Washington

by Ron Chernow

  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.”72 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 crim
inal 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.

  Champe and Baldwin were set to execute their plan in December, when Arnold was sent to Virginia, a state largely untouched by the war thus far, with a fleet of forty-two ships and seventeen hundred soldiers. Despite a warning from Washington, Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson procrastinated in summoning the state militia, and Arnold swept into the state capital at Richmond, burning supply depots and buildings. The scheme to abduct Arnold had been foiled, but Washington remained grimly implacable in his resolve to capture the blackguard. In February 1781 he sent Lafayette to Virginia with twelve hundred troops to pursue Arnold and toughened the terms for dealing with him. Should Arnold “fall into your hands,” he ordered Lafayette, “you will execute [him] in the most summary way.”79 Washington never did capture Arnold. In the spring Arnold wrote to George Germain and suggested a neat way of seducing Washington to the British side. “A title offered to General Washington might not prove unacceptable,” he wrote.80 In the end, Arnold proved no better at reading George Washington’s character than Washington had been at penetrating his disguise.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Mutiny

  AFTER THE DRAMA of Benedict Arnold’s treachery, Washington returned to the mundane issues that had long bedeviled his army, especially the abysmal food shortages and barren warehouses that failed to supply winter outfits. His desperate men started to swarm across the countryside, engaging in “every species of robbery and plunder,” Washington reported.1 Earlier in the fall he had grown so distressed over his men ransacking citizens’ homes that he had sentenced to death one David Hall, who stole money and silver plates from a local resident. He assembled fifty men from every brigade to watch the execution and ponder its significance. For all his dismay over such misbehavior, however, Washington was far more livid with the venal farmers who illegally sold “fresh meats and flour of the country” to the British Army, which feasted on ample supplies in New York.2

  In late November 1780 Washington sent his army into winter quarters, assigning the bulk of them to West Point, while he lodged in a cramped Dutch farmhouse overlooking the Hudson River at New Windsor, New York. Depressed by this “dreary station,” he had to requisition supplies from nearby residents to set his meager table and pleaded with Congress for emergency funds.3 “We have neither money nor credit,” he wrote, “adequate to the purchase of a few boards for doors to our log huts . . . It would be well for the troops if, like chameleons, they could live upon air, or, like the bear, suck their paws for sustenance during the rigor of the approaching season.”4 Things grew so grim that Washington’s own horses were starving for want of forage.

  Perhaps it was the aborted plan to kidnap Benedict Arnold that planted the idea in Washington’s mind of attempting a daring abduction of Sir Henry Clinton. On Christmas Night he gave the go-ahead to Lieutenant Colonel David Humphreys to row down the Hudson to New York with a small band of men, their oars muffled to avert detection. The nature of the top secret mission was disclosed only to participants, right before they shoved off. “I prefer a small number to a large one,” Washington said, “because it is more manageable in the night and less liable to confusion.”5 The party was supposed to land at Clinton’s house on the Hudson, disarm the guards, pinion Clinton, then hurry back up the Hudson with their high-ranking prize. In the event, a brisk wind sprang up and blew the boats into the bay, scuttling the operation.

  On New Year’s Day 1781 Washington’s worst nightmares were realized when thirteen hundred troops from the Pennsylvania Line, encamped near Morristown, mutinied and killed several officers. Much inflamed by rum, these men aired a host of legitimate grievances: insufficient food, clothing, and pay. After grabbing every musket in sight and six cannon, they angrily stormed off toward Philadelphia, where they intended to intimidate Congress into providing relief. The insurgents stressed that they acted under duress—“We are not Arnolds” was a favorite battle cry—but they could no longer stomach the inhumane treatment inflicted on them by politicians. Among other things, they could not tolerate that newly enlisted men were being paid cash bounties while they had received no pay in more than a year.

  The ranking officer on the scene was the valiant but hot-blooded Anthony Wayne. Washington encouraged him to stick close to his men as they marched and not brake their movement until they crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania. Washington experienced an overriding fear of massive desertion or even full-blown defection to the British—Sir Henry Clinton sent emissaries to entice them into exactly such treachery—and he thought it would help to stem such flight if the river stood behind the mutineers. Because his officers warned of smoldering discontent among the New Windsor troops, Washington feared abandoning them and tried to screen them from inflammatory news of the mutiny. Taking personal charge of the situation, he also worried about a loss of face if he ordered mutineers to desist and they ignored him. Bypassing Congress, Washington wrote directly to the states and demanded more provisions along with three months’ pay for the troops. Sympathetic to their complaints, if aggrieved by their methods, he spluttered in wrath that “it is in vain to think an army can be kept together much longer under such a variety of sufferings as ours has experienced.”6

  The Pennsylvania Line stopped at Princeton and Trenton and never reached Philadelphia. To squash the uprising, Wayne drew on New Jersey soldiers and summoned additional militia. He negotiated a settlement with the mutineers under which half would be discharged and another half furloughed until April. The soldiers would receive certificates to compensate them for their depreciated currency and would be issued extra clothing. Although Washington accepted the expediency of this bargain, he hated negotiating with disobedient soldiers. Wayne also decided, with Washington’s blessing, to make an example of the ringleaders. He called out twelve refractory members of the revolt and lined them up in a farmer’s field before firing squads made up of their fellow soldiers. One fifer described this brutal scene: “The distance that the platoons stood from [the condemned men] at the time they fired could not have been more than ten feet. So near did they stand that the handkerchiefs covering the eyes of some of them were set on fire . . . The fence and even the heads of rye for some distance within the field were covered with the blood and brains.”7 When one firing squad victim lay bleeding but still alive, Wayne ordered a soldier to bayonet him to death. The soldier balked, saying he couldn’t kill his comrade. With that, Wayne drew his pistol and said he would kill the man on the spot if he didn’t obey orders. The hapless soldier then stepped forward and plunged his bayonet into the writhing man. To ensure that the bloody message of these deaths lingered, Wayne ordered the entire Pennsylvania Line to circle around the dead soldiers.

  Anthony Wayne had no qualms about his action and wrote proudly to
Washington that “a liberal dose of niter [gunpowder] had done the trick.”8 Washington, who could be extremely tough when necessary, didn’t second-guess Wayne’s reprisals. Months later he told Wayne, “Sudden and exemplary punishments were certainly necessary upon the new appearance of that daring and mutinous spirit which convulsed the line last winter.”9 Washington had long believed that mutinies, if not stamped out vigorously, would only multiply.

  No sooner was the Pennsylvania mutiny suppressed than the contagion spread to the New Jersey Line in Pompton. As two hundred mutinous troops, giddy with liquor, headed for the state capital at Trenton, Washington decided he had had enough. He refused to negotiate with the rebels, demanded unconditional submission, and vowed to execute several of the leaders. To quell the uprising, he ordered five hundred or six hundred troops under Major General Robert Howe to march from West Point toward New Jersey. He also tried to impress upon the loyal troops “how dangerous to civil liberty the precedent is of armed soldiers dictating terms to their country.”10 Sending troops was a high-stakes gamble, since Washington didn’t know whether they would fire upon rowdy fellow soldiers, “but I thought it indispensable to bring the matter to an issue and risk all extremities,” he told Congress.11 On January 27 General Howe surrounded the mutineers, snuffed out the revolt, and made an example of several instigators. He lined up a firing squad composed of a dozen mutineers and ordered them to execute two mutinous sergeants. Three of the executioners were told to shoot at the head and three at the heart, while the other six stood ready to finish off victims that lay squirming on the ground. Once again Washington feared he would squander his authority if men disobeyed him, and he kept his distance from the scene at Ringwood, New Jersey. Once he heard that the New Jersey men had surrendered and repented, he took up their crusade to lobby politicians for better pay, food, and housing.