Hanging Offense

Major General Benedict Arnold’s 1780 plot to surrender the American fortifications and garrison at West Point to the British, one of the Revolution’s most dramatic episodes, nearly succeeded. Arnold’s treasonous undertaking failed thanks to a remarkable convergence of events—events that many, including General George Washington, could explain only as divine intervention. “In no instance since the commencement of the war has the interposition of Providence appeared more conspicuous than in the rescue of the post and garrison of West Point from Arnold’s villainous perfidy,” he said later. Scrutiny reveals the sequence’s more mundane logic, whose conflicted outcome severely tested Washington.

British commanding General Sir Henry Clinton first negotiated terms with Arnold through ciphers and intermediaries, then insisted on a face-to-face meeting between a trusted subordinate and the turncoat. Clinton wanted to ascertain that Arnold’s proposition was not a ruse to set up Crown forces for an ambush. The Briton he assigned to vet the supposed turncoat Arnold and his proposal was Major John André, barely 30 years old, a dashing adjutant general Sir Henry held in much the same esteem as Washington held the Marquis de Lafayette.

A seasoned intelligence officer, André was accomplished, well educated, and by many accounts charismatic. He spoke fluent German and French—his parents were wealthy Huguenots, his mother a Parisienne—and was schooled in painting, music, and verse. He wrote poetry. Over the years a composite portrait has evolved of a charming, gentlemanly warrior.

Historian Nathaniel Philbrick is not buying it. Philbrick sees in André a bloodthirsty and ambitious careerist who “developed a chameleon-like talent for ingratiating himself with whoever