Treacherous Beauty

by Stephen Case

  West Point was built where the Hudson River takes two ninety-degree turns, meaning that ships must slow down and maneuver, making them especially vulnerable to shore batteries. The first fort there was equipped with artillery surrendered by Burgoyne at Saratoga, and was named after the hero of the fighting there—Benedict Arnold. Across the river from Fort Arnold was Constitution Island, and stretching between the two points was a lengthy chain to keep ships from passing. The chain lay just under the surface, supported by wooden rafts, with each link made from two-inch-thick iron and weighing at least a hundred pounds.

  Though challenging to enemy ships, the rebel position was vulnerable from the land side, a weakness that the army tried to address with the help of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish officer who was a brilliant engineer. A defensive ring was constructed, and the site featured ten separate forts by the summer of 1780.

  That June, Washington’s chief intelligence officer, Benjamin Tallmadge, wrote to Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull, who was in charge of supplying West Point, and warned that the British might make “some sudden and unexpected stroke” against the forts.331 Small wonder that Tallmadge was worried. British general Clinton wrote that the capture of West Point “would have finished the rebellion immediately.”332 Continental general Nathanael Greene said that “such an event would have been a dangerous if not a fatal wound.”333

  West Point was a smart choice for the Arnolds for a reason other than its strategic value: Peggy could be with the general, and could defect in the same instant, something that would be almost impossible if Arnold commanded an army in the field. The couple launched a concerted lobbying effort, tapping New Yorkers who were grateful to Arnold for his sacrifice at Saratoga.

  The general recruited the help of General Philip Schuyler, a key figure in the region’s military affairs. (This was the same Schuyler who had befriended André when he was a prisoner of war and was passing through Albany on parole.) Schuyler talked to Washington and then reported back to Arnold on the commander in chief’s sentiments:

  He expressed a desire to do whatever was agreeable to you, dwelt on your abilities, your merits, your sufferings, and on the well-earned claims you have on your country, and intimated that as soon as his arrangements for the campaign should take place that he would properly consider you. I believe you will have an alternative proposed, either to take charge of an important post, with an honorable command, or your station in the field. Your reputation, my dear sir, so established, your honorable scars, put it decidedly in your power to take either. A state [New York] which has full confidence in you will wish to see its banner entrusted to you. If the command at West Point is offered, it will be honorable; if a division in the field, you must judge whether you can support the fatigues, circumstanced as you are.334

  Peggy, meanwhile, worked on another New Yorker, Robert R. Livingston, a member of Congress who was one of only three to vote against the reprimand for Arnold. The married Livingston was so charmed by Peggy that he wrote a letter to Washington complaining about the current management of West Point and asserting that Arnold would be a better choice. Peggy’s attentions toward Livingston were so out of the ordinary that they alarmed Arnold’s sister Hannah, who was apparently unaware of the plot and suspected that Peggy was having an affair with “Chancellor Livingston,” as he was known because he was New York’s chancellor, or top judicial officer. A few months after the lobbying effort, Hannah wrote her brother about West Point and Peggy:

  ’Tis no place for me—nor do I think Mrs. Arnold will long be pleased with it, though expect it will be rendered dear to her (for a few hours) by the presence of a certain chancellor who, by the by, is a dangerous companion for a particular lady in the absence of her husband. I could say more than prudence will permit. I could tell you of frequent private assignations and of numberless billets-doux, if I had an inclination to make mischief, but as I am of a very peaceable temper, I’ll not mention a syllable of the matter. 335

  Hannah’s suspicions of her sister-in-law were more than likely unfounded. No further correspondence suggests any infidelity by Peggy at any time in her life, nor is there any indication that the easy-to-offend Arnold ever held jealous feelings toward her. Perhaps Arnold understood that Livingston was an important friend to keep, and felt confident that his wife’s motives were the same as his.

  In early June, Arnold set out for Connecticut to sell his New Haven house, whose construction was still not completed. En route, he sent information to the British.336 From Washington’s headquarters in Morristown, Arnold reported that the French were expected to land six thousand troops in Rhode Island. And he said presumptuously that “Mr. M expects to have the command of West Point offered him on his return.” Washington had made no such decision. Arnold was behaving in an increasingly risky manner that made code names useless. No Patriot who intercepted Arnold’s letter would have had any problem guessing who “Mr. M” was.

  Arnold’s next message came from Fishkill, New York, north of West Point. Arnold had just completed his first visit to the forts that he planned to surrender in his treacherous plot. Unlike some other messages, Arnold wrote this letter so that it would appear entirely faithful to the rebel cause if read by a rebel, yet would convey valuable details to the British. He was “greatly disappointed in the works and the garrison,” but noted that twelve hundred men were expected to reinforce the fifteen hundred there now. “It is hoped they will arrive before the English can make an attack, which it is thought they have in contemplation. This place has been greatly neglected.”337 He went into further detail about which forts were strong and which were weak, and noted that there was a good road the British could use to bring up cannon. “I am convinced the boom or chain thrown across the river to stop the shipping cannot be depended on,” he added.

  His trip to Connecticut was fruitless, and the house remained unsold. When he got back to Peggy and his family in Philadelphia in early July, there was more frustration—no answers had come from either Washington or the British.

  Arnold quickly asked the British for a “very explicit answer” on the terms of his service, urged a meeting with an officer, and repeated that he expected to take command at West Point soon. Only a few days later, with his impatience growing, he wrote that “a mutual confidence between us is wanting” and asked for either progress or cessation of the negotiations. But in an attempt to make his loyalties clear, he offered a bit of poetic optimism about the prospects of American independence: “The present struggles are like the pangs of a dying man, violent but of short duration.”338

  André and Clinton had finally returned to New York, and when André wrote his first note to Arnold in nearly a year, he was responding only to the general’s reopening correspondence of June, not to his more anxious notes in July. While agreeing that a meeting was necessary, André did not address Arnold’s financial demands.

  Arnold, obviously annoyed, appeared to up his price. He wanted ten thousand pounds guaranteed for any loss of his property in the scheme, plus an annuity of five hundred pounds for life. And here was the capper: “If I point out a plan of cooperation by which Sir Henry shall possess himself of West Point, the garrison, etc., twenty thousand pounds I think will be a cheap purchase for an object of so much importance.”339

  He got an extremely bureaucratic answer in a note Odell wrote to Stansbury: “His Excellency authorizes me to repeat in the strongest terms the assurances so often given to your partner, that if he is in earnest and will to the extent of his ability cooperate with us, he shall not in any possible event have cause to complain.” But, Odell wrote, “indemnification (as a preliminary) is what Sir Henry thinks highly unreasonable.”340

  In a separate note sent at the same time, André made clear that the crown would pay for success: If West Point and its garrison were put in British hands, twenty thousand pounds was a fair price.

  But at this point, even though Arnold had assured the Brit
ish that he had the West Point job, he didn’t. Washington was short of reliable battlefield commanders and was preparing an offensive against New York City. He wanted Arnold to command his left wing. Washington was leading his army over the Hudson at King’s Ferry, south of West Point, on July 31 when Arnold asked him about his assignment. “I told him that he was to have command of the light troops, which was a post of honor, and which his rank indeed entitled him to,” Washington recalled. “Upon this information his countenance changed, and he appeared to be quite fallen; and instead of thanking me or expressing any pleasure at the appointment, never opened his mouth.”341

  Back in Philadelphia, Peggy appeared even more stunned. She was dining at Robert Morris’s house when a visitor congratulated her on Arnold’s appointment as commander of the left wing. That was the first Peggy had heard of it. She reacted with what were described as “hysteric fits,” and refused to be consoled. Some of the other diners may have viewed Peggy’s behavior as an understandable reaction by a wife worried about her husband’s safety in battle.

  Of course, it is impossible to know the meaning of Peggy’s outbursts at the Morrises’ dinner or at other times in her life. Were they manipulative attempts to get her way? Or were they sincere and uncontrollable expressions of emotion?

  “Hysteria” was a catch-all medical diagnosis of the era, used to describe various symptoms of what the modern world might simply call mental illness, particularly when exhibited by women. The condition was known by many names: melancholy, “the vapors,” bile, nerves, and “the spleen.” The word “hysteria,” which comes from the Greek word for womb, carried a connotation of women bedeviled by their own volatile anatomy. The now-discredited idea of “the vapors” was based on the theory that vapors rising from the uterus and other organs played havoc in the brain.342 Some physicians believed that upper-class ladies such as Peggy were especially susceptible to hysteria because they overindulged in luxuries and were “tortured by imaginary wants.”343

  Peggy certainly accepted the notion that she suffered from episodes of severe mental distress and disorientation. Later in her life she wrote: “I have frequently in the course of every day a confusion in my head resembling what I can suppose would be the sensations of anybody extremely drunk, and very desirous of concealing their situation.”344 But it was never clear whether Peggy’s fits were truly uncontrollable or were merely a convenient psychological weapon.

  Peggy’s hysterics at the Morris mansion, for example, buttressed a cynical argument: Hadn’t Arnold given enough to his country? Was he really fit for battlefield duty? Hadn’t he earned the appointment he wanted at West Point? Along the Hudson River, Arnold reacted to Washington’s decision by making essentially that argument to one of the commander in chief’s aides, only slightly less hysterically.

  When Washington received intelligence that dissuaded him from making a thrust toward New York City, he relented. Arnold would go to West Point, and Peggy would soon join him. Their outpost in the country would be far behind the battlefront, but it would be at the center of one of the most dramatic episodes in American history.

  CHAPTER 11

  “The Greatest Treasure You Have”

  While Benedict Arnold assumed his appointment at West Point, Peggy Shippen held the fort in Philadelphia. Her husband instructed her to draw all the supplies she could from the commissaries and try to sell them. Every bit of cash would be helpful to a family that might have to travel on short notice.345 Arnold’s relocation to West Point made communication with the British more difficult, which in turn forced Peggy to serve as a conduit for messages. She accepted letters from New York, but at first had no safe way to get them to her husband. “Mr. Moore commands at West Point,” Stansbury wrote Odell, “but things are so poorly arranged that your last important dispatches are yet in her hands.”346

  A vital source for this approximation of André’s route is Willard M. Wallace’s biography of Arnold, Traitorous Hero (1954). Illustration by Rick Tuma

  It would be weeks before a letter from the British reached Arnold explaining that his stated price for delivering West Point—twenty thousand pounds—had been accepted but that no payment for failure would be guaranteed. Did Peggy know the news before Arnold did? Could she have resisted the temptation to read correspondence that would determine her future and her baby’s future as well as his?

  Though not able to forward André’s messages to Arnold promptly, Peggy found a way to receive letters from Arnold and to forward the information to the British. Written as if they were personal letters to his Peggy, Arnold’s messages included the kind of military information that no general’s wife would need to know unless she were planning to join the army herself—or were serving as a spy. “All the Continental troops from West Point have joined the main army,” Arnold wrote. “At present there are no troops there but about fifteen hundred of the militia of Massachusetts Bay, who are destitute of almost every necessity.”347 This wasn’t exactly pillow talk.

  Odell felt compelled to explain to André: “You will observe that the above extracts are from letters written to Mrs. Moore, but with a view of communicating information to you. . . . I wish it were possible to open a shorter road of correspondence.”348 Ultimately they were able to find other routes.

  Robinson House, across the Hudson from West Point, was seized from a Loyalist and used as Benedict Arnold’s headquarters. Peggy went mad there, and George Washington wept there. It burned down in 1892. The Beverley House, the Geographic Collection; Negative #84548d New-York Historical Society

  In Philadelphia, Peggy must have felt burdened with her weighty secret. She kept company with her husband’s aide David Franks and her sister-in-law Hannah Arnold, neither of whom ever showed any sign that they knew about the conspiracy. Hannah, in a letter to her brother, gossiped that Peggy was too much of a gossip. “For news of any kind I must refer you to Mrs. Arnold and Major Franks,” she wrote. “If they have none, they can make you a little, my word for it.”349

  Peggy planned to say goodbye to Hannah soon and take her news northward, joining Arnold at a lovely estate near West Point that had been confiscated from a leading Loyalist, Beverley Robinson.350

  Robinson, a boyhood friend of George Washington, had become wealthy through land speculation and marriage. Like Peggy Shippen’s father, he had attempted to find neutral political ground, but he had been brought before a rebel Committee to Detect Conspiracies and told to choose sides. When the war came to his part of New York in 1777, he joined the British and raised a Loyalist regiment.

  From New York City, Robinson had written to Arnold in early 1779, urging the general to take over the Loyalist leadership and reach a peace settlement, thereby giving the Americans the right to make their own laws and raise their own taxes—but not enjoy total independence. It does not appear that Arnold ever answered.

  Robinson House, located on a high plateau across the Hudson and two miles downstream from the forts, was a poor choice for a headquarters, according to the previous commander of West Point. That officer, Major General Robert Howe (no relation to the British general William Howe), was coincidentally the president of Arnold’s court-martial board. The two were cordial afterward, when Howe gave Arnold his first look at West Point in June. But Howe thought that any commander who stayed at Robinson House would be in an “exposed” position, and he told Arnold: “I leave it to you to determine whether, should accident happen, you will be held accountable.” 351

  Arnold responded that his arrangements were “most convenient for an invalid.” Little did Howe consider that they would also be most convenient for a traitor.352 If the British attacked West Point, the house’s distance from the forts would allow Arnold and Peggy to dash the hundred feet down to the water’s edge to be picked up by their new British friends.

  As commander, Arnold did not visit West Point often, even though he had a convenient mode of transportation for
the two-mile commute—a barge with seats and awnings, manned by a crew of nine. The task before him would be challenging: The forts were in poor shape, and Arnold had to act as if he were improving them without actually doing so. He also had to weaken the installation’s fighting strength without reducing its numbers so much that General Clinton would be disappointed in the catch.

  When Arnold sent two hundred men to nearby Fishkill to cut firewood for the winter, one of his subordinates warned that he was threatening the garrison’s ability to finish the defensive works and man them. In one of Arnold’s messages to the British, he indicated that there were only a thousand soldiers in the garrison but that fifteen hundred more could be brought to the forts just before the trap was sprung. The goal was to keep troops from working on West Point but to have them there in time to be taken prisoner. Eventually Arnold and the British seem to have settled on a goal of three thousand captives.

  From his Robinson House headquarters, Arnold certainly behaved like the fiery, impatient commander who had helped win Saratoga. He issued orders about sentry posts, the jail, the hospital, and deployment of artillery units and cavalry. He urged stricter discipline in a case that seemed to echo his own: A wagon master had been found guilty of using military transport for private commerce and was ordered to repay the army. Arnold protested the light sentence and secured a tougher punishment—twenty lashes on the wagon master’s bare back.353