Arnold’s persistently peculiar manner continued to puzzle Washington. He prided himself on being a good judge of character—and now something seemed off. Arnold was distracted and on edge, distant, and yet too oddly friendly, all at once. Was it his physical pain that caused him to act so strangely?
Washington requested Billy Lee to produce the great brass spyglass that he always carried with him. Washington saw nothing of note up ahead, but to the south he began to discern a billowing of great, white sails—and, yes, the fluttering of the Union Jack! That the enemy had dared to sail so far upriver, so near to West Point, struck Washington as ominous. He asked Arnold what he knew of it.
“It’s British all right—been there a while—a sloop,” Arnold answered nonchalantly, “with eighteen guns.”
“Its name?”
“It’s called … it’s called …,” answered Benedict Arnold, trying to avoid seeming too familiar with the craft.
“… the Vulture.”
September 22–23, 1780
Hudson River
Teller’s Point
Two oarsmen beached Major John André’s craft upon the rocky Hudson River beach and hauled it farther up on the shore—completing their brief voyage from the Vulture. A shout—“Halloo!”—pierced the night’s shadows. A shadowy figure, barely visible from the candlelight emanating from the swaying tin lantern he held in his hand, lurched toward them.
Benedict Arnold had business to conduct—but only with André. Tersely, he commanded André’s oarsmen to keep their distance from the little knot of fir trees where he and André would hold their mysterious meeting.
Arnold began to rapidly relay information to André, forcing him to commit much of it to memory—countless details of weaknesses to exploit and strengths to avoid when he and Clinton would eventually storm West Point. Beyond that, Arnold provided André with maps and documents to aid the British in their assault—and nervously advised him to secret these documents inside his boot.
As if the meeting were not long enough already, André, bone-weary from lack of sleep, also had to endure listening to Arnold’s continuing financial demands. The traitor not only wanted to be guaranteed his twenty thousand pounds sterling of blood money—his modern-day equivalent of Judas’s thirty pieces of silver—on completion of his mission, but also that he would also soon wear the gold-fringed epaulets of a royal British brigadier general, receive a proper command—and, above all, receive proper respect. After months of sending and receiving conspiratorial encrypted messages, this was, after all, Benedict Arnold’s first actual meeting with his new masters, and his delicate ego demanded assurance that he would never be slighted again.
It was now almost daylight. André’s two oarsmen refused to row him back against a strong Hudson River tide to the safety of the Vulture so André instead rode back to a private home—the same home that had recently sheltered George Washington on his voyage to Hartford, Connecticut.
From its second-floor windows, André saw Vulture still anchored at low tide. Suddenly explosions roared from across the Hudson at Teller’s Point. BOOM!! BOOM!! Two small American four-pounders belched smoke and shot at the enemy ship. BOOM!! BOOM!! Six shots in all hit Vulture, smashing into its hull and sails and rigging.
With no wind to fill her sails, the Vulture could not set sail. She was dead in the water.
Vulture‘s captain ordered its longboats lowered into the water. Sailors manned the oars; others strained at long, heavy ropes to slowly haul their mother ship beyond the reach of the roaring guns on Teller’s Point.
Slowly, the wounded Vulture, John André’s ticket home, passed beyond his heartsick sight. For no matter where the Vulture now anchored, and no matter how many American cannonballs had torn through its timbers and its masts, John André sorely wished he was aboard it, as far away as possible from the deadly dangers of being a spy behind enemy lines.
September 23, 1780
Tarrytown, New York
A rather scruffy man, barely twenty-two years old, jumped out from behind a clump of trees. He held a musket and looked like he knew how to use it.
His excited shouts roused two of his friends. They had been playing cards nearby, but suddenly they appeared at the ready—as did their two muskets.
Which meant that three muskets were now squarely pointed, with triggers nervously cocked, directly at Major John André.
That André found himself in this predicament was not entirely surprising, though he’d done all he could to prevent it. After the Vulture was attacked, André had set off on horseback south, toward New York City. He had donned a suit of civilian clothes, a red coat with gold lace buttonholes, yellow breeches and vest, and a round hat. Such a wardrobe, it seemed, would be far less noticeable and dangerous to wear behind American lines—where he had ended up that evening—than the British military uniform he typically wore.
The first musket pointed at André belonged to a tall and muscular young farmer named John Paulding. Four days earlier, Paulding had escaped from New York’s Sugar House prison. After jumping from his prison window and finding the fall air to be chilly, he searched for a coat, eventually appropriating a Hessian uniform jacket. That bright green, though quite threadbare, coat caused André to jump to an immediate conclusion: Paulding fought for the British.
“Gentlemen, I see you belong to our party,” he asked quite breezily and with real relief.
“What party?”
“The lower party,” André answered, meaning the British.
The bumpkins at the other end of the muskets smiled. They were not as dumb as their manners and appearance made them out to be. “We do,” Paulding solemnly responded.
That answer relieved the nervous André. True, he was a spymaster—but he was hardly a master spy. In fact, the last twenty-four hours had been his first actual day as a spy. He was painfully new at this game—and it showed.
“Ah, my good men,” André continued, grinning broadly, “then you can be of assistance to me—and to your king. I am an officer of the Crown on a mission, a very special mission, and it is imperative I return as quickly as possible to General Clinton’s headquarters in New York.” André ostentatiously displayed his gold pocket watch to impress upon these rustics that he was, indeed, a man of some prominence.
“Do tell, your lordship!” Paulding answered. He paused a beat to allow André to properly absorb his sarcasm. “Well, we own no gold watches, but we know that the time is up for redcoats like you. We’re patriot men—not Loyalist dogs.” With that, the three scruffy rebels spread out to surround André, their muskets still pointed squarely at his head.
But if the rebels thought André would simply admit defeat, they were sorely mistaken. “But I was only pretending to be a damnable redcoat because I thought you were redcoats!” André stammered nervously. “You can understand that? Can’t you?”
“… Can’t you?!”
André nervously produced his Arnold-signed safe-conduct pass. But it was too late. Paulding and his friends stripped him and found Arnold’s other papers—the incriminating maps and battle plans—stuffed into his boot. “A spy!” Paulding exclaimed.
André offered them a healthy bribe to transport him safely to the British lines. They could, he assured them, have whatever they wanted: gold, his horse and saddle, even dry goods from Manhattan.
“No,” Paulding answered, “if you would give us ten thousand guineas, you should not stir a step.”
Major John André was no longer dealing with Benedict Arnold. He was now dealing with Americans. And they were not for sale.
September 23, 1780
North Castle, New York
“What should we do with him, Colonel?” John Paulding asked Lieutenant Colonel John Jameson, commander of the nearest rebel post. Jameson looked like the very model of an officer of the Second Regiment of Light Dragoons that he was—a full six feet in height, blue-eyed, fair-complexioned, and with jet-black hair—but his demeanor was far different; he acted like a b
ureaucrat.
The documents from André’s boot were highly suspicious—and worse, Jameson recognized that they were in Arnold’s own handwriting. Yet Arnold was technically Jameson’s superior. It was an impossible situation.
Jameson eventually decided to do what all good bureaucrats do: he hedged his bet. He sent a messenger, Lieutenant Joshua Allen, to Major General Arnold informing him of André’s capture. But by separate messenger, Jameson also forwarded the sheaf of highly incriminating documents found in André’s boot to a different general: George Washington.
September 25, 1780
Beverley Robinson House
Benedict Arnold’s Headquarters
Garrison, New York
George Washington, a master surveyor in his youth, seemed lost.
“Mon Général!” the Marquis de Lafayette exclaimed, “This is not the road to the home of General Arnold.” Washington clearly heard him but kept his horse pointed in the same direction.
Billy Lee suppressed a small smile. He understood that Washington knew exactly what he was doing. But now Alexander Hamilton also chimed in, reminding Washington that General and Mrs. Arnold were not only expecting their party, but also preparing a breakfast for them. They should not be late.
“Ah,” Washington sighed, “you young men are all in love with Mrs. Arnold! I see you are eager to be with her as soon as possible. Go and breakfast with her then, and tell her not to wait for me; I must ride down and examine the redoubts on this side of the river, but I will be with her shortly.”
Two hours later the breakfast was in full swing, but it did not include the gray-eyed Peggy Arnold, who was too busy feeding their new infant son upstairs to be bothered with entertaining guests.
The clattering of hooves interrupted their meal. The noise, however, did not foreshadow the arrival of Washington, Henry Knox, and Lafayette, but instead that of Lieutenant Joshua Allen, the courier dispatched from North Castle by Lieutenant Colonel Jameson.
Lieutenant Allen entered the home drenched and mud-splattered and handed Arnold a sealed packet, which the major general promptly ripped open. As he read the words that Jameson had written inside his eyes began to grow wide:
Sir:
I have sent Lieutenant Allen with a certain John Anderson from New York. He had a pass signed with your name. He had a parcel of papers taken from under his stockings, which I think of a very dangerous tendency. The papers I have sent to General Washington.
Arnold looked around for this “John Anderson.” Had he really come with Lieutenant Allen? It made no sense—but Arnold was not about to interrogate Allen in front of his guests. His heart pounding, he excused himself and fled upstairs to Peggy.
“We’re ruined, Peggy!” Arnold shouted mournfully. He really didn’t have to say any more. She knew what their plot was and what he meant by being ruined: the hangman’s noose for her husband and perhaps for her as well.
“What will we do, Benedict?”
“I must flee—now! There is no time. There’s no way to talk my way out of this! They’ve got my papers. They’ve captured André.”
Peggy Arnold blanched. Her knees wobbled.
“You play dumb!” Arnold ordered her. “Play more than dumb, play the madwoman! And play on Washington’s sympathies! He has a great heart. I will do what I can for you!”
Arnold momentarily paused to reflect on the decency and honor of the man he had betrayed and manipulated. But that feeling passed in an instant. The only reflection he was seeing at that moment was his own—heading straight for the gallows.
Downstairs, Billy Lee rapped upon the front door to inform Arnold’s aide-de-camp, Major David Franks, that George Washington would soon be approaching. It was now Franks’s turn to hustle upstairs.
Arnold kissed his son, not knowing if he would ever see him again. He grabbed two guns for his safety and headed downstairs faster than anyone knew possible.
“I have to attend to some matters at West Point—to prepare for the general’s inspection,” he lied to his guests, jumping on his horse, whipping the steed furiously, and galloping down a steep, winding, and dangerous shortcut to reach his waiting barge.
He lied to Franks and Hamilton and Billy Lee, and he also lied to his barge’s crew, grandly promising them two gallons of rum if they could row him downriver to Stony Point and back home so that he might be there in time to greet General Washington on his arrival. The crew, of course, had no idea that Arnold would not be coming back.
Standing on the barge’s stern and waving his sword furiously, Benedict Arnold appeared for all the world like a hero heading toward battle instead of what he really was: the greatest traitor of his time.
September 25, 1780
West Point, New York
“It’s all quite peculiar,” George Washington said to himself, kicking at the rotted lumber he found at West Point and seeing it splinter and fall to the ground. Everything he saw seemed amiss: cannon in the wrong place, troops stationed at too great a distance to withstand an attack from Henry Clinton, construction so slapdash that a spray of grapeshot could topple it.
This was not the West Point he knew—this was no “Gibraltar of America.”
Washington turned to address the superior officer present, Colonel John Lamb. At the Battle of Quebec, Lamb had been horribly wounded and a large green patch now covered his missing left eye. When Lamb became upset, it seemed that his scars assumed a particularly ugly hue.
“All quite peculiar, Colonel Lamb, don’t you think?” he asked. “Are you sure General Arnold is not here? Are you positive he provided you with no word of my arrival today?”
“As I informed you previously, General Washington,” replied Lamb impatiently. He was getting tired of being asked the same questions over and over again. “I received no word of anything. I have seen neither hide nor hair whatsoever of Major General Arnold!”
The scars upon Colonel Lamb’s face were assuming a particularly reddish, purplish cast, revealing his agitation.
General Washington’s face revealed nothing of the sort. In fact, it revealed nothing at all. But inside, he churned with the fear that something was horribly, horribly wrong.
September 25, 1780
Beverley Robinson House
Garrison, New York
George Washington stood bare-chested, alone in his room.
When he’d arrived at the house he’d been greeted with word that Benedict Arnold had left and not returned, and that, perhaps more ominously, Peggy Arnold had become hysterical since her husband’s abrupt departure.
But if Washington were to untangle this maddening puzzle of vanished generals, frenzied women, and woefully deficient fortifications, he would first need to freshen up.
Alexander Hamilton wrapped on his door.
“General? I have a packet for you from Colonel Jameson downriver. I took the liberty of opening it to determine if it would require your personal attention. I can assure you that it does.”
Can’t I even be let alone to wash? Washington fumed to himself. Then, a flash of inspiration—or rather, fear—exploded within him. Hamilton’s expression was strange, almost sickly. Might this message be connected to all that seemed so inexplicably wrong today?
He examined the documents Hamilton handed to him. He hastily unfolded the maps. They were official maps of West Point. He feverishly scanned the rest of the documents. Details of West Point’s fortifications, strengths, weaknesses—and all of it in Benedict Arnold’s handwriting!
All at once it finally came together: Benedict Arnold was a traitor.
Shaken, personally betrayed, barely able to compose himself, Washington threw on his shirt, waistcoat, and coat. He yelled for Knox and Lafayette. As they entered his room, they heard their commander, his heart and spirit broken, weep as they had never heard him before:
“I ask you men,” he said through bleary eyes, “whom can we trust now?”
George Washington blamed himself.
Had he placed too much t
rust in Benedict Arnold? Had he ignored the warning signals provided by Arnold’s increasingly suspicious behavior? Yes, in hindsight, he had—that was now easy to admit. He should have seen it, but Arnold had been a patriot, one of the boldest and bravest he had known.
Washington might have wallowed in self-doubt, perhaps, even in self-pity. He had been betrayed by Arnold. He had been wronged. It was a bitter pill for any man to swallow, but for Washington, so scrupulous concerning his reputation, so trusted by his nation, it was more than just bitter, it was nearly poison.
Even as he had cried out in pain, “Whom can we trust now?” he feared others would no longer trust him.
But his second-guessing vanished in the sound of that tortured cry. America faced a crisis. It needed sound judgment and instant action. It needed a leader. George Washington, reluctant as he was to fill that role, knew that he had no other choice. It was time to act.
“Hamilton!” he demanded. “We are going to West Point! It must be defended! The British may strike at any moment! I want every unit within a day’s march to head there in short order. General St. Clair will take command of the post. No, wait—he’s too far away. I still want him—but General MacDougall will command until St. Clair arrives! Greene must mass the troops in the Highlands. And, yes, sound the alarm! Scour the countryside for Arnold!”
September 25, 1780
Aboard Vulture
Hudson River
Benedict Arnold had a request.
Not for twenty thousand pounds sterling or a brigadier general’s uniform—but for simple pen and paper.
He gathered his wits about him and sat down to write his first communication from the other side of the great divide he had just now so perilously crossed. And though he sailed down the Hudson, moving closer to Manhattan and Sir Henry Clinton and irretrievably farther from West Point and George Washington, it was to Washington that he now wrote the following words:
SIR:
The heart which is conscious of its own rectitude, cannot attempt to palliate a step which the world may censure as wrong. I have ever acted from a principle of love to my country, since the commencement of the present unhappy contest between Great Britain and the colonies; the same principle of love to my country actuates my present conduct, however it may appear inconsistent to the world, who very seldom judge right of any man’s actions.