Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution by Philbrick Nathaniel

Author:Philbrick, Nathaniel [Philbrick, Nathaniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography, War
ISBN: 9780525426783
Amazon: 0525426787
Goodreads: 26109390
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2016-05-10T07:00:00+00:00

By then he had received a second message from John André. Like Washington prior to Arnold’s court-martial, Clinton was not pleased by Arnold’s assumption that the two of them were equals, and he issued the equivalent of Washington’s earlier rebuke. André informed Arnold that his commander “wishes to apprise you that he cannot reveal his intentions as to the present campaign, nor can he find the necessity of such a discovery or that a want of proper degree of confidence is to be inferred from his not making it.” The onus at this point was not on the British but on Arnold, and it was up to him to find that “one shining stroke” by which they might “accelerate the ruin to which the usurped authority is verging and . . . put a speedy end to the miseries of our fellow creatures.”

What Arnold needed to do, André insisted, was to secure a “conspicuous command” in Washington’s army. If, for example, he was able to orchestrate the surrender of, say, five to six thousand soldiers, Clinton would be willing to reward him with “twice as many thousand guineas”—not a bad sum, even by Arnold’s standards.

But as Clinton was well aware, Arnold’s current injuries precluded him from active command. The American general was, whether he admitted it or not, damaged goods from the British perspective, and Clinton was not about to guarantee the rewards that Arnold clearly felt were his due. His well-publicized problems in Philadelphia further reduced his value. “Whatever merit this officer might have had,” Clinton later wrote, “his situation . . . made him less an object of attention.”

Arnold, ever thin-skinned, sensed as much, and on July 11 Stansbury reported that André’s earlier letter was “not equal to his expectations” and that “he found by the laconic style and little attention paid to his request that the gentleman appeared very indifferent respecting the matter.” Instead of sending along any additional information, Arnold provided Stansbury with a shopping list from Peggy for various types of cloth and ribbon. Was Arnold mocking André—the officer who had once made Peggy a dress?

Toward the end of July André sent a letter that was almost apologetic. “I am sorry any hesitation should still remain,” he wrote, “as I think we have said all that the prudence with which our liberality must be tempered will admit.” In early August, Stansbury forwarded a verbal message from Arnold in which he insisted that although “he wished to serve his country in accelerating the settlement of this unhappy contest”—according to Arnold’s self-referential logic, it was possible to serve his country by being a traitor to it—“yet he should hold himself unjust to his family to hazard his all on the occasion and part with a certainty (potentially at least) for an uncertainty.” In other words, André had so far failed to meet Arnold’s monetary requirements.

On August 16 André appealed directly to Peggy. “It would make me very happy to become useful to you here,” he wrote. “You know the Mischianza made me a complete milliner.

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