The Trial and Execution of the Traitor George Washington

by Charles Rosenberg

  “Which you richly deserve.” He rose and extended his hand. “You have the thanks of the entire nation.”

  Atwood, realizing that he was being dismissed, rose and shook Huntington’s proffered hand. “I am pleased to have been of service to my country.” He stepped towards the door, but just before reaching it, he turned and said, “What are you going to do?”

  “Why, try to rescue him,” Huntington said.

  After Atwood had left, Thompson said, “Surely, you cannot be serious. Especially without the name of the ship. There are no doubt dozens of British warships out there.”

  “I didn’t mean a rescue at sea. We will instead start by trying to negotiate his release in London.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “We will need to work that out,” Huntington said.

  They quickly agreed that whatever the strategy might be, whomever they sent to negotiate should be sent quickly, followed by more people later. Yet the need for speed left out three of their very best.

  John Adams was already in France as a special representative to try to bring about a more formal alliance with France, as was Benjamin Franklin. Even if they were able to be notified and make their way to England amidst the French war with England, there would be no way to instruct them. But perhaps, someone pointed out, it was just as well. Adams, if the London papers which they had seen were to be believed, was the patriot leader whom George III disliked the most.

  Thomas Jefferson was another possibility, but he was at that moment two hundred fifty miles away in Virginia serving as its governor. Virginia was at least a week’s travel each way. In addition, he owned slaves, and slavery had already been effectively abolished in England several years earlier, which might make him a poor choice. And, as one member of the committee put it—whether seriously or not, it was hard to tell—“He might not really work all that hard to prevent Washington being put to death.”

  They also discarded the names of various generals, as well as a few well-regarded colonels and majors.

  In the end, they chose Ethan Abbott, thirty-nine years old, not a delegate, but a war hero and a well-known and well-regarded lawyer in Philadelphia. He already knew many of the members of Congress well, including every member of the committee, because he’d represented them on personal and business matters while they were in Philadelphia. He had even briefly represented Benjamin Franklin before he left for France.

  On some level, Huntington said, it didn’t matter whom they chose. The British were going to do with Washington what they were going to do, and the representative sent from the Congress would likely make little difference. What mattered, he said, based on his careful reading of the London papers they received, the reports of the parliamentary debates that came his way, and his meetings with the Carlisle Commission, when they had spent six futile months in Philadelphia in 1778 trying to get someone in the Patriot camp interested in negotiating a settlement to the war, was whether Lord North or the King ended up winning the argument about how the war should end.

  “What about Mr. Abbott’s missing leg?” one of the delegates asked. “Won’t having only half a leg hinder him in getting around?”

  Huntington laughed. “No, and when they find out exactly how he lost it, the British will respect him. With regard to those men in Parliament and at court who have not themselves been in any war, it will give him a leg up.” He smiled at the pun.

  “He is also something of a dandy,” one of them said.

  “No, he simply dresses a great deal better than you,” one of the men, who had spent time in London, said. “And that, too, will go over quite well in London and especially in court. Have you ever seen court dress, with its velvet and lace and gold buttons and medallions? He will fit right in.”

  And so Ethan Abbott was selected to travel to London and represent the Continental Congress in negotiations with the British, with a larger, supporting delegation to follow within the week. Perhaps Dr. Franklin could later be dispatched from France as well if needed, but that would take much longer to arrange and might put Franklin, wanted for treason for having signed the Declaration, at personal risk.

  Now there remained only to let Abbott know he’d been chosen and persuade him to go. Huntington had gone to visit with Abbott before their current meeting to let him know he planned to put his name in contention. Abbott had reluctantly consented, but he did so, he had said, only because he knew he would never be chosen.

  When Huntington went immediately to Abbott’s home to tell him the news, he resisted. “I have not the talent for this.”

  “I think you do, Mr. Abbott. I think you are perfect.”

  “I was a soldier, and now I have returned to being a lawyer. What talents do I have for this? I think I have none.”

  “I know well your reputation as a negotiator, sir. You are measured and polite most of the time. But when needed you can be blunt. It is the very combination of talents which we need in this endeavour. That your country needs.”

  “My tendency to be blunt on occasion? I consider that a flaw in my character. When I feel it start to rise up in me, I try to beat it down.”

  Huntington smiled. “Try not to beat it down too much, Mr. Abbott. I have no doubt you will need it in London.”

  Neither of them said anything for a moment. Finally, Huntington broke the silence and said, “And there is one more thing. If you do this and are successful—or even if you’re not—you will be famous for the rest of your life.”

  “I’m already quite famous enough.”

  “Only in a minor way for your exploits on the battlefield. That will all fade quickly. I am talking about wider fame, of the kind that I have no doubt is well worth having. Amongst other things, you can more easily acquire a wife.”

  “I’m not sure I want a wife.”

  “Everyone should have one, Mr. Abbott. It doesn’t preclude you from—Well, never mind.”

  “General Washington has no idea who I am.”

  “I will give you a glowing letter of introduction. And since Washington does not consider me a competitor, it will go much further than something from Adams or Jefferson. Only a letter from Hamilton would do better, but he is at the moment at best two days’ ride from here, and you must leave quickly.”

  “It makes no sense to send only one man.”

  “We will dispatch a small delegation shortly after you leave to arrive in London, we hope, not long after you do. And we can perhaps find a way to get Dr. Franklin to France to come to your assistance should things seem not to be going well.”

  “I still don’t see how this is all going to work.”

  Over a bottle of fine port—two, actually—that Huntington had brought with him, they argued back and forth well into the night. Finally, Abbott gave up and accepted.

  At the very end, as Huntington was preparing to leave, there was a loud knock at the door. Abbott opened it, and there stood Herman Atwood.

  “Mr. Huntington, they told me I’d find you here.” He looked to Abbott. “Pardon the intrusion, sir, but I didn’t want to wait to tell the news.” He was breathing hard, as if he’d run there from his inn. “I finally remembered the name of the ship. It was on the side of the longboat. HMS Peregrine.”

  16

  TWO DAYS EARLIER

  Aboard the HMS Peregrine

  three miles off the coast of New Jersey

  Captain Ingram stood on the rolling deck, feet braced wide apart, talking with his first officer, Lieutenant Joshua Lansford, and looking shoreward.

  “Mr. Lansford, what do you make of the weather?”

  “You know the old saying, ‘Red sky at night, sailors’ delight, red sky at morning...’”

  Ingram laughed and finished it for him. “‘...sailors take warning.’”

  “Yes, and the sky was blood red at dawn. Now, at sunset, it’s not. But whether that old ditty
is right or wrong, we must take warning because all the other signs—the swells, the wind, the smell—say a huge storm is in the making. And the rain is starting to come down hard.”

  “I agree,” Ingram said. “That means tonight is likely the last night we will be able to launch a boat towards shore, and even then that boat will be at great risk. Once it has returned, we must get out of here and head for the open sea.”

  “I have looked at the charts,” Lansford said. “There is no port nearby to take shelter in, at least not one our forces are likely to control.”

  “And the bottom here is very shallow.”

  “Yes, so as the wind rises, we are at risk of being blown aground. Unless we leave now.”

  “Agreed again,” Ingram said. “But here’s the thing. We are obligated to send a boat in again tonight to see if our mysterious friend has returned. If he isn’t there tonight—as I suspect he will not be—we won’t be able to try again. Our orders are not to try for more than eight nights.”

  “Captain, we must surely sail from here within the next few hours or risk losing the ship without sending in a boat. If we sail without Black we can decide later if we should return for him and call that the eighth night.”

  “No. Launch the boat towards the beach at the appropriate time as usual, and then get us ready to sail as soon as it comes back in. In the meantime, I will get some badly needed hours of sleep. Wake me when the boat is back.”

  He walked over to his bunk, pulled back the heavy curtain that provided a modicum of privacy and climbed in, not even bothering to remove his boots. He pulled the drapes closed. If he were the captain of a larger ship, he might well have a separate cabin to himself. The thought followed him into sleep.

  He was in the midst of a wonderful dream—he was in a pub with his wife in the small village of Chedworth, in which they had met and courted, toasting an old friend’s retirement—when a loud voice dragged him rudely out of sleep. “Captain! The boat is back!”

  He threw back the curtain and heaved himself to his feet beside the bunk. The voice belonged to Lansford.

  “Then we must put to sea at once and leave our friend to his fate.”

  “No, no. Smith has returned with another man, who is wearing an American uniform.”

  “You know nothing else about the second man?”

  “Not yet. The man is in sickbay, near to death with cold and wet. And to boot, Smith is seasick again, poor man.”

  “He has not said who the second man is?”

  “No.”

  “Take me to them.”

  17

  Ingram had not set foot in the sickbay—a small, cramped room deep in the bowels of the ship—since his inspection of the ship just before they set sail. His conversations with the naval surgeon, Mr. Arbuthnot, had been perfunctory. They had not yet been in battle, so there had been no grievous wounds to discuss. Nor had anyone fallen out of the rigging. And since they had not made landfall anywhere, no sailor had come down with the clap. Indeed, the crew assigned to the ship by the Navy Board had seemed an unusually healthy lot for a group of British seamen. To his astonishment, many seemed, except for drinking the usual allotment of grog, downright abstemious. He had attributed it to the luck of the draw. Certainly, he’d captained ships on which his luck had run hard the other way.

  He and Lansford entered the sickbay, a small room with an iron stove in the corner set atop bricks and a layer of sand to protect the wooden deck from the heat. Curtains had been hung on the walls—well away from the stove—to reduce draughts. He immediately spotted a man laid out in a bunk against the wall, on his back and wrapped chin to toe in blankets. From what he could see of his face, the man was of late middle years. Arbuthnot was leaning over him.

  Ingram glanced over and saw Black with his arms folded, his shoulders pushed back into a corner, no doubt trying to brace himself against the increasing roll of the ship. His clothing was damp, and he had the green look of someone who has been seasick for hours.

  “Mr. Arbuthnot,” Ingram said, “may I have your report please?”

  Arbuthnot looked up and said, “Welcome to sickbay, Captain. This man—” he pointed to the body on the bunk “—is near to death from cold and exposure. I’m told he fell overboard. He also has a bruise on the side of his head.”

  “What can you do for him?”

  “For the cold we’re heating bricks.” He pointed to the surgical mate, who was crouched in front of the sickbay stove, in which a blaze was roaring. “As soon as they’re hot enough, we’ll place them around his body and try to warm him up gradually. If done too quickly, he will certainly die.”

  “Is there nothing else you can do...with all your education?”

  Ingram assumed Arbuthnot would understand that he was making sly reference to the fact that most navy surgeons didn’t receive their training and degree from the Royal College of Physicians. Most went instead to a lower prestige, barber-related program. Indeed, Ingram had asked Arbuthnot, when he had first come aboard, if his assignment by the Navy Board to such a small, insignificant ship—normally a physician with his fancy Royal College credentials would be posted to an admiral’s flagship—was a punishment of some sort. Arbuthnot had shrugged and replied that he had no idea why he’d been assigned to Ingram’s ship, but he was pleased to be of service.

  Arbuthnot ignored Ingram’s reference to his fancy education. “Rum might be of help to him,” he said. “But he has to be conscious, or he’ll choke. If he survives there might be some other things I could give him to help him recover from the cold. As for the head bruise, it’s hard to say. It may or may not be serious. It will have to heal itself if it can.”

  The Captain looked at Black. “Who is the man in the bunk?”

  “His Excellency, General George Washington.”

  “I don’t think this is the time for levity, Mr. Smith. Who is he?”

  “I intend no levity, Captain. That’s who he is. My mission was to arrest him and bring him back to London to face the King’s justice. He is a leader of the rebellion and thus a traitor.”

  There was a long silence in the room as Ingram, Lansford and Arbuthnot turned, almost as one, to stare down at Washington’s face.

  “I suppose it could be him,” Ingram said. “I’ve seen a few drawings in magazines, and the face is perhaps the same. Mr. Smith, how do you know for certain it’s Washington?”

  “I captured him myself.”

  “What? Where?”

  “At his headquarters.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “And you did this alone?”

  “Of course not. I had aid from Loyalists, much of it preplanned. And you no longer need to call me Smith. My true name, which is Colonel Black, will do from now on.”

  The surgeon’s mate spoke up. “Mr. Arbuthnot, the bricks are warm enough now. And perhaps it’s not my place, but if you still have any doubts as to who this man is, his uniform speaks for his high station.” He pointed to a heap of clothes piled in the corner.

  Lansford walked over, picked up the largest piece and hoisted up a dripping-wet military-style waistcoat. The buttons and epaulettes were gold. Or at least Ingram could make out that they had once been gold, even if they were now a dirty brown.

  “I took the coat off him when he was brought in,” the mate said.

  Black unlimbered himself from the corner and spoke in a tone of command Ingram had not heard before. “Captain, if you still have doubts, I will show you my orders, and you will believe who this is. The question now, though, is whether he will survive.” He looked to the doctor.

  The mate had begun handing the hot bricks to Arbuthnot, wrapping each first in thick cloth to prevent them burning their own hands or the patient. As he answered, Arbuthnot was bent over his patient placing the bricks around his body, beneath the blanket. “Only God knows,” he said. “But I will do my best, as I would
for any man, general or no.”

  “Colonel, let’s return to the Great Cabin,” Ingram said. “I want to see those orders you referred to.”

  “Of course, Captain. In the meantime, may I suggest you station four marines here to make sure he doesn’t escape?”

  Ingram laughed. “Even if he lives, where would he go?”

  “I don’t know. But he tried to escape once on our way to the beach. And I’m still not convinced he fell accidentally off the boat. He may well have been intending to try to swim back to shore.”

  “We don’t have a lot of marines on board, given the small size of our boat. I can spare only two, at least for now.”

  “I must insist on four,” Black said.

  “Who is the captain of this ship, Colonel Black?”

  “You are, sir, but I remind you that I outrank you.”

  “Any time you want to take command, Colonel, do let me know. In the meantime, I will continue to make these kinds of decisions that immediately affect the ship and its safety. I will send two only.”

  Arbuthnot cleared his throat, clearly uneasy at the confrontation. “Pray send two who don’t have colds,” he said. “This patient is in bad enough condition as it is.”

  “You really believe that one person can give a cold to another, Mr. Arbuthnot? That it is not just foul vapours that all breathe in?”

  “I do believe that.”

  Ingram laughed again. “I suppose it’s your fancy education speaking.”

  “Yes, and now we know why, with that fancy education, I was assigned to this ship, Captain.”

  Ingram headed for the door. “Follow me, Colonel Black. I would like you to show me your orders.” The ship was by then rolling steeply enough that Black had visible difficulty holding on to the ladders as well as climbing through the hatches that led from deck to deck. At one point, Ingram, who led the way, reached a hand down to help hoist him up and said, “I thought you had gotten better at this on the voyage over.”

  “No, Captain, I fear I will never get better on ships. After we return to London, I hope never to board one again.”