Patriots (73 page)

There was one brief tremor. A report reached Philadelphia that Washington had offered General Arnold command of the army’s left wing in the coming military campaign. When Peggy Arnold heard the news, she went into one of her fits of hysteria, even though friends explained that the offer represented a promotion. Arnold managed to stay on in command of West Point, and his wife joined him in a house across the river from the fort.

Washington was looking forward to a stopover there in September on his way back from a conference in Connecticut. Food and lodging at West Point would be especially welcome, since currency these days was so debased. The eight thousand dollars Washington’s entourage had raised for the trip would barely pay for rooms at an inn for two nights. In Connecticut the night before, the party had been relieved when a tavern owner told them that the governor had ordered the state to pay their expenses.

As he neared West Point, Washington sent Major James McHenry and another aide ahead to tell the Arnolds that his party would be arriving soon and, if it was convenient, would appreciate being offered breakfast, a prospect that brightened Washington’s spirits. Riding with him was the Marquis de Lafayette, who had returned from France. At one point Washington turned off the direct road to inspect a fortification, and Lafayette called to him that he was heading the wrong way. Washington replied that he knew all young men were in love with Mrs. Arnold and wanted to get to her as quickly as possible. If Lafayette wished, he could go ahead with Major McHenry. Lafayette smiled and stayed with Washington.

They reached the Arnolds’ house at about 10:30
A.M.
, but neither the general nor his wife was there to greet them. An aide apologized on behalf of General Arnold, who, he said, had been called across the river to the fort after receiving Washington’s advance party. Arnold had promised to be back in an hour to meet with His Excellency. Mrs. Arnold was still in her room. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Varick, Benedict Arnold’s chief aide, had been confined to bed with a fever, but he got up briefly to welcome the visitors. Washington’s immediate concern was breakfast. After they ate, he announced, they would inspect the fort. If General Arnold had not returned, they would see him there.

Only after Washington and his officers had finished their meal
and been rowed across the Hudson were they puzzled by Arnold’s absence. At the fort, they were told that he hadn’t been seen all morning. Washington was nettled by Arnold’s apparent lack of respect, and his inspection of the fort did not improve his disposition. The entire outpost was in appalling disrepair and suffered from many evidences of bad judgment. One section of the fort had been so crudely built of dry wood that the first British shells would ignite it. Another position had been left nakedly vulnerable to attack from a nearby hill. It would take months of work to make West Point an effective fortress.

The inspection lasted two hours. Washington returned to the Arnold house with vague misgivings. Dinner had been delayed until
4 P.M
., and there was still no sign of General Arnold. As Washington prepared for dinner, Alexander Hamilton, who had stayed behind at the house during Washington’s inspection, came to his room and handed him a packet of letters. Washington skimmed through them, cried out and immediately sent Hamilton to ride at full speed down the river.

As he waited for Hamilton’s return, Washington was told that Mrs. Arnold had gone berserk. She had been shrieking in her bedroom all morning that her husband was gone, gone forever! Now she was raving about a hot iron burning into her head. She claimed that only General Washington could lift it from her. He must come at once.

Hamilton had returned with another letter for the commander. He joined Washington and Lafayette as they went to see their hostess. They found her with her blond hair uncombed and streaming down her back. The nightgown she wore was so sheer she was almost nude. Wailing, Mrs. Arnold strode back and forth, sometimes clutching up her baby to her breast. When Washington was announced, she screamed that the man in front of her was not the general but instead was the man who had come to kill her baby. Peggy Shippen Arnold had become hysterical before when thwarted, but Washington had no way of knowing this, and in any event he had reason to trust her mad ranting. Benedict Arnold was gone forever.

—

The papers Alexander Hamilton had passed to Washington that afternoon had been pried the previous day from the boot of a
man traveling as John Anderson. He had been riding south on the east side of the Hudson toward Tarrytown when he was accosted by three men playing cards as they loitered by a stream. Gangs of highwaymen had begun roaming the neutral ground in Westchester County between the two armies, confiscating the property of any enemy they captured; the patriot bands were called “Skinners,” the loyalist bands “Cowboys.” One of these groups had stopped aristocratic John Anderson in his wine-colored coat and civilian’s beaver hat.

Since one man wore a British Army coat, Anderson addressed the group confidently. “
I hope, gentlemen, you belong to the lower party”—a reference to the British-occupied southern area, Manhattan and Long Island.

“We do,” said one of the men.

“So do I,” Anderson said with relief. “I am a British officer on business of importance and must not be detained.”

But one of the men was already taking Anderson’s watch, brandishing a musket and telling him to get down from his horse. Apparently the gang had deceived him—they were patriotic Skinners. The supposed loyalist was wearing a coat he had stolen from a British corpse.

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.