Exhausted by hours of crying and hysterics, Peggy fell into a restless sleep. Her marathon display of insanity, the grandest theatrical performance of her life, had successfully deceived Washington and Hamilton.
7
“A Momentary Pang”
“THE RAIN FELL IN torrents, and it was the darkest and most dismal night I have ever known,” recalled army surgeon mate Dr. Isaac Bronson of the first hours of Tuesday, September 26.1 By 8 a.m. a soggy group of soldiers had arrived at the Arnold residence with an agitated Joshua Hett Smith in tow. Hearing the commotion, Washington appeared on the porch, eyed the prisoner coolly, then withdrew into the house.
Soldiers had awakened Smith at midnight as he slept in a relative’s house in Fishkill and forced him at bayonet point to march the eighteen miles to Arnold’s house. After confinement in a back room, the irate attorney was brought before Washington from whom he demanded an explanation. “Sir,” Washington icily replied, “do you know that Arnold has fled and that Mr. Anderson, whom you piloted through our lines, proves to be Major John André, the Adjutant General of the British Army, who is now our prisoner? I expect him here under guard of one-hundred horses to meet his fate as a spy.” Pointing to a tree outside the window, the commander in chief added, “Unless you confess who were your accomplices I shall suspend you both on that tree.”2
As Washington predicted, one hundred Continental dragoons on horses soon pounded into the yard with Major John André in their possession. The prisoner sat upon a horse, Dr. Bronson recalled, with an expression that was “impossible to describe.”3
Major John André
Washington’s attitude towards the British spy was measured. “I would not wish André to be treated with insult,” he observed. But since André was not a “common prisoner of war,” the officer “could not be entitled to the usual indulgence they receive and so is to be most closely and narrowly watched.”4 Notably, André and his old friend Peggy Arnold spent that night in the same house but did not communicate. They may not have even known of each other’s presence.
Fearing that Arnold’s betrayal would provoke a British attack, Washington immediately tightened security for West Point. “Put the division on the left [flank] in motion as soon as possible with orders to proceed to King’s Ferry,” he wrote Nathanael Greene at headquarters in Tappan, New York.5 With equal urgency, Knox ordered the region’s heavy guns repositioned to repulse an enemy attack along the Hudson. “The strangest thing in the world has happened. Arnold has gone to the enemy,” Knox warned Major Sebastian Bauman, head of artillery at West Point. “It is incumbent on us to be on our guard.”6
Before long, messengers were galloping across the region, conveying the news to each army post. At Preakness, New Jersey, one officer recalled that “dark moment . . . in which the defection of Arnold was announced in whispers. It was midnight, horses were saddling, officers going from tent to tent ordering their men, in suppressed voices, to turn out and parade. No drum beat; the troops formed in silence and darkness . . . in consternation, for who in such an hour, and called together in such a manner, and in total ignorance of the cause, but must have felt and feared the near approach of some tremendous shock.”7
According to Dr. James Thacher, “At three o’clock this morning an alarm was spread throughout our camp. Two regiments from the Pennsylvania line, were ordered to march immediately to West Point, and the whole army to be held in readiness to march at a moment’s warning . . . in consequence of the discovery of one of the most extraordinary events in modern history . . . the treacherous conspiracy of Major General Arnold, and the capture of Major John André, adjutant general.”8
At daybreak on Tuesday, September 26, General Greene ordered all soldiers to hear an announcement:
Treason, of the blackest dye, was yesterday discovered. General Arnold, who commanded at West Point, lost to every sentiment of honor, of private and public obligation, was about to deliver up that important post into the hands of the enemy. Such an event must have given the American cause a dangerous, if not a fatal wound; happily, the treason has been timely discovered, to prevent the fatal misfortune. The providential train of circumstances which led to it, affords the most convincing proofs that the liberties of America, are the object of Divine protection.9
Had André initially been more cautious in his plans or less trusting of Arnold, he might have avoided capture. Once trapped in Haverstraw, though, the British officer had no choice but to disguise himself in Smith’s old clothes before they crossed the Hudson that Friday evening, September 22. At dawn the next day, after spending the night in a Verplanck farmhouse, André and Smith ate a hurried breakfast and mounted their horses.
The closer they rode towards neutral territory, Smith recalled, “the more his [André’s] countenance brightened into a cheerful serenity, and he became very affable. In short, I now found him highly entertaining.” As they approached Pine’s Bridge in Tarrytown, the country lawyer gave André half his cash, presented him with a map, and directed him towards British lines. André seemed so “affected at parting,” Smith claimed, that he had even offered “a valuable gold watch in remembrance of him, as a keep-sake, which I refused.”10
For several miles André traveled alone before stopping at a bridge to consult his map. Three scruffy young men suddenly emerged from the woods and blocked his way. The tallest, wearing a German sharpshooter’s coat, pointed a musket at André, who muttered, “I hope you belong to our party.” The second man asked André, “Which party?” Assuming that the coat belonged to a Hessian, André replied, “The lower,” meaning the British. Then, to confirm his status, André displayed his gold watch. “I am an officer in the British service and have now been on particular business in the country,” he explained. “I hope you will not detain me.”11 Suspicion hardened the faces of the trio. “My God, I must do anything to get along!” André exclaimed. “My lads, you had best let me go or you will bring yourselves into trouble, for, by stopping me, you will detain the General’s business. I am going to Dobbs Ferry to meet a person there and get information for him.”12
Paulding, the wearer of the German jacket, explained that he and his companions “did not mean to take anything from him,” but one of his companions, Isaac Van Wart, demanded André’s money. After realizing that the traveler had only a few coins, the trio stripped him. In André’s socks they found Arnold’s papers on West Point. Paulding, the only one of the trio who could read, studied them for a moment. “This,” he exclaimed, “is a spy!”13
Accounts differ as to what happened next. André’s captors claimed that he attempted to bribe his way to freedom with his watch, horse, 100 guineas, and the promise of household goods. André insisted that he was even more generous and had offered the trio a sizeable sum to be paid at the British border. After a whispered argument, the trio decided to turn André over to soldiers at the nearest military post.
Before leaving, Paulding fired his musket, notifying other “irregulars” that something important had happened. It was then, Van Wart recalled, that “big drops of sweat” poured off André’s face. “You never saw such an alteration in any man’s face . . . only a few moments before, he was uncommonly gay in his looks, but after we had made him prisoner, you could read in his face that he thought it was all over with him. After traveling one or two miles, he said, ‘I would to God you had blown my brains out when you stopped me!’”14
At the North Castle post, Lieutenant Colonel John Jameson ordered the prisoner and his papers sent on to Arnold. André was relieved, convinced the American general would free him and have him returned to the British. But as he and his guards rode towards the Hudson, a messenger intervened and ordered their return to North Castle. Military protocol demanded that, insisted secret service officer Major Benjamin Tallmadge: the prisoner must appear at the Arnold residence only after Washington arrived there on Monday. Never dreaming that West Point’s commander had instigated the treachery, Tallmadge consequently reported the capture
of a John Anderson—and unwittingly provoked Arnold’s flight.
The next day André’s guard at a second post in South Salem observed that the British captive “looked like a reduced [impoverished] gentleman. His small clothes (beneath his jacket) were nankeen [a yellow cloth]. . . . His coat, purple, with gold lace, worn, somewhat threadbare, with a small-brimmed hat tarnished on his head.” One hint of the prisoner’s true identity were his whitetop boots, which British officers wore on informal occasions. Another was André’s hair. When a barber combed it, white power fell onto the prisoner’s clothes, suggesting the recent wearing of a wig and convincing his guard he had “no ordinary person in charge.”15
After learning that Washington, rather than Arnold, would supervise his capture, André decided to confess the truth. His real name, he wrote the commander in chief, was John André, not Anderson. He had entered neutral territory to “meet a person who was to give me intelligence,” only to be “betrayed . . . into the vile condition of an enemy in disguise within your posts.” Consequently André said that he hoped he would be “branded with nothing dishonorable, as no motive could be mine, but the service of my king, and I was involuntarily an imposter.”16
The letter did not soften Washington. Nor, when the dragoons delivered André to the Arnold residence that rainy Tuesday morning, September 26, had the Virginian chosen to meet him. To do so, reasoned Washington, might weaken his judgment. André had violated the international laws of war. He had behaved as a common spy. Death by hanging was the usual punishment.
On Tuesday, September 26, Peggy seemed calmer but spent the day in bed weighing where to go: to Arnold in British New York or to her parents’ home in Philadelphia. By the following morning, a rainy Wednesday, she had decided upon the latter. After accepting sympathetic farewells from Washington and Hamilton, Peggy was escorted into Arnold’s light carriage with her baby and, at a signal from her escort and Arnold’s aide, David Franks, wheeled away.
The roads north and south of West Point buzzed with activity. Hundreds of Continental soldiers filed along them. Some stood guard; still others served as lookouts along the Hudson. Heavy guns and cannons had been repositioned for attack. Continental regiments from New Jersey marched towards West Point, as locals, spooked by rumors of other nearby traitors, retreated into their homes and farms. “Heavens on earth! We are all astonishment, each peeping at his next neighbor to see if any treason was hanging about him; nay, we even descended to a critical examination of ourselves,” Colonel Alexander Scammel observed. “The surprise soon settled down to a fixed detestation and abhorrence of Arnold.”17
As Mrs. Arnold’s carriage creaked along the muddy roads towards New Jersey, Peggy stared into the driving rain, shrinking from the taunts and jeers of residents who recognized the vehicle. Occasionally Franks stopped at inns and farmhouses to purchase food and drink but often had the door slammed in his face. Finally, on September 28, Arnold’s carriage rolled into the town of Kakait. There, Franks met a Mr. Reed, “the only man who would take us in at the place or give our horses anything to eat,” he wrote Varick. “We got here, I very wet, Mrs. Arnold, thank God in tolerable spirits. . . . I have hopes to get them home without any return of her distress in so violent a degree.”18
A few miles away, in a farmhouse near army headquarters in Preakness, New Jersey, Lucy Knox must have been jolted by news of Arnold’s treason. Once that military hero had been her friend, the warrior whose affection she attempted to win for Betsy DeBlois, the same man who had gallantly escorted her and her baby to Valley Forge. How was that possible? Arnold was the renowned hero of Valcour Island, the courageous Eagle of Saratoga, the Hero of Freeman’s Farm, the man who had sacrificed his fortune and his leg for the American cause—the general whom “her Harry” continued to admire even after the court-martial. It was true that the Supreme Executive Council had persecuted him and Congress had not appropriately honored his courageous performance on the battlefield.
Still, Arnold’s betrayal of the patriotic cause was reprehensible, a desecration of the thousands of lives lost in battle and a mockery of the lofty ideals that inspired the Revolution. To signify her own faith in the war, Lucy had styled her long dark hair in the shape of a tricornered Continental military hat, forming a “a pyramid which rose a foot above her head,” as the French general Chastellux noted soon afterwards.19 Moved by Knox’s description of Peggy’s anguish resulting from Arnold’s treason, Lucy, too, probably sympathized with her counterpart, the defiant bride of Philadelphia.
By September 29 Peggy’s carriage approached Paramus for a second overnight stay with Theodosia Prevost. The house was filled with guests, but after they left, Peggy allegedly made a startling confession. “She was heartily tired of the theatricals she was exhibiting,” she told Theodosia. Moreover, she confessed that she had “corresponded with the British commander . . . 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.”20
The story not only implicated Peggy as a fellow traitor but as instigator of Arnold’s treason. Aaron Burr, who would marry the newly widowed Theodosia in 1782 and later became America’s third vice president, often repeated that story to others after the Arnolds’ deaths, and an account of it appeared in Matthew Davis’s 1836 Memoirs of Aaron Burr.
In the late nineteenth century, Lewis Burd Walker, a Shippen descendant, attempted to refute the accusation by publishing a rationale for Burr’s comments in the influential Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. According to Walker, Burr was visiting at the Hermitage when Peggy arrived. He offered to escort her to Philadelphia. Supposedly she accepted, but as they rode together in a carriage, Burr, a notorious womanizer, tried to seduce Peggy, who rejected him. “Indignantly repelled,” Walker wrote, Burr later “treasured up his revenge and left a story behind him worthy of his false and malignant heart.”21
But Walker’s story was specious. Not only had the ever-loyal David Franks escorted Peggy and her child to the Hermitage, but he also delivered her in early October to the Shippens’ home in Philadelphia.
By the time Peggy’s carriage left the Hermitage, on Wednesday, September 27, Arnold’s betrayal had been announced in Philadelphia. Immediately, Joseph Reed and the Pennsylvania Supreme Executive Council ordered the city sheriff to “make a diligent search for General Arnold’s papers.”22 No sooner were the files located than authorities discovered André’s August 16, 1779, “millinery” letter to Peggy.
On Saturday, September 30, a notice, probably written by Reed, appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet asserting that the letter proved Peggy’s role in Arnold’s treason. “Our correspondent concludes . . . on the fallacious and dangerous sentiments so frequently avowed in this city that female opinions are of no consequence in public matters,” the Packet shrilly announced. “Behold the consequences. Col. Andrie [sic], under the mask of friendship and former acquaintance at Meshianzas [sic] and balls, opens a correspondence in August 1779 with Mrs. Arnold, which has doubtless been improved on his part to the dreadful and horrid issue . . . and which but for the overruling care of a kind Providence, must have involved this country and our allies in great distress, and perhaps utter ruin.”23
Aghast at the public accusations, the Shippens protested that André’s letter was nothing more than a gracious offer to supply Peggy with materials for stylish new bonnets. As her brother-in-law, Burd (who served as the family’s spokesman), asserted, those accusations were ludicrous: “The impossibility of so delicate and timorous a girl as poor Peggy being in the least privy or concerned in so bold and adventurous a plan is great. . . . It is not possible she should have engaged in such a wicked one.” Even General Washington, Burd added, “certifies ‘that he has every reason to believe she is innocent & requests all persons to treat her with that humanity & tenderness due to her sex & virtues.’”24
The same Saturday of the Packet notice, the beat of a solitary drum summoned Philadelphians to the streets. Behind the drummer marched six soldiers, a commander, and a wagon displaying an effigy of Arnold. The dummy had two faces and held a mask in his right hand. In his left, the figure clutched a message from Satan, announcing his completion of mischief. Behind the dummy stood the devil, “shaking a bag of money at the general’s left ear” and grasping a pitchfork poised to drive the traitor into hell “as the reward due for the many crimes which the thief of gold had made him commit.”25 As the wagon paraded by the Shippens’ home and passed through other city streets, spectators shouted, whistled, and hooted. Later they set Arnold’s effigy on fire. “The public clamor,” Burd grimly noted, “is high.”26
Adding to the animosity were the Packet’s exposes of Arnold’s illegal business schemes. Among his correspondence Arnold had preserved one of Peggy’s letters that further ruined her reputation as a sweet-tempered young woman. Written after a concert at the French minister’s house, Peggy’s note jeered at several other women also in attendance. Philadelphia society was consequently outraged, producing “much offense.” Even so, Burd criticized the Packet for printing it. To him, it seemed “rather hard that those observations which are intended merely for the eye of a husband should be made public and criticized.”27
In the midst of that uproar, on October 2 or 3, Peggy arrived at the Shippen house, where her sympathetic parents fussed over her. Almost immediately “she fell into a kind of stupor,” which Burd attributed to her “violent transitions from one kind of grief to another.” For days, the young woman remained ill, so emotionally distraught that she could not be comforted. Her outbursts were understandable, Burd opined, reflecting the family’s view: “A girl of the most refined feelings, of the most affectionate disposition and dotingly fond of her husband, must be affected in a very extraordinary manner upon such an unhappy event. She keeps to her room and is almost continually on the bed. Her peace of mind seems to me entirely destroyed.”28
Defiant Brides Page 12
