Washington: A Life

At this point Washington learned of an episode that made sense of his enigmatic day. At breakfast that morning Arnold had been given some papers, had grown agitated, said goodbye to his wife, left the house abruptly, and disappeared. The papers had alerted him to André’s arrest, prompting him to flee down the Hudson to the safety of the Vulture. Although Washington sent Hamilton and McHenry in hot pursuit, Arnold had long since hopped on board a barge and found asylum with his British masters.

It was Arnold’s aide, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Varick, who notified Washington of the delirious behavior of Peggy Arnold upstairs. He had found her roaming the halls in a state of partial undress and coaxed her back into bed, where she insisted that “there was a hot iron on her head and no one but General Washington could take it off.”51 In a drawing of Peggy Arnold done by John André, she looks cool-eyed and cu

In cahoots with her husband, Peggy Arnold played her mad scene to perfection. Blinded by chivalry, Washington, Hamilton, and Lafayette were duped by her lunatic ravings, if not aroused by her immodest getup. They assumed that Arnold had confessed his guilt to her before fleeing and that she was still reeling from the shock. Lafayette wrote tenderly about Peggy Arnold, “whose face and whose youthfulness make her so interesting.”54 Hamilton proved especially susceptible to her wiles. “It was the most affecting scene I ever was witness to,” he wrote to Elizabeth Schuyler. For a considerable time Peggy Arnold had “entirely lost her senses . . . One moment she raved, another she melted into tears. Sometimes she pressed her infant to her bosom and lamented its fate, occasioned by the imprudence of its father, in a ma

Washington had no idea whether other conspirators were still at large. With impressive self-control, he sat through the four P.M. di

Washington soon received a pair of letters from the perfidious Arnold himself. In the first, written to Washington, Arnold blamed American ingratitude for his actions and presented himself as a patriot of a higher order than Washington. He had the gall to ask the commander to forward his clothes and baggage, as if he had hastily absconded from a busy i

The second letter was addressed to Peggy Arnold, and Washington did not dare tamper with a sealed letter from a gentleman to his lady. Instead, he sent it upstairs, unopened, along with a soothing reassurance to Peggy that her husband was unharmed. It is hard to say whether this chivalric behavior was foolhardy or sublime. It shows that, for all the atrocities Washington had witnessed, he still believed that well-bred people inhabited a genteel world, governed by incontrovertible rules. The next morning Peggy Arnold, miraculously recovered from her madness, expressed fear that “the resentment of her country will fall upon her who is only unfortunate.” 60 Still convinced of her i

AT THIRTY, Major John André was handsome, cultivated, and charming. Educated in Switzerland and something of a poet—during the occupation of Philadelphia, he had perused Benjamin Franklin’s library and engaged in amateur theatricals—he was also a proficient artist, skilled at drawing quick sketches of people. In an oval portrait of André, he stares out with a powdered wig and gold epaulettes and the soft, unformed face of a boy. In the eighteenth century soldiers often identified with their social peers on the other side of the conflict because they subscribed to the same code of class honor. André’s youth and gallantry touched the imagination of Washington’s officers. Hamilton visited André several times at the tavern in Tappan, New York, where he was held captive and left breathless with admiration. “To an excellent understanding, well improved by education and travel, [André] united a peculiar elegance of mind and ma

The case of Major André became a cause célèbre because of his aristocratic ma