by Stephen Case
There was, however, plenty of despondency upstairs. Peggy’s episode of insanity showed no signs of letting up. Dr. Eustis was so alarmed by her behavior that he pleaded with Varick and Franks to fetch Arnold. In a quaint eighteenth-century diagnosis, the doctor declared that if the general didn’t return immediately, “the woman would die.”
Thinking that one way to alert Washington to the overall crisis—if he didn’t know about it already—would be to show him Peggy’s condition, Varick told the commander in chief that his old family friend from Philadelphia was in distress and that she had asked to see him. Varick escorted him to Peggy’s bedroom, then told her that General Washington was paying her a visit.
Clutching her baby to her breast, Peggy responded that the man before her was not Washington.413 Washington assured her it was him. “No,” Peggy said, “that is not General Washington. That is the man who was a-going to assist Colonel Varick in killing my child.” Peggy again announced that Arnold had gone up through the ceiling. “There, there, there,” she said, pointing skyward.
It is not clear whether Peggy was in the same state of undress in the presence of Washington that she had been with Varick. If she was, perhaps the Father of His Country was too discreet to have ever mentioned it.
When Washington went downstairs, he resisted making a general announcement that Arnold had betrayed the country. Only a few trusted aides such as Hamilton and Lafayette knew. Varick and Franks were left to their deep suspicions. Washington simply announced, “Mrs. Arnold is sick and General Arnold is away. We must therefore take our dinner without them.”414 Even under normal circumstances, Washington had a reputation as a miserable person to eat a meal with, owing to his inability to manage small talk. This dinner, with the future of the American Revolution in the balance, was even more excruciating. As Lafayette recalled: “Gloom and distrust seemed to pervade every mind.”415
Washington soon received word from Hamilton that Arnold had escaped. Hamilton’s dispatch included letters that Arnold had written to Washington and to Peggy from the safety of the Vulture. The letter to Washington cast Arnold’s treachery in high-minded terms:
The heart which is conscious of its own rectitude cannot attempt to palliate a step which the world may censure as wrong. I have ever acted from a principle of love to my country since the commencement of the present unhappy contest between Great Britain and the Colonies. The same principle of love to my country actuates my present conduct, however it may appear inconsistent to the world, who very seldom judge right of any man’s actions.
I have no favor to ask for myself; I have too often experienced the ingratitude of my country to attempt it. But from the known humanity of your Excellency, I am induced to ask your protection for Mrs. Arnold from every insult and injury that the mistaken vengeance of my country may expose her to. It ought to fall only on me. She is as good and as innocent as an angel and is incapable of doing wrong. I beg that she may be permitted to return to her friends in Philadelphia or to come to me, as she may choose. From your Excellency I have no fear on her account, but she may suffer from the mistaken fury of her country.416
Arnold also threw in a good word for his aides Varick and Franks and his friend Joshua Hett Smith, saying they were unaware of his conspiracy. But near the end of his letter, Arnold became a bit presumptuous. He asked Washington to send his clothes to him, offering to pay for them if necessary. And he signed the letter in a customary but absurd manner: “your Excellency’s most obedient humble servant.”
Many histories have reported that Washington forwarded Arnold’s letter to Peggy unopened, which would indicate good manners to some and military incompetence to others. But in fact the letter was read by Washington’s staff if not by the general himself. A copy written in the hand of Washington’s secretary James McHenry resides in the Library of Congress. And it’s clear that Arnold expected his letter to be read by others:
Thou loveliest and best of women,
Words are wanting to express my feelings and distress on your account, who are incapable of doing wrong yet are exposed to suffer wrong. I have requested the Excellency General Washington to take you under his protection and permit you to go to your friends in Philadelphia—or to come to me. I am at present incapable of giving advice. Follow your own intentions. But do not forget that I shall be miserable until we meet. Adieu—kiss my dear boy for me. God almighty bless and protect you.417
Arnold then offered a postscript: “Write me one line if possible to ease my anxious heart.” Peggy indeed did so, in a letter dispatched to the British commander Clinton about a week later. Its contents are unknown.418
With Arnold’s betrayal confirmed, Washington took decisive steps to protect West Point by calling in trusted units from nearby states and appointing Nathanael Greene as the forts’ commander. Even before Washington’s order, Hamilton had sent a message to Greene urging him to send troops to West Point. Washington placed Varick and Franks under arrest as a precaution. The two Arnold aides asked for official proceedings to clear their names, and indeed they were ultimately found blameless. Arnold had fooled them, just as he had fooled Washington.
And Peggy had fooled them too. All the men around Peggy seemed to unite around Varick’s assessment of her as a “poor distressed, unhappy, frantic, and miserable lady.” But had she truly taken leave of her senses?
Peggy had certainly thrown her share of fits, and some kind of emotional reaction to her husband’s news seemed completely understandable that Monday morning. But this episode was the mother of all hysterical fits, so hallucinatory and over the top that it’s difficult to believe it was a condition rather than a calculated piece of theater. And the fact that it didn’t start until Washington had left to inspect West Point strongly suggests that it was a distraction aimed to give Arnold time to make good his escape.
Her husband had fled with the help of a barge and nine crewmen. Peggy had no similar means. She was stuck at Robinson House with her infant son. She had no choice but improvisation, no weapons but her wits. And so she brilliantly took advantage of gender expectations: The men around her were obligated to show chivalric concern for her suffering, and to avoid any rude questions about her husband’s conspiracy. She played her role, and they played theirs. For Peggy, the Mad Scene was a great achievement, a virtuoso performance.
The next morning found the wife of the traitor subdued and more or less back to her usual self. She claimed not to remember what had happened the day before. While she was busy entertaining bedside visitors such as Hamilton and Lafayette who served as witnesses to her distress, John André was taken to Robinson House by a heavy guard under torrents of rain. There is no indication that Peggy saw him or even knew he was there. He was escorted to West Point later that day.419
There is no documentation that a Continental Army official ever asked Peggy a single question about whether she was aware of the conspiracy or had assisted it. Lafayette’s account of that morning instead hints of a certain sexual fascination:
The unhappy Mrs. Arnold did not know a word of this conspiracy; her husband told her before going away that he was flying never to come back, and he left her lying unconscious. When she came to herself, she fell into frightful convulsions, and completely lost her reason. We did everything we could to quiet her; but she looked upon us as the murderers of her husband, and it was impossible to restore her to her senses. The horror with which her husband’s conduct has inspired her, and a thousand other feelings, make her the most unhappy of women.
P.S. She has recovered her reason this morning and as, you know, I am upon very good terms with her, she sent for me to go up to her chamber. General Washington and everyone else here sympathize warmly with this estimable woman, whose face and whose youthfulness make her so interesting. It would be exceedingly painful to General Washington if she were not treated with the greatest kindness. . . . As for myself, you know that I have always been fond of her, and at t
his moment she interests me intensely. We are certain she knew nothing of the plot.420
Washington reportedly declared that he had “every reason to believe she is innocent, and requests all persons to treat her with that humanity and tenderness due to her sex and virtues.”421 The official story was established before Peggy left Robinson House: One of America’s finest flowers had been betrayed by the dastardly Arnold.
While Hamilton was no master of psychology, he was adept at publicity. His letter to his friend John Laurens about Arnold’s treachery was published in American newspapers, increasing Hamilton’s fame while providing a prominent defense for Peggy. “It was impossible not to have been touched with her situation,” Hamilton wrote. “Everything affecting in female tears, or in the misfortunes of beauty; everything pathetic in the wounded tenderness of a wife, or in the apprehensive fondness of a mother; and, till I have reason to change the opinion, I will add, everything amiable in suffering innocence conspired to make her an object of sympathy to all who were present.”422 Even in a letter to Elizabeth Schuyler, the woman he would marry in a few months, Hamilton seemed a bit too interested in Mrs. Arnold. “She received us in bed with every circumstance that would interest our sympathy,” Hamilton wrote. “Her sufferings were so eloquent that I wished myself her brother to have a right to become her defender.”423
Peggy inspired that in men. It was one of her many great gifts. Another was her resilience. The woman who shrieked about her husband flying through the ceiling with hot irons in his head was impressively down-to-earth in a note she wrote to Varick the very next day: “You will be so obliging as to receive any monies which may be due to General Arnold and transmit the same to me.”424
CHAPTER 15
Pariah of Philadelphia
In an era when female intelligence and talents were often dismissed, women held one advantage: They were rarely suspected of elaborate crimes.
Peggy’s friend and protector David Franks believed she was too nervous and flighty to be trusted by Arnold as an accomplice. “In truth,” he said, “she was subject to occasional paroxysms of physical indisposition, attended by nervous debility, during which she would give utterance to anything and everything on her mind. This was a fact well known amongst us of the general’s family; so much so as to cause us to be scrupulous of what we told her or said in her hearing.”425 Franks offered a second reason why Arnold wouldn’t have involved her in the plot: “He was, moreover, too well aware of her warm patriotic feelings. You know . . . how completely she was an American at that important period. . . . I can aver solemnly she was totally ignorant of his schemes.”
The truth was that Peggy had socialized with British officers, maintained close friendships with outspoken Loyalists such as Becky Franks, and become an enemy of Philadelphia’s radical independence movement. Yet one of her intimates believed that she was such an ardent Patriot that she would have turned in her husband for talking with the British? What a testament to Peggy’s powers of personal manipulation.
Others embraced the too-flighty-for-treason argument. “The surviving members of the lady’s family, some of them her contemporaries, are satisfied that the texture of her mind did not qualify her to be the confidante of such perilous secrets,” a journal article in 1837 declared.426 A century after the events, her husband’s biographer Isaac N. Arnold defended Peggy with the too-virtuous argument: “If Arnold had disclosed his plans to her,” he wrote, “she would have been much more likely, prompted alike by her love and her clear perception of right, to have tried to have saved him from the commission of a fearful crime and a terrible blunder.”427
Many judged her to be innocent using even simpler logic: She was a woman; therefore, she couldn’t have done it. Elizabeth Ellet, the leading nineteenth-century biographer of revolutionary women, wrote that she was “utterly rejecting” the idea that Peggy could have instigated the plot, and declared that “all common principles of human action” were opposed to it.428
But really, the only way Peggy could have been ignorant of the plot is if she had tried hard to be oblivious; if she had passed on secret correspondence without any thought and written to André with nothing more in mind than sewing supplies. On the contrary, Peggy wanted to know every detail of everything in her life. She upbraided Arnold for not sharing enough court-martial information with her. And in her later letters to her father, her command of financial nuances is awe-inspiring. Peggy was many things, but she was no dupe. She was, however, perfectly cast as the suffering spouse.
When the plot was exposed, American diplomat John Jay wrote from Madrid: “All the world here are cursing Arnold, and pitying his wife.”429 “Poor Mrs. Arnold!” exclaimed Robert Morris, a family friend of Peggy who now felt free to denounce her husband. “Was there ever such an infernal villain!”430
Washington gave Peggy the choice of crossing the battle lines with her child to join her husband in New York City or returning to her family in Philadelphia. She chose Philadelphia, a decision that cemented her admirers’ view that she was true to the American cause and appalled by her husband’s betrayal.
The reasons behind her decision were never explained. In many cases when Loyalists went over to the British army, they left their wives behind to try to secure their property. It didn’t always work out well—Joseph and Grace Galloway were a stark example—but sometimes it did. No one can say whether finances were a factor in Peggy’s decision. Her family may well have been the deciding factor. The house on Fourth Street may have seemed like the only haven left.
But in choosing Philadelphia, was she rejecting Arnold? After all, she was only twenty years old. A divorce was virtually impossible under the laws of the time, but she could have simply stayed away from the man who had abandoned her at Robinson House. She could have built a separate life, and no one in America would have judged her harshly for it. Was that her intention? In the end, her only option would be to rejoin Arnold, but she couldn’t have known that on the rainy Wednesday when she left Robinson House, where her greatest hopes had died. Hamilton and the others were probably sad to see her go. “She experienced the most delicate attentions and every friendly office, till her departure for Philadelphia,” he wrote.431
Peggy, ever conscious of the little kindnesses bestowed on her, left the residents of Robinson House “a little tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, Madeira wine, and some salmon and old spirits, as well as some biscuits of our private stores for our use,” Varick recalled.432
Though Franks was technically under arrest, he was assigned to accompany Peggy to Philadelphia—another sign that Washington believed the plot was isolated and Arnold’s aides were uninvolved. As Peggy headed for Philadelphia with her baby, nurse, servant, and Franks, the news of her husband’s treason preceded her. People along the way treated Peggy and her party as lepers, refusing to share supplies or shelter. The travelers were forced to push ahead through a rainstorm.
In Kakiat, New York, they finally encountered a man named Reed—most likely no relation to Peggy’s enemy Joseph Reed in Philadelphia—who welcomed them for the night.433 “Mr. Reed is the only man who would take us in at this place or give our horses anything to eat,” Franks wrote Varick. “We got here, I very wet, Mrs. Arnold, thank God, in tolerable spirits; and I have hopes to get them home without any return of her distress in so violent a degree.”434
Even during her miserable journey, Peggy continued to tend her relationships with powerful Patriots. Franks wrote Varick: “She expresses her gratitude to you in lively terms and requests you make her acknowledgements to his Excellency, to the Marquis, and to Hamilton, and indeed to all the gentlemen for their great politeness and humanity.”
The next night’s stop was at the Hermitage, an estate near Paramus, New Jersey. Peggy was hosted by Theodosia Prevost (pronounced PRE-vo), a woman thirteen years her senior but in many ways strikingly similar.435 Like Peggy, Prevost was a fifth-generation American born to privilege. Th
e well-read Prevost spoke fluent French and proved herself the intellectual equal of the prominent men who surrounded her. Like Peggy, she had married young. At age seventeen, Prevost wed a Swiss-born lieutenant colonel serving in the British army in farflung locations such as the southern states and the Caribbean. Like Peggy, she achieved social standing with officers on both sides of the war. While married to a man loyal to the crown, she made close friends with champions of independence, such as James Madison, who would become president, and Aaron Burr, who would become both vice president and her husband. And like Peggy, Prevost was a survivor. Madison praised her “gaiety in the midst of affliction.”436
By the time Peggy stopped at Hermitage in late September 1780, Prevost probably had started her love affair with Burr, though her marriage wouldn’t end until the next year, when her husband died of yellow fever in Jamaica.
