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October 25 - November 29, 2018
Arnold is usually credited with coming up with the idea himself, but there are reasons to suspect that the decision to turn traitor originated with Peggy.
When her father had initially refused to allow her to marry Arnold, she had used her seeming frailty—her fits, her hysteria, whatever you wanted to call it—to artfully manipulate him into agreeing to the engagement in fear that to do otherwise might cause his emotionally delicate daughter irreparable harm.
Peggy had gotten her way with her father, and once she was married, she would get her way with her equally indulgent husband.
Adams was lucky; his wife and virtually every member of his extended family supported his political positions. Arnold now found himself in an entirely different situation.
Angered over his treatment by his own country and increasingly enticed by Peggy to turn traitor, he still nonetheless felt a genuine loyalty to Washington.
In the reference to money, Arnold had unintentionally betrayed the real reason why he had been moved to consider this course. If he handled the negotiations correctly, turning traitor could be extremely lucrative.
“Money is this man’s god,” Colonel John Brown had insisted two years before, “and to get enough of it, he would sacrifice his country.”
But as he was about to make clear, he was doing this first and foremost for the money.
Prostitutes had always been in New York, but now with a large number of bored and unhappy soldiers based in the city, the profession flourished like never before.
Arnold’s timing, it turned out, was quite good. André had just been put in charge of British intelligence operations, and he was eager to assure Arnold that the British were not about to give up their American colonies.
Arnold undoubtedly knew the contents of Deane’s letter. That he was willing to place that letter into the hands of Nathanael Greene within a few weeks of having disclosed precious military secrets to the British reveals the extent of Arnold’s treachery. Not only had he betrayed his country; he had betrayed in that single act the trust of two of his closest friends.
Arnold had never worried about the consequences of his actions.
Arnold projected unwavering certitude. Whatever was best for him was, by definition, best for everyone else.
Washington’s sense of right and wrong existed outside the impulsive demands of his own self-interest.
For Arnold, on the other hand, rules were made to be broken.
What made Arnold unique was the godlike inviolability he attached to his actions. He had immense respect for a man like Washington, but Arnold was, in the end, the leading personage in the drama that was his life. Not lost to his own character, but lost in it, Arnold did whatever Arnold wanted, and upon arriving at Middlebrook he made what Washington described as a “self-invited” appearance at headquarters.
The American general was, whether he admitted it or not, damaged goods from the British perspective, and Clinton was not about to guarantee the rewards that Arnold clearly felt were his due.
A month later, the Virginian captain Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee led an equally daring assault on the British outpost at Paulus Hook, New Jersey, just across the harbor from New York. Although of minimal strategic importance, both operations were proof that, much to Clinton’s dismay, the Americans were still a force to be reckoned with.
A country born in a revolution was in danger of being destroyed by the same distrust of authority with which it had begun.
When Arnold’s sentence was taken up by Congress, the delegates voted overwhelmingly to allow the reprimand to stand.
As was now obvious, Arnold had grossly misrepresented his overall worth prior to their marriage.
This was a hard matter for the soldiers to think upon. They were truly patriotic; they loved their country, and they had already suffered everything short of death in its cause; and now, after such extreme hardships to give up all was too much, but to starve to death was too much also. What was to be done?”
When all attempts to convince the men to retire to their quarters failed, Washington’s officers realized that they had a mutiny on their hands.
Charleston had fallen to the British. Rather than abandoning the city when he still had the chance, Benjamin Lincoln had allowed the pleas of local citizens to delay his exit until it was too late, and he and almost his entire army of fifty-five hundred soldiers had been captured.
In the end, it had all come down to money. Unwilling to pay the taxes demanded by Great Britain, the American people had fomented a revolution; unwilling to pay for an army, they were about to default on the promise they had made to themselves in the Declaration of Independence.
For almost half of its 315-mile overall length, from New York Harbor to Troy, the Hudson is tidal, meaning that it flows south at ebb tide and north with the flood.
By all accounts, men found Peggy immensely attractive.
made no reply to it,” he remembered, “but [Arnold’s] behavior struck me as strange and unaccountable.”
While Franks had tolerated Arnold’s suspicious behavior in Philadelphia, Varick proved to be much less open minded.
Arnold embarked on a twofold project: do as little as possible to complete the much-needed repairs and improvements to the fort’s outer works while making sure the required number of soldiers were either in or near the fortress on the day of the British attack.
Before that, however, he had been an enthusiastic participant in two of the most gruesome massacres of the war.
Paoli, Pennsylvania,
Old Tappan, New Jersey,
In the weeks ahead, it became convenient to portray André as the unwitting victim of Arnold’s conniving duplicity, but in many fundamental ways André and Arnold were two of a kind.
André was Peggy’s boyish former acquaintance, and Arnold may have felt that he lacked the gravitas for negotiations of such importance.
Indeed, Arnold’s behavior at this critical moment is so puzzling that one has to wonder whether jealousy was contributing to his need to put some distance between himself and Peggy’s young and handsome friend.
For André, however, the appearance of the officer came as a terrifying shock. He knew this man. Colonel Samuel Blachley Webb was a former aide of Washington’s who had been a prisoner in New York for more than a year and a half, and he was now on parole so that he could visit his family in Connecticut.
What really irritated André was the fact that he had been undone by three American peasants. Just as had happened the day before with the Cahoon brothers, the three militiamen had refused to do as they’d been told by their social superiors. In this country, the lower orders apparently had minds of their own,
Treason, along with suicide, is the most self-centered of acts. Unmoored from his past and without, as of yet, a future, Arnold was now the loneliest man on God’s earth.
Within minutes he knew the full extent of Arnold’s treachery—that he had conspired to surrender West Point to the British, and that he had fled approximately six hours earlier down the river.
For someone of Washington’s inherently trusting nature, what Arnold had done was inconceivable.
Arnold had betrayed not just Washington but every American citizen he had pledged to protect. Since republics rely on the inherent virtue of the people, they are exceedingly fragile. All it takes is one well-placed person to destroy everything.
Peggy had apparently decided that insanity was her best defense.
Even the very bright and normally clearheaded Alexander Hamilton was completely taken in. “Her sufferings were so eloquent,” he wrote his fiancée, “that I wished myself her brother, to have a right to become her defender.”
If this account is true (and there is no reason to suspect it is not), Peggy had devoted more than a year to convincing her husband to betray his country and then, as soon as the plan fell apart, left him to his fate in New York. Arnold, apparently, was not the only traitor in the family.
