Defiant Brides

by Nancy Rubin Stuart

  Ultimately Arnold rejected the concept of a court-martial. Instead he appealed to Congress, which, in turn, handed over the accusations to a special committee. After an anguished debate, all but two of the charges were dropped. Reed was outraged, protesting so forcefully that on April 3 Congress agreed that Arnold must be judged on four accusations of the Supreme Executive Council.

  Peggy, meanwhile, continued to believe in Arnold’s innocence. She was eighteen, in love, implicitly trusted her fiancé, and had the support of her relatives. “I think all the world are running mad. What demon has possessed the people with respect to General Arnold? He is certainly much abused; ungrateful monsters, to attack a character that has been looked up to,” wrote her cousin, Elizabeth Tilghman, to Betsy Shippen. “Poor Peggy how I pity her; at any rate her situation must be extremely disagreeable. She has great sensibility, and I think it must often be put to trial.”55

  Discretion was bred into the Shippens’ bones. Whatever arguments, embarrassments, or regrets the family expressed were hidden behind their handsomely polished front doors. The accusations against Arnold were unjust, the Shippens publicly maintained, yet another instance of political chicanery from the fanatically patriotic Reed and his intimidated Congressional cronies.

  By March 19, Arnold had resolved to change his plans, resigning that day as commandant of Philadelphia. He also released General Schuyler from his offer for an upstate New York residence. Instead, either by scraping together or borrowing assets, he purchased Mount Pleasant, an elegant property just outside Philadelphia for £16,240. Built of white stone, the Georgian mansion on the banks of the Schuylkill included ninety-six acres of lawn, a formal garden orchards, and outbuildings. According to John Adams, it was “the most elegant seat in Pennsylvania.”56 Now part of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, Mount Pleasant was never meant to be Arnold’s residence. Instead it was to serve as an income-producing rental, placed in trust for Peggy and her future children as financial protection in the event of his death.

  On Thursday, April 8, a white-gowned Peggy and Arnold, leaning on the arm of an aide, were married in the Shippen drawing room. Among the witnesses were Peggy’s relatives, bridal attendants, Arnold’s sister Hannah, and his three sons, newly arrived from Connecticut. Of the subsequent celebration, Judge Shippen wrote, “We saw company for three days. This, with punch drinking, etc. is all the entertainment that was given.”57

  Six days later an enchanted Elizabeth Tilghman gushed to Betsy, “Will you my dear give my best love to Mrs. Arnold, tell her that I wish her every happiness that this world is capable of affording, and that she may long live the delight and comfort of her adoring General.”58

  4

  “Our Sweetest Hopes Embittered by Disappointment”

  BY THE WINTER OF 1779 Lucy Knox was happily ensconced in a fieldstone farmhouse in the hills of Somerset County, New Jersey. After the June 28 Battle of Monmouth, Henry had urged Lucy to join him in the army camp at White Plains where she and her daughter stayed until mid-autumn. So pleasant was that reunion that when Washington ordered the Continentals to a winter encampment in New Jersey, the Knoxes saw no need to separate again. Lucy, consequently, had traveled with her daughter to a hamlet near Middlebrook, New Jersey, near the contemporary town of Bound Brook.

  To Washington, the encampment was an ideal site from which to protect the Hudson Highlands, spy upon the British movements in New York City, and protect patriotic New Jersey from an enemy attack. Located at the crossroads of the state, Middlebrook was also “as near our supplies as possible,” a place where “our cattle can be driven to us,” with easy access to Pennsylvania and supplies of flour.1

  Instead of a log hut, Henry, Lucy, and their little daughter lived in a Dutch farmhouse owned by the elderly Jacobus Vandeveer, whose house stood two and a half miles west of the army camp. There at the foot of the Watchung Mountains, Knox fulfilled his dream of establishing a military school, or “college.” Called the Pluckemin Artillery Cantonment, heavy field pieces and cannons guarded the entrance to the square-shaped campus at whose borders stood barracks, an armorer’s shop, a military forge, and a munitions laboratory. The centerpiece of Knox’s first war college was a cupola-topped hall where soldiers studied tactics, military engineering, and gunnery. A foreign visitor, amazed that its construction was only “the work of a few weeks,” praised the results for their “look of enchantment.”2 Needing funds to train more men, Knox traveled to Philadelphia in January to meet with Congress.

  Lucy, heavy with a second pregnancy, had remained in Pluckemin, waiting anxiously for the arrival of two relatives, Elizabeth and Sarah Winslow. The two women had left Boston in 1775 and settled in New York City, but by 1779 longed to return to their home town. Nearly penniless but knowing that the Knoxes lived nearby, Elizabeth and her niece, Sarah, had appealed for help. Lucy and Henry had complied, assuring them they would “afford them every assistance necessary,” in spite of their political differences. It was “absolutely necessary” for them to leave New York, Knox wrote his brother, since one of their relatives was sailing for England, which would have left the two Winslows “friendless and without protection.”3

  Just before Knox left for Philadelphia, the two women arrived. Little is known about that visit, although Sarah seems to have been the more spirited of the two, so street smart that the Knoxes’ somber Rhode Island friend Nathanael Greene labeled her a “hussy.” Lucy, nevertheless, warmly welcomed them. Undoubtedly they chatted about life in New York City under the British and gossiped about its Loyalist Bostonian residents. More important for Lucy’s purposes, though, was that their visit served as a family reunion, evoking memories of the high-toned life they had shared in Boston before the Revolution—the splendid dinners, drawing-room receptions, and formal teas Lucy enjoyed as a girl.

  If the Winslows provided a window to Lucy’s past, the forthcoming gala at Pluckemin previewed her future. By mid-February, workers swarmed over the Pluckemin campus to prepare the first-anniversary celebration of the Franco-American alliance. Tables, chairs, blue-plate dishes, and utensils soon appeared in the academy building and transformed it into a banquet hall for four hundred guests. Outside, carpenters hammered boards into a towering colonnade one hundred feet long, “a temple, or frame, of 13 Corinthian arches . . . each . . . containing an illuminated painting emblematic of the Revolution.”4 Each mural contained an inspiring picture of the Revolution, among them the battle at Lexington, the founders of Congress, the triumph at Saratoga, a portrait of Louis XVI, and the anticipated fall of England. On the appointed day, a sunny Thursday, February 18, Washington and his wife, Martha, arrived in mid-afternoon. So too did dignitaries like Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, Alexander Hamilton, and General “Mad Anthony” Wayne, followed by throngs of the most “respectable ladies and gentleman of the state of New Jersey,” Dr. James Thacher noted in his journal.5

  At 4 p.m., thirteen cannons sounded, signaling the start of the festivities. After toasts and a dinner, fireworks lit up the clear winter sky. Then, as music wafted from the banquet room, “the ball was opened by Mrs. Knox and General Washington in the Academy building,” reported the Pennsylvania Packet.6 Though in her ninth month of pregnancy, the begowned Lucy danced a minuet with Washington, glorying in her role as the event’s presiding hostess. Afterwards, musicians struck up a lively tune as thirty couples appeared on the dance floor, ready “to foot it to no indifferent measure.”7

  To the astonishment of the guests, Washington and Caty Greene joined hands and danced tirelessly to song after song, each seemingly daring the other to quit. “We had a little dance at my quarters a few evenings past,” Nathanael Greene proudly recalled. “His Excellency and Mrs. Greene danced upwards of three hours without once sitting down. Upon the whole we had a pretty little frisk.”8

  In contrast to Caty’s “frisk,” Lucy spent most of that night conversing with Martha Washington, dignitaries, officers, and their wives, forming what the Packet described as a “circle of
brilliants.”9 Conversations in other parts of the room dwelled upon the course of the Revolution. When the flirtatious Packet reporter asked a young woman “if the roaring of the British lion in his late speech did not interrupt the spirit of the dance,” she saucily retorted, “Not at all. It rather enlivens, for I have heard that such animals always increase their howlings when most frightened.”10 The celebration was so dazzling, gushed the New Jersey Journal, that “the power of description is too languid to do justice to the whole of this grand entertainment.”11

  Afterwards, Knox boasted to his brother: “We had above seventy ladies, all of the first ton [class] in the State. We danced all night; between three-hundred and four-hundred gentlemen: an elegant room. The illuminating fireworks, etc. were more than pretty.”12

  Ten days after the Pluckemin Grand Alliance Ball, Lucy “was brought to bed of a beautiful daughter,” Knox announced to William. “Though we wished her a son. . . . It is a divine child—we shall call it Julia.”13 Soon afterwards he reported, “Mamma has been so well as to ride out every day for the . . . post.”14 By May 2, Lucy even traveled to Middlebrook to watch the Continental army parade before French minister Gerard.

  Quite unexpectedly, a week later Lucy became “most alarmingly ill,” so feverish and weak that she could no longer nurse Julia.15 Then her skin turned yellow, leading the doctors to conclude that she suffered from “jaundice occupied by bilious obstructions.”16 Lucy had contracted infectious hepatitis, a disease associated with poor sewage and contaminated water often found in overcrowded sites like army camps. Soon afterwards, little Julia and her four-year-old sister, Lucy, also fell ill.

  At the same time, at British headquarters at 1 Broadway in New York City, General William Clinton, commander of the North American forces, schemed to weaken Washington’s supply lines along the Hudson. By June 1, he led eight thousand men along the Hudson’s rocky, western shores above the Palisades and seized a key garrison at Stony Point. The next day Howe’s men took Verplanck’s Point on the opposite shore, effectively blocking a key crossing of the Hudson at King’s Ferry. The loss of that station, Clinton gleefully noted in his narrative on the Revolution, “obliged the enemy to pass and repass the Highlands twice” through a mountain road, extending their journey by more than sixty miles.17 Alarmed, Washington ordered the army to the Hudson on June 4 and posted them at various strategic positions along the Hudson Highlands as he contemplated a counterattack.

  Worried about his ailing wife and children, Knox had marched reluctantly to the Hudson. By June 14 he learned that Lucy was well enough to enjoy an outing. “I long to hear how my dear Julia is,” he wrote that day from headquarters at New Windsor near Newburgh, New York. “Heaven preserve her—kiss her and my angelic Lucy [their daughter] for me.”18 But ten days later came alarming news: baby Julia was gravely ill. “Good Heavens, my Lucy, what affliction did your letter . . . inflict upon me,” Knox hastily replied on June 29. “Julia, poor innocent, is not in half so much pain as is its unhappy mother. To add to her and my distress, I am absent, unable to assist. . . . I long to see you, to be assured from your own lips that you are getting better daily. I long to hear the little prattle of my lovely Lucy and to see the expressive countenance of Julia.”19

  That was not to be. On July 2, the Knoxes’ infant daughter died. Though obliged to remain on the Hudson with the army, a local legend insisted that he returned to Pluckemin. According to that story, Knox arrived just as members of the local Dutch Reformed Church refused to bury Julia in the churchyard. The reason? Because he and Lucy were Congregationalists. Coincidentally, the Knoxes’ elderly landlord, Jacobus Vandeveer, had been denied that right because his daughter had died insane. The old man, it was said, led Knox to a grave beyond the churchyard fence. “General, this is my ground,” he explained. “Bury your child here.” Years later a more enlightened generation of churchgoers moved the cemetery fence to encompass the graves of Julia Knox and Vandeveer’s daughter.20

  Naturally news of the baby’s death stunned Knox’s colleagues and their wives, many of who were either pregnant or had recently given birth. “How our brightest prospects are blasted, and our sweetest hopes embittered by disappointment. May guardian angels protect you against such evils,” Nathanael Greene wrote his pregnant wife, Caty, who had returned to Rhode Island. Lucy, he added, seemed to accept the baby’s death “with a degree of fortitude that marks a philosophic temper.”21 But that was far from the truth: Lucy was so devastated that, after the baby’s death, she rarely wrote Knox.

  “I have not had the happiness to hear from you since your Letter of the 28th. . . . I entreat if you have opportunities that you would . . . embrace them and confer that pleasure on your Harry,” Knox begged her from his post at West Point on August 18. To cheer her, he promised she could soon join him. He too ardently wished for “that period when my Lucy and I shall be no more separated, when we shall set down free from the hurry, bustle and impertinence, of the world, in some sequestered vale where the education of our children and the preparation on our own parts for a pure and more happy region shall employ the principal part of our time in acts of love to men and worship to our maker.”22

  True to his promise, Lucy and their daughter, little Lucy, joined him on the Hudson in late August. Other than Major Henry Lee’s August 19 triumph against the British at Paulus Hook (today’s Jersey City) on the Hudson’s western shore, the summer passed quietly, leading Washington to deem West Point a “happy spot.”23 Had they been polled, the Knoxes would probably have agreed. Within a few weeks of their reunion, they were expecting another child.

  If, as British lexicographer Samuel Johnson observed, “the applause of a single human being is of great consequence,” Arnold’s marriage to Peggy Shippen was a monumental life shift.24 Not only was the bride beautiful, but, as the general later confided to a General Robert Howe, she was also remarkably sexy. “I myself had enjoyed a tolerable share of the dissipated joys of life, as well as the scenes of sensual gratification,” Arnold admitted, “but when set in competition with those I have since felt and still enjoy,” there was no comparison.25

  Peggy was equally enchanted with the older, more sexually experienced Arnold. Long after their honeymoon and first years of marriage she continued to praise Arnold as “the best of husbands.”26

  The one cloud hovering over the newlyweds was the accusations of the Supreme Executive Council. Five days before the Arnolds’ wedding, Washington announced a court-martial to examine the council’s four original charges. So heavily did that weigh upon Arnold that, half through his honeymoon, he grumbled to his friend John Jay, then president of the Second Continental Congress, “I cannot resist my surprise, that a court-martial should be ordered to try me for offences, some of which the committee of Congress in their report say, ‘there appears no evidence.’”27 Even Jay’s considerable powers of persuasion, nevertheless, would not change the Supreme Executive Council’s decision.

  Nor did Peggy’s tender reassurances soothe Arnold, who became obsessed with the damage done to his public reputation. The perception of a man’s honor, as the popular British decorum book Letters, Sentences and Maxims had advised readers, was key to worldly success: “Your moral character must be not only pure, but like Caesar’s wife, unsuspected. The least speck or blemish upon it is fatal.”28

  To blemish his character was precisely Reed’s intent, Arnold groused to Washington. The man had deliberately “kept the affair in suspense for near two months . . . and will use every artifice to delay the proceeding of a court-martial.” The only remedy was “an early day . . . fixed for it as [soon as] possible.” He thus hoped Washington would notify the Supreme Executive Council of that date as soon as possible “so that the court may not be delayed for want of their evidence.” Explaining that he preferred a trial in Philadelphia, where records were more accessible, than one in Middlebrook, Arnold conceded that wherever it was scheduled he “will be ready at the shortest notice.”29

  In confiden
ce Washington explained why the court-martial had to be held at Middlebrook: “It would have given me great pleasure to have indulged you with a court at Philadelphia,” he wrote to Arnold, “but such is the weak state of the line in respect to general and field officers that it would have been impossible without entirely divesting the army of officers of that rank.”30

  Reed, meanwhile, fumed over Washington’s agreement to an early trial date. In a thinly veiled threat, he warned the commander in chief, “Such is the dependence of the army upon the transportation of this state, that should the court martial treat it as a light and trivial matter, we fear it will not be practicable to draw forth wagons for the [army] in the future, be the emergency what it may.”31 More time, Reed insisted, was needed to collect evidence and call witnesses. The trial must be rescheduled for a later date.

  To protect the already disquieted Arnold from Reed’s monumental hostility, Washington simply informed the general that the trial date had been postponed. “As Congress have stamped ingratitude as a current coin, I must take it. I have nothing left but the little reputation I have gained in the army,” Arnold bitterly retorted on May 5 in a letter to Washington. “Delay in the present case is worse than death. I want no favor, I only ask for justice. . . . If your Excellency thinks me a criminal, for heaven’s sake, let me be immediately tried and if found guilty, executed.”32

  One can only imagine how Arnold’s turmoil affected Peggy. Such matters were beyond her experience, indeed beyond that of nearly all Revolutionary-era women, whose sphere was the home and hearth. Knowing little about the nuances of military law or the righteousness of the accusations against her husband, her only recourse was to calm Arnold with kisses and caresses. If she sensed that those accusations against him boded ill for their future, Peggy kept them to herself. Raised in an era when women were valued for their sexuality, solicitude, and silence, the eighteen year old stood loyally by Arnold’s side. Only decades later did Peggy finally comprehend the sacrifices she had made as Arnold’s wife. “My life,” she admitted in 1801 to her father, Judge Shippen, “has been a most trying and eventful one.”33