Anderson tried another approach. “I am happy, gentlemen, to find I am mistaken. You belong to the upper party and so do I.” He reminded them that these days a man had to use any tactic to get through no-man’s-land. To prove he was genuinely on the American side, he pulled out a pass signed by General Benedict Arnold.
The men—John Paulding, Isaac Van Wart and David Williams—thought of themselves as members of the militia when it didn’t interfere with extortion. “Damn Arnold’s pass,” one of them said. “You said you was a British officer. Where is your money?”
“Gentlemen, I have none about me.”
“You a British officer and no money!” a man repeated incredulously. “Let’s search him.”
They led their prisoner to a wood off the highway to avoid having their prize plucked off by a larger gang. They emptied his pockets and found nothing. “He has got his money in his boots,” one man said. Between his stocking and his bare foot they found a wad of papers, but they paid no attention to them and went on looking for money hidden in his saddle.
Anderson decided these men were neither loyalists nor patriots but simple thieves, and he asked them to name their price for taking him to King’s Bridge at the southern end of no-man’s-land. His captors thought it was a trick. If we take you there, they said, you will turn us in to the authorities, and we’ll end up in prison.
“If you will not trust my honor,” Anderson said, growing edgier as the minutes passed, “two of you may stay with me, and one shall go with a letter which I shall write. Name your sum.”
They set a price, but then decided the risk was too great and they might all be seized by the British. They would take the prisoner instead to the commander on the American lines.
That was how three Skinners captured Major John André, Sir Henry Clinton’s adjutant general, Peggy Shippen’s former dancing partner and Benedict Arnold’s accomplice in his plot to betray America.
—
The papers in Major André’s boot could not have damned him more clearly. They included a plan of the fortifications at West Point, an American engineer’s analysis of how to defend the fort and a copy of the secret minutes of General Washington’s last council of war. By the time the papers reached Washington, André had realized that concealment was hopeless and admitted his identity to Washington in a letter. André claimed that, despite appearances, he had not gone behind American lines as a spy. General Clinton had warned him not to disguise himself but to act as though he were traveling under a flag of truce. The mission had been marred by blunders, however, and André had been forced against his will to wear civilian clothes and use a false name.
As the significance of the capture struck George Washington, he confronted more urgent problems than André’s military honor. Washington had endured dinner at the Arnold table with his customary reserve, not mentioning Arnold’s flight to Richard Varick. But to Lafayette he had cried out when he first received the messages from Hamilton, “My God! Arnold has gone over to the British. Whom can we trust now?” Washington’s shoulders had slumped and, impossible as it seemed, the American commander in chief had looked close to tears.
West Point’s neglected defenses, along with André’s papers, suggested that Benedict Arnold had intended to stage a sham resistance and then surrender the fort to the British. Now that the plot was exposed, Henry Clinton might strike at once. The fort was put on alert, André was placed under close guard, and Nathanael Greene and Anthony Wayne were told to rush reinforcements to West Point. Wayne got the word at 1 A.M. and within an hour was moving his Pennsylvania troops north. They marched sixteen miles in the dark for four hours without halting and reached the fort by sunrise. The night had been tense and discouraging for Washington, and he could hardly believe that relief had come so fast. He greeted the troops with an effusiveness that Wayne said made him feel like a god. “All is safe,” Washington told him, “and again I am happy.”
Washington’s precautions had been wise, but Henry Clinton didn’t yet know that André had been captured and he had no plan to attack so quickly. When Clinton had been advising Gage and Howe, he had pressed for lightning action, but now that he was in charge he was as wary and cautious as his predecessors. Days passed and the attack did not come. General Washington was left to deal with John André and with Benedict Arnold’s young wife.
Arnold was safely beyond Washington’s reach. When Washington first read the captured documents, he had sent Hamilton to try to head Arnold off before he could reach sanctuary on a British sloop, the Vulture, at anchor in the Hudson. Arnold had been negotiating with Henry Clinton for more than a year over the terms for his betrayal. André had been their go-between. Arnold had first asked for twenty thousand British pounds but settled for a cash payment of six thousand pounds sterling and a commission in the British Army. Once the deal was struck, Arnold had to persuade General Washington to appoint him commander at West Point. Except when Washington had seemed to prefer putting Arnold on the battlefield, that part of the conspiracy had gone smoothly.
Benedict Arnold had not been the only American officer the British had approached. John Sullivan, Daniel Morgan, Philip Schuyler, even Israel Putnam, had all been sounded out and all had rejected the overture indignantly. The same was true of the coxswain on Arnold’s barge the morning of his escape. As commander of the fort, Arnold had been told of John Anderson’s arrest at the time he was greeting Washington’s advance party. After a brief farewell with his wife, he had rushed to the barge and ordered its crew to take him to the Vulture. He announced his switch in allegiance during the trip and promised crew members promotions in the British Army if they would join him.
“No, sir!” said the coxswain, Corporal James Larvey. “One coat is enough for me to wear at a time.”
The rest of the crew agreed. When they reached the Vulture, Arnold had them taken prisoner by the British sailors. From the sloop, he had sent the message to Washington that Hamilton delivered: “The heart which is conscious of its own rectitude cannot attempt to palliate a step which the world may censure as wrong . . .” Arnold’s letter revealed a sense of injustice that had been festering longer than his war wounds. “I have no favor to ask for myself,” he continued—although he did request that his clothes and baggage be sent after him. “I have too often experienced the ingratitude of my country to attempt it.” But, he said, because of General Washington’s well-known humanity, he was asking protection for Mrs. Arnold. “She is as good and as innocent as an angel, and is incapable of doing wrong.”
George Washington’s entourage had the same opinion. The night the Americans worked to strengthen their fortifications, Alexander Hamilton, only five years older than the bereft woman, had tried to comfort her. Peggy Arnold received him and his fellow officers from bed. She had recovered from her apparent madness and said she remembered nothing about burning irons or plots to kill her baby. But she was so overcome by the prospect of the hostility she would soon face that Colonel Hamilton wished he were her brother and entitled to defend her honor. He might have been less sympathetic had he known about the letters that had passed between John André and Mrs. Arnold. On their surface, André had merely offered to become Peggy Arnold’s milliner, but the correspondence had been intended to determine the price of her husband’s loyalty. Whether or not General Washington was equally convinced of Mrs. Arnold’s innocence, he sent her and her infant home to Philadelphia, and Lafayette wrote ahead to say that it would be exceedingly painful to Washington if Mrs. Arnold were not received with the greatest kindness.
Washington would not extend the same charity to John André. The major considered himself a legitimate wartime emissary and still hoped he would be exchanged again as a prisoner of war. Riding downriver to be put on trial at Washington’s headquarters in Tappan, New York, André had tried to draw some comforting words from his escort, Major Benjamin Tallmadge. But he had chosen the wrong man.
Surely, André asked, he would not be treated as a spy?
His guard evaded the question. When André persisted, Tallmadge told him about a classmate from Yale, a friend he had loved, who had joined the American Army and then served General Washington by entering New York in civilian clothes and gathering information about British installations. The young man was Nathan Hale.
“Do you remember the sequel of this story?” Tallmadge asked.
“Yes,” said André. “He was hanged as a spy, but you surely do not consider his case and mine alike?”
“Precisely similar,” said Tallmadge, “and similar will be your fate.”
For the first time, André understood the enormity of his offense. Benjamin Tallmadge had reason to gloat over André’s obvious agitation, but he had been as charmed by him as men and women always were, and he watched with nothing but sympathy.
General Washington selected Nathanael Greene to preside over André’s trial. Greene had been a Quaker once, but that was many battles ago. If John André was a spy—and he freely admitted that he had not gone to West Point under any legal protection—he must pay with his life. That was the finding of the board. The next day, October 1, 1780, George Washington endorsed it: “The commander-in-chief directs the execution of the above sentence in the usual way this afternoon at 5 o’clock precisely.” The usual way was hanging.
In New York, Henry Clinton threatened to execute American prisoners of war if André was hanged, but Washington remained unmoved. He knew that his army held too many British prisoners for Clinton to embark on bloody reprisals. Alexander Hamilton, who felt sympathy for the prisoner, wrote an anonymous letter to Clinton suggesting that André be traded for Benedict Arnold. Since Hamilton regularly wrote George Washington’s letters, Clinton recognized his handwriting and assumed he was speaking on Washington’s behalf. Even so, Arnold was too great a prize to surrender. Other American officers also fell under André’s spell and suggested that Hamilton ask André to make the plea himself. Surely Clinton would not refuse an appeal from his favorite young officer. But Hamilton refused even to pass along the idea, because he was sure André’s high sense of honor would force him to reject it.
When André saw that nothing would save him and that he would die before nightfall, he sent General Washington a message asking to be shot as a soldier rather than hanged as a spy. Washington did not reply. He had decided not to honor the request and thought it was a kindness to let André go on hoping until the final moment. When Hamilton made the same plea on André’s behalf, Washington continued to resist it. John André, for all his charm and good manners, had been convicted of spying, and spies were hanged.
As the hour approached, a vast crowd gathered at the field behind Maybie’s Tavern where the gibbet had been built. Then, at the last minute, Henry Clinton caused a cruel delay. In exchange for André’s life, Clinton offered any American prisoner he held. By the time Washington had rejected the proposal, the hanging had been delayed until noon of the next day.
As his admirers expected, John André behaved impeccably on the last day of his life. A servant was allowed through the lines to bring him a dress uniform, but when the man entered the room in tears André sent him away, saying, “Leave me until you show yourself more manly.”
Each morning since his arrest, André’s breakfast had come from George Washington’s own table, and this day was no different. After André ate, he was shaved and dressed in full uniform. Seated before a mirror, he made a pen-and-ink sketch of himself as a memento for one of his guards. He then rose and linked arms with the two men who were to escort him. “I am ready at any moment, gentlemen, to wait on you,” André said. The guards thought his mood seemed cheerful.
Again a crowd had turned out. Only General Washington and his staff were absent. Washington had ordered his shutters drawn against the sight of the execution. There was no glee in carrying out the sentence, only sadness. André walked out from his quarters, arm in arm with the American officers. He smiled as he bowed to members of the court that had condemned him, and he complimented the fifers of the military band on the excellence of their music. André expected to face a firing squad, and when he saw the gallows he gave a start and held back.
“Why this emotion, sir?” one of the guards chided him.
André recovered and continued walking. “I am reconciled to my death,” he said, “but I detest the mode.”
A wagon with his coffin had been drawn up directly under the gallows. André stepped upon the back of the wagon and, hands on hips, paced up and down the length of his coffin as he surveyed the audience that had come to see him die. Those nearby watched him look to the top of the gallows and say, “It will be but a momentary pang.”
The executioner appeared, his face and arms smeared with black grease. He was a Tory prisoner named Strickland, who would be paid for the day’s work with his freedom. When he tried to put the noose around André’s neck, André pulled back and said, “Take your black hands off me.” Instead he did it himself, drawing the rope up snugly, with the knot under his right ear. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and tied it over his eyes. The commanding officer announced that his arms must also be bound, and André produced a second handkerchief and let himself be tied behind his back, just above the elbows.
The commander asked if he had any last words. Major André said, “Only bear witness that I died like a brave man.”
The rope was long, and when the wagon was suddenly pulled away John André’s body swung in a great arc. Gradually, the movement slowed until he hung still. The commander ordered a soldier to shorten André’s misery by pressing down hard on his shoulders. For almost half an hour, his body hung from the gallows amid silence from the crowd.
America was avenged, but George Washington had lost twice in the affair. Benedict Arnold, once his bravest general, was now his enemy. And Alexander Hamilton could not forgive Washington for his hardness of heart and began to look less worshipfully at his commander.
The battle of Yorktown, painted by an eyewitness, Louis van Blarenberghe
MUSÉE DE VERSAILLES
Yorktown
1781
THOMAS JEFFERSON had suffered a series of political defeats over the five years since the bright days of his Declaration of Independence. Serving in the Virginia assembly until June 1779, he had proposed a host of reform measures to redistribute the privileges held by the plantation owners and the Anglican clergy. Jefferson believed that for a strong society to arise, the community should consist of many farmers with small holdings, perhaps fifty acres, rather than the same men working vast estates as tenants. Jefferson had also proposed tax-supported schools to give both boys and girls at least three years of education. He advocated revising the penal code so that only murder and treason remained punishable by death and argued for absolute separation of state and church. But after three years he had succeeded in passing only one major reform—a bill abolishing primogeniture, which had required that upon a man’s death the bulk of his property go to his oldest son. For all his influence in Philadelphia, Jefferson had been no match for the conservative faction in the Virginia legislature. When he ran for the speaker’s post in 1778, he had been defeated by better than two to one.
Patrick Henry had nominated Jefferson as governor, a post Henry had held for three one-year terms. The Virginia assembly elected Jefferson by a six-vote margin in June 1779, but by the time he took office Virginia had become all but ungovernable. Henry, unable to curb his need for applause, had worked harder at being popular than at preparing Virginia for the war that was moving steadily south. And Jefferson, devoted to liberty and the virtue of reason, lacked the imperial qualities of a war governor. Behind the scenes, he and Patrick Henry often differed, and Jefferson suspected that Henry wanted to return to office, not as Virginia’s governor but as her despot. Both men still supported having a militia over the standing army that Washington considered essential. Yet Jefferson’s stewardship of the militia was uncertain. Troops would be called to duty to find that their arms and equipment had been sent
halfway across the state. When the Congress gave the Continental Army’s quartermaster the right to confiscate provisions for the soldiers, Jefferson worked to limit his authority.
As governor, Jefferson did not always bring the full power of his unquestioned intellect to his public duty. Frail as she was, his wife continued to conceive, but the infants did not live. In their most recent loss, the boy died even before he could be given a name. Two of five children had survived, both daughters. During Jefferson’s second year as governor another baby daughter died in her fifth month, but by that time he had already decided to resign. Other politicians had been suggesting for years that Jefferson was on the easy path to premature retirement. They did not know how mortified Jefferson became whenever he faced a greater challenge than he thought he could meet. When, in the face of increasing threats from the British, the seat of government moved from Williamsburg to Richmond, Jefferson announced that he would quit the governorship on July 2, 1781.
His decision became unshakable when Britain’s newest general, Benedict Arnold, made an unexpected assault on Richmond. Although Arnold had failed to deliver West Point, Henry Clinton had paid him the full six thousand pounds John André had promised, plus three hundred and fifteen pounds in expenses. Arnold was also commissioned as a provisional brigadier general, which gave him an annual salary of six hundred and fifty pounds, far more than his former pay in devalued Continental currency. Despite Clinton’s patronage, General Arnold quickly made himself so unpopular that many younger British officers refused to serve under him. Changing allegiances had left him neither less rough-edged and graceless nor less audacious. Burning and pillaging his way through Virginia, he showed his contempt for the state’s militia. Jefferson had ignored warnings of the coming attack and only at the last minute had appointed Baron von Steuben to defend Richmond. Finally Jefferson himself rode his horse to exhaustion as he tried to raise a resistance. His effort was ineffectual, and although he was not captured, Jefferson wrote candidly about the debacle to George Washington. The general sent back his sympathy, along with Lafayette and twelve hundred Continental troops to keep Benedict Arnold at bay.
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