wiles. “It was the most affecting scene I ever was witness to,” he wrote to Elizabeth Schuyler. For a considerable time Peggy Arnold had “entirely lost her senses … One moment she raved, another she melted into tears. Sometimes she pressed her infant to her bosom and lamented its fate, occasioned by the imprudence of its father, in a manner that would have pierced insensibility itself.”
⁵⁵
In dealing with Arnold’s wife, Washington and Hamilton left something to be desired as psychologists. The sudden onset of her madness and her exaggerated theatrics should have aroused their incredulity. “Mrs. Arnold is sick and General Arnold is away,” Washington told the assembled officers when he went downstairs. “We must therefore take our dinner without them.”
⁵⁶

Washington had no idea whether other conspirators were still at large. With impressive self-control, he sat through the four P.M. dinner without disclosing what had happened. For security reasons, he sealed off the house and did not permit anyone to enter or exit. Stunned by events, he proved slow to take precautionary steps. Hamilton, showing more initiative, took it upon himself to order a Connecticut regiment to bolster West Point. In the early evening Washington issued rapid-fire bulletins to tighten security there in case Clinton tried to exploit the confusion with a preemptive strike. Amid a mood of tense expectation, he directed troops toward West Point and served notice that the Continental Army might be deployed on a moment’s notice. He also informed Arnold’s two chief aides, Franks and Varick, that he had no reason to suspect their complicity with Arnold but felt duty-bound to place them under arrest, a decision the two understood. The next day Washington announced the terrible revelation to his men: “Treason of the blackest dye was yesterday discovered!”
⁵⁷
As in many major moments in the war, he traced exposure of the conspiracy to divine intervention: “In no instance since the commencement of the war has the interposition of providence appeared more conspicuous than in the rescue of the post and garrison of West Point from Arnold’s villainous perfidy.”
⁵⁸

Washington soon received a pair of letters from the perfidious Arnold himself. In the first, written to Washington, Arnold blamed American ingratitude for his actions and presented himself as a patriot of a higher order than Washington. He had the gall to ask the commander to forward his clothes and baggage, as if he had hastily absconded from a busy inn. The request was a commentary on Arnold’s vulgar mind, but the punctilious Washington honored it. Arnold also tried to exculpate his young wife of any wrongdoing. “She is as good and as innocent as an angel and is incapable of doing wrong,” he insisted.
⁵⁹

The second letter was addressed to Peggy Arnold, and Washington did not dare tamper with a sealed letter from a gentleman to his lady. Instead, he sent it upstairs, unopened, along with a soothing reassurance to Peggy that her husband was unharmed. It is hard to say whether this chivalric behavior was foolhardy or sublime. It shows that, for all the atrocities Washington had witnessed, he still believed that well-bred people inhabited a genteel world, governed by incontrovertible rules. The next morning Peggy Arnold, miraculously recovered from her madness, expressed fear that “the resentment of her country will fall upon her who is only unfortunate.”
⁶⁰
Still convinced of her innocence, Washington asked whether she wanted to be reunited with her husband in New York or with her father in Philadelphia. Playing the wronged patriot to the hilt, she declared her wish to join her father, and Washington drafted a special order guaranteeing her safe conduct. “It would be exceedingly painful to General Washington if she were not treated with the greatest kindness,” Lafayette explained to the Chevalier de La Luzerne.
⁶¹
All the male actors had played their parts perfectly in the tragedy of Peggy Arnold, unaware that the performance was actually a farce.

 

 

AT THIRTY, Major John André was handsome, cultivated, and charming. Educated in Switzerland and something of a poet—during the occupation of Philadelphia, he had perused Benjamin Franklin’s library and engaged in amateur theatricals—he was also a proficient artist, skilled at drawing quick sketches of people. In an oval portrait of André, he stares out with a powdered wig and gold epaulettes and the soft, unformed face of a boy. In the eighteenth century soldiers often identified with their social peers on the other side of the conflict because they subscribed to the same code of class honor. André’s youth and gallantry touched the imagination of Washington’s officers. Hamilton visited André several times at the tavern in Tappan, New York, where he was held captive and left breathless with admiration. “To an excellent understanding, well improved by education and travel, [André] united a peculiar elegance of mind and manners and the advantage of a pleasing person,” he attested.
⁶²

The case of Major André became a cause célèbre because of his aristocratic manner and his controversial claim that he hadn’t really functioned as a spy. Nobody disputed that he had been caught with concealed papers from the turncoat Arnold. The spying allegation arose because he had crossed into American lines, donned civilian clothes, and assumed a nom de guerre. André countered that he had come ashore in uniform and met Arnold in neutral territory, but the latter had then lured him into American territory. While making his way back to the
Vulture,
he had had no choice but to shed his uniform and adopt a fake name. André asserted less his innocence than his honorable conduct, telling Washington that he wished to clear himself “from an imputation of having assumed a mean character for treacherous purposes or self-interest.”
⁶³
The practical significance of this esoteric dispute was that spies were treated like common criminals and hung from the gallows, whereas a British officer in uniform caught communicating with an American spy would be shot by a firing squad in a manner befitting a gentleman.

Although Washington understood the appeal of Major André’s personality, he also knew that the plot to take West Point, had it succeeded, could have been catastrophic, and this toughened him against lenient treatment of the prisoner. He instructed André’s captors that he did not deserve the indulgences accorded to prisoners of war and should “be most closely and narrowly watched.”
⁶⁴
Intent upon seeing justice swiftly enacted, Washington impaneled a board of fourteen generals to hear André’s case in a village church in Tappan. André answered their questions with such honesty and candor that his captors were moved. “I can remember no instance where my affections were so fully absorbed in any man,” said Major Benjamin Tallmadge.
⁶⁵
It was one of those singular moments in wartime when class solidarity overtook ideology.

Washington received a plea for mercy from an unlikely source. Benedict Arnold had the cheek to threaten Washington that, should he execute the adjutant, Arnold would “retaliate on such unhappy persons of your army as may fall within my power … I call heaven and earth to witness that your Excellency will be justly answerable for the torrent of blood that may be spilt in consequence.”
⁶⁶
Arnold thereby rubbed salt into an open wound. “There are no terms that can describe the baseness of his heart,” Washington said of Arnold.
⁶⁷

The board of officers returned a guilty verdict against André and ruled that he should die as a spy—that is, by hanging. André pleaded with Washington to allow him to be shot by a firing squad. Refusing to capitulate under duress, Washington decided that André’s offense was so grave that he had to make an example of him, even if it offended the sensibilities of many officers. André was sentenced to hang in full view of soldiers drawn from various quarters of the army. The decision rankled Hamilton in particular, who already chafed at Washington’s exacting treatment of him. “The death of André could not have been dispensed with,” Hamilton later told Knox, “but it must still be viewed at a distance as an act of
rigid justice
.”
⁶⁸
Trying to avert a hanging, Washington sounded out the British on a swap of André for Benedict Arnold, but the enemy declined the offer.

At noon on October 2, 1780, John André marched to the gallows. As he neared the spot, he bowed his head to those who had befriended him and showed a serene acceptance that startled everyone. “Such fortitude I never was witness of … To see a man go out of time without fear, but all the time smiling, is a matter I could not conceive of,” marveled the army surgeon John Hart.
⁶⁹
When André reached the hangman, whose face was blackened with grease, he asked if he had to die in this manner and was told it was unavoidable. “I am reconciled to my fate,” he replied, “but not to the mode.”
⁷⁰
People heard him whisper to himself that “it will be but a momentary pang.”
⁷¹
Leaping upon the cart from which his body was to be released, André took the rope from the hangman and tightened it around his own neck, then drew a handkerchief from his pocket and blinded his own eyes. When told that the time had come and asked if he had any final words, he replied, “Nothing but to request you will witness to the world that I die like a brave man.”
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His body hung slackly from the gibbet for nearly half an hour before being cut down. André’s noble conduct only enhanced the misgivings of those who thought he should have been shot. It seemed hard on Washington’s part to refuse the request of a man sentenced to death. Lafayette wrote to his wife that André had “conducted himself in such a frank, noble, and honorable way that, during the three days we imprisoned him, I was foolish enough to develop a real liking for him. In strongly voting to sentence him to the gallows, I could not help [but] regret what happened to him.”
⁷³

Washington boycotted the execution. He had no special animus toward André and shared the respect felt by his men. “André has met his fate and with that fortitude which was to be expected from an accomplished man and gallant officer,” he wrote to John Laurens.
⁷⁴
Clearly he didn’t relish hanging André, yet he also believed he had to mete out punishment for a heinous crime that might have given the American cause “a deadly wound, if not a fatal stab.”
⁷⁵
For Washington, who never shrank from doing the right thing, however hard or unpopular, it was a lonely moment of leadership. Even as a young officer in the French and Indian War, his justice had often seemed stern and inflexible. As he told Rochambeau, the circumstances of André’s capture necessitated the hanging and “policy required a sacrifice, but as he was more unfortunate than criminal in the affair, and as there was much in his character to [excite] interest, while we yielded to the necessity of rigor, we could not but lament it.”
⁷⁶

By contrast, Washington’s desire for revenge against the villainous Arnold, whom he saw as “lost to all sense of honor and shame,” intensified in the coming months .
⁷⁷
He backed a scheme concocted by Major Henry Lee to abduct Arnold from New York City. On the night of October 20-21 a sergeant in Lee’s cavalry, John Champe, pretended to desert from the American army and convinced Sir Henry Clinton that he was disaffected from the patriot cause. He then accosted Benedict Arnold in the street and struck up an acquaintance. The idea was for Champe and an American agent from New Jersey named Baldwin to grab Arnold as he strolled in his garden one night and row him across the Hudson, making it seem as if they were struggling with a drunken soldier. Washington endorsed the plan with the proviso that Arnold be brought to him alive. “No circumstance whatever shall obtain my consent to his being put to death,” Washington informed Lee. “The idea which would accompany such an event would be that ruffians had been hired to assassinate him. My aim is to make a public example of him.”
⁷⁸
For their trouble, Champe was promised a promotion and Baldwin one hundred guineas, five hundred acres of land, and three slaves.