Treacherous Beauty

by Stephen Case

  According to historian Carl Van Doren, Arnold made more money from the war than any other American officer. But Patriots scorned the bounty of his treason. Benjamin Franklin wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette: “Judas sold only one man, Arnold three million. Judas got for his man thirty pieces of silver, Arnold not a halfpenny a head. A miserable bargainer.”465

  Meanwhile, Peggy also was trying to track down every last cent owed to her. In mid-September, André had sent two hundred pounds in earnest money to cover “expenses” to the Arnolds in Philadelphia via a courier. But Peggy had already left for Robinson House, and the money didn’t reach them. Ever the hardheaded money manager, Peggy hunted down and collected the two hundred pounds in New York City in January 1781.

  Peggy, Arnold, and little Edward, who was nicknamed Neddy in the Shippen tradition, settled in a stately town house in Lower Manhattan next to British headquarters and across from Bowling Green Park.466 The notorious couple endured stares and rude judgments, but they had their money, and they had their safety.

  Not so for the third figure in the grand conspiracy. On the same day that Peggy left Robinson House for Philadelphia, John André was taken from West Point to Stony Point by barge, accompanied by Benjamin Tallmadge.467 André, with his usual geniality, struck up a conversation with Tallmadge as they floated downriver. The prisoner pointed out the spot where the British would have landed, and described how he would have taken personal command of the invasion force, leading it up a mountain and around to the back of Fort Putnam to overwhelm the garrison. “The animation with which he gave the account, I recollect, perfectly delighted me, for he seemed as if he were entering the fort, sword in hand,” Tallmadge wrote.468

  After they transferred to horseback for the rest of the journey to Washington’s headquarters in Tappan, New York, André asked Tallmadge how he thought he would be treated by Washington, or by a military tribunal if there was one.

  By Tallmadge’s written account, this is what he told André: “I had a much-loved classmate in Yale College by the name of Nathan Hale who entered the army in the year 1775. Immediately after the Battle of Long Island, General Washington wanted information respecting the strength, position, and probable movements of the enemy. Captain Hale tendered his services, went over to Brooklyn, and was taken just as he was passing the outposts of the enemy on his return. Do you remember the sequel of this story?”

  “Yes,” André said. “He was hanged as a spy. But you surely do not consider his case and mine alike.”

  “Yes,” said Tallmadge, “precisely similar, and similar will be your fate.”

  Washington, now at Tappan, received letters from Clinton and Arnold arguing that André had operated under a flag of truce in good faith, and that all his actions had been at the direction of a senior American officer—Arnold. Hence, they said, André should be freed immediately. But Washington was not buying it. To help him determine André’s fate, he appointed an advisory board that included Knox, Lafayette, and Robert Howe, the former commander of West Point who had presided over Arnold’s court-martial.

  No witness but André testified at the board’s hearing. And the prisoner did not claim he was protected by a flag of truce. Rather, he admitted going behind enemy lines, disguising himself, and carrying secret papers, but said he had done so unwittingly.

  Members of the board were impressed with his dignified manner, his straightforward answers, and the fact that he said nothing against the other suspect in custody, Joshua Hett Smith. But the board saw no alternative to recommending death. André was a spy, and death was the proper punishment for spies. Washington endorsed that view and scheduled André’s execution for the next day, October 1.

  André was helpless, except for one remaining weapon: his charm. During his imprisonment he became fast friends with several rebel officers, who advocated for him in his final days and praised him when those days were done. Even Tallmadge, who had told André bluntly en route to Tappan that he faced the hangman, had been recruited into the fan club: “He has unbosomed his heart to me, and indeed, let me know every motive of his actions so fully since he came out on his late mission that he has endeared himself to me exceedingly,” Tallmadge wrote. “Unfortunate man! . . . Had he been tried in a court of ladies, he is so genteel, handsome, polite a gentleman that I am confident they would have acquitted him.”469

  Alexander Hamilton seemed almost as fascinated with André as he was with Peggy Shippen. He wrote his fiancée, Elizabeth Schuyler: “I wished myself possessed of André’s accomplishments for your sake, for I would wish to charm you in every sense.”470 Hamilton was so sympathetic toward André that he was strongly suspected of being the man who slipped a secret note into a packet that Washington sent to Clinton. The American commander was informing his British counterpart that André had been given a death sentence, but the secret note suggested that the Americans were willing to trade André for Arnold.

  As tempting as that offer was for Clinton, it was also impossible. The British campaign to lure defectors would lack all credibility if they started giving them back. But Clinton did send a group of officers to meet with rebel leaders, and Washington delayed André’s execution for a day so they could hear what the British had to say. Some of André’s admirers thought a window had been opened by the postponement, but they were wrong. The British emissary simply repeated the argument about the flag of truce, and the Americans rejected it, while raising the idea of an André-for-Arnold swap. The British could not do that, but they said they were willing to free any prisoner in their custody. The Americans wanted Arnold or no one. The stakes were simply too high to allow any deal to be made. Threats, however, were in adequate supply. The British emissary noted that Clinton had never executed a rebel prisoner for violating the rules of war but had “many” captives in hand who might face that fate.

  Peggy’s husband, who had done as much as anyone to endanger her friend and set the stage for his capture, jumped into the discussion with all the subtlety of a twenty-four-pound cannon, and to much less effect. If André were killed, Arnold wrote Washington, he would personally “retaliate on such unhappy persons in your army as may fall within my power,” and he also suggested that forty South Carolinians might be put to death in “a scene of blood at which humanity will revolt.”471

  By this time André knew better than to make threats. He wrote Washington a far more polite and eloquent letter, pleading to be shot to death like a soldier rather than hanged as a spy. “Buoyed above the terror of death by the consciousness of a life devoted to honorable pursuits, and stained with no action that can give me remorse, I trust that the request I make to your Excellency . . . will not be rejected,” André wrote. “Sympathy toward a soldier will surely induce your Excellency and a military tribunal to adapt the mode of my death to the feelings of a man of honor.”472

  As John André awaited the gallows, he sketched this self-portrait. Self Portrait (the day preceding his execution), Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of William S. Reese, B.A. 1977

  Washington, who avoided meeting or even seeing André for the four days he was in Tappan, did not respond to the request. Hamilton made his own appeal to Washington to spare André from hanging, but to no avail.473

  André’s manservant had been allowed to visit from New York City to bring linen and a clean uniform, and to shave his master’s beard and powder and dress his hair. The prisoner passed the time talking with his fascinated guards and drawing sketches, including a self-portrait.

  On the morning of Monday, October 2, Washington’s adjutant informed André that his execution was set for noon, and the prisoner’s servant fell into sobs. “Leave me until you can show yourself more manly!” André told him.

  André then enjoyed breakfast from Washington’s table, with the general absent. The condemned man’s theater training was having a final benefit: He projected an image of calm to all those who saw him. After breakfast, André dres
sed and conversed with his two guards about their families until Washington’s adjutant returned, ready to take the prisoner on his final walk.

  The village of Tappan was swarming with soldiers and other onlookers—at least five hundred, and perhaps thousands. As André stepped outside the stone tavern that was his jail, he linked arms with his two guards. It was warm for October, and André was oddly sunny, flashing what one witness described as “a complacent smile.”

  A black coffin sat on a flatbed wagon. He was invited to ride on the wagon to the execution site, but preferred to walk. Escorted by a fife-and-drum band playing the “Dead March” and rows of soldiers four abreast, André strolled past a church and up a hill. André, ever a master of the compliment, turned to them and said: “I am much surprised to find your troops under so good discipline, and your music is excellent.”

  But when he reached the top of the hill and stepped into a field crowded with sightseers, he saw the gallows. “Gentlemen, I am disappointed,” he said. “I expected my request would have been granted.” Even so, he kept walking toward his place of death. “I am reconciled to my death but not to the mode,” he said.

  A freshly dug grave was covered in canvas so as not to upset the condemned prisoner. But the tenor of the crowd was soaked with emotion. Many in attendance wept, but not André.

  Tallmadge stepped out of the throng at André’s behest, and the two new friends shook hands. As Tallmadge later put it, “I became so deeply attached to Major André that I can remember no instance where my affections were so fully absorbed in any man.”

  The fatal pageantry seemed perfect for the era—it was suffused with bravery, honor, tradition, and terrible waste. For some witnesses, it was a ceremony of sad sacrifice; for others, it was a historical event with great entertainment value. Witnesses later described André in lavish terms, noting the flush of his cheek, the handsomeness of his hair, and that strange yet admirable smile.

  The wagon with the coffin pulled underneath the gallows. André’s death sentence was read, and he stepped into the wagon, and atop the coffin. He took off his three-cornered hat and laid it on the coffin. Then he put his neckcloth in his pocket and turned down his collar. “It will be but a momentary pang,” André declared, speaking to himself as much as to anyone else.

  By tradition, the hangman smeared his own face with soot in order to hide his identity. Anonymity was an especially good idea in this case: The executioner was a Loyalist prisoner who had agreed to hang André in order to earn his freedom.

  André took the noose away from the man and dropped it over his own head. Then André tied a white handkerchief around his eyes. Asked whether he had any final words, André pulled up the handkerchief and replied: “I pray you to bear me witness that I meet my fate like a brave man.”474

  A presiding officer ordered André’s hands tied behind his back, and the prisoner provided a second handkerchief for that purpose. Then he put the blindfold back in place. The hangman whipped the horses and the wagon moved away. The thirty-year-old adjutant general of the British Army in America was no more.475

  American soldiers and curious civilians stood in line to view the corpse, and a few hours later André was buried on that hill in Tappan, with Tallmadge, Hamilton, and Lafayette in attendance. Four decades later, the British government disinterred his remains and reburied them in a place of high honor at London’s Westminster Abbey.

  The news of André’s death was delivered to New York City by his distraught servant, who had witnessed the hanging.476 Clinton was disconsolate. “The horrid deed is done,” he wrote. “Washington has committed premeditated murder; he must answer for the dreadful consequences.” But Clinton, who undoubtedly wondered whether he could have done more to protect his protégé, added a statement he truly wanted to believe: “I cannot reproach myself in the least.”

  Arnold was at Chief Justice Smith’s home when the news arrived, and he was “vastly disconcerted,” according to Smith. Arnold, certainly no humanitarian, was likely more distressed over the potential of being blamed for André’s death than he was upset over the demise of a man he had met only once for a few hectic hours.

  The news probably reached Peggy’s ears when she was newly arrived in Philadelphia and had not yet been banished to New York City. She spent weeks in a state of shock, often hiding in her bedroom on Fourth Street. Was her distress based on her husband’s sudden departure or her old friend’s demise, or both?

  Did Peggy talk to her family about André? Did she dare? After all, the discovery of his letter about millinery supplies had brought the family under a tighter and more torturous siege. Did she keep her memories and her grief to herself? Did she feel responsible for André’s hanging?

  There is no documentation that Peggy ever said a single word to anyone about André after his death. But there is little doubt that her friend’s sad and shocking end was a wound that went unhealed for the rest of her life.

  CHAPTER 17

  “The Handsomest Woman in England”

  Finally, Peggy knew for certain which side of the war she was on. She was a Loyalist, with allegiance to the king of England. She was the wife of the king’s newest warrior, Benedict Arnold. And within a few weeks of arriving in New York, Peggy was helping in her own small way to build the empire. She was pregnant with Arnold’s second child.

  Before she was too far along in the pregnancy, she sought to establish herself in New York City’s high society. And she made a brilliant recovery from the excruciating weeks of dishevelment and histrionics that had followed the exposure of the plot.

  A Loyalist woman described a ball at British headquarters in which Peggy was “amazingly improved in beauty and dress, having really recovered a great deal of that bloom she formerly possessed but did not bring in with her.” Indeed, Peggy “appeared a star of the first magnitude, and had every attention paid her as if she had been Lady Clinton.”477 But the woman also noted: “Peggy Arnold is not so much admired here for her beauty as one might have expected. All allow she has great sweetness in her countenance, but wants animation, sprightliness and that fire in her eyes which was so captivating in [another officer’s] wife. But notwithstanding she does not possess that life and animation that some do, they have met with every attention indeed, much more than they could have promised themselves.”

  The gossipy witness was Rebecca Warner Rawle Shoemaker, widow of a former mayor of Philadelphia, Francis Rawle. Her second husband, Loyalist Samuel Shoemaker, fled Philadelphia when Washington’s troops liberated the city in 1778. Mrs. Shoemaker stayed behind, but, like Peggy, she was banished by Joseph Reed’s government and went to New York City.

  Mrs. Shoemaker’s first husband had purchased the beautiful estate of Laurel Hill before he died in a hunting accident. Laurel Hill, in what is now Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park along the Schuylkill River, was less than a mile from Mount Pleasant, the mansion that Arnold bought for Peggy but never occupied.

  By marrying the widow Rawle, Samuel Shoemaker took ownership of Laurel Hill, according to the laws of the time. But when the estate was confiscated because authorities determined he had committed treason, the property was supposed to revert to her as if he had died. Reed ignored that stipulation of the law and decided it would make a fine summer estate for a government official such as himself.

  Some saw divine justice when Reed’s wife, Esther, took ill at Laurel Hill and died a few days later. In a letter from Philadelphia, Mrs. Shoemaker’s daughter Anna shared speculation that Esther had died from eating too many of Laurel Hill’s peaches.478

  Anna Rawle also conveyed gossip about how Peggy was being remembered in her hometown: “They tell strange stories here of her, and strive to blacken her character in a way which her uncommon affection for the general renders very improbable.”479

  Though Peggy and Mrs. Shoemaker had plenty in common—their Philadelphia roots, their New York exile, their hatred of
the Reeds—they didn’t get along particularly well, and seemed to socialize out of obligation. “I drank a social dish of tea with Peggy Arnold today and the general came in while we were at it,” Mrs. Shoemaker wrote. “You wonder, I don’t doubt, at my improving an acquaintance there. I have never been in the house since the morning visit I paid her upon her first coming in.” But there was a simple reason to get along, Mrs. Shoemaker said: “She is a Philadelphian.”480

  Another transplanted Philadelphian who saw little of Peggy was her saucy-tongued friend Becky Franks. “I have not seen or heard of her these two months,” Becky wrote. “Her name is as little mentioned as her husband’s.”481

  Peggy lived a careful and relatively quiet life in New York City while her husband tried, with limited success, to rebuild his military career under a new flag. He was befriended by Major General James Robertson, a Scotsman who had joined the British army as a private many decades earlier and had become royal governor of New York.482 After Arnold made his narrow escape down the Hudson, he was taken in by Robertson as a houseguest at Fort George. Robertson became an enthusiastic booster of Arnold, writing to London that the defector was “the boldest and most enterprising of the rebel generals.”483