Washington had come prepared to offer four plans. First priority, he told the French, must be placed on taking New York, for he believed its capture would end the war. He suggested a siege if and when French naval reinforcements arrived, but barring that he proposed that the two armies move to the very periphery of Manhattan; at least that would prevent Clinton from sending reinforcements to Cornwallis in the South. While his allies mulled over those possibilities, he suggested two alternative courses of action: a joint expedition to the South, a venture that would compel Clinton to assist Cornwallis and which might produce the first major clash of the adversaries in the two years since Monmouth; curiously, he also suggested a joint expedition into Canada, the sort of enterprise he had found abhorrent as long as Gates was plumping for such a strategy. Rochambeau listened patiently to what must have been a dreadfully long presentation for Washington, then he replied in kind. His speech threw cold water all over Washington’s planning. A siege of New York he agreed to, but only in the unlikely event that enough French ships of war slipped through to America. He vetoed the other notions, apparently asserting that his orders were to use the army only in concert with the navy, and that Ternay’s fleet was too small to consider a thrust either to the southward or into Canada. With that the meeting ended. One thing only seemed to have been decided. There would be no further action in 1780, and next summer’s campaign would depend on the mood in Versailles as well as on the willingness of thirteen American states to prosecute the war. The future, which had “appeared pregnant with events of a favourable complexn” in July, had “prov’d delosury,” Washington lamented in September. “I see nothing before us but accumulating distress,” he now maintained.49
The next morning Washington was up early and on his way out of Hartford. If he could not take the offensive, he had to be certain that his defenses in the Highlands were adequate. His destination was West Point on the Hudson, where he planned to confer with its commander, Major General Benedict Arnold.
Arnold’s career had followed a twisted, tortuous path since his heroics three years earlier in the Saratoga campaign. Seriously wounded in the leg during that fray, he spent six months recuperating, returning to active duty only just before Washington departed Valley Forge. He was still in pain and limping badly, however, and a battlefield post was out of the question. Hence, upon Clinton’s withdrawal from Philadelphia that summer, Washington named Arnold to command the army in that city. It turned out to be a more dangerous theater for Arnold than any battlefield upon which he had fought.
His policies, his expensive habits, his open friendliness with many prominent neutralist—some said Tory—families, and his eventual marriage to Peggy Shippen, a member of one of those suspect families, angered many Philadelphians. Today, Arnold’s behavior in these instances seems perfectly innocent. Some of his financial dealings probably were not, however. Arnold always had lusted after money and the status he believed it would fetch, and during his stint in Philadelphia he engaged in several shady financial transactions, maneuverings in which he seems to have misused public property for his own private ends. Ultimately, the Council of Pennsylvania drew up a list of eight charges against him. Arnold immediately asked Washington to convene a court martial. It was his only hope of exoneration.
While he awaited word of his fate, Arnold’s anger swelled. Already passed over by Congress for a promotion that he believed he deserved, Arnold seethed at this new affront. Even before the court convened to hear his case, Arnold, bitter and frustrated, initiated clandestine talks with the British high command. If the price was right, he suggested, he might engage in a treasonous act.
Ultimately, Clinton’s headquarters made clear what it hoped to procure from Arnold: West Point. He remained interested, more so, in fact, following the verdict of the panel that heard his court martial. He was acquitted on seven charges, but convicted of mishandling public property. While his sentence was light—merely a reprimand from General Washington—Arnold could only look on the conviction as a dark stain upon his honor. He continued to talk with the British, haggling over the fee that his betrayal would bring. Meanwhile, he stumped to gain command of that vital post. He wrote influential friends, and he called on Washington at Morristown early in June. The commander’s response was disappointing, for he planned to garrison West Point with invalids. Washington indicated that he preferred to give Arnold a field command instead.50
A few weeks later Washington formally announced that if a Franco-American campaign against New York occurred, Arnold would command the American left in the siege army. The appointment was meant to confirm Arnold’s vindication, at least in Washington’s eyes, but Arnold’s bitterness toward the United States evidently was immutable. Arnold hurried to headquarters as soon as he read the orders. He wished to decline the post, he told Washington, pleading that his slowly mending wounds precluded his assumption of a field command. Once again, he asked to be given command of West Point. Later Washington realized that Arnold’s requests should have aroused his suspicions. At the time, however, he took Arnold’s excuse at face value. Early in August, Arnold was granted command of the Highlands post.
Soon Arnold had everything he wanted, for the turncoat shortly struck a deal with Clinton. He would exchange West Point and its entire garrison for twenty thousand dollars. He sped north to take command, and he established his headquarters nearby in the Robinson house, a dwelling once owned by Beverley Robinson, the friend with whom Washington had stayed during his journey to Boston in 1756.51
Much work had to be done to prepare for the sell-out, but for Arnold all went well until September 22, the very day that Washington was meeting with the French leaders a hundred or so miles to the east of West Point. Arnold, too, had a meeting that day. His was with a young British officer, Major John Andre. They rendezvoused in a grove of firs near the Hudson, there to complete the arrangements for the transferral of West Point. Following the meeting Andre started back to Manhattan. He did not make it. After traveling several miles, he was stopped by sentries. A search uncovered suspicious papers concealed in his boot. The guards ushered Andre to North Castle, the site of the nearest Continental army post, where he was detained; meanwhile, his papers were sent to Washington, while simultaneously word was sent to Arnold—until now, ignorant of the events of the past thirty-six hours—of Andre’s detention. It now was September 23, and General Washington was departing Hartford for his return to West Point at almost that very moment.
When Arnold awakened that Monday morning he still did not know of Andre’s difficulties. Nor did Washington. The courier sent with the captured papers had been unable to locate the commander, and he had been rerouted to West Point. In the earliest hours of the day, hence, three men were proceeding toward the Robinson house from different directions: Washington, ignorant of any of the recent curious occurrences; the messenger instructed to tell Arnold of Andre’s arrest; and the dispatch-rider bearing the incriminating documents for Washington’s perusal. Members of General Washington’s staff were the first to arrive at Arnold’s residence. The commander had been delayed, aides to Lafayette and Knox told Arnold; Washington, they added had urged everyone to begin breakfast without him. Sometime during the meal the messenger looking for Arnold arrived. Without evident emotion Arnold read the letter from North Castle, asked his guests to excuse him for a moment, went upstairs to speak with his wife, then returned to the dining room to announce that he had been summoned to West Point. He would be back within thirty minutes, he said. Instead, spurring his horse on at breakneck speed, he raced to the Hudson and to the barge that normally carried him across to West Point. This time, however, he ordered the vessel to proceed downriver.52
A few minutes after Arnold’s departure Washington arrived. Hungry after his own long ride, he ate without waiting for Arnold to return. But when the meal ended and Arnold still had not returned, Washington and his retinue rode to the fort. Perhaps there was an emergency. Perplexingly, Arnold was not there either. For that matt
er, neither had he come to West Point that morning nor had anyone summoned him. Washington inspected the outpost, then he was rowed back to the Robinson House. It was about 3:30. Arnold still was unaccounted for. But soon the mystery was resolved. The emissary whose saddlebags contained André’s incriminating papers finally arrived just before 4:00.
The commander did not have to read the documents twice to deduce what Arnold was about, and he immediately dispatched a party led by Hamilton to stop the traitor before he escaped. Washington quickly interrogated Arnold’s principal officers and aides, then, with Lafayette in tow, he entered Mrs. Arnold’s bedchamber and tried to speak with her. It was hopeless. Disheveled, clad only in a rumpled nightgown, her eyes red and swollen from a day of weeping, she paced the floor throughout the interview, crying and raving about this and that, none of it very comprehensible. She did not even recognize Washington. He excused himself after a few minutes, anxious to escape a scene that he found embarrassing. All about Washington people seemed to have been transported into a frenzy, but he remained calm, issuing his initial orders with an icy calm that had become habitual after encountering one crisis after another for so many years. When all his commands were given, however, he lowered his guard, and his real emotions poured out. Lafayette, whose imagination was too vivid to be very trustworthy, later alleged that Washington wept like a baby. The man who owned the house where Andre had slept on the twenty-first told a different story. Washington, he said, shrieked in a black fury, denouncing Arnold and expressing his distrust of each and every one of his officers. This version sounds more probable, and, indeed, a month later Washington urged the Board of War to pursue every lead it came upon that might suggest perfidious conduct by any officer.53
Strangely, the commander hesitated for more than three hours before issuing orders to put his army on full alert. Fortunately, Clinton was not coming, but Washington was finally certain of that only after he spent a long, tense, vigilant evening. During the night he learned that Arnold, with his seven-hour head start, had escaped onto a British ship of war. In fact, before dawn Washington even received a brief note from the traitor, but it was too confusing and contradictory to shed much light on his actions. Arnold seemed to attribute his behavior to patriotism and to revanchism, to his desire to settle the score for the “ingratitude of my country.”54
Washington kept the army on the ready for seventy-two hours, all the while seeing to it that both Andre and the people who had served Arnold were questioned relentlessly. He also had his aides go through Peggy Arnold’s correspondence, and he even directed them to search her quarters for clues to her husband’s treachery. With that finally done, he concluded that Arnold had acted alone, that his grandiose plot had been foiled.
All that was left was to deal with Andre. Caught behind American lines in civilian attire, he could be treated as a spy. Whatever Washington thought of him, he felt that American security required that an example had to be made of this unfortunate young man. A military tribunal recommended capital punishment, and the commander consented, postponing the execution for a day to receive the emissaries of Clinton. The British commander desperately bargained for the officer’s release, but he would not consent to the one demand made by Washington that instantly would have liberated Andre: a swap of Arnold for the British major. On October 2, nine days after his capture, Major André was hanged.55
The public was shaken by Arnold’s apostasy, but not just because of the “deadly wound if not a fatal stab” that would have resulted from the loss of West Point. As one scholar has demonstrated, contemporaries feared that Arnold’s venality was the final, cataclysmic symbol of the loss of America’s virtue. From the outset the nation seemed unanimous in its belief that independence could only be attained—and, indeed, that it would only be desirable—if the citizenry was virtuous, if men fought and risked their lives and estates, if the populace eschewed self-indulgence. Some grew concerned for American virtue as early as 1776 when enlistments fell off, but the citizenry generally had remained confident through the best and worst of times. Yet the events of 1780 nearly extinguished all cause for optimism. First the inhabitants of South Carolina had failed to rally behind Lincoln at Charleston, while at Camden militiamen and their officers had fled in a panic, leaving the South almost undefended. Now Arnold—literally selling out, a turncoat’s act that seemed to symbolize the eclipse of the public’s virtue. Washington recognized the danger, and in public he endeavored to paper over the event. He told Rochambeau, for instance, that “traitors are the growth of every country” and a commonplace ingredient of civil wars. The wonder is, he added, that their numbers were so few. In private, however, he seethed with anger. “The world are disappointed at not seeing Arnold in Gibbets,” he told a young aide six months later. That Arnold was never punished was not due to lack of effort on the part of Washington. He churned with a lust to seize the traitor, once even sending an intrepid young Virginian, a sergeant under Light Horse Harry Lee, into New York on a mission to kidnap Arnold, as if the turncoat’s blood would cleanse the nation of its impurity. Of course the enterprise to take Arnold failed, and Washington was left to reflect aloud that if virtuous men did not emerge “to rescue our affairs” all might be lost “in the general Wreck.”56
One thing came of Arnold’s treachery. Since sometime in 1779 Continental army officers had resumed their hue and cry about pensions. They barely had secured the national government’s commitment of half-pay for seven years before they began to beseech Congress to grant them half-pay for life at the end of the war. For a year the financially strapped Congress rebuffed their every entreaty. Now, suddenly, things were different. Arnold’s act seemed to be at least partially attributable to his financial woes. If he had stabbed the nation in the back for that reason, what was to keep other officers from similarly selling out? Late in 1780, with Arnold’s treachery sticking like a bone in its craw, Congress pledged half-pay for life to the army’s officers. It pledged nothing to the common soldiery.57
What more could 1780 bring to this beleagured nation? Within a few days of Arnold’s treason some good news trickled into headquarters at Preakness. At King’s Mountain in South Carolina a force of militiamen had drubbed an enemy army consisting mostly of Loyalists. At about the same time Congress reorganized the Continental army more or less along the lines that Washington had recommended. During the summer Washington had proposed to a congressional committee that men be conscripted for three-year hitches. Congress would not go quite that far. Instead, it passed legislation that assigned a manpower quota to each state. Men were to sign on or be drafted for varying periods, and in September of each year each state was to be apprised of any shortfall in its recruitment; on January 1, if the errant state had not made up its deficiency, an appropriate number of veteran soldiers from that state, men whose service should be ending, would be detained in the ranks. Not only would Washington be assured of his troop strength, but the new plan would save money by reducing the incredible loss of supplies that resulted when thousands of men annually were mustered into the army in the stead of thousands who departed. There might be an immediate benefit as well. Washington was convinced that Britain had remained at war in part because it thought each American army surely would be its last army. Now with an army assured for 1781, and with French troops still here too, Britain might reconsider its commitment.58
In a letter that rang with his ebullience at the army’s reorganization, Washington noted: “The history of the war is a history of false hopes and temporary expedients. Would to God they were to end here!” Such was not the case. Three days into 1781 came the news that Washington had feared since that very first winter—mutiny had erupted within the ranks, a contagion born of anguish and frustration, and potentially more deadly to the war effort than the blackest treason.59
Washington had entered winter quarters in the late fall of 1780, scattering his troops from New Jersey to West Point, while his French allies cantoned in abandoned houses in Newport. In no ti
me the Continental army was afflicted by the familiar problems of the season, and its commander’s letters read like carbon copies of the plaintive messages he had written three winters before at Valley Forge. Once again there was a “scarcity of provision,” a “want of Cloathing,” inadequate supplies of coats and blankets, much “distress for want of flour,” too few hours to forage and too little provender for the horses that conveyed the men who looked for food, breeds of livestock that were too poor and thin to provide much meat, a dearth of supplies for the army’s hospitals, and insufficient funds with which to pay the troops.60
“Our soldiers are not devoid of reasoning faculties,” Pennsylvania’s General Wayne observed that December, and some Pennsylvania troops soon reasoned that the best means of getting the attention of officialdom was to protest. Their principal grievances concerned the length of their service. They had signed on for three years or the duration, but they had been told that “duration” meant that they would be discharged if the war lasted less than three years. Having come aboard during that winter at Valley Forge, their service obligation ended on January 1, 1781—or so they concluded. But the authorities reached a different conclusion. They believed the soldiers were compelled to serve for the duration—that is, until the war ended. The ingredients were in place for a confrontation. The explosion occurred about 9:00 P.M. on New Year’s Day.61
Nearly one thousand men—fully 15 percent of Washington’s army—mutinied, commencing a march on Congress from their cantonment at Mount Kemble, near Morristown. General Wayne, the commander of the post, was powerless to stop them, for his non-mutinous troops balked at fighting other Continental soldiers. He tried to cajole them, then he sought to bargain. Nothing worked. By mid-afternoon on January 2 the mutineers, armed now with six cannon, were marching—literally marching, for they were a well-disciplined outfit—on Philadelphia.
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