Treacherous Beauty

by Stephen Case

  Though many Americans, both Patriots and Loyalists, viewed the Revolutionary War as a battle to the death, some politicians back in Britain considered it a sideshow. They fixated on the Caribbean, a sugar-producing area that was more profitable than the thirteen colonies at the time—though with far less potential, as it turned out. The British Empire so valued its sugar-related holdings that it sent five thousand troops to the Caribbean to fend off the French and three thousand more to Florida to ward off the Spanish. Such actions sapped the forces available to General Clinton and encouraged him to maintain a timid, largely defensive posture in New York City while the Continental Army recovered from its near-fatal wounds.264

  Meanwhile, Continental naval hero John Paul Jones captured the British man-of-war Serapis off the English coast, an exploit that had little strategic importance but served as a propaganda coup both for the Continental government and for opposition members of Parliament.

  British opinion makers were increasingly questioning the war strategy of King George and the parliamentary majority. In early 1779, radical preacher Richard Price declared in a sermon: “A third of our empire is lost. . . . We see powerful enemies continuing against us, our commerce languishing, and our debts and taxes . . . likely soon to crush us.”265 America was no longer an impudent child to be punished. It was “a distant country, once united to us,” a place where every citizen owned “a book on law and government, to enable him to understand his civil rights” as well as “a musket to enable him to defend these rights.”

  The war increasingly became a struggle for the British to save face rather than a mission to quash a rebellion. British politician Horace Walpole assessed the stakes if his nation lost the war: “We shall be reduced to a miserable little island; and from a mighty empire sink into as insignificant a country as Denmark or Sardinia!”266

  No matter the downcast feelings among many subjects of the king, the times were propitious for John André. The man who had risen steadily on the strength of his charm and abilities had made amazing leaps in his career since saying goodbye to Peggy Shippen and her friends in Philadelphia.

  Returning with the British army to New York, André seemed to have dim prospects at first. His hero, General Howe, had gone home to England, replaced by a Howe rival, General Clinton. André’s commander, “No Flint” Grey, was rumored to be leaving for the Caribbean, inspiring André to write to his uncle that he was “on the fidgets and not without anxiety.”267 Grey did indeed leave, but for England, and André was assigned as an aide to Clinton, a job where he could be expected to languish.

  Clinton, the son of an admiral, showed skill at military strategy but often feuded with the colleagues he most needed to charm, such as Howe and the leading naval commanders. Standoffish, jealous, insecure, and easily offended, Clinton took a surprisingly warm interest in André, a Howe loyalist.268

  The two became close friends. At lunchtime they would leave the British military headquarters at the Archibald Kennedy mansion at One Broadway and ride their horses to a handball court for a game. They also enjoyed billiards and bowling, as well as foxhunts and horseback rides in the country.

  As other aides fell out of favor, André gained increasing trust and responsibility until he rose to the rank of major and served as acting adjutant general, Clinton’s chief of staff. Writing home, he took stock: “You may well conceive how much I am flattered at being called in the space of three years from a subaltern in the Fusiliers to the employment I hold and the favor in which I live with the commander in chief.”269

  Though André was generally well liked, his ascent was not well received. Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Kemble, a Loyalist who stepped aside to avoid the prospect of serving under André, complained in his journal about Clinton’s “unheard-of promotion to the first department of boys not three years in service, his neglect of old officers, and his wavering, strange, mad behavior.”270 Some Loyalists speculated that André’s career advances were helped by sexual advances—that he was having an affair with Clinton. Historians have sometimes sought to identify the “closeted” gays among the bright lights of the past, and André’s name has come up. But it’s a tough case to make. Certainly, descriptions of him seem to lend some evidence. While a young man in Germany, André was praised by German scientist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg as “a man of nearly womanlike modesty and gentleness.”271 Later, a key figure in the Arnold conspiracy, Joshua Hett Smith, said André impressed him with “the softness of his manners.”272 But there is no solid evidence that André was gay, or that his relationship with Clinton was sexual.

  André, who was circumspect in his love life, was linked at this time to a New York woman known as “Miss K,” who may have been the much-admired Kitty Van Horn. Peggy Shippen’s friend Becky Franks, who had moved to New York, observed that Van Horn had “the finest hair I ever saw” but that “her teeth are beginning to decay, which is the case of most New York girls after eighteen.”273

  Meanwhile Clinton, a widower, had a longtime mistress who served as his housekeeper and bore his children. She was an Irishwoman married to a British soldier who benefited from his wife’s services to Clinton—an arrangement similar to General Howe’s with Mrs. Loring.274

  There is a simple explanation for André’s rise that has nothing to do with sex: He was an energetic administrator who knew how to charm those above him and who found, in Clinton, a superior who was desperate for an aide he could trust. André wasn’t a scheming sycophant—he was a bright young man dedicated to the cause who could be counted on to get things done in difficult circumstances. And indeed, there was no manual for the present situation in New York.

  With Philadelphia and Boston both in rebel hands, Loyalists from across the North fled to New York and the protection of Clinton’s army. The families of arriving British soldiers also swelled the population, as did runaway slaves lured by British promises of freedom. The city’s population, which was as low as five thousand after Patriots fled the British invaders in 1776, grew to at least twenty-five thousand with the Loyalist and slave arrivals.275

  Up to a quarter of the city’s housing was destroyed in a fire shortly after the British occupation began, leaving many residents living in the squalor of tent cities. The influx of the moneyed classes caused prices for food and other essentials to skyrocket, adding to the misery of the poor. Profiteering and graft pushed the people further into desperation.

  Clinton tried to impose price controls with limited success, but his sympathy did not inspire any personal sacrifices of note. The commander in chief had four New York residences, perhaps in part to thwart would-be kidnappers, and he kept his kitchens well-stocked with beef, veal, turkey, mutton, crabs, tripe, eggs, and sweetbreads. He ordered brandy in ten-gallon lots.276

  André also found New York hospitable. When he first arrived, he stayed with other soldiers in the home of a Dutch family whose daughters gossiped about them. André surprised the daughters by delivering a lecture—in Dutch—about good manners.277 Moving on to more luxurious quarters, André found himself a welcome guest at dinners, dances, concerts, and card games hosted by Loyalists and high-ranking officers. He once regaled a dinner party with his description of a dream in which various rebels showed up as animals. The judge who had ordered the execution of the two Philadelphia Quakers was a bloodhound, while one enemy politician was a monkey and another was a serpent. The entire Continental Army was a timid hare.

  While André was making new friends in New York, he had not forgotten about the ladies of Philadelphia. Despite the battle lines, André and his friends managed to correspond regularly with the Meschianza ladies—just one illustration of how “talking to the enemy” was a well-practiced art in this war. Such flirtations with single men would have been improper for Peggy Shippen as a married lady, but her friend Peggy Chew was certainly involved in a sort of “birthday club” with André and company.

  Peggy Chew and her sister
Nancy described the long-distance dalliances while having tea with Grace Galloway, an in-law of the Shippens who was the wife of leading Loyalist Joseph Galloway. The sisters said André and five other British officers “sent them cards and messages and that they kept the birthdays of six of them by meeting together and drinking their healths in a glass of wine, and that the gentlemen kept theirs in the same manner.” Grace Galloway, who recorded the conversation in her diary, added: “They bragged so much of their intimacy that I was sick of it.”278

  André continued another of his favorite pursuits from Philadelphia. Though short of time, he volunteered at the Theatre Royal, where fellow officers put on such plays as Shakespeare’s Richard III and Macbeth and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. André painted backdrops, wrote prologues, and took minor roles.

  But his role in real life was quite major, and often all-consuming. Praised for his diplomacy in a politically poisonous atmosphere, André maintained an aggressive attitude about prosecuting the war while holding fast to civilized norms. In a report about plundering by British and Hessian troops, André pointed to the sorry sight of “soldiers loaded with household utensils which they have taken for the wanton pleasure of spoil and have thrown aside soon afterwards.” While some soldiers were following the rules and suffering privation, others were feasting on what they stole, creating a morale problem in the army. And the king’s troops were stealing not only from suspected rebel sympathizers but from Loyalists as well. André denounced this, but showed himself to be practical: He recommended that a board consider restitution—for the Loyalists only.279

  André’s efficiency at correspondence made him the go-to person at the One Broadway headquarters—“the only man of abilities,” according to one Loyalist—but the work took a toll on him.280 André, who explained his illness only as a “treacherous complaint,” was twice sent off for rest, once to Oyster Bay on Long Island and another time to one of Clinton’s country houses closer to the city.

  Despite his physical problems and crushing workload, André retained an optimism about the war. While Clinton’s correspondence was bluntly negative about how the war was going, André wrote that the Americans seemed ready to sue for peace and were already sick of their alliance with the French.

  In April 1779, André received the assignment that would end him. Clinton appointed him director of his secret service—his spy chief. André had virtually no training in such activities, and no particular qualifications except a resourceful mind and a gift for stagecraft. Two weeks after he became spymaster, he received two visitors at One Broadway. They carried a message from Philadelphia, from the spouse of a friend of his.

  Peggy Shippen’s new husband, the Continental Army’s most ferocious warrior, was ready to betray the cause of independence, if André was interested in helping him and his wife.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Dance of Deceit

  At first they didn’t know how, where, or whether they would strike. But all three saw tremendous potential in their secret partnership, so much potential that they were willing to risk their lives. Three of North America’s most prominent people transformed themselves into shadowy conspirators known by a variety of code names. André would be called Lothario, Joseph Andrews, or John Anderson. Arnold was Monk, Gustavus, or Mr. Moore. Peggy was simply the Lady, or Mrs. Moore.281

  The three of them enlisted the help of confederates both intentional and oblivious, and in May 1779 they set about to deal a death blow to the American Revolution.

  Arnold took the first step when he summoned Joseph Stansbury, a Philadelphia china dealer who had helped furnish the Penn Mansion after the general became military governor. A London-born Loyalist known for his fashionable clothes and his poetry, Stansbury used his social skills to avoid persecution by the rebels despite his firm friendship with the British general Howe. In 1776 Stansbury had gone so far as to pen a bit of verse welcoming Howe to America:

  He comes, he comes, the hero comes

  Sound, sound your trumpets, beat your drums

  From port to port let cannon roar

  Howe’s welcome to this western shore.282

  Later, when the British occupied Philadelphia, Stansbury helped supervise the policing of the city and ran Howe’s lottery to benefit the poor. But when the British left, Stansbury took an oath of allegiance to the rebels. Somehow that was considered enough.283

  The Shippens knew Stansbury, and it seems likely that Peggy recommended that he be approached. The Arnolds’ faith in the china dealer was well founded: Stansbury enthusiastically embraced their plot, even if he didn’t always embrace their rules. Whether Peggy attended that first meeting with Stansbury and Arnold is unclear. Describing the encounter fifteen years later, Stansbury left Peggy out of it, as her allies and admirers often seemed to do. “General Arnold sent for me,” Stansbury wrote, “and, after some general conversation, opened his political sentiments respecting the war carrying on between Great Britain and America, declaring his abhorrence of a separation of the latter from the former as a measure that would be ruinous to both.”284

  Arnold said he was ready to take any action necessary to bring down the “then usurped authority of Congress,” either by defecting immediately to the British or embarking on “some concerted plan” with the British commander Clinton. Although finances were a vital concern to Arnold, he soft-pedaled his monetary interest at this time, asking Stansbury to inquire about what the British would pay him but making no firm demands. The question that Arnold said he most wanted answered was whether the British were in America for the long haul—whether they were committed to fight until victory. He asked Stansbury to put nothing in writing, and to take his entreaty directly to a British officer in New York named John André.

  Why André? Peggy may not have yet learned that he was Britain’s spymaster, but she almost certainly knew that he was highly placed with Clinton. And she knew that the days of parlor games and dances and friendship in Philadelphia had forged a trust that would be vital if the plot was to come to fruition.

  Arnold had another instruction for Stansbury: He was to share his secret with no one but André. Stansbury promptly ignored that by confiding in a New York–based Anglican minister and physician, the Reverend Jonathan Odell, who, like Stansbury, enjoyed penning Loyalist poetry, such as:

  Long as sun and moon endure

  Britain’s throne shall stand secure

  And great George’s royal line

  There in splendid honour shine

  Ever sacred be to mirth

  The day that gave our monarch birth!285

  What gave Stansbury and Odell mirth was the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the crown and dabble in cloak-and-dagger intrigue at the same time. The two showed up at British headquarters in New York on May 10, 1779, and asked for a private audience with André.286

  The spy chief was surprised by their news, to say the least. Surprised, and intensely interested. André wrote a memorandum to Stansbury, to be shared with Arnold, explaining what the British were willing to promise and what they most desired. First of all, André wrote, royal forces had no intention of leaving America; “on the contrary, powerful means are expected for accomplishing our ends.” Second, Arnold could feel confident that if he helped the British, “our liberality will be evinced.” André avoided numbers, though he said vaguely that there would be “rewards equal at least to what such service can be estimated at.”287 André said the rewards would be especially sweet if Arnold helped the British “defeat a numerous body” or assisted them in “seizing an obnoxious band of men.” The use of the word “obnoxious” has prompted modern speculation that André may have referred to the group most annoying to the British, that is, Congress. But perhaps André only meant the word in the purely Latin sense, describing any group that was “harmful.”288

  Also on André’s wish list were details on troop deployments and moveme
nts, locations of gunpowder, original military dispatches, recruitment of other defectors, and efforts to secure prisoner exchanges. André was especially interested in recovering the thousands of British soldiers who had surrendered at Saratoga—troops whose capture was largely a result of Arnold’s bravery. Conspicuous by its absence was any suggestion that Arnold immediately cross the lines and join the British army. For now, he was more valuable to the British while wearing a Continental Army uniform.

  This first message from André referred to Arnold as Monk, a code name chosen by the general to compare himself to George Monk, a seventeenth-century British general under Oliver Cromwell who had turned against Parliament and helped restore the monarchy. Peggy was the Lady, whose meaning seems innocent enough, despite the temptation to note that one of André’s theater productions in New York featured Lady Macbeth, another woman with elaborate schemes.

  André would communicate with the Arnolds through Stansbury, using a code. As a key, each side would have a copy of the same edition of the same book—Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England—and they would use three sets of numbers as code for every word they wanted to use. The first number would signify the page on which the word appeared, the second would signify the line, and the third would signify the placement of the word on the line. They also would use invisible ink to write messages “interlined” between the lines of a normal-looking letter. If the invisible ink was meant to be revealed by being heated over a fire, the letter F would be on the message. If the ink was to be revealed by acid, the letter A would be used. André suggested that such letters contain innocuous information. For example, “an old woman’s health may be the subject.”

  This very first correspondence made clear that André knew, without talking to either Arnold or his wife, that Peggy Shippen was important to the plot, and that she could be counted on if a second channel was needed. “The Lady might write to me at the same time with one of her intimates,” he instructed them. “She will guess who I mean, the latter remaining ignorant of interlining and sending the letter.” That intimate was Peggy Chew. “I will write myself to the friend to give occasion for a reply,” André explained. “The letters may talk of the Meschianza and other nonsense.”