The hangman, a fellow named Strickland, hideously disguised with black grease on his face, stepped into the wagon with a halter in his hand, but André pushed him away, unpinned his shirt collar, took the rope from the executioner’s hand, and, placing the knot under his right ear, drew the noose snug around his neck. Colonel Alexander Scammell informed André that he had a right to speak, and he responded, “I pray you to bear the witness that I died like a brave man.”
Then the Briton took a handkerchief from a pocket and tied it around his eyes. That done, the provost officer commanded that his arms must be tied, so André pulled out another handkerchief and handed it to the executioner, who fastened his arms behind his back. The rope around his neck was then made fast to the pole overhead and suddenly the wagon was drawn from under the gallows—so suddenly that it swung the victim violently back and forth until the lifeless body finally hung absolutely still. As the man in Baldwin’s regiment said, “He remained hanging, I should think, for twenty to thirty minutes, and during that time the chambers of death were never stiller than the multitude by which he was surrounded.”
“Thus died, in the bloom of life, the accomplished Major André, the pride of the Royal Army, and the valued friend of Sir Henry Clinton,” wrote James Thacher, who, like so many of those present, was deeply affected by what was perceived as the final scene in a tragedy.
America’s military men recognized that the gentlemanly, courtly André was the antithesis of Arnold, but even so, they asked themselves, why had Arnold done what he did? How could someone who had fought so hard for the independence in which he believed turn against his country and his fellow soldiers? They may not have liked him, but there was no denying the man’s courage in battle, his utter determination to win at all costs, his disregard for his own safety, and his ability to inspire men to fight.
At the time no one imagined that Peggy Arnold was intimately involved in the plot; not for a century and a half would it be known that she was her husband’s accomplice in the squalid affair.* With Benedict Arnold, who gave his name to traitors in America, the motivation is easier to understand. He was greedy—greedy for money, for position, for recognition—all denied him or given him only grudgingly despite his heroic actions in battle. He had been passed over for promotion several times by Congress and understandably resented that other men, less qualified and with far less experience in battle, were appointed to a higher rank than his own. Unfortunately for his career, Arnold was plainly disliked by a number of his contemporaries, who were rankled by his raw ambition and his naturally pushy nature. Although the world might see what he did as a despicable, venal act, to Arnold it was a commercial transaction, no different from the sale of the share he had claimed in the British sloop Active, captured by a Pennsylvania privateer while he was the commandant in Philadelphia. Instead of wooden timbers and armaments and rigging, the merchandise was his country. What’s more, Arnold knew how desperate the condition of the American army was, and wanted to ensure that he would end up on the winning side.
Greed is a goad that has turned many a man to the devil’s work. In Benedict Arnold’s case, the man obsessed by greed had no hesitation in resorting to evil to satisfy his craving.
As Washington put it, “He wants feeling!” and went on to say that “he seems to have been so hackneyed in villainy, and so lost to all sense of honor and shame that while his faculties will enable him to continue his sordid pursuits, there will be no time for remorse.”
Peggy Arnold was something else again. She had grown up with money, never having to worry about it. Money was always there, and what she wanted she was always given. Spoiled by her family, sought after by young men, the cynosure of all eyes in her charmed circle, she took it for granted that she was admired, adored, and would always be invited to dance when the waltz began. Then this dark, mysterious, powerful figure, with a limp that reminded everyone of his heroism in battle, appeared on the scene, and she was drawn to him, an outsider, as he was to her, the ultimate insider. Filled with desire for him, she wanted whatever it was that he wanted, and what he wanted must have seemed eminently appealing to an attractive, impressionable young woman who longed for excitement and adventure.
On September 25, aboard the Vulture, Arnold had written a letter to George Washington—which could, under the circumstances, fairly be described as an obscenity—in which he claimed that love for his country actuated his present conduct, “however it may appear inconsistent to the world, who very seldom judge right of any man’s actions.” Having blamed the world for misinterpreting his actions, he then asked the General to protect his wife from any insult or injury, for “she is as good and as innocent as an angel, and is incapable of doing wrong.” And that assessment of her character was the one the public seems generally to have accepted for a century and a half.
Arnold enclosed a letter for his Peggy with the one to Washington, asking that it be delivered to her, and carefully included a sentence he intended Washington to read, so as to divert suspicion from his wife: “Thou loveliest and best of women, Words are wanting to express my feelings and distress on your account, who are incapable of doing wrong yet are exposed to suffer wrong.”
In the wake of the treasonable act, authorities in Philadelphia seized Arnold’s papers, and at once other repugnant activities came to light: his wrongdoing in office, his own and his wife’s secret purchases in New York, his influence peddling, his apparent theft and sale of goods intended for the garrison at West Point. Accused in the Pennsylvania Packet of “baseness and prostitution of office and character,” Arnold soon became a figure of derision across the United States, his effigy hanged or burned in village after village, his once-heroic image shattered for good.
When he reached New York, the traitor’s reception was a far cry from the hero’s welcome Arnold had foreseen before his plot was discovered. General Clinton did give him the rank of brigadier general of provincials, but that was a step down from his rank in the Continental Army, with a somewhat demeaning limitation of his command, which Arnold was obliged to accept. His reputation with Clinton’s officers was suggested in a London newspaper: “General Arnold is a very unpopular character in the British army, nor can all the patronage he meets with from the commander-in-chief procure him respectability.… The subaltern officers have conceived such an aversion to him that they unanimously refused to serve under his command.…”
Arnold, brash as ever, wrote to Clinton, quoting André as saying that while he was authorized to offer Arnold only £6,000 for his services, he was certain that General Clinton would give him the £10,000 Arnold proposed (even though “No sum of money would have been an inducement to have gone through the danger and anxiety I have experienced,” the traitor added). Clinton’s response was immediate and spoke eloquently: he sent Arnold a draft for £6,000. When one of Arnold’s former comrades-in-arms learned of the transaction, he wrote to John Lamb, saying that the hero of Quebec and Saratoga had shown himself “as base a prostitute as this or any other country” had produced. It would have been far better for Arnold and his friends, he continued, “had the ball which pierced his leg at Saratoga been directed through his heart; he then would have finished his career in glory.”
Before long an announcement appeared in New York’s Royal Gazette, a loyalist newspaper, addressed to officers and soldiers of the Continental Army “who have the real interest of their country at heart, and who are determined to be no longer the tools and dupes of Congress and of France.” Brigadier General Benedict Arnold offered to lead the volunteers in what was to be called an American legion and to share with them “the glory of rescuing our native country from the grasping hand of France.…” For the next six weeks the announcement appeared semiweekly and in that time produced volunteers of only eight officers, three sergeants, twenty-eight common soldiers, and one drummer for Arnold’s American legion.
In mid-November of 1780 a haggard, exhausted Peggy Arnold arrived in New York with her baby, Edward. She had been
banished from the state of Pennsylvania by the Supreme Executive Council on grounds that her presence there was “dangerous to the public safety,” and, fearing for her life, she had been escorted to the west bank of the Hudson River by her father. There they bade each other a tearful farewell, and she was soon united with her husband. Interestingly, while in Philadelphia she had agreed, if permitted to remain there with her family, to cease all correspondence with her husband for the duration of the war, but the authorities would have none of that. They wanted no part of Benedict Arnold.
Whether the relationship between Arnold and Peggy had changed during her exposure to what must have been a shattering experience in her hometown, where old friends turned their backs on her and she learned firsthand the meaning of treason, is impossible to say, but the two had a powerful physical attraction for each other and within several weeks of her arrival in New York Peggy was pregnant. Soon they became part of loyalist society in the city to which thousands of Tories had flocked during the war, consorting with the chief justice, William Smith, and his wife, with Sir Henry Clinton and others at dinner parties, dances, and the theater. Yet as much as Benedict Arnold may have enjoyed the limelight, he was not a man to adjust easily to the sedentary life. He wanted action, and suddenly Clinton gave him a shot at it. He was to lead a detachment of some seventeen hundred men to Portsmouth, Virginia, at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.
* * *
AT THE END of what Washington called an “inactive campaign,” he positioned his troops in such a way as to protect West Point while camping near sources of provisions he hoped would carry them through the coming winter. He was sure that Clinton would detach some of his troops from New York and send them to the South “to extend his conquests,” but if that should happen, the Americans were in no position to do much about it. After Gates’s horrific loss at Camden, no one wanted that general in charge of anything, and Washington’s immediate thought was to replace him with Nathanael Greene, his most able, resourceful general. Greene was then at West Point and accepted the southern command reluctantly, knowing he could expect little help from the commander in chief, who was burdened with so many problems. Writing to his beloved wife, Kitty, Greene said, “My dear Angel, What I have been dreading has come to pass. His Excellency General Washington by order of Congress has appointed me to the command of the Southern army.”
Happily for Greene, Washington gave him the best possible support in the form of two officers: Baron Steuben and Henry Lee. Steuben was incomparable as a trainer of troops and could also serve Greene well as an experienced adviser, while “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was a superb horseman with a small but well-trained cavalry force.
After graduating from Princeton at the age of seventeen, Lee was about to leave for England and study law when the war broke out. Patrick Henry nominated him for a captaincy in a Virginia cavalry regiment, and it was not long before his military proficiency and exploits attracted the attention of the commander in chief. For his conduct during the campaign of 1778 he won a promotion to major commandant and was authorized to increase the size of his cavalry command, which would serve as an independent corps. A victory at Paulus Hook in 1779 earned him one of the eight medals voted by Congress during the war, and he was promoted to lieutenant colonel when he was only twenty-three.
Before Lee headed south to join Greene, Washington had a conversation with him about a subject of utmost importance. The General wanted desperately to get his hands on Benedict Arnold—not to have someone kill him but to give him a trial, sentence him, and make an example of him before the army and the world. The only possible way to accomplish this was to kidnap him from the British army, and to do this Washington asked his young friend Henry Lee to suggest a man from his command. Lee believed he had just the man for the job.
On the night of October 9 Lee summoned a sergeant major named John Champe to his headquarters, locked the door behind him, and disclosed an audacious plan. The idea was for Champe to desert from Lee’s cavalry brigade, flee to the British in New York, insinuate himself into the corps Benedict Arnold was raising—his American legion—and somehow work his way into the good graces of the traitor. On top of this, he was to meet every second day with an American agent who would make himself known as Mr. Baldwin. When the circumstances seemed auspicious, they should take advantage of a dark night, seize Arnold, gag him, and, pretending he was a drunken soldier, carry him to a boat provided by Baldwin, cross the Hudson, and head for Bergen Woods, where a rebel patrol would meet them and take them to headquarters.
Champe was a tall, strong fellow in his early twenties who had been chosen by Lee as “a very promising youth of uncommon taciturnity and inflexible perseverance”—two qualities that were essential in this bizarre assignment. Lee knew Champe’s family in Virginia and was confident that he would be faithful to his duty, but at first Champe was reluctant, not because he was afraid of the hazardous mission but because he hated the idea of even pretending to be a deserter. Obviously, he would have to run the risk any real deserter would face, but Lee promised to delay any pursuit of him as long as possible. Beyond that, Lee assured him that he would receive a promotion, and that if the plan miscarried and he was caught, his name would be cleared.
Lee wrote to Washington, saying he had arranged for two men to carry out the General’s wishes. Champe was to be rewarded with a promotion; Mr. Baldwin was to receive “one hundred guineas, five hundred acres of land, and three Negroes.” Washington approved promptly, but only “with this express stipulation and pointed injunction”: “that he A——d, is brought to me alive. No circumstance whatever shall obtain my consent to his being put to death. The idea which would accompany such an event would be that ruffians had been hired to assassinate him. My aim is to make a public example of him.”
On the night of October 20, Champe and Lee met for the last time, the sergeant packed his gear in a knapsack, saddled his horse, and rode out of camp on his extraordinary mission. Thanks to Lee’s efforts to delay pursuit, he had a head start of about an hour and a quarter and managed to reach the vicinity of a popular tavern, the Three Pigeons, on the ridge above salt marshes on the west bank of the Hudson. But there his luck ran out. As he was emerging from the woods about daylight on Saturday, October 21, he heard hoofbeats and saw dragoons near the tavern galloping after him. Riding hard for Bergen, about four miles distant, he managed to elude his pursuers, but they came in sight again just as he leaped from his horse, strapped his knapsack on his shoulders, and plunged into the Hudson.
Providentially, he had been spotted by a British officer on a frigate in the river, who realized at once that an American deserter was making an escape, and had a boat lowered to row toward him and pick him up while the ship’s guns covered Champe. Hauled aboard ship, Champe identified himself and said he was seeking British protection in New York City.
On October 23 the escapee was interviewed by Assistant Adjutant General George Beckwith at British headquarters at 1 Broadway, the beautiful home built by Captain Archibald Kennedy of the Royal Navy. The deserter’s story of unrest and terrible conditions rang true to British officers, who had heard similar tales from malcontents of the Continental Army, and Champe was invited to enlist in the British army. He was ready for this: to accept would heighten the risk of his being caught and hanged by the rebels, he argued, so he was allowed to look for a job in Manhattan.
Fortunately, Arnold’s quarters were next door to Clinton’s headquarters, and almost immediately Champe arranged to run into the traitor, who spotted the deserter’s Light Horse uniform and was impressed by Champe’s story that he had been led to desert by General Arnold’s example. At the end of their conversation, Champe accepted a rank in the American legion that was equivalent to that which he had held in Lee’s corps.
Within a matter of days the “deserter” discovered that Arnold had a regular habit of walking in his garden around midnight, just before retiring, and decided that this was the time and place to catch him. He then worked
loose a number of palings in the picket fence so that he and his accomplice Baldwin could pass through quietly, jump on Arnold, stuff a gag in his mouth, and drag him into the alley behind the house and to a waiting boat at the pier behind headquarters. These precautions took time, and Champe was such a careful, meticulous planner that it was early December before he was ready to make his move. He set the date for the 11th of the month.
That winter afternoon as he waited for darkness to fall, General Arnold suddenly appeared and handed him an order. Champe was to leave immediately with the American legion, which was embarking for Virginia with orders to take the town of Portsmouth on Chesapeake Bay. Champe’s efforts had been to no avail; now he had to join the loyalists struggling up the gangplanks with their gear and wait on board until the fleet sailed on December 20, leaving him with no chance to seize Arnold or notify Mr. Baldwin or call off the Continental soldiers who would be waiting in the Bergen Woods for the three men to appear.
As the transports bearing Arnold and his seventeen hundred men, including John Champe, set sail and slipped out of New York harbor on the evening tide, no one could have known it, but the Revolutionary War in the North was over.
4
BEWARE THE BACK WATER MEN
In Newport, Rochambeau’s French officers settled in for a comfortable season of sociability, having taken over a number of elegant houses after repairing the damage the British had done to them. But early in October they got their first taste of severe American weather when the howling tail of the hurricane that had devastated Martinique and Barbados blew into Rhode Island, driving ships aground, dismasting others, and blowing over all the tents in camp.
Victory at Yorktown Page 8
