Washington [266]
Washington received a plea for mercy from an unlikely source. Benedict Arnold had the cheek to threaten Washington that, should he execute the adjutant, Arnold would “retaliate on such unhappy persons of your army as may fall within my power . . . I call heaven and earth to witness that your Excellency will be justly answerable for the torrent of blood that may be spilt in consequence.”66 Arnold thereby rubbed salt into an open wound. “There are no terms that can describe the baseness of his heart,” Washington said of Arnold.67
The board of officers returned a guilty verdict against André and ruled that he should die as a spy—that is, by hanging. André pleaded with Washington to allow him to be shot by a firing squad. Refusing to capitulate under duress, Washington decided that André’s offense was so grave that he had to make an example of him, even if it offended the sensibilities of many officers. André was sentenced to hang in full view of soldiers drawn from various quarters of the army. The decision rankled Hamilton in particular, who already chafed at Washington’s exacting treatment of him. “The death of André could not have been dispensed with,” Hamilton later told Knox, “but it must still be viewed at a distance as an act of rigid justice.”68 Trying to avert a hanging, Washington sounded out the British on a swap of André for Benedict Arnold, but the enemy declined the offer.
At noon on October 2, 1780, John André marched to the gallows. As he neared the spot, he bowed his head to those who had befriended him and showed a serene acceptance that startled everyone. “Such fortitude I never was witness of . . . To see a man go out of time without fear, but all the time smiling, is a matter I could not conceive of,” marveled the army surgeon John Hart.69 When André reached the hangman, whose face was blackened with grease, he asked if he had to die in this manner and was told it was unavoidable. “I am reconciled to my fate,” he replied, “but not to the mode.”70 People heard him whisper to himself that “it will be but a momentary pang.”71 Leaping upon the cart from which his body was to be released, André took the rope from the hangman and tightened it around his own neck, then drew a handkerchief from his pocket and blinded his own eyes. When told that the time had come and asked if he had any final words, he replied, “Nothing but to request you will witness to the world that I die like a brave man.”72 His body hung slackly from the gibbet for nearly half an hour before being cut down. André’s noble conduct only enhanced the misgivings of those who thought he should have been shot. It seemed hard on Washington’s part to refuse the request of a man sentenced to death. Lafayette wrote to his wife that André had “conducted himself in such a frank, noble, and honorable way that, during the three days we imprisoned him, I was foolish enough to develop a real liking for him. In strongly voting to sentence him to the gallows, I could not help [but] regret what happened to him.”73
Washington boycotted the execution. He had no special animus toward André and shared the respect felt by his men. “André has met his fate and with that fortitude which was to be expected from an accomplished man and gallant officer,” he wrote to John Laurens.74 Clearly he didn’t relish hanging André, yet he also believed he had to mete out punishment for a heinous crime that might have given the American cause “a deadly wound, if not a fatal stab.”75 For Washington, who never shrank from doing the right thing, however hard or unpopular, it was a lonely moment of leadership. Even as a young officer in the French and Indian War, his justice had often seemed stern and inflexible. As he told