Treacherous Beauty

by Stephen Case

  With no war to fight, Arnold collected his half pay and struggled to find his future. In 1784 he reached out to George Johnstone, a director of the East India Company, seeking a position in the trading company. Arnold explained the West Point conspiracy in detail, and Johnstone wrote back: “Under an unsuccessful insurrection all actors are rebels. Crowned with success they become immortal patriots. A fortunate plot holds you up as a savior of nations; a premature discovery brings you to the scaffold or brands your fame with dark and doubtful suspicions.”518 In other words, Arnold had gambled with treachery and had lost. Johnstone turned him down.

  Peggy, on the other hand, had found a fulfilling role as wife and mother and was pursuing it with vigor. But she also encountered heartbreak. After giving birth to two sons within eighteen months, she longed for a girl. But her third child and namesake, Margaret, died six months after her birth in 1783.519 “Poor woman, she lost her daughter last summer,” an acquaintance wrote. “When we first came to London, you know how much she wished for a girl.”520

  A son named George followed in 1784, but he lived less than two months. All told, Peggy’s maternal fortunes were the same as her mother’s, with two of her children dying at an early age while five others survived to adulthood. The third of those five, a daughter named Sophia, arrived in the summer of 1785.

  Peggy maintained contact with her saucy old friend Becky Franks, who was also in England. Becky wrote to fellow Meschianza veteran Williamina Bond in 1784 that Peggy “always behaved more like an affectionate sister than a common friend. . . . I hear every week or fortnight from her.”521

  Becky noted that in the latter stages of pregnancy, Peggy kept a low profile: “She expects to be confined the beginning of next month.” Even so, “She was and is still more noticed and more liked than any American that ever came over. She is visited by people of the first rank and invited to all their houses.”

  While charming the English, Peggy may have been most comfortable with fellow Loyalist exiles. She visited the village of Mortlake, outside London, and was welcomed by the family of Beverley Robinson, the former owner of the Hudson Highlands estate where Peggy’s life had taken its sharpest turn. The Robinsons were happy to host such exiles as Peggy, Samuel Shoemaker, and William Smith.522

  Peggy rode there on horseback, impressing Beverley Robinson’s daughter Joanna. “She is grown amazingly lusty,” Joanna wrote, “but it becomes her better than I thought it did when I first saw her in London.”523

  Peggy was still a striking young woman. When a London lawyer gossiped about the Arnolds, he expressed the imaginations of many men, who couldn’t help wondering what might become of Peggy if she were free of the despised Arnold. “By all accounts,” the lawyer wrote, “she is an amiable woman and, were her husband dead, would be much noticed.”524

  CHAPTER 18

  Strangers in America

  Less than four years after Benedict Arnold brought Peggy to England, he prepared to leave her there and embark on yet another hunt for treasure far from home. Peggy, who had transformed herself from public curiosity to demure mother, moved her family into smaller quarters in the same Portman Square neighborhood in London so that her husband could buy and outfit a ship called the Lord Middlebrook for trade across the ocean.525 And she welcomed Arnold’s son Richard, who came across the Atlantic to help his father mount his new adventure.

  In October 1785, a few months after the birth of daughter Sophia, Arnold and Richard set sail for Canada, where many Loyalists had fled in hopes of building a new life after the disaster of the American Revolution. The father and son reached St. John, New Brunswick, in December during a gale. Their arrival had one similarity with every other major enterprise of Arnold’s career: It gave birth to a new collection of conspiracy theories and a new set of enemies. The Lord Middlebrook ran aground in the harbor while Arnold was belowdecks fighting off an attack of gout, and ultimately its cargo of flour, beef, butter, and pork was looted. Arnold accused his crewmen of intentionally running it aground as part of a plot to damage the reputation of St. John as a business center.526

  St. John had doubled in population, to twelve thousand, because of land grants in New Brunswick that attracted Loyalist refugees, including members of Arnold’s own Loyalist unit. Arnold viewed St. John as a shining opportunity for a fresh start, despite the best efforts of his conspiratorial crewmen. He set up a store, bought a wharf, acquired city lots, built a house, and purchased a thousand acres of forest, which he used to supply timber for a lumber yard he constructed in St. John’s Lower Cove. He also acquired property in the provincial capital, Fredericton, where Peggy had cousins.

  The St. John Royal Gazette praised Arnold’s construction of a white-oak ship named the Lord Sheffield and declared that his “laudable efforts to promote the interest of this infant colony have, during his short residence, been very productive to its commercial advantage.”527 But the creation of the Lord Sheffield also provided a fresh example of Arnold’s fractious nature: He and the shipbuilder engaged in a public exchange of accusations after they wrangled over late changes and then Arnold deducted a late fee from money due the builder.

  While Arnold was seeking his fortune, Peggy’s time without him in London—lasting most of a year—was excruciating. She had heard a rumor that Arnold was involved in a disaster at sea, and had not received any news to contradict it even three months after his arrival in St. John. “I am still in the most unhappy state of suspense respecting the general, not having heard from him since the account of his ships being lost,” she wrote her father.

  Arnold had left behind plenty of serious financial problems for Peggy to contend with, including a lawsuit by Frenchman Jean Holker seeking repayment of the twelve-thousand-pound loan from Arnold’s time in Philadelphia. Peggy’s grasp of her family finances was exceptional: A study of more than four hundred claims by Loyalist women for British compensation after the American Revolution showed them to be profoundly ignorant about money matters in their own households, lacking details about such vital matters as their husbands’ income or the price of their former homes. Peggy, on the other hand, was interested in finances, and understood them, and had no choice but to get involved, considering her husband’s speculation and absence.528 While people seemed to credit Peggy’s father for her financial talents, her mother also may have had such skills, or at least interests. Many of the Shippen properties in America were held in the names of both of Peggy’s parents, an unusual arrangement at the time.

  Peggy, in her London exile, felt alone and burdened. In the most stiff-upper-lip manner she could manage, she described her desperate emotional state to her father:

  I assure you, my dear papa, I find it necessary to summon all my philosophy to my aid, to support myself under my present situation. Separated from, and anxious for the fate of, the best of husbands, torn from almost everybody that is dear to me, harassed with an expensive and troublesome lawsuit, having all the general’s business to transact, and feeling that I am in a strange country, without a creature near me that is really interested in my fate, you will not wonder if I am unhappy. But I will not distress you, my beloved papa, with my unavailing complaints, which I seldom suffer to engross either my pen or my tongue, but deprived of all domestic society, I have too much time to indulge them.529

  Arnold, of course, was not lost at sea. To some extent, he had found himself at sea. After shipbuilding in St. John, he took the Lord Sheffield south to the Caribbean for more of the kind of trading that had been his livelihood in the pre-Revolution days. He returned to London in late 1786 to prepare his wife and children for a voyage to their new home in Canada. When they set off in the summer of 1787, they were in a new ship named Peggy.

  Peggy, who was seven months pregnant when they arrived, watched moving men fill a fine rental house on King Street in the Upper Cove. She had brought along blue damask sofas and chairs, matching drapes, a mahogany table that seated twelv
e, Wedgwood giltware, Nankeen china, and a globe of the world.530

  Two friends, Judge Jonathan Sewall and his wife, had taken the ocean voyage with them, and Peggy soon made other friends as well. Her manners, looks, and charm were a currency valuable across nations and continents, and she was welcome in the salons and dining rooms of her new town.

  It’s not clear how many servants Peggy’s household required in St. John, though throughout her life she made sure they were plentiful. Many years later, when money was tight, she wrote that “our living is plain and frugal” with only two full-time servants—a cook and a maid.531 Peggy certainly wasn’t idle, though. She kept up with her reading and always monitored her children’s education. She also was an avid seamstress, and even made some of her own furniture.

  Arnold saw St. John as a gathering place for his far-flung loved ones. Nineteen-year-old Benedict was away in pursuit of his military career, but the rest of his family assembled—Arnold’s sister Hannah, seventeen-year-old Richard, and fourteen-year-old Henry, plus Peggy and her newer branch: seven-year-old Edward, five-year-old James, and Sophia, who was nearly two.532

  From letters, it’s clear that Peggy never considered St. John her permanent home. She figured Arnold would earn his fortune and they would ultimately return to England. But for the time being, she was happy to get to know her stepchildren better and to attend dinners and horseback rides with willing members of local society.

  She was not, however, prepared for the news that probably reached her ears soon after she reached St. John: Her husband had been a traitor to their wedding vows. No one has ever identified the woman who had the affair with Arnold in St. John in late 1785 or early 1786 when he came to town to establish himself. But their union led to the birth of a son named John Sage, who was described as “about fourteen years of age” in Arnold’s will of August 30, 1800, less than a year before his death.533

  There’s no reason to think Peggy learned about John Sage from the will, and every reason to suppose that she learned of his existence soon after arrival, considering what a small town St. John was and how many enemies Arnold had already made.534 The revelation must have come as a grievous blow to a woman who had already suffered many. Peggy had called Arnold “the best of husbands” back in March 1786 when she feared she would never see him again—perhaps at the very time when he was being unfaithful to her. But after her arrival in St. John, she never again used such exalted language to describe her husband, at least not during his lifetime.

  In the place where Arnold had dishonored her, Peggy gave birth to a son in September 1787. He was given the same name as his brother who had died three years earlier—George, in honor of the king. But Peggy was nearly done with childbearing. The next year, she wrote her sister Betsy: “It gives me great pleasure to hear of your prudent resolution of not increasing your family; as I can never do better than to follow your example, I have decided upon the same plan; and when our sisters have had five or six, we will likewise recommend it to them.”535

  Though St. John carried bitter connotations for her, Peggy made the best of it, helping Arnold with his businesses, some of which struggled. She longed to make one last visit back to Philadelphia to see her family, and such a trip was now legal, since the banishment order had lapsed at war’s end. “I am much gratified by your earnest solicitations for me to visit, and hope to accomplish so desirable an event in the fall,” Peggy wrote to Betsy in June 1788. “Yet my pleasure will not be unaccompanied by pain; as when I leave you, I shall probably bid you adieu forever. Many disagreeable and some favorable circumstances will, I imagine, fix me forever in England, upon my return to it; while his majesty’s bounty is continued to me, it is necessary I should reside in his dominions.” 536

  Arnold was in England on business, and while he was gone, a fire destroyed his warehouse, store, and lumberyard in St. John. His son Henry was sleeping in the office and barely escaped the flames.537

  Despite the setback, Peggy continued to think she would be able to visit Philadelphia that year. “As I have got the better of almost every obstacle to paying you a visit, I ought to anticipate nothing but pleasure,” she wrote Betsy. “I feel great regret at the idea of leaving the general alone and much perplexed by business, but as he strongly argues a measure that will be productive of so much happiness for me, I think there can be no impropriety in taking the ship.”538 Arnold urged her to make the same arrangements she had during her voyage to England in the winter of 1781–82: buying out the whole cabin of the ship and then admitting only those people whom she deigned to travel with. She was especially eager to take the trip because her mother’s health was failing. “She must suffer extremely from the loss of her limbs,” Peggy wrote, “as she has been accustomed to so much exercise.”

  But Arnold did not return that year in time for Peggy to go. She had to wait another year, until late 1789, to make the voyage to her beloved Philadelphia. Traveling with her two-year-old son George and a servant, she sailed to New York City, where her ship’s arrival refuted a rumor that the vessel had been wrecked. By December, she was with her family on Fourth Street.

  Peggy came back to a Philadelphia that was very different from the one she had left.539 Congress was gone, having departed to escape intimidation from hundreds of protesting Continental soldiers in 1783.540 The city streets had been made level in 1782, leaving “many graceful undulations destroyed,” in the words of one writer.541 Luckily, most of the city’s trees seemed to have survived a short-lived law that same year that ordered their removal from streets and alleys because they were deemed fire spreaders, waterway destroyers, and hazards to navigation.542

  In 1789, when Peggy arrived with toddler George in tow, she fit in well with Philadelphia’s new coat of arms, which featured pregnant women to symbolize the land’s fertility.543 Some of Peggy’s enemies were dead or defeated. Joseph Reed, who had persecuted her husband and driven her out of town, had succumbed in 1785 at age forty-three after a period of paralysis.544 Reed’s ally Timothy Matlack, who had bedeviled Arnold over his militiaman son being ordered to fetch a barber, lived far longer—to age ninety-nine. But by the time Peggy came to visit, Matlack had stepped down as secretary of the Supreme Executive Council amid charges of accounting irregularities.545

  In her absence, Peggy’s family had found its equilibrium. Peggy’s father was back on the judge’s bench and would soon achieve appointment to the state’s Supreme Court. Her mother, despite illness, had survived to see her youngest daughter again. Her sister Betsy and cousin Neddy Burd were happily married with children, and her other siblings had all married in her absence, Edward at twenty-seven, Mary at twenty-eight, and Sarah at twenty-nine.546 All four gave their firstborn daughters the same name: Margaret.547

  Despite the warmth she received from her family, Peggy discovered during her five months in Philadelphia that the wounds of the war—and especially the injuries to the new nation that had been plotted by her husband—were hardly forgotten. The nineteenth-century writer Lorenzo Sabine, in his biographies of Loyalists, described Peggy’s homecoming: “Out of respect to her family, many warm Whigs had been to see her, though the common opinion was that, as her presence placed her friends in a painful position, she would have shown more feeling by staying away. I learn from another source that she was treated with so much coldness and neglect, even by those who had most encouraged her ill-starred marriage, that her feelings were continually wounded. She could never come again.”548

  After leaving Fourth Street, Peggy summed up the trip in downcast terms. “How difficult is it to know what will contribute to our happiness in this life,” she wrote Betsy. “I had hoped that by paying my beloved friends a last visit, I should insure to myself some portion of it, but I find it far otherwise.”549

  Back in Canada, she seemed depressed by the chilly July. “Our summer fogs are just setting in, which is in fact the only thing that denotes the season, as we have not left off fires
and have never slept under less than two blankets.” But what distressed her most was the fact that Arnold was again sinking into financial quicksand, thereby threatening her hopes of returning to England: “From the present appearances of things, there is great reason to apprehend a disappointment in our going home this fall. For my own part, I have given up every hope of going. There has been a succession of disappointments and mortifications in collecting our debts ever since my return home.”

  The warehouse fire from two years earlier had consequences far beyond the actual financial loss. Arnold was insured for it, which turned out to be the problem. A former business partner publicly accused Arnold of committing arson to defraud the insurance company—an unlikely theory considering that Arnold was thousands of miles away and his son Henry nearly died in the fire. But the insurance company balked at paying. When Arnold demanded that his ex-partner apologize for accusing him of setting the fire, he instead received an insult: “It is not in my power to blacken your character, for it is as black as it can be.”550

  Arnold sued. Arriving at court in Fredericton with two lawyers and thirty witnesses, Arnold mounted an impressive case, including testimony from a Loyalist veteran that he had gone to the warehouse with Henry and had accidentally started the fire through the careless use of a candle. The jury found the ex-partner guilty of slander, but two judges awarded damages of only twenty shillings.

  It was a humiliating result for Peggy and her family and suggested that Arnold’s reputation was virtually worthless. As a further indignity, a mob invaded the Arnolds’ home on King Street while they were away and set fire to an effigy of Arnold with the word “traitor” on its chest. British troops were called out to chase away the rabble and secure the Arnolds’ possessions.