Defiant Brides (10 page)

Quite unexpectedly, a week later Lucy became “most alarmingly ill,” so feverish and weak that she could no longer nurse Julia.
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Then her skin turned yellow, leading the doctors to conclude that she suffered from “jaundice occupied by bilious obstructions.”
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Lucy had contracted infectious hepatitis, a disease associated with poor sewage and contaminated water often found in overcrowded sites like army camps. Soon afterwards, little Julia and her four-year-old sister, Lucy, also fell ill.

At the same time, at British headquarters at 1 Broadway in New York City, General William Clinton, commander of the North American forces, schemed to weaken Washington’s supply lines along the Hudson. By June 1, he led eight thousand men along the Hudson’s rocky, western shores above the Palisades and seized a key garrison at Stony Point. The next day Howe’s men took Verplanck’s Point on the opposite shore, effectively blocking a key crossing of the Hudson at King’s Ferry. The loss of that station, Clinton gleefully noted in his narrative on the Revolution, “obliged the enemy to pass and repass the Highlands twice” through a mountain road, extending their journey by more than sixty miles.
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Alarmed, Washington ordered the army to the Hudson on June 4 and posted them at various strategic positions along the Hudson Highlands as he contemplated a counterattack.

Worried about his ailing wife and children, Knox had marched reluctantly to the Hudson. By June 14 he learned that Lucy was well enough to enjoy an outing. “I long to hear how my dear Julia is,” he wrote that day from headquarters at New Windsor near Newburgh, New York. “Heaven preserve her—kiss her and my angelic Lucy [their daughter] for me.”
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But ten days later came alarming news: baby Julia was gravely ill. “Good Heavens, my Lucy, what affliction did your letter . . . inflict upon me,” Knox hastily replied on June 29. “Julia, poor innocent, is not in half so much pain as is its unhappy mother. To add to her and my distress, I am absent, unable to assist. . . . I long to see you, to be assured from your own lips that you are getting better daily. I long to hear the little prattle of my lovely Lucy and to see the expressive countenance of Julia.”
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That was not to be. On July 2, the Knoxes’ infant daughter died. Though obliged to remain on the Hudson with the army, a local legend insisted that he returned to Pluckemin. According to that story, Knox arrived just as members of the local Dutch Reformed Church refused to bury Julia in the churchyard. The reason? Because he and Lucy were Congregationalists. Coincidentally, the Knoxes’ elderly landlord, Jacobus Vandeveer, had been denied that right because his daughter had died insane. The old man, it was said, led Knox to a grave beyond the churchyard fence. “General, this is my ground,” he explained. “Bury your child here.” Years later a more enlightened generation of churchgoers moved the cemetery fence to encompass the graves of Julia Knox and Vandeveer’s daughter.
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Naturally news of the baby’s death stunned Knox’s colleagues and their wives, many of who were either pregnant or had recently given birth. “How our brightest prospects are blasted, and our sweetest hopes embittered by disappointment. May guardian angels protect you against such evils,” Nathanael Greene wrote his pregnant wife, Caty, who had returned to Rhode Island. Lucy, he added, seemed to accept the baby’s death “with a degree of fortitude that marks a philosophic temper.”
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But that was far from the truth: Lucy was so devastated that, after the baby’s death, she rarely wrote Knox.

“I have not had the happiness to hear from you since your Letter of the 28
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. . . . I entreat if you have opportunities that you would . . . embrace them and confer that pleasure on your Harry,” Knox begged her from his post at West Point on August 18. To cheer her, he promised she could soon join him. He too ardently wished for “that period when my Lucy and I shall be no more separated, when we shall set down free from the hurry, bustle and impertinence, of the world, in some sequestered vale where the education of our children and the preparation on our own parts for a pure and more happy region shall employ the principal part of our time in acts of love to men and worship to our maker.”
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True to his promise, Lucy and their daughter, little Lucy, joined him on the Hudson in late August. Other than Major Henry Lee’s August 19 triumph against the British at Paulus Hook (today’s Jersey City) on the Hudson’s western shore, the summer passed quietly, leading Washington to deem West Point a “happy spot.”
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Had they been polled, the Knoxes would probably have agreed. Within a few weeks of their reunion, they were expecting another child.

If, as British lexicographer Samuel Johnson observed, “the applause of a single human being is of great consequence,” Arnold’s marriage to Peggy Shippen was a monumental life shift.
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Not only was the bride beautiful, but, as the general later confided to a General Robert Howe, she was also remarkably sexy. “I myself had enjoyed a tolerable share of the dissipated joys of life, as well as the scenes of sensual gratification,” Arnold admitted, “but when set in competition with those I have since felt and still enjoy,” there was no comparison.
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Peggy was equally enchanted with the older, more sexually experienced Arnold. Long after their honeymoon and first years of marriage she continued to praise Arnold as “the best of husbands.”
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The one cloud hovering over the newlyweds was the accusations of the Supreme Executive Council. Five days before the Arnolds’ wedding, Washington announced a court-martial to examine the council’s four original charges. So heavily did that weigh upon Arnold that, half through his honeymoon, he grumbled to his friend John Jay, then president of the Second Continental Congress, “I cannot resist my surprise, that a court-martial should be ordered to try me for offences, some of which the committee of Congress in their report say, ‘there appears no evidence.’”
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Even Jay’s considerable powers of persuasion, nevertheless, would not change the Supreme Executive Council’s decision.

Nor did Peggy’s tender reassurances soothe Arnold, who became obsessed with the damage done to his public reputation. The perception of a man’s honor, as the popular British decorum book
Letters, Sentences and Maxims
had advised readers, was key to worldly success: “Your moral character must be not only pure, but like Caesar’s wife, unsuspected. The least speck or blemish upon it is fatal.”
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To blemish his character was precisely Reed’s intent, Arnold groused to Washington. The man had deliberately “kept the affair in suspense for near two months . . . and will use every artifice to delay the proceeding of a court-martial.” The only remedy was “an early day . . . fixed for it as [soon as] possible.” He thus hoped Washington would notify the Supreme Executive Council of that date as soon as possible “so that the court may not be delayed for want of their evidence.” Explaining that he preferred a trial in Philadelphia, where records were more accessible, than one in Middlebrook, Arnold conceded that wherever it was scheduled he “will be ready at the shortest notice.”
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In confidence Washington explained why the court-martial had to be held at Middlebrook: “It would have given me great pleasure to have indulged you with a court at Philadelphia,” he wrote to Arnold, “but such is the weak state of the line in respect to general and field officers that it would have been impossible without entirely divesting the army of officers of that rank.”
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Reed, meanwhile, fumed over Washington’s agreement to an early trial date. In a thinly veiled threat, he warned the commander in chief, “Such is the dependence of the army upon the transportation of this state, that should the court martial treat it as a light and trivial matter, we fear it will not be practicable to draw forth wagons for the [army] in the future, be the emergency what it may.”
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More time, Reed insisted, was needed to collect evidence and call witnesses. The trial must be rescheduled for a later date.

To protect the already disquieted Arnold from Reed’s monumental hostility, Washington simply informed the general that the trial date had been postponed. “As Congress have stamped ingratitude as a current coin, I must take it. I have nothing left but the little reputation I have gained in the army,” Arnold bitterly retorted on May 5 in a letter to Washington. “Delay in the present case is worse than death. I want no favor, I only ask for justice. . . . If your Excellency thinks me a criminal, for heaven’s sake, let me be immediately tried and if found guilty, executed.”
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One can only imagine how Arnold’s turmoil affected Peggy. Such matters were beyond her experience, indeed beyond that of nearly all Revolutionary-era women, whose sphere was the home and hearth. Knowing little about the nuances of military law or the righteousness of the accusations against her husband, her only recourse was to calm Arnold with kisses and caresses. If she sensed that those accusations against him boded ill for their future, Peggy kept them to herself. Raised in an era when women were valued for their sexuality, solicitude, and silence, the eighteen year old stood loyally by Arnold’s side. Only decades later did Peggy finally comprehend the sacrifices she had made as Arnold’s wife. “My life,” she admitted in 1801 to her father, Judge Shippen, “has been a most trying and eventful one.”
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Even before his vitriolic letter to Washington of May 5, Arnold weighed his options. What more could he lose by defection? “A patriot is a fool in ev’ry age,” English satirist Alexander Pope had written in 1738.
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Arnold now shared that view: The Revolution was ill-conceived from the start. The idea that a British colony could survive on its own had been naïve. Undermining it was a politically divisive Congress that had failed to support the army and confounded the ideals originally inspiring the Revolution. Since Arnold was already suspected of being a traitor, why not profit by becoming one—and stop the unnecessary bloodshed along the way? So, presumably, the tortured general raved through the first weeks of his marriage as his bride sympathetically listened.

On Saturday, May 1, Arnold summoned Joseph Stansbury to his home. The man, a 1767 émigré from London, was not only Philadelphia’s most fashionable china merchant but also a writer of anti-Revolutionary poems. During the British occupation of 1777–1778, Stansbury had been rewarded with the post of commissioner of the city watch. After the patriots reclaimed Philadelphia, Stansbury switched sides again by swearing loyalty to the Revolution. Covertly, though, he remained a Tory.

Years later, Stansbury claimed he initially thought Arnold summoned him to the Masters-Penn House to order more china. Instead, the crippled general had stunned him by explaining “his intention of offering his services to the commander in chief of the British forces . . . that would most effectually restore the former government and destroy the then-usurped authority of Congress, either by immediately joining the British army or cooperating on some concerted plan with Sir Henry Clinton.”
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To accomplish that, Arnold proposed disguising his identity through the alias of Gustavus Monk—Monk for short. Flushed with promises of a handsome reward, Stansbury thus agreed to become Arnold’s secret agent. A week later the china merchant rode through patriot-held New Jersey, sailed across New York harbor, and entered the city. There he connected with a Loyalist poet, the Reverend Jonathan Odell, who was acquainted with another amateur poet, the British officer John André. By 1779, André had ingratiated himself with General Henry Clinton and served as one of his most trusted aides. As Howe had before him, Clinton admired André’s intelligence, finesse, and talents. So fond was the widowed commander in chief of the younger officer that he often hosted André at his country house in The Fields, today the corner of First Avenue and Fifty-second Street.

By Monday morning, May 10, Odell had arranged for Stansbury to meet with André at British headquarters (and Clinton’s home) at No. 1 Broadway. Patiently the British officer listened to the Philadelphian’s message that a certain American named Monk offered to reveal key information about the Continental army. Added to his astonishment was Stansbury’s message from his old friend Peggy Shippen—now Peggy Shippen Arnold—conveying her regards.

“Such sudden proposals,” a flustered André wrote Clinton, created “confusions . . . when one must deliberate and determine at once” a decision. By afternoon the British commander in chief agreed that he was willing to consider the American’s offer. “We meet Monk’s overtures with full reliance on his honorable intentions and disclose . . . the strongest assurances of our sincerity,” André explained. Nevertheless, that information must produce a significant triumph for the British, either by “seizing an obnoxious band of men . . . or enabling us to attack [and] defeat a numerous body.”
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To seal the deal, André handed Stansbury a letter of instructions that explained the three ways that Monk could transmit information. The first was through the use of ciphers, or numbers coded to the letters of a certain “long book,” like
Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

Another was by using invisible ink to write a message that would be inserted between the lines of a conventional letter. That was known as “interlining”—a technique André hoped to persuade Peggy to use in letters from her friend Peggy Chew. “The lady might write to me at the same time with one of her intimates,” André explained to Stansbury. “She will guess whom I mean, the latter remaining ignorant of interlining. . . . I will write myself to the friend to give occasion for a reply. This will come by a flag of truce . . . every messenger remaining ignorant of what they are charged with. The letters may talk of mischianza [entertainment] & other nonsense.”
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