Treacherous Beauty

by Stephen Case

  If Burr’s memoirs are to be believed, Peggy felt comfortable enough with Prevost to unburden herself, to admit that she had been putting on a show. “As soon as they were left alone, Mrs. Arnold became tranquilized, and assured Mrs. Prevost that she was heartily sick of the theatrics she was exhibiting,” Burr recalled. “She stated that she had corresponded with the British commander—that she was disgusted with the American cause and those who had the management of public affairs—and that, through great persuasion and unceasing perseverance, she had ultimately brought the general into an arrangement to surrender West Point to the British.”437

  Burr’s memoirs, published posthumously in 1836 based on his recollections conveyed to longtime friend Matthew L. Davis, would renew a controversy over Peggy’s role that many thought had been settled. Burr said that Prevost told him about the conversation with Peggy, but members of the Shippen family denounced it as a falsehood by Burr, and responded with a story of their own.

  A Shippen family account, published six decades after Burr’s memoirs, accused him of making a crude sexual pass at Peggy while he offered his help after Arnold’s flight. “The tempter moved in serpent circles, ever smaller, around the intended victim,” and when Peggy rejected him, he invented his story as revenge, the family claimed.438

  Except that now we know that Peggy was indeed part of the plot. And the family claimed that Burr made his pass while taking Peggy to Philadelphia, but Franks was with Peggy at that time. Perhaps the Shippens’ eagerness to exonerate Peggy could have turned a mere suspicion about Burr into a full-fledged tale. It’s quite unlikely to be true.

  Which is not to say that Burr’s memoirs weren’t harsh. They were, even if one believed her guilty. The memoirs concluded that Peggy’s only motive was greed. “Mrs. Arnold was a gay, accomplished, artful, and extravagant woman. There is no doubt, therefore, that, for the purpose of acquiring the means of gratifying an inordinate vanity, she contributed greatly to the utter ruin of her husband, and thus doomed to everlasting infamy and disgrace all the fame he had acquired as a gallant soldier at the sacrifice of his blood.” A more charitable and accurate view would be to see Peggy as a helpmate whose plot would have succeeded if all of her accomplices—including her husband—had been as cunning and efficient as she was.

  When Peggy returned to Philadelphia in late September 1780, endorsements of her virtue by Washington, Lafayette, and Hamilton were fresh in the public mind. Her mad scene had established the story line of woman as wounded innocent. All would have been well, except that she was returning to a place where the politicians were writing the story lines, not reading them. To Peggy, Philadelphia was home. But it was also the epicenter of anger toward the British and all who would help them, especially Arnold.

  Patriots in Philadelphia hold a parade featuring a two-faced effigy of the traitor Arnold, with the devil behind him. Fotosearch/Getty Images

  While Peggy was en route home, Philadelphians paraded her husband in effigy. On that Thursday, a day after news of his treachery reached the city, a papier-mâché version of Arnold was marched to a gallows and hanged. Then Charles Willson Peale, the radical who painted portraits of many of the Founding Fathers and became known as the Artist of the Revolution, organized a more theatrical demonstration for the coming weekend.439 A life-size version of Arnold was built, with two faces that rotated. He was dressed in a military uniform and seated on a cart, reflecting the image that Philadelphians had of him as a carriage rider rather than a horse rider because of his wounded leg. In one hand he held a mask and in the other “a letter from Beelzebub, telling him that he had done all the mischief he could do, and now he must hang himself,” according to an account of the event in the Pennsylvania Packet.

  Joining Arnold on the cart was another elaborately constructed character—the devil, with a pitchfork and a purse of gold to tempt the traitor. In the front of the cart was a lantern with transparent paper on which was written a description of his crimes and a picture of the devil pulling Arnold into the flames. The cartoon Arnold says, “My dear sir, I have served you faithfully.” The devil responds, “And I’ll reward you.”

  The cart was escorted by men on horseback, lines of Continental officers, militiamen with candles in the muzzles of their muskets, and “sundry gentlemen.” Drummers and fife players performed “The Rogue’s March.” The effigy of Arnold was set aflame and reduced to ashes.

  The West Point treason had vindicated the suspicions of Reed, Matlack, and the others about the general’s questionable business deals and lavish spending while he was military governor of their city. William Church Houston, a member of Congress from New Jersey, reflected the common thinking that Arnold’s decision was based solely on greed. “His dissipated and expensive course of living in this city has so involved and impoverished him that money was probably very necessary to him,” Houston wrote.440

  Authorities confiscated the Arnolds’ property, including a “carriage almost new” and a “valuable negro man slave 22 years old.”441 Each sold for one hundred pounds sterling.

  Reed, who had been embarrassingly short of evidence when he pursued charges against Arnold, had all the excuse he needed to dig deeper. His government directed “an immediate seizure of all Arnold’s papers,” the Pennsylvania Packet reported. “Though no direct proof of his treachery was found, the papers disclose such a scene of baseness and prostitution of office and character as it is hoped this new world cannot parallel.”442 The papers revealed details of Arnold’s secret business deals, and also included a mean-spirited note that Peggy had once written to Arnold describing a concert attended by French officials and their ladies. Peggy’s brother-in-law Neddy Burd, who learned of the note’s contents, wrote: “She is free in her observations upon several of the ladies there and . . . has given them much offense.”443

  But the most devastating discovery in Reed’s search was an innocent-sounding letter from a source suddenly bathed in guilt. It was the Millinery Letter, written by John André, currently held prisoner as an accused spy. “André, under the mask of friendship and former acquaintance at Meschianzas and balls, opens a correspondence in August, 1779, with Mrs. Arnold, which has doubtless been improved to the dreadful and horrid issue we have described,” the Packet reported, assuming incorrectly that the Millinery Letter had been the first communication in the plot.

  The newspaper argued that Peggy bore some of the blame, and denounced “the dangerous sentiments so frequently avowed in this city, that female opinions are of no consequence in public matters.” The article even noted how women had influenced the history of ancient Rome, citing “the Clelias, the Cornelias, and Anias of antiquity.” Peggy had no interest in becoming a famous female in history, especially not under these circumstances. The systematic destruction of her correspondence by family and friends was designed to do just the opposite—to obliterate any evidence that might incriminate her, and in essence to obliterate her story.

  The Millinery Letter somehow survived and increased suspicions about Peggy, but it was hardly enough proof to justify the arrest of a woman who was so personally popular and who came from such a prominent family. It was certainly enough, however, to put tremendous pressure on that family, and to inspire demands that she be banished from the city.

  “The family has been in the deepest distress, and how long it may continue I cannot foresee,” wrote Neddy Burd. “If Mrs. Arnold shall be sent off to her base husband, it will be a heartbreaking thing.”444 Burd was convinced of Peggy’s innocence, and adopted a version of Franks’s too-flighty defense that might be called the too-timid defense. “The impossibility of so delicate and timorous a girl as poor Peggy in being in the least privy or concerned in so bold and adventurous a plan is great, and it is impossible she should be engaged in such a wicked one.”

  Peggy was an emotional wreck when she arrived back in Philadelphia, and surely that was not entirely an act. “Her spirits being quite exhaus
ted, she fell into a kind of stupor from which she is not yet recovered and has not shed a tear for six days past,” Burd reported. “She keeps [to] her room and is almost continually on the bed. Her peace of mind seems to be entirely destroyed.”

  The family tried to reach a deal with authorities: If they let her stay, she would pledge not to write to her husband, and she would turn over any correspondence from him to the Supreme Executive Council. Peggy’s father made an explicit promise to the council, and submitted a paper signed by Peggy attesting to it. He even appealed to the Council to save her soul, warning that if she were forced to live with Arnold, her mind would “be debased, and her welfare, even in another world, endangered by his example.”445

  His pleas fell on deaf ears. “The Council seemed for a considerable time disposed to favor our request, but at length have ordered her away,” Burd wrote.446

  The order came on October 27, 1780:

  The Council, taking into consideration the case of Mrs. Margaret Arnold (wife of Benedict Arnold, an attainted traitor, with the enemy at New York), whose residence in this city has become dangerous to the public safety; and this board being desirous, as much as possible, to prevent any correspondence and any intercourse being carried on with persons of disaffected character in this state and the enemy at New York, and especially with the said Benedict Arnold, therefore, resolved, That the said Margaret Arnold depart this State within fourteen days of the date hereof, and that she do not return again during the continuance of the present war.447

  And so Peggy was declared an enemy of the people, and she prepared to leave Philadelphia. There was only one world that she knew, and she had been cast out of it. She had no viable option but to join her husband in New York City.

  Had she intended to rejoin Arnold all along? Had her return to Philadelphia been a mere detour, an attempt to establish her innocence, with an eye toward a reunion with Arnold later? Her father, who seemed to be the closest person in her life if Arnold was not, had pleaded with her to forget about Arnold. “If she could stay, Mr. Shippen would not have wished her ever to be united to him again,” Burd wrote.448

  But she could not stay. And she would be united with Arnold. Because, in the end, Peggy really had no choice.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Three Fates

  To Peggy’s family, it was the bitterest of surrenders. Her mother, her siblings, and her cousins said their farewells to Peggy and her infant son. Her father endured a longer goodbye, helping his youngest daughter and his grandson into his carriage and taking them out of Philadelphia.

  Peggy was an exile, and her family was crushed by this fact. “I cannot bear the idea of her reunion,” wrote brother-in-law Neddy Burd. “The sacrifice was an immense one at her being married to him at all. It is much more so to be obliged, against her will, to go to the arms of a man who appears to be so very black.”449

  But Peggy was fading to black as well, at least as far as her family was concerned. She was leaving to start a new life in New York as the wife of an American traitor. Perhaps the only comfort for Peggy was the idea that her departure would make it easier on her family. Indeed, standing beside Peggy could be downright dangerous for the rest of the Shippens.

  Englishman George Grieve, a gossipy writer of the era, went so far as to suggest without any apparent evidence that Peggy’s two sisters—presumably the unmarried ones, Sarah and Mary—might have helped tempt Arnold toward evil. “Mrs. Arnold is said to be very handsome,” Grieve wrote, “but this I know, that her two sisters are charming women, and must have been very dangerous companions for a wavering mind, in the least susceptible of the most powerful of passions. But an apology for Arnold, on this supposition, is too generous for a mind so thoroughly base and unprincipled as his.”450

  Yet the Shippen family had survived scandals in the past, and would survive this one as well. About a decade after the conspiracy was exposed, Peggy’s father would be named to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and would ultimately serve as chief justice.451

  The Marquis de Chastellux, a major general with the French expeditionary force, attended a high-society party with Peggy’s cousin Nancy Shippen, daughter of Dr. William Shippen, less than a month after Peggy’s banishment. And he remarked on Americans’ lack of collective blame: “Thus we see that in America the crimes of individuals do not reflect upon their family; not only had Dr. Shippen’s brother [actually first cousin] given his daughter to the traitor Arnold, a short time before his desertion, but it is generally believed, that being himself a Tory, he had inspired his daughter with the same sentiments, and that the charms of this handsome woman contributed not a little to hasten to criminality a mind corrupted by avarice, before it felt the power of love.”452

  Peggy and her father found temporary respite from the whispers and speculation as they made the lonely and grim trip across New Jersey. He delivered her to the British fort at Paulus Hook (now Jersey City, New Jersey), across the Hudson from Manhattan. Arnold was not there on November 14, 1780, to greet them, since it was too close to the front lines and the British could not risk having their new defector captured. It is difficult to imagine that Arnold would have looked forward to facing Peggy’s father at that time anyway. After making her farewell, Peggy and her son crossed into New York City and were reunited with Arnold within the hour.453

  Meanwhile, Peggy’s sister-in-law Hannah had left Philadelphia for the family’s house in New Haven, taking along Arnold’s son Henry and summoning Arnold’s two oldest sons, Benedict and Richard, from their school in Maryland.454

  Arnold joined the British army and was charged with raising a Loyalist regiment. He was given the rank of brigadier general, a demotion from his position as major general in the Continental Army. Still, it was more than many British officers thought he deserved, though they were discreet about where they expressed that opinion. Official support for Arnold was part of the British face-saving effort in the wake of John André’s capture. And there were those who believed that this brilliant tactician might prove useful to a British military leadership that sometimes seemed timid about leaving the island of Manhattan.455

  There was yet a third reason for the British in New York to express pleasure in Arnold’s arrival: To some it signaled the death throes of the independence movement. According to a common saying in the city at the time, “The ship must be near sinking when the rats are leaving it.”456 Among the pro-British officials who allied themselves with the defector was New York chief justice William Smith, whose brother Joshua had inadvertently helped derail the West Point conspiracy. Justice Smith thought Arnold’s presence might prod General Clinton into a more lively pursuit of the war.

  Together Smith and Arnold wrote two open letters to Americans, published in the Royal Gazette. The title of the second one fairly advertised its contents: “Proclamation by Brigadier General Arnold to the officers and soldiers of the Continental Army who have the real interest of the country at heart, and who are determined to be no longer the tools and dupes of Congress and of France.”457 But one thing that title didn’t signal was the virulent anti-Catholic pitch he would make. Referring to members of Congress attending the funeral for Don Juan de Miralles, a Spanish envoy in Philadelphia, Arnold produced some paranoid prose: “Do you know that the eye which guides this pen lately saw your mean and profligate Congress at mass for the soul of a Roman Catholic in purgatory and participating in the rites of a church against whose anti-Christian corruptions your pious ancestors would have witnessed with their blood?”458

  Religious appeals by a man like Arnold were unlikely to hold sway, but he also made promises of attractive pay and commensurate rank for those who joined his new Loyalist regiment, the American Legion. Arnold seemed to think other high-ranking members of the rebel army might, like himself, have a price.

  Benjamin Tallmadge, whose intervention had prevented André’s delivery into Arnold’s hands after his capture, received a le
tter from the traitor inviting him to defect with “as many men as you can bring over with you.”459 “As I know you to be a man of sense,” Arnold wrote, “I am convinced you are by this time fully of opinion that the real interest and happiness of America consists in a reunion with Great Britain.” Tallmadge gave the letter to Washington, and described himself as “mortified” that Arnold would consider him open-minded about treason.

  But Arnold was such a poor judge of character that he even thought the commander in chief could be recruited. “A title offered to General Washington might not prove unacceptable,” Arnold wrote to Lord George Germain, Britain’s secretary of state for the colonies.460

  In the end, Arnold’s recruitment efforts proved underwhelming. As one British officer wrote, Arnold’s goal was to “raise a regiment of as great scoundrels as himself, if he can find them.” But as it turned out, he couldn’t.461

  Despite doubts about Arnold’s value to the British, his new government kept its side of the bargain. He was paid six thousand pounds for failure, as agreed by Clinton and André. But Arnold kept pressing his offensive by asking for ten thousand.462 “When you consider the sacrifices I have made . . . the sum is a trifling object to the public, though of consequence to me, who have a large family that look up to me for support and protection,” Arnold wrote Clinton.463 The final sum granted was the six thousand pounds, plus 315 pounds in expenses. That is roughly equivalent to one million dollars in today’s currency.464 The British—unlike the Americans—paid their high-ranking officers with regularity, so Arnold would receive an additional 650 pounds a year in military pay, and half of that when he retired.

  Arnold’s three eldest sons also benefited. Benedict, age thirteen, was commissioned in November as a British ensign. The next October, twelve-year-old Richard and nine-year-old Henry won commissions as lieutenants in their father’s regiment, though they were not expected to serve immediately. All three were entitled to salaries or half-pay pensions for life. Yet Arnold was never satisfied. He wrangled for nearly five years over various details, including his cockamamie claim that the British should pay him extra because his defection had cost him a chance for the rebel command in South Carolina. Arnold noted that the man who got the job instead, Nathanael Greene, had received twenty thousand pounds from Virginia and the Carolinas. Arnold thought the money should have been his, and he wanted the British to make good on it. Never mind that Greene had been Washington’s first choice for the appointment anyway, and that Greene spent much of the money to supply his army. The British said no.