Treacherous Beauty
Page 21
And Robertson perhaps offered the most succinct and accurate assessment of his audacious new friend. “Arnold,” he said, “does nothing by halves.”484 Arnold was quick to offer military advice, which came with the clear implication that the more the British relied on him, the greater would be their chances for success. The tone of his message was simple: Attack! He proposed to draw General Washington into a decisive battle by going on the offensive in the southern states, or by sailing up the Hudson and fulfilling the mission that André had died for—seizing West Point. He also called for driving Congress out of Philadelphia, though it’s difficult to imagine that his real target wasn’t Joseph Reed.485
Meanwhile, General Washington was so stung by Arnold’s treason that he approved a bold plan to kidnap the traitor. A sergeant major named John Champe was recruited to pose as a defector to the British and to stalk Arnold. Washington was adamant that Champe must be an abductor rather than an assassin: “No circumstance whatever shall obtain my consent to his being put to death. . . . My aim is to make a public example of him.”486
When Champe went over to the British lines, he was interrogated, given a few pounds, and invited to join their army. Champe declined, explaining that if he fought for the British and was captured, the rebels would likely hang him. Set free, Champe arranged to run into Benedict Arnold on a New York street, and he played to Arnold’s vanity, explaining that he had been inspired to cast off his loyalty to the Continental Army after seeing Arnold do so. The two became friendly, and Arnold offered Champe a position as sergeant major in his Loyalist regiment. Champe accepted, and began paying careful attentions to Arnold’s comings and goings.
Lurking outside the house in Lower Manhattan where Peggy was taking care of her baby, Neddy, Champe noticed that Arnold often took a midnight stroll and would stop at the outhouse before going inside to bed. He got word to his rebel commanders that he would kidnap Arnold on December 11 and take him across the Hudson to New Jersey, and then on to Washington’s headquarters.487
Unfortunately for Champe, December 11 was the very day that Arnold mobilized a force of sixteen hundred men—including Champe—and prepared to leave New York for Virginia. Arnold’s first combat mission for the British, launched less than a month after Peggy’s arrival, was designed to ease pressure on Lord Cornwallis, whose army was taking a beating in the Carolinas.488
Some officers reportedly refused to serve under Arnold, blaming him for André’s death. But one of André’s best friends, Lieutenant Colonel John Graves Simcoe, apparently held no serious grudge. His Loyalist regiment, called the Queen’s Rangers, joined Arnold on the mission, outfitted with black and white feathers on the horses’ bridles in tribute to André. Also in Arnold’s force were a company of Hessians and a regiment of British regulars under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Dundas.
Although Arnold outranked Simcoe and Dundas, General Clinton ordered him to consult both of them before “undertaking any operation of consequence.” Clinton also secretly gave the two permission to seize command upon Arnold’s “death or incapacity,” with the definition of incapacity left up to their judgment.
The fleet of forty-two ships was battered by the weather on the way down the coast, but Arnold managed to move up the James River in good order and surprise the rebel defenders. Arnold’s orders called for the establishment of a base at Portsmouth and for raids to be conducted in the surrounding area only if they were low-risk. But Arnold was far better at raiding than at setting up bases. And risk was the fuel for his genius, so he could hardly resist some raiding.
He managed to overpower several rebel-held positions, including the state capital, Richmond. Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson was barely able to escape.Yet for all the old dash and audacity that Arnold displayed, he could not escape from his past. According to one story, Arnold interrogated a rebel prisoner who did not know who his questioner was, and when the general asked the prisoner what local residents would do with Arnold if they somehow managed to capture him, the prisoner said they would cut off the leg that had been wounded at Saratoga and bury it with honors. The rest of Arnold they would hang.489
Arnold also could not shake his greed. He had reached an agreement with the commodore of the fleet that had transported his army to Virginia, promising that they would split the proceeds from all enemy goods seized on land and on sea. Personal appropriation of the spoils of war was standard operating procedure back then, but Arnold seemed incapable of keeping things tidy. He and the commodore ended up in a nasty dispute, with Arnold insulting him so thoroughly that the naval officer refused to cooperate in military matters.
Clinton’s best friend, Major General William Phillips, arrived at Portsmouth in March, taking over command from Arnold. Though Phillips and Arnold had been on opposite sides of the battle lines at Saratoga, they got along well in Virginia. But when Phillips came down with a fever and died in May, some of his admirers speculated that Arnold had poisoned him. Arnold never received the benefit of the doubt.
Phillips’s death put Arnold back in temporary command of the force, but the harassed Cornwallis moved north and joined up with Arnold, taking over the helm. Cornwallis and Arnold discussed tactics, and the junior commander suggested that the British army move up the James River where it would not be vulnerable to the French fleet. Ignoring Arnold’s advice, Cornwallis settled into a place called Yorktown. Arnold, suffering from excruciating gout and tired of such an inactive role, returned to New York in June.
Peggy was seven months pregnant when Arnold rejoined her, and he stayed until she gave him another son in August 1781. The boy was named James Robertson Arnold, after New York’s royal governor, who would be the last person to hold that job.
A week after James’s arrival, when Peggy was still in the “lying-in” period of post-birth rest, her husband left on another military mission.490 Peggy felt even more alone a few weeks later when she got word that her grandfather Edward Shippen, the former Philadelphia mayor who had left the city for the freer lifestyle of rural Lancaster, had died at the age of seventy-eight. In his will, he freed his slaves.491
Peggy was thoroughly an adult. The Meschianza must have felt as if it was a hundred years ago, though it was barely three. Now Peggy was a mother of two and a stepmother of three, and not the type to be flitting from party to party with Becky Franks. She was in a strange city, hoping that her husband would find a way to reestablish his honor. But on his new expedition, Arnold would accomplish what some thought was impossible: the lowering of his reputation even further.
He had urged a series of raids along the Atlantic coast to destroy rebel shipping, and Clinton had finally approved an attack on Connecticut’s largest port, New London, which was only about a dozen miles from Arnold’s hometown of Norwich.492 Arnold’s troops succeeded in destroying privateers in New London’s harbor and torching warehouses full of rebel supplies. But one of the warehouses was full of gunpowder, and a huge explosion shook the town. Fires quickly grew out of control and devastated New London.
Across the Thames River, Arnold’s forces tried to capture Fort Griswold. But Arnold realized that they would not be able to seize the fort before ships could escape upriver, so he sent orders calling off the assault. Those instructions did not arrive in time to prevent a vicious and bloody attack on the fort. When Arnold’s forces finally entered the fort after suffering heavy casualties, the defenders attempted to surrender. But amid anger and confusion, the defending force was massacred. The fort’s commander, who had turned over his sword, was bayoneted. Even though Arnold had not ordered the massacre and in fact had issued orders that would have prevented it, he was blamed.
On September 4, when Arnold was raiding New London and Peggy was caring for her newborn son in New York City, the city of Peggy’s own birth was swept up in martial pageantry. French and Continental armies were marching through Philadelphia, headed south for a confrontation with Cornwallis’s army in Yorktown.
When the news of Yorktown reached Philadelphia, the homes of Loyalist-leaning residents were attacked by window-smashing celebrants. Anna Rawle wrote, “For two hours we had the disagreeable noise of stones banging about, glass crashing, and the tumultuous voices of a large body of men, as they were a long time at the different houses in the neighborhood.”495 It is not known whether the Shippens’ home on Fourth Street was spared.
Meanwhile, in a much quieter, rather stunned New York City, Arnold prepared to take his family to London. He refused to accept Britain’s ultimate defeat, and he planned to lobby the government for more vigorous conduct of the war. He was “desirous to go home,” as William Smith put it in the parlance of the time, even though “home” was a place where Arnold had been only on business, and where Peggy had never been.496
According to William Smith, Arnold told Clinton that he would “recommend a reinforcement of twenty thousand men and promised to be back in March,” but he confided in Smith that he would never return while Clinton was in command.497 Obviously, Arnold dreamed of replacing Clinton in command of British forces in North America, a prospect that was remote at best.
On December 8, 1781, Arnold, Peggy, and their two young sons set off for London, having worn out their welcome in America.498 “No doubt they will attract attention in England,” opined Anna Rawle.499 Peggy and the boys traveled separately from Arnold, since she wouldn’t have been comfortable in a military ship and he couldn’t risk traveling in a nonmilitary vessel that might be subject to capture. Arnold’s traveling partner was the defeated but still ambitious Cornwallis, who had been freed in exchange for Henry Laurens, a former president of the Continental Congress captured at sea and held in the Tower of London.500
In a letter, Mrs. Shoemaker explained the Arnolds’ travel arrangements: “The Fleet sailed from the Hook today. . . . Lord Cornwallis, his suite, and General Arnold in the Robuste. Peggy Arnold and her family in a private ship as more agreeable for her than a man-of-war, yet not safe for him. They give for the cabin three hundred guineas and then took in what company they chose, chiefly military I believe. I do not hear of any females but her maids.”501 Maybe Mrs. Shoemaker’s comment about Peggy buying out the cabin and surrounding herself with men was innocent. But maybe not. As her own daughter had written, people told “strange stories” about Peggy.
When Peggy boarded the ship to England, she knew she might never see her Philadelphia family again. But while she may have felt lonely, she was far from alone in leaving an America torn apart by war. The fighting would officially end less than two years later, and many Loyalists would seek their fortunes elsewhere. By one count, the total diaspora from America was sixty thousand whites and fifteen thousand black slaves—one in forty residents of the thirteen colonies.502
Few of those refugees inspired as much anticipation in London as Peggy and her husband.503 As had happened in New York, the Arnolds were greeted politely by top British officials, who needed the general as vindication for their policies. Arnold met with the secretary of state for America, George Germain, and visited Lord Amherst at the War Office. Jeffery Amherst and Arnold had something in common: a dicey reputation that would endure for centuries. For Amherst, lasting notoriety came from his endorsement of a plan to give smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans after the French and Indian War.504
The Arnolds were especially well received at the Court of St. James’s. The general was presented to the British monarch by Sir Walter Stirling, a career officer in the British Navy who had married a first cousin of Peggy’s father in the 1750s. Stirling had brought home the news of the British victory at the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius in 1780, and King George III had rewarded him with a knighthood.505 The permanently limping Arnold met the king while leaning on the arm of Sir Guy Carleton, who had been his opponent in the Battle of Valcour Island and would soon replace Clinton as commander in chief of British forces in America.
Peggy was presented at court by Lady Amherst, the smallpox schemer’s wife, who like Peggy was about half her husband’s age. The American beauty made such an impression that Queen Charlotte urged the ladies of the court to shower attention on her.506 British royalty showered money on Peggy, too, presenting her with a pension of five hundred pounds a year. At the time, people might have thought she was receiving the money for her unquestioning and uninformed support of her husband. But a handwritten memorandum by Clinton, found in his papers a century and a half later, stated that the money was “obtained for her services, which were very meritorious.”507 The services were not specified, but such a citation suggests gratitude from the enemy that went beyond her role as the wife of a defector. After all, Arnold had already received his financial rewards. Peggy insisted on saving this pension money, allowing her to establish some semblance of stability while married to a mercurial and financially risky man.
The Arnolds settled in Portman Square, a fairly fashionable area of London with some colorful characters, such as “authoress” Elizabeth Montague, who held a Sweeps Holiday for chimney sweeps every May 1, feeding them roast beef and plum pudding “so that they might enjoy one happy day in the year.”508
The Rawle-Shoemaker family seemed to conduct surveillance of Peggy even on the far side of the Atlantic. William Rawle, Mrs. Shoemaker’s son who was in England to continue his legal studies, described the Arnolds’ entry into London society: “They have taken a house and set up a carriage and will, I suppose, be a good deal visited.”509 They were indeed a novelty. “I saw Mrs. Arnold a few days after her arrival in town,” wrote Rawle, “and was really pleased she looked so well, as general expectation was raised so high by the incessant puffers of the newspapers and the declaration of Colonel Tarleton that she was the handsomest woman in England.”
The purveyor of that compliment was Banastre Tarleton, a dashing British cavalry officer and playboy who had known Peggy in Philadelphia and escorted a minister’s daughter, Williamina Smith, at the Meschianza. Tarleton, who developed a reputation as a butcher for his brutal warmaking in the South, surrendered along with Cornwallis at Yorktown. After he made his way back to England, he became a baronet and a member of Parliament.510
Initially, Arnold’s advice and counsel to Britain’s leaders seemed welcome. He was seen strolling in the public gardens with the Prince of Wales and reportedly attended private conferences with the king.
Benjamin Franklin, presently in Paris, was getting reports about Arnold. “Generals Cornwallis and Arnold are both arrived in England,” Franklin wrote. “We hear much of audiences given to the latter, and of his being present at councils. He seems to mix as naturally with that polluted court as pitch with tar; there is no being in nature too base for them to associate with, provided he may be thought capable of serving their purposes.”511
Yet English popular culture, with its rough-and-tumble political discourse, was rough on Arnold—as rough as any pro-Reed newspaper in Philadelphia. Even before the Arnolds reached London, common verse was ridiculing him:
Our troops by Arnold thoroughly were banged,
And poor St. André was by Arnold hanged;
To George a rebel, to the Congress traitor,
Pray, what can make the name of Arnold greater?
By one bold treason, to gain his ends,
&n
bsp; Let him betray his new adopted friends.512
And soon after Peggy and Arnold reached London, a letter signed “R.M.” heaped abuse on the defector in the General Advertiser and Morning Intelligencer, calling him a horse thief and a “mean mercenary” who found his courage in a brandy bottle.513 It was enough to engender sympathy for Arnold, almost.
Arnold’s hopes of military glory evaporated in March 1782 when the British government that supported the war in the colonies—and supported Arnold as well—bowed out. Lord North became the first prime minister in British history to be ousted by a parliamentary vote of no confidence.514 His replacement sent a delegation to talk peace with Franklin.
Suddenly Peggy and Arnold were merely reminders of English political folly. And they soon discovered that contemporary culture was more fascinated by the noble death of John André than by the ongoing lives of either of them. André’s old friend Anna Seward had written a “Monody on Major André.” In this monody (elegy, or dirge), Britain is personified, and wanders the shore, distraught over André’s death:
With one pale hand the bloody scroll he rears,
And bids his nations blot it with their tears;
And one, extended o’er th’ Atlantic wave
Points to his André’s ignominious grave!515
Despite the overheated verse, Seward tapped into a wounded nation’s thirst for nobility and pride.
King George was so taken with André’s sacrifice that he gave the major’s mother one thousand pounds and made his brother a baronet. The king also ordered a marble monument installed at Westminster Abbey to honor André, who “fell a sacrifice to his zeal for his king and country,” according to the inscription.516
A book written more than a half century later recalled a New York Loyalist named Peter Van Schaack visiting Westminster Abbey one day when “his musings were interrupted by the entrance of a gentleman, accompanied by a lady. It was General Arnold, and the lady was doubtless Mrs. Arnold. They passed to the cenotaph of Major André, where they stood and conversed together. What a spectacle! . . . Mr. Van Schaack turned from it with disgust.”517