Washington [265]
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 innocence, Washington asked whether she wanted to be reunited with her husband in New York or with her father in Philadelphia. Playing the wronged patriot to the hilt, she declared her wish to join her father, and Washington drafted a special order guaranteeing her safe conduct. “It would be exceedingly painful to General Washington if she were not treated with the greatest kindness,” Lafayette explained to the Chevalier de La Luzerne.61 All the male actors had played their parts perfectly in the tragedy of Peggy Arnold, unaware that the performance was actually a farce.
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 manners and the advantage of a pleasing person,” he attested.62
The case of Major André became a cause célèbre because of his aristocratic manner and his controversial claim that he hadn’t really functioned as a spy. Nobody disputed that he had been caught with concealed papers from the turncoat Arnold. The spying allegation arose because he had crossed into American lines, donned civilian clothes, and assumed a nom de guerre. André countered that he had come ashore in uniform and met Arnold in neutral territory, but the latter had then lured him into American territory. While making his way back to the Vulture, he had had no choice but to shed his uniform and adopt a fake name. André asserted less his innocence than his honorable conduct, telling Washington that he wished to clear himself “from an imputation of having assumed a mean character for treacherous purposes or self-interest.”63 The practical significance of this esoteric dispute was that spies were treated like common criminals and hung from the gallows, whereas a British officer in uniform caught communicating with an American spy would be shot by a firing squad in a manner befitting a gentleman.
Although Washington understood the appeal of Major André’s personality, he also knew that the plot to take West Point, had it succeeded, could have been catastrophic, and this toughened him against lenient treatment of the prisoner. He instructed André’s captors that he did not deserve the indulgences accorded to prisoners of war and should “be most closely and narrowly watched.”64 Intent upon seeing justice swiftly enacted, Washington impaneled a board