Authors: Nancy Rubin Stuart
Beneath the Arnolds’ luxurious lifestyle lay sorrows that Mrs. Shoemaker astutely surmised. “The former American general’s ‘particular situation,’” she opined, “is such as must give her [Peggy] great pain & anxiety.”
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Nevertheless, within two weeks of her arrival in New York, Peggy had become pregnant. Like her political opposite, Lucy Knox, Peggy must have wondered if she would ever see the Shippens again.
No less disturbing was the way the British regarded her compared to her husband. Invariably, they warmed to Peggy’s pretty face and quick wit, but they treated Arnold politely and with little warmth. Typical of their attitude was a comment by an officer that “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 his respectability.”
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To win that respectability Peggy refined the role she once played as a belle in British-occupied Philadelphia, appearing as a stunning, good-will ambassador to smooth Arnold’s reception in New York’s military society.
If Lucy’s transformation as a partner to the patriotic Knox began at Pluckemin, Peggy’s evolution as the disarming wife of a traitor commenced in New York. Youthful passion and defiance, the twin forces that led both women to marry men beneath their social station, had already extracted an enormous price. Love and devotion would be their repayment, transforming those headstrong brides into resilient, forgiving wives.
Reports of growing agitation in the Carolinas, stirred by the swelling numbers of patriots from Georgia and Virginia commanded by General Nathanael Greene, had disquieted British general Henry Clinton. “Unless he [Cornwallis] immediately attacked North Carolina, we must give up both South Carolina and Georgia and retire within the walls of Charleston,” wrote Clinton in his narrative on the American war.
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To strengthen British presence in the south, the commander ordered Arnold, who was growing restless in New York, to seize the strategic town of Portsmouth, Virginia. Arnold prepared to wage war against his former countrymen and, on December 20, set sail with three regiments totaling 1,600 men.
Along the coast stormy weather intervened, scattering the transports that carried most of Arnold’s men. By the thirtieth, nearly all the vessels had reconvened and entered Hampton Road, the waterway joining Chesapeake Bay with the James River. Still, one ship and three transports carrying four hundred men were missing, but Arnold pushed ahead. After landing in Virginia, marching to Richmond, and arguing with Governor Thomas Jefferson over the tobacco crop, Arnold vengefully burned the city.
By early January 1781, convinced that the British would win the war, Arnold’s confidence soared. Any setback or defeat against the Continental army became his personal triumph. News about the mutiny among the Continentals in New Jersey consequently thrilled him. “This event will be attended with happy consequences,” he gleefully wrote Clinton, indicating his hope that more mutinies would follow. “We anxiously wait in expectation of hearing that the malcontents have joined His Majesty’s army in New York.”
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Once again, Arnold underestimated the depth of contempt he elicited. When Clinton sent men to win over those mutineers, the Pennsylvanians recoiled. Recalling the “treachery and meanness like that of Benedict Arnold,” they notified the authorities who, in turn, had the British spies tried and executed.
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With few battles to wage in Virginia that winter, Arnold grew bored. “A life of inaction will be very prejudicial to my health,” he complained to Clinton and requested a return to New York.
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But greed soon proved more “prejudicial” to Arnold than inaction. As often was the case in his earlier life, Arnold quarreled with his peers, this time with Commodore Thomas Symonds over “prizes,” or the ships (and cargos) that officers often retained as rewards for those victories. So bitterly did they argue that Symonds finally refused to patrol the Chesapeake, which enabled the patriotic Lafayette to cross the bay with his soldiers. Disgusted and also riddled with gout, Arnold sullenly returned to New York.
During Arnold’s six-month absence, Peggy had thrived. Even with her advancing pregnancy, she had dazzled New York with her beauty, vivacity, and chatter. Among her friends were those not seen in nearly two years—Loyalists and former Philadelphia belles who had fled that city with the British in June 1778. Her favorite was the witty, dark-eyed Becky Franks, who continued to flirt with British officers much as she had in Philadelphia. As usual Becky caustically opined about those around her. “Few New York ladies know how to entertain company in their own houses unless they introduce the card table,” she scoffed. “I will do our ladies, that is in Philadelphia, the justice to say they have more cleverness in the turn of an eye than the New York girls.”
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Among the most clever of these exiles was Peggy, who had seemingly forgotten her tumultuous days on the Hudson and in Philadelphia, and had recovered her old spirit and style. Arnold’s wife was “amazingly improved in beauty and dress, having really recovered a great deal of the bloom she
formerly
possessed, but did not bring in with her,” Rebecca Shoemaker wrote her daughter. During a ball at Clinton’s headquarters on Broadway, Peggy was widely acknowledged, praised as the “star of the first magnitude, and had every attention paid her as if she had been Lady Clinton.”
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By June 20, 1781, General George Washington had ordered the Continental army to Peekskill, from where he hoped to launch his stalled plan to attack New York with French reinforcements. Nestled upon hills near the Hudson, the Continental camp’s “pleasing variety of vegetables and flowers perfume the air, and the charming music of a feathered tribe delights our ears,” observed army surgeon Dr. James Thacher. Soon afterwards that natural tranquility was shattered by “that martial band, the drum and fife, bugle and horn and shrill trumpet, which set the war-horse in motion.”
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Lucy Knox, who was again pregnant, consequently left Peekskill with her children and traveled north with Gertrude Schuyler Cochran, the wife of Dr. John Cochran, chief physician and surgeon of the Army. After two years of living together, the Knoxes’ separation deeply distressed them. “Although we are not bad in accommodating ourselves to our circumstances, yet I . . . feel the inconveniences we labor under . . . in proportion to the increase of our family,” Henry complained to his brother, William. “I sincerely pray God that the war may be ended this campaign, that public and private society may be restored.”
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Heightening the Knoxes’ frustrations was the unpredictability of the mail, leaving each uncertain about the other’s location. At Livingston Manor, inland on the opposite Hudson shore from Peekskill, Lucy waited vainly for Henry’s letter. Finally, on July 26, she wrote to him that she planned to “set off tomorrow for Albany,” since there was “no chance of hearing from you.”
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In Philipsburg (today’s Sleepy Hollow section of Tarrytown), Henry also resented his distance from Lucy: “I have never found my absence from her so truly insupportable as the present. I am alone amidst a crowd and unhappy without my companion. Haste happy time when we shall be no more separate.” The war, he complained, “has deprived us of the right enjoyment of six years, long years of our life—a period infinitely too long to be enjoyed by other objects than the business of love.”
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A few brief exchanges followed, but after August 3, Henry’s correspondence stopped, plunging Lucy into her old fears of abandonment. “I am at a loss whether to write you or not, four posts have passed without a line from you,” she scrawled on August 12. Even their friend, General Benjamin Lincoln, who had seen Knox at Peekskill, “brought no token of remembrance.” Lucy’s letter then dissolved into a screed. Rather than supporting the Revolution as in the past, she now cursed it. “We hear nothing of the movements of the army, and poor I am constantly sick with anxiety. Oh, horrid war! How has thou blasted the fairest prospect of happiness, robbed of parents, of sisters and brother, thou art depriving me, of the society of my husband: who alone could repair the loss.”
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Ironically, new military developments would unite the Knoxes once more. That same week, Washington learned that Admiral Francois Joseph Paul de Grasse had sailed from St. Domingue with 29 ships and 3,200 men bound for Chesapeake Bay. With Cornwallis at Yorktown, there was no time to waste. In a rushed consultation, Washington and Rochambeau agreed to dispatch their armies to Virginia and reconnoiter with Lafayette’s forces at the Chesapeake. Should Cornwallis attempt to escape to the sea, de Grasse’s fleet would block him and force a confrontation with the combined Franco-American forces at Yorktown.
From North Carolina, General Greene, knowing nothing of those plans and believing Washington was attacking New York, wrote Knox, “Methinks I hear the cannon roar while I am writing. . . . The splendor of such a siege, will sink our puny operation [in North Carolina] into nothing.” Where, Greene asked, “has Mrs. Knox taken post during your operations? I beg you will present her my most affectionate regards; and I hope you will not get in the way of a four and twenty pounder, but will return to her with whole bones.”
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On Tuesday, August 28, Peggy delivered a second sturdy son whom she and Arnold named James Robertson, after New York’s Loyalist governor. That same hot summer’s day, Clinton ordered Arnold to prepare for battle in Connecticut, where he was to destroy the Americans’ privateer base. A week later, Arnold left Peggy and his newborn son and sailed with two regiments to New London, twelve miles from his native town, Norwich.
By noon, September 6, Arnold had subdued New London, reducing its key military targets—arsenals, warehouses, and privateers—to flames. On the opposite side of New London Bay, an exhausted regiment of Americans in the high-walled Fort Griswold, having twice repulsed the British, finally raised a white flag of surrender. As custom dictated, its commanding officer, Colonel William Ledyard, surrendered his sword to one of Arnold’s officers, who, against military tradition, slaughtered him with it. A riot followed, leading to the death of eighty of the surrendered patriots. By then, Arnold, who had previously ordered Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Eyre to countermand the attack at Fort Griswold, had not waited for the outcome. Apparently oblivious to the massacre, Arnold led a column into New London to destroy its military targets, including the home of its militia captain, the revolutionary general Gurdon Saltonstall; the mill; the printing office; and a dozen ships at mooring.
Suddenly, at the moment of the massacre, the ground shook, as one of those ships, a warehouse, filled with gunpowder, exploded. Flames, fanned by winds, spread to New London’s residential sections, burning homes and shops, panicking its citizens, and leaving ninety-seven families homeless and the town in ashes.
Accusations of negligence were hurled at Arnold from every direction—from his men, the patriots of New London, and the British of New York—etching his name even deeper into history as one of its darkest villains. General Clinton, nevertheless, commended Arnold for “his very spirited conduct in New London” and assured him that he believed the brigadier-general had taken “every precaution in his power to prevent the destruction of the town.”
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The Continental army and its patriots, nonetheless, perceived the destruction of New London as one more example of Arnold’s heartlessness. Jared Sparks’s 1835 biography of Arnold compared him to Nero. The former American general was “delighted with the ruin he had caused, the distresses he had inflicted, the blood of his slaughtered countrymen, the anguish of the expiring patriot, the widow’s tears and the orphan’s cries. And what adds to the enormity is, that he stood almost in sight of the spot where he drew his first breath.”
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When Washington, Knox, and Rochambeau arrived in Philadelphia on Friday, August 31, they found burnt, crumbling homes left over from the earlier British occupation ringing the city. The streets, Dr. James Thacher observed, were “extremely dirty and the weather warm and dry . . . dust like smothering snow storm, blinding our eyes and covering our bodies.” To boost morale for the forthcoming battle in Virginia, Washington paraded his officers and their aides in “rich military uniform, mounted on noble steed.”
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Behind them sounded the fife and drum, followed by marching regiments of the common soldiers.
That night, cannons boomed as Philadelphians illuminated their streets, shops, and homes in honor of Washington’s arrival. The following morning, French soldiers marched through the streets, nattily dressed in white uniforms trimmed with green. With the exception of Lucy Knox’s initial stench-filled visit to Philadelphia after the British evacuation, this was her first in-depth look at the City of Brotherly Love. Impressed with its stately Georgian homes on Society Hill and its splendid ballrooms and theaters, Lucy decided to wait out her pregnancy there.
Her friends, the avuncular Washington and Martha, convinced her otherwise. “The General and Mrs. Washington, prefers Mrs. Knox to take a trip to Virginia and she seems inclined to accept the offer,” Knox wrote to his brother, William. If so, Lucy planned to take their son, nicknamed Hal, to Mount Vernon with her and would leave her daughter in a boarding school watched over by her friends Rebekkah and Colonel General Clement Biddle.
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To prepare for Yorktown, Knox asked Congress to order an enormous collection of arms from the states, among them three-, six-, and twelve-pound guns; three hundred musket cartridges; countless rounds of ammunition; and twenty thousand flint and one thousand powder horns. By September 8, the Continental army was thus readied for battle. “Our prospects are good and I shall hope to inform you in fifteen days that we have Lord Cornwallis completed invested,” Knox predicted to William. His wife, Lucy, he wrote, “in the next five or six days will set out for Virginia to reside with Mrs. Washington.”
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