Washington [267]
By contrast, Washington’s desire for revenge against the villainous Arnold, whom he saw as “lost to all sense of honor and shame,” intensified in the coming months .77 He backed a scheme concocted by Major Henry Lee to abduct Arnold from New York City. On the night of October 20-21 a sergeant in Lee’s cavalry, John Champe, pretended to desert from the American army and convinced Sir Henry Clinton that he was disaffected from the patriot cause. He then accosted Benedict Arnold in the street and struck up an acquaintance. The idea was for Champe and an American agent from New Jersey named Baldwin to grab Arnold as he strolled in his garden one night and row him across the Hudson, making it seem as if they were struggling with a drunken soldier. Washington endorsed the plan with the proviso that Arnold be brought to him alive. “No circumstance whatever shall obtain my consent to his being put to death,” Washington informed Lee. “The idea which would accompany such an event would be that ruffians had been hired to assassinate him. My aim is to make a public example of him.”78 For their trouble, Champe was promised a promotion and Baldwin one hundred guineas, five hundred acres of land, and three slaves.
Champe and Baldwin were set to execute their plan in December, when Arnold was sent to Virginia, a state largely untouched by the war thus far, with a fleet of forty-two ships and seventeen hundred soldiers. Despite a warning from Washington, Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson procrastinated in summoning the state militia, and Arnold swept into the state capital at Richmond, burning supply depots and buildings. The scheme to abduct Arnold had been foiled, but Washington remained grimly implacable in his resolve to capture the blackguard. In February 1781 he sent Lafayette to Virginia with twelve hundred troops to pursue Arnold and toughened the terms for dealing with him. Should Arnold “fall into your hands,” he ordered Lafayette, “you will execute [him] in the most summary way.”79 Washington never did capture Arnold. In the spring Arnold wrote to George Germain and suggested a neat way of seducing Washington to the British side. “A title offered to General Washington might not prove unacceptable,” he wrote.80 In the end, Arnold proved no better at reading George Washington’s character than Washington had been at penetrating his disguise.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Mutiny
AFTER THE DRAMA of Benedict Arnold’s treachery, Washington returned to the mundane issues that had long bedeviled his army, especially the abysmal food shortages and barren warehouses that failed to supply winter outfits. His desperate men started to swarm across the countryside, engaging in “every species of robbery and plunder,” Washington reported.1 Earlier in the fall he had grown so distressed over his men ransacking citizens’ homes that he had sentenced to death one David Hall, who stole money and silver plates from a local resident. He assembled fifty men from every brigade to watch the execution and ponder its significance. For all his dismay over such misbehavior, however, Washington was far more livid with the venal farmers who illegally sold “fresh meats and flour of the country” to the British Army, which feasted on ample supplies in New York.2
In late November 1780 Washington sent his army into winter quarters, assigning the bulk of them to West Point, while he lodged in a cramped Dutch farmhouse overlooking the Hudson River at New Windsor, New York. Depressed by this “dreary station,” he had to requisition supplies from nearby residents to set his meager table and pleaded with Congress for emergency funds.3 “We have neither money nor credit,” he wrote, “adequate to the purchase of a few boards for doors to our log huts . . . It would be well