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 of fourteen generals to hear André’s case in a village church in Tappan. André answered their questions with such honesty and candor that his captors were moved. “I can remember no instance where my affections were so fully absorbed in any man,” said Major Benjamin Tallmadge.⁶⁵ It was one of those singular moments in wartime when class solidarity overtook ideology.

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 Rochambeau, the circumstances of André’s capture necessitated the hanging and “policy required a sacrifice, but as he was more unfortunate than criminal in the affair, and as there was much in his character to [excite] interest, while we yielded to the necessity of rigor, we could not but lament it.”⁷⁶

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