Authors: Nancy Rubin Stuart
Reluctantly, Washington agreed to the meeting, appointed Nathanael Greene to arrange the parley, and postponed André’s execution until noon, Monday, October 2. To André, Clinton piteously wrote, “God knows how much I feel for you in your present situation, but I dare hope you will soon be returned from it—believe me, dear Andre.”
44
The meeting accomplished nothing. In it, Greene reiterated the Board of General Officers’ decision that neither the existence nor absence of a flag had relevance to the case against André. He had violated the international laws of war. If the British agreed to return Arnold, the Americans would release André. If not, the British officer must be executed.
In a back room at the stone-walled Mabie’s Tavern, André came to terms with his imminent death. Humbled, generous-spirited, and impeccably polite, he had not reported Arnold’s insistence that he carry incriminating papers across enemy territory. Nor had he implicated Smith for abandoning him during the last few miles of neutral territory. Instead, André blamed his capture upon himself. “Had he been tried by a court of ladies, he is so genteel, handsome and polite a young gentleman that I am confident they would have acquitted him,” his moved guard Tallmadge opined.
45
Hamilton was also touched by André’s genteel humility. He wished, as he wrote his fiancée, that he was “possessed of André’s accomplishments for your sake, for I would wish to charm you in every sense.”
46
Foremost among André’s concerns was the effect of his death upon Clinton. “I am bound to him by too many obligations and love him too well to bear the thought, that he should reproach himself, or that others should reproach him,” he tearfully confided to Hamilton.
47
Through the future statesman’s efforts, André was finally allowed to write to Clinton. His letter expressed his desire to remove “any suspicion . . . that I was bound by your Excellency’s orders to expose myself to what has happened. . . . I am perfectly tranquil in mind and prepared for any fate to which an honest zeal for my king’s service may have devoted me. . . . With all the warmth of my heart, I give you thanks for your Excellency’s profuse kindness to me.”
48
André had one other wish: to be shot as a soldier, rather than hanged as a common spy. “Sympathy towards a soldier will surely induce your Excellency and a military tribunal to adopt the mode of my death to the feelings of a man of honor,” he wrote Washington. “Let me hope, sir . . . that I am not to die on a gibbet.”
49
To avoid causing the prisoner more anguish, the Virginian did not reply.
On the sunny morning of October 2, five hundred people waited outside Mabie’s Tavern as others streamed into the area. An observer reported that suddenly an unnaturally pale André appeared on the porch, flanked by soldiers on one side and a fife and drum corps on the other, and “had run down the steps [of the tavern] as quickly and lively as though no execution were taking place.”
50
As musicians played the “Dead March,” soldiers escorted him past Tappan’s Dutch church and up a long hill. Upon the summit stood a gallows and beneath it a two-horse baggage cart upon which rested a black coffin. Nearby was a freshly dug grave. “Gentleman, I am disappointed. I expected my request would have been granted,” André said with a frown as he saw the gallows, then added, “I am reconciled to my death, but not the mode.”
51
Having scanned the faces of the spectators, André mounted the wagon, stood on the coffin, removed his hat, and lowered his shirt collar. “It will be but a momentary pang,” Dr. James Thacher heard him say.
52
Seizing the noose, André brought it over his head, tied a knot under his left ear, and placed a handkerchief over his eyes. When asked for his last words, the British officer raised his handkerchief. “I pray you to bear me witness that I meet my fate like a brave man.”
After tying André’s arms, a second kerchief was knotted above his elbows. At the hangman’s signal, a whip cracked, driving the horses forward, leaving Major John André hanging from the gallows. Messengers immediately carried reports of André’s execution south to Philadelphia.
Within a day of that news, Peggy arrived at her parents’ home at South Fourth Street in a state of nervous collapse. After her own death, in 1804, Peggy’s heirs found among her possessions the gold locket André had once given her containing a lock of his hair.
“
SHALL MEN ALWAYS BE
the enemies of men. . . . Is society, at least, susceptible of amendment, if not perfection?” asked the Marquis of Chastellux in his 1772 book
An Essay on Public Happiness.
1
With that question in mind, the forty-six-year-old author sailed from France to Rhode Island in July 1780 as a major general with General Rochambeau. Two months later, on a rainy Friday, November 24, Chastellux met Henry Knox, whom he instantly liked. As the Frenchman noted in his travel journal, later published as
Travels in North-America,
Washington’s chief of artillery was “very fat but very active and of a gay and amiable character.” That same Friday, Knox led Chastellux down a thickly wooded path to meet his wife, Lucy, who was happily “settled in a little farm” with her children.
2
Lucy’s clothes, Chastellux observed, were “ridiculous without being neglected”—tidy and clean but apparently an odd imitation of current fashion. Equally striking to him was her hairdo, arranged like a three-cornered military hat and “all decked out with scarves and gauzes in a way that I am unable to describe.” Regardless of Lucy’s appearance, he admired her warmth, devotion to Knox, and the domesticity of a “real family” she provided for him near the army camp.
3
During that visit, Chastellux observed Knox’s pride in his family. Weeks earlier, in a letter to his brother, William, Henry had written of his new son, “We think our gosling quite a cygnet.” Moreover, Lucy, his “dearest partner, enjoyed [a] fine state of health since last August.” Best of all, she had “for the greater part of the time been with me” during the past months of the war.
4
Overshadowing Knox’s domestic harmony were the army’s depleted resources. With few funds available from a financially pinched Congress, Knox, Greene, and other generals sent a circular on October 7 to the patriotic states of New England. “Our present condition promises them [the enemy] the speedy accomplishment of their wishes,” the notice warned, our “army consisting of an inadequate thousands, almost destitute of every public supply . . . subsisting month after month on one bare ration of bread and meat.”
5
With the return of cold weather in December, conditions grew even worse.
From headquarters, Knox complained to his brother, “The soldier, ragged almost to nakedness, has to sit down . . . and with an axe . . . to make his habitation for winter . . . punished with hunger into the bargain.”
6
Privately, Knox was also financially strapped. Like other officers he suffered a “total stoppage of pay [which] has put me to many difficulties.”
Enlisted men in the Continental army suffered from similar “stoppages.” On January 1, 1781, eleven regiments from Pennsylvania under General Wayne mutinied and killed three officers, then marched from the Morristown encampment and seized Princeton, New Jersey. From there the mutineers planned to confront Congress and demand back pay. Despite the horror of the officers’ deaths, the mutineers’ complaints were real, observed Dr. James Thacher, because the men had received only “a mere shadow of compensation . . . a total want of pay for twelve months and a state of nakedness and famine to excite . . . the spirit of insurrection.”
7
By January 5, Washington desperately issued another circular to New England legislators. “It is vain to think an army can be kept together much longer under such a variety of sufferings unless some immediate and spirited measures are adapted to fund at least three-months pay for the troops,” he warned the states.
8
To speed that message he had “prevailed upon Brigadier General Knox to be the bearer of this Letter.”
Knox consequently rode to New England to meet with members of various state legislatures. So persuasively did he portray the “aggravated calamities and distresses” resulting from the soldiers’ lack of pay that several states sent small amounts of aid.
9
The most generous were Massachusetts and New Hampshire, which provided their soldiers and noncommissioned officers with twenty-four dollars in specie.
By January 10, General Wayne and Joseph Reed had reached a compromise with the mutineers. Half of the men took furloughs until March, with a bonus for reenlistment, and the other half were discharged.
From Arnold’s perspective, Congressional reluctance to provide financial support for the Continental army was only one of several mistakes made by leaders of the Revolution. Five days after André’s execution, Arnold addressed a letter “To the Inhabitants of America.” Published in the October 11 issue of New York’s
Royal Gazette
and as a broadside, the letter declared that the American alliance with France was misguided.
The Americans, according to Arnold,
have been duped by a virtuous gullibility . . . to give up their fidelity to serve a nation . . . aiming at the destruction both of the mother country and the provinces. Before the insidious offers of France, I preferred those from Great Britain, thinking it infinitely wiser and safer to cast my confidence upon her justice and generosity, than to trust a monarchy too feeble to establish your independence.
I bear testimony to my old fellow soldiers and citizens, that I find solid ground to rely upon the clemency of our sovereign . . . that it is the generous intention of Great Britain, not only to have the rights and privileges of the colonies unimpaired together with their perpetual exemption from taxation, but to add such further benefits as may consist with the common prosperity of the empire.
10
Arnold’s letter fell flat, failing to persuade the patriots of his motives. Nor did it convince his new commander in chief, Sir Henry Clinton, who believed the traitor was more motivated by pounds than by politics. Convinced that Arnold had sacrificed André’s neck to save his own, Clinton, nevertheless, plied the turncoat with questions about American defenses, armaments, and supplies. Arnold’s defection was “likely to produce great and good consequences,” Clinton optimistically wrote Lord George Germain, Britain’s secretary of state for America.
11
Consequently, Clinton had appointed the American the “colonel of a regiment, with the rank of brigadier general of provincial forces.”
Though he now occupied a rank lower than his former position in the Continental army, Arnold’s compensation was £450 a year, a sum that enabled him to live in a spacious townhouse at 3 Broadway, one door down from Clinton. Aspiring to still larger rewards, the American indelicately reviewed his meeting with André in an October 18 letter to the still-grieving Clinton. Admitting that André had promised him only £6,000, Arnold insisted the young officer “was so fully convinced of my proposal of being allowed ten thousand pounds sterling for my services, risk and the loss” that he expected “to use his influence and recommend it to Your Excellency.” No sum of money, Arnold self-righteously added, “would have been an inducement to have gone through the danger and anxiety I have experienced, nothing but my zeal to serve his Majesty and the common cause.”
12
Coolly, Clinton issued a draft for £6,000. Determined to prove his worth, Arnold published another provocative notice in the
Royal Gazette
urging his former military peers to desert the Revolution. “To the 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, or of France,” his message began. Anyone who joined his so-called American Legion would receive guaranteed wages, a good rank, and “lead a chosen band of Americans to the attainment of peace, liberty, and safety . . . rescuing our native country from the grasping hand of France.”
13
After reading it, Washington wryly wrote Congress he was “at a loss which to admire most, the confidence of Arnold in publishing, or the folly of the enemy in supposing that a production signed by so infamous a character will have any weight with the people of these states.”
14
Indeed, by December only three sergeants, twenty-eight soldiers, and a drummer had signed with the American Legion.
To Americans, the name Benedict Arnold had become anathema, a synonym for
traitor
. Several efforts were made to kidnap him in New York. On October 4, Congress ordered the Board of War to strip Arnold’s name from the records. Fort Arnold at West Point was renamed Fort Clinton for the American general, George Clinton. In Connecticut, the Masons blotted Arnold’s name from their rolls; residents of Norwich shattered the grave markers of his father and infant brother in the cemetery; and in New Milford, citizens marched effigies of Arnold and Satan through town, accompanied by exploding firecrackers. A popular ditty reflected America’s public opinion:
Base Arnold’s head, by luck, was saved, poor André’s was gibbeted /
Arnold’s to blame for André’s fame, and André’s to be pitied.
15
Simultaneous with Arnold’s efforts to acquire more funds, Peggy had arrived in New York from Philadelphia to share a spacious townhouse and garden on the Battery at the southern end of the island with her husband. In public the twenty year old seemed glum, even depressed as she mingled in ornate English gowns with high-ranking British and American Loyalists at balls, concerts, and plays.
“Peggy Arnold is not so much admired here for her beauty as one might have expected,” Loyalist refugee Rebecca Warner Rawle Shoemaker confided to her daughter in Philadelphia in November. “All allow she has great sweetness in her countenance, but wants animation, sprightliness and that fire in her eyes.” Nevertheless, the Arnolds “have met with every attention indeed.” In addition, the former American general now held a “very genteel appointment . . . in the service, joined to a very large present . . . fully sufficient for every demand in genteel life.”
16