Defiant Brides (2 page)

In contrast was Peggy’s solicitous attitude towards Arnold—“the General,” as she referred to him. During the tense days preceding a July 1792 duel in London between the contentious Arnold and the feckless Earl of Lauderdale, the frightened Peggy practiced restraint. To do so, as she later wrote her father, Judge Edward Shippen, in Philadelphia, had required “all my fortitude . . . [to] prevent [me from] . . . sinking under it, which would unman him [Arnold] and prevent his acting himself.”
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Their marital styles were as significant as their political sensibilities. As the following pages reveal, Lucy, for all her patriotism and personal losses, was a temperamental, often difficult mate; Peggy, a shrewd accomplice to Arnold’s treason, endured emotional and financial hardships with genteel restraint. It was my hope that their pairing in
Defiant Brides
would transcend the coincidence of their “defiant” marriages to reveal how lapses in one of them inadvertently highlighted admirable traits in the other.

Is treason or betrayal of others forgivable if the rest of that person’s life seems admirable? Do sacrifices for patriotism—or for any other pro-social cause—excuse selfishness or insensitivities towards a loved one? To make such judgments must be left to you.

My goal was to capture the lives of Lucy Flucker Knox and Peggy Shippen Arnold beyond their iconic portraits as patriot and traitor, respectively, and depict them as human beings, as vulnerable, fallible, and praiseworthy as we are today.

DAWN BROKE GRAY OVER
Philadelphia on May 18, 1778, nearly nine months after thousands of scarlet-coated British soldiers occupied the once-patriotic Revolutionary stronghold. Added to the morning’s gloom was the surprise arrival of a committee of scowling Quaker women at Edward Shippen’s townhouse on Society Hill. Dressed in somber dresses and bonnets, the Friends minced no words: Judge Shippen must forbid his daughters from appearing that afternoon at the British gala known as the “Mischianza.”

Warily, the balding forty-eight-year-old attorney listened to the Quakers’ rant about the costumes his teenage daughters would wear—low-cut beaded and bangled gowns, their heads covered in feathered turbans suggestive of a Turkish harem. Those outfits hardly befit the daughters of the distinguished Judge Shippen, the women railed. Their appearance in such risqué outfits would taint the family name, prominent for four generations in Philadelphia society, finance, and politics.

Edward Shippen listened politely, steeled against their lecture, knowing that the Quakers had scolded other parents of daughters selected for the Mischianza. Nor did their warnings about his reputation threaten the judge. The truth was that he had little to lose. Three years earlier, during the first tumultuous months of the Revolution, Philadelphia’s radical patriots had eradicated Pennsylvania’s Crown-appointed ruling body, the Provincial Council, upon whose upper legislature he sat. Then, on September 26, 1777, the government changed again. That day, General William Howe and his troops marched into the city. Nobody resisted. Within a matter of hours, the British occupied Philadelphia’s public buildings, its officers quartered in some of its finest homes while other, more raucous red-coated men gathered in the city streets and squeezed into its taverns.

From Edward Shippen’s perspective, predicting the war’s outcome seemed as dangerous as the lightning rod invented by his former Junto Club associate, Benjamin Franklin. Given the new political climate, the judge pandered to Philadelphia’s latest rulers by inviting them to the drawing room in his home on South Fourth Street. There the officers met the Shippens’ pretty daughters and soon invited them to English-style dinners, balls, and plays. After the first dreary years of the war, that seemed only fair. The Shippens’ three teenagers, Peggy, Mary, and Sally, had been cheated out of Philadelphia’s glittering social life just as they were coming of age.

Had the judge’s youngest, seventeen-year-old Peggy, overheard the Quakers’ lecture on May 18, she would have scoffed. Since early winter, the petite, gray-eyed blonde had gloried in her role as the toast of the British officers. To her delight, the dashing Captain John André often escorted her to dinners, promenades, and plays. Once, in a teasing flirtation, the trim, dark-haired gallant presented her with a lock of his hair encased in a gold locket.

Another of Peggy’s social triumphs was a special invitation from A. S. Hammond, captain of the British flagship, the
H.M.S. Roebuck
, whose men piped Peggy aboard that vessel for dinner and a ball with other well-born young women. So lovely and demure was the Philadelphia belle that Hammond later admitted he and his fellow officers “were all in love with her.”
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Others, like Captain Francis Lord Rawson of the British army, insisted that Peggy was “the handsomest woman” in America.
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Heady with admiration, Peggy was consequently thrilled when she learned that André—the self-appointed organizer of British galas—had selected her, the youngest of Philadelphia’s beauties, for the Mischianza, to be held in honor of General Howe’s imminent departure for London.

Ironically, the politics behind that event meant little to the Quakers who confronted Judge Shippen that May morning, for they prided themselves on neutrality. The Friends’ apolitical stance had disgusted the patriots, especially those who had served on the second Continental Congress. Among them was Massachusetts delegate John Adams who, in 1777, acidly wrote his wife, Abigail, that the Quakers were “as dull as beetles. From these neither good is to be expected nor evil apprehended. They are a kind of neutral tribe, or race of the insipid.”
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How seriously Peggy considered the political fallout from her flirtations remains a matter of historical debate. Subsequently, scholars have pointed to the Shippen family’s reaction to her behavior as a clue to her loyalties. Why else would the family have destroyed all her letters written during the war? The few descriptions of Peggy from friends and relatives in that era do not reveal which side she favored in the Revolution—the patriots or the Loyalists. At seventeen, that conflict may have seemed less relevant to Peggy than her desire for good times. Those who knew her in 1777 and 1778 simply describe her as an accomplished Philadelphia belle, skilled in needlework, music, drawing, and dancing, and fond of stylish clothes. But beneath those gauzy symbols of feminine charm lurked a sensible young woman. “There was nothing of frivolity either in her dress, demeanor or conduct,” recalled a family friend, “and though deservedly admired, she had too much good sense to be vain.”
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Subsequent to the Revolution, the Shippens saved Peggy’s letters supporting the opinion that she was intelligent, well-informed, and pragmatic.

A few traces of Peggy’s youthful personality are also preserved in sketches by John André. Most famous is one of her that captures her china-doll beauty as she smiled coyly in her Mischianza costume.

By early 1778, Peggy; her sisters, Mary and Sally; and friends like Becky Franks, Peggy Chew, and Becky Redman attended dances hosted by British officers at Philadelphia’s exclusive City Tavern, Assembly balls, and plays at André’s newly built Southwark Theatre. In winter the belles frolicked with scarlet-coated officers at skating parties and sleigh rides along the Delaware; in spring they appeared on the arms of their British beaux for outings, cricket matches, and horse races.

Little harm would come from allowing their daughters to participate, Judge Shippen and his wife, Margaret Francis, had decided. At the least it provided the girls with diversion, a reward for the dull months they had spent with their parents in the countryside when militant patriots had ruled Philadelphia from 1775 through summer 1777. At best, their daughters’ popularity, especially Peggy’s, served as social insurance for the judge’s family in the event that the British won the Revolution.

Nor were the Shippens alone in their thinking. After the British occupation, while Philadelphia’s remaining patriots fumed about flirtations between Colonial women and British officers, one resident rose to the defense of the young women. “Proper allowances,” she insisted, must be made for those “in the bloom of life and spirits, after being so long deprived of the gaieties and amusements.”
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Why should Philadelphia’s young beauties deny themselves pleasure because of politics—especially since females had no control over the war’s outcome? Indeed, by January 1778, the wife of Tory James Allen reported that the city’s social life had resumed. “Everything is gay & happy,” she wrote her husband, “& it is like to prove a frolicking winter.”
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Sometimes those frolics bordered on the frenetic. “You can have no idea of the life of continual amusement I live in,” Becky Franks, Peggy’s witty friend, gloated to Nancy Paca, the wife of a Maryland delegate to the Continental Congress who had fled to York, Pennsylvania. “I scarce have a moment to myself. I have stole this while everybody is retired to dress for dinner. I am but just come from under Mr. J. Black’s hands, and most elegantly, as I dressed for a ball this evening at Smith’s where we have one every Thursday. You would not know the [ball]room ’tis so much improved.”
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Not only had the British refurbished the City Tavern and established English-style eating clubs, gaming casinos, and theaters, but they had also sparked interest in the latest European clothes and hairstyles. Stylish dress suddenly became an imperative for Philadelphia’s young women, an expensive endeavor demanding gossamer gowns and the two-feet-high hairdos then fashionable in England and France. “I mentioned to you the enormous head-dresses of the ladies here,” the disapproving New Englander, Thomas Pickering, wrote his wife that spring. “The more I see, the more I am displeased with them. ’Tis surprising how they fix such loads of trumpery [false hair] on their polls.”
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By late summer, rumors about the approach of the British had prompted thousands of frightened patriots to flee Philadelphia. “Carriages are constantly passing, and the inhabitants going away,” Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker, noted in her diary on September 11, 1777.
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On the eve of the Continental Congress’s flight to York, John Adams wrote Abigail that “more than half of the inhabitants have removed into the country.”
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Even those city residents who stubbornly remained in their homes, observed druggist Christopher Marshall, were “in confusion, of all ranks, sending all their goods out of town into the country.”
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Finally, on September 26, 1777, at around 10 a.m., Howe’s nine thousand soldiers had marched into Philadelphia. “Thus was this large city surrendered to the English without the least opposition whatever, or even firing a single gun,” Quaker Sally Logan noted in her diary with awe.
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Subsequent to the peaceful surrender of Philadelphia (then North America’s largest city with forty thousand residents) Howe’s soldiers had transformed it into a miniature London, its once-quiet taverns, shops, and inns converted into boisterous places to drink, gamble, flirt, and fornicate. To the war-weary redcoats and their German mercenary peers, the Hessians, Philadelphia was a place to let off steam, a reprieve from war during the long months of winter. “The only hardships I endure are, being obliged to sleep in my bed, to sit down to a very good dinner every day, to take a gentle ride for appetite’s sake or to exercise my horses, to gossip in Philadelphia to consider something fashionable to make me irresistible this winter,” John André gleefully wrote his sister Louisa in England that November.
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Nor did the British fear an American attack. That autumn, George Washington’s Second Continental Dragoons had bitterly battled Howe’s men in New Jersey until a snowstorm ended the threat. By mid-December British spies reported that the enemy had trudged twenty-five miles northwest of Philadelphia, its soldiers, ill, ragged, starved, and shoeless, leaving bloody footprints in the snow en route to a hilly hamlet called Valley Forge. Why, then, mused the indolent General Howe, should he bother risking the lives of his troops?

Privately, critics whispered that Howe’s fondness for high living—heavy drinking, revelry, and long hours with his beautiful, blonde mistress Elizabeth Loring, the wife of an obliging Boston Loyalist—set a bad example for his soldiers. A popular ditty reflected his dissolute image:

By early winter 1778, an atmosphere of frivolity and licentiousness dominated the once-dour Quaker City of Brotherly Love. Rumor had it that the costly imported silks and satins many young women suddenly sported were purchased “at the expense of their virtue” for “it is agreed on all hands that the British played the devil with the girls.”
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Sarah Logan, whose Quaker family had fled to Germantown, also reported in her diary “very bad accounts of the licentiousness of the English officers in deluding young girls.”
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Not everyone fell victim, especially the city’s most affluent young women, whose mothers had stockpiled imported fabrics years earlier.

Still, few women could avoid noticing the bawdy behavior of the British. Becky Franks once confided such an incident to the Shippen sisters. After several officers courteously greeted her on the street, they walked down the road a few steps and entered the home of the notorious Mrs. McKoy, a woman “well known to the gentlemen.” Outraged, Becky added, “And don’t you think Grif and Laow had the impudence to go in while I was looking right at them. I never was so angry in my life. I never think of it, but I feel my face glow with rage.”
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Far more disturbing to John André than his peers’ sexual exploits was General Howe’s decision to return to England. Regardless of his personal decadence, Howe had triumphed at the battles of Long Island, Brandywine Creek, and Germantown, and had earned admiration from his men.