• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 31443 0

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 cunning, with just a hint of a smirk, her tall beehive hairdo towering above a small, pretty face. When Washington went upstairs to calm her, he found her hugging her baby to her breast, her abundant blond curls tumbling across her face and her dressing gown thrown open for easy viewing. She didn’t seem to recognize Washington. “There is General Washington,” Varick urged her gently, but she assured him he was wrong. “No, that is not General Washington! That is the man who was a-going to assist Colonel Varick in killing my child.”52 Peggy Arnold seemed too wildly distracted to participate in anything so methodical as a plot. “General Arnold will never return,” she informed her gullible male audience. “He is gone forever, there, there, there.” She motioned toward the ceiling. “The spirits have carried him up there. They have put hot irons in his head.”53

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 manner that would have pierced insensibility itself.”55 In dealing with Arnold’s wife, Washington and Hamilton left something to be desired as psychologists. The sudden onset of her madness and her exaggerated theatrics should have aroused their incredulity. “Mrs. Arnold is sick and General Arnold is away,” Washington told the assembled officers when he went downstairs. “We must therefore take our dinner without them.”56

Washington had no idea whether other conspirators were still at large. With impressive self-control, he sat through the four P.M. dinner without disclosing what had happened. For security reasons, he sealed off the house and did not permit anyone to enter or exit. Stunned by events, he proved slow to take precautionary steps. Hamilton, showing more initiative, took it upon himself to order a Connecticut regiment to bolster West Point. In the early evening Washington issued rapid-fire bulletins to tighten security there in case Clinton tried to exploit the confusion with a preemptive strike. Amid a mood of tense expectation, he directed troops toward West Point and served notice that the Continental Army might be deployed on a moment’s notice. He also informed Arnold’s two chief aides, Franks and Varick, that he had no reason to suspect their complicity with Arnold but felt duty-bound to place them under arrest, a decision the two understood. The next day Washington announced the terrible revelation to his men: “Treason of the blackest dye was yesterday discovered!”57 As in many major moments in the war, he traced exposure of the conspiracy to divine intervention: “In no instance since the commencement of the war has the interposition of providence appeared more conspicuous than in the rescue of the post and garrison of West Point from Arnold’s villainous perfidy.”58

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