TEN
“Treason of the Blackest Dye”

By the summer of 1779, as the sixth year of Revolution began, Continental currency had depreciated so badly that Alexander Hamilton could not afford to buy a horse. His old gray horse had been wounded at Monmouth—and army regulations he himself had written barred him from borrowing one except for military use. Hamilton had scratched together the money to buy a mare but she had to be left behind with her colt at Middlebrook, New Jersey, when Hamilton moved with Washington’s headquarters, first to Pompton, then to Morristown. As Washington put it, even “a rat in the shape of a horse is not to be bought at this time for less than £200.”¹

That was about $40,000 in depreciated Continental currency. Hamilton was paid only $360 Continental for the six-month period between June and December 1779, or $60 Continental a month. Hamilton had invested a small inheritance from kin in St. Croix in privateering ships and he was subsisting on the shelter and rations provided by the army, taking all his meals at Washington’s mess table. That winter, the price of a season ticket for the dancing assembly at winter headquarters was $400 Continental. Hamilton decided to buy the dancing ticket. It would have been a lonely winter, surrounded as he was by the sons of wealthy Americans, had he not.

What made his loneliness more acute was that his best friend, John Laurens, had gone home to South Carolina to try to advance his scheme of arming and leading slaves against the Loyalists. The two exchanged sometimes very personal letters. Hamilton had just learned, and not from Laurens, that before the Revolution, Laurens had married in London. He had fathered a daughter and left both mother and child behind, never to see them again. To cushion Laurens’s embarrassment at the discovery and his own shock at this news, Hamilton wrote Laurens a long, witty, and remarkably intimate letter about his idea of a perfect wife:

I empower and command you to get me [a wife] in Carolina…Take her description: she must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape); sensible (a little learning will do); well bred…chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness); of some good nature; a great deal of generosity (she must neither love money nor scolding for I dislike equally a termagant and an economist).

In politics, I am indifferent what side she may be of: I think I have arguments that will safely convert her to mine. As to religion, a moderate stock will satisfy me. She must believe in god and hate a saint. But as to fortune, the larger stock of that, the better. You know my temper and circumstances and will therefore pay special attention to this article of the treaty. Though I run no risk of going to Purgatory for my avarice, yet as money is an essential ingredient of happiness in this world, as I have not much of my own and as I am very little calculated to get more, it must needs be that my wife bring at least a sufficiency to administer to her own extravagancies.

If you should not readily meet with a lady that you think answers my description, you can only advertise in the public papers and doubtless you will hear of many competitors for most of the qualifications required who will be glad to become candidates for such a prize as I am. To excite [them], it will be necessary for you to give an account of the lover—his size, make, quality of mind and body, achievements, expectations, fortune, etc. In drawing my picture, you will no doubt be civil to your friend. Mind you do justice to the length of my nose and don’t forget that I _______________. [Words evidently scratched out by Hamilton’s son and biographer.]

After reviewing what I have written, I am ready to ask myself what could have put it into my head to hazard this jeu de follie. Do I want a wife? No—I have plagues enough without desiring to add to the number that greatest of all. And if I were silly enough to do it, I should take care how I employ a proxy.

As a postscript, he added, “You will be pleased to recollect in your negotiations that I have no invincible antipathy to the maidenly beauties and that I am willing to take the trouble of them upon myself.” Translation: he preferred a maiden, a virgin.²

WHEN THE British finally sallied from their ever-more-elaborate defenses and sailed from New York City on December 26, 1779, to besiege Charleston, South Carolina, they left behind a garrison of Hessians and Loyalists to hold the city. In April 1780, after a four-month siege of Charleston, fifty-four hundred Americans, including virtually all the South’s Continentals, surrendered in the worst American defeat of the war. Among the captives was Hamilton’s friend Laurens. It took weeks before Hamilton could find out if his friend was dead or alive. The old agony of loss once again afflicted him. At the same time, Hessians and Loyalist forces crossed over from New York City and attacked New Jersey. Loyalist guides pointed out Hamilton’s alma mater Elizabethtown Academy and Presbyterian Church to the British. They burned both. Nearby, in the Battle of Springfield, Hamilton’s onetime teacher and, more recently, intelligence source, the Reverend James Caldwell, and his entire family were killed.

THE BRITISH paroled John Laurens to Philadelphia. He gave his word of honor not to fight until he could be exchanged for a British officer of equal rank. But because his father was the president of Congress and because he was able to speak French, Congress appointed him in December 1779 as secretary to the American legation in Paris. But he refused the appointment. Instead, Laurens nominated Hamilton, whose French also was impeccable:

I thought it incumbent on me in the first place to recommend a person equally qualified in point of integrity and much better in point of ability [but] unhappily they could not agree on Colonel Hamilton…I am sorry that you are not better known to Congress. Great stress is laid upon the probity and patriotism of the person to be employed in this commission.³

In fact, Hamilton was already too well known for his criticisms of Congress, his loyalty to Washington, and his implacable hostility to Congress’s favorite generals, Lee and Gates. At least once, he had threatened to challenge a member of Congress to a duel for criticizing Washington.

In July 1779, at an informal meeting of Revolutionary leaders in a Philadelphia tavern, Congressman Francis Dana of Massachusetts, a close friend of Sam and John Adams, said that “many persons in the army were acting, under a cloak of defending their country, from principles totally incompatible with its safety.” Hamilton’s friend and Baron Steuben’s former deputy, Lieutenant Colonel John Brooks, had insisted that Dana, one of the leading members of Congress, name names:

He fixed at length on Colonel Hamilton, who he asserted had declared in a public coffeehouse in Philadelphia that it was high time for the people to rise, join General Washington and turn Congress out of doors. He further observed that Mr. Hamilton could be in no ways interested in the defense of this country, and therefore was most likely to pursue such a line of conduct as his great ambition dictated.

By mid-1779, Hamilton had emerged as Washington’s principal aide, in effect his chief of staff and one of a handful of his most trusted advisers. As Colonel Brooks put it, he occupied “so highly dignified a station.” Hamilton’s growing prominence only made Congressman Dana’s charge more devastating. Even friends like Brooks could not believe that a congressman could dare savage Hamilton’s reputation without some basis in fact. Brooks wrote to Hamilton to ask if he had ever shown any “want of that honor and regard to truth so eminently necessary in the patriot and statesman.”⁴

Dana knew Hamilton well. He had spent five months at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78 as chairman of the committee working with Hamilton to reorganize the army. Hamilton wrote to assure Brooks that Dana’s accusation was “absolutely false and groundless.” But he went further. If Congressman Dana had actually said what Brooks attributed to him, its “personal and illiberal complexion” could trigger “a very different kind of competition”: a duel. Dana, no soldier, ducked the implied challenge, but he responded to Brooks that, if Hamilton had suggested what would have been a military coup, he “ought to be broke [discharged] whatever his particular services may have been.” He also brought up Hamilton’s foreign birth. Love of country, Dana argued, could be no brake on Hamilton’s ambition. When Brooks sent Hamilton Dana’s response, Brooks added more details: Dana had accused Hamilton of being one of those “dangerous designing men” whose schemes “would be fatal to the liberties of this country.” Brooks told Hamilton, “The words desperate fortune were more than once applied to you.” And Brooks provided the names of two colonels who had also heard these slurs.⁵

Infuriated, Hamilton wrote Congressman Dana that only a written positive denial of his charges could avert a duel. Hamilton also threatened to fight a duel with the Reverend William Gordon, a Congrega-tionalist minister and self-styled historian who had repeated to Dana the hearsay of someone else who supposedly had overheard Hamilton, thus bringing on the entire incident. Higher officials became embroiled. General Artemus Ward, Washington’s predecessor as commander-in-chief, said that Brooks’s account stemmed from a conversation on a boat crossing the Charles River in Boston after two Massachusetts officers, disgusted with Congress’s neglect of the army, threw down their guns and went home.

As weeks and months of threats and counterthreats passed between Hamilton and his antagonists, Reverend Gordon scolded Hamilton, slurred him over his illegitimate birth, and, when Hamilton challenged him to a duel, delivered a homily against dueling. “Duels do not in general produce more than the honorable settlement of a dispute, yet they may be the unhappy cause of the public’s losing good and useful members, and upon the principles of religion I am totally averse to them.” When Hamilton demanded to know who had disparaged his name, Gordon countered that a gentleman did not have to reveal his sources. But he would give Hamilton the name of his informant if Hamilton withdrew his demand for a duel.

In five weeks of fuming after first hearing Dana’s slur, Hamilton traced the “calumny” to its “inventor,” the Reverend Gordon, who would go on to write an early history of the United States. Gordon urged Hamilton to refer the matter to Congress.⁶

In one of his angriest and most sarcastic letters, Hamilton excoriated the cleric, twice his age, for his condescension and his “officious zeal for the interests of religion and for the good of society.” Gordon’s slander required “an act of justice”: Hamilton now berated the clergyman in a homily of his own:

It often happens that our zeal is at variance with our understanding. We do not live in the days of chivalry. The good sense of the present times has happily found out that, to prove your own innocence, or the malice of an accuser, the worst method you can take is to run him through the body or shoot him through the head.⁷

The standoff sputtered on for a year and a half, leaving Hamilton writing to his friend Laurens:

Pleasant terms enough! I am first to be calumniated and then, if my calumniator takes it into his head, I am to bear a cudgeling from him with Christian patience and forbearance.

Hamilton finally chalked up the matter to the Conway cabal. But his enemies in Congress once again denied him the coveted diplomatic posting to France, where he would have served beside Franklin and Adams. By outspokenly defending Washington, Hamilton had made lasting enemies of Washington’s critics. Now he was making enemies of his own.⁸

So SCARCE were supplies at the Continental Army’s encampment at Morristown in the winter of 1779-80 that the commissary’s storehouse could provide room for dancing. General and Mrs. Washington appeared in black—the color of Revolution, their way of signaling the side they were on. The French officers wore elegant white uniforms bedecked with yards of gold lace and bushels of medals. More importantly, from Hamilton’s point of view, as many as fifty daughters of Revolutionary officers and local gentry appeared in brocades, decorously black and white, to honor the Franco-American alliance, their hair heavily powdered and piled fashionably high. The daughters of Abraham Lott, whose house in Morristown became one of Washington’s 284 temporary headquarters, were fairly typical. Nathanael Greene described them as “of delicate sentiments and polite education.”⁹

REKINDLING HIS yearnings of adolescent visits to Liberty Hall in Eliza-bethtown, Hamilton was pursuing at these dances “Lady Kitty” Livingston, who may have been his first and idealized love. He had been seventeen then, an awkward boy; now he was a resplendent aide to Washington at age twenty-five, feeling the twenty-three-year-old Kitty more within his reach. He whirled with her at the dancing assemblies, bundled in bearskins beside her on sleigh rides, strolled with her at picnics, but there was always a long line of eager swains-Tench Tilghman and John Laurens, his fellow aides; Colonel Robert Troup, his former roommate—all wealthier, more eligible for the hand of Governor Livingston’s daughter. From Morristown, he wrote to her in desperate supplication that her sister, Suky, had asked him to make “an advance towards a correspondence with you.” He held out as bait his interest in politics, one that matched hers. He had obviously pumped Suky for some hint of common ground with Kitty. To fulfill her “relish for politics,” he contended that his post “qualifies me better for gratifying” this than his rivals. But he did not want to be “limited to any particular subject”:

I challenge you to meet me in whatever path you dare. If you have no objection, for variety and amusement, we will even sometimes make excursions in the flowery walks and roseate bowers of Cupid. You know I am renowned for gallantry and shall always be able to entertain you with a choice collection of the prettiest things imaginable.

Hamilton’s letter was frank, bold, a blunt proposition to become the lover of the daughter of the wealthy and powerful governor of New Jersey. Touting himself as a gallant—an explicit eighteenth-century term for a man noted for his sexual prowess—Hamilton was offering himself either as a literary correspondent or as something even more intimate. Take your pick, Lady Kitty, he was saying, but in some form, take me.

But to protect himself in case Miss Livingston thought his advances only outrageous, he added that he was only following the advice of “connoisseurs” on the subject of women.

According to them, Woman is not simple, but a most complex, intricate and enigmatical being. After knowing exactly your taste and whether you are of a romantic or discreet temper as to love affairs, I will endeavor to regulate myself by it. If you would choose to be a goddess and to be worshipped as such, I will torture my imagination…You shall be one of the graces, or Diana or Venus.¹⁰

Fully a month passed before Kitty replied, and then only when Hamilton was “almost out of patience and out of humor with your presumptuous delay.” Fearing that Kitty had succumbed to the blandishments of a rival, Hamilton wrote her that he had shown a copy of his letter to her to his most feared rival, probably his best friend, the dashing John Laurens. And when Kitty did respond, Hamilton showed him her letter and then wrote her:

To give, at once, a mortal blow to all his hopes, I will recount what passed on this occasion. “Hamilton!” cries he, “when you write to this divine girl again, it must be in the style of adoration: none but a goddess, I am sure, could have penned so fine a letter.”

In her letter, now lost, Kitty had obviously ignored his offer of a physical relationship; she would settle for news and a literary dalliance. He wrote back to accept her terms, adding with a flourish, “ALL FOR LOVE is my motto.”¹¹

FOR SEVERAL weeks that winter, even as he left his fate in the hands of Kitty Livingston, Hamilton paid such avid attention to another Mor-ristown belle, Cornelia Lott, that he was talked about at headquarters. Fellow aide-de-camp Samuel Blachley Webb took up his pen and wrote about his lovesick friend Hamilton:

To Colonel Hamilton

What, bend the stubborn knee at last,

Confess the days of wisdom past?

He that could bow to every shrine

And swear the last the most divine;

Like Hudibras, all subjects bend,

Had Ovid at his finger’s end;

Could whistle every tune of love,

(You’d think him Ovid’s self or Jove)

Now feels the inexorable dart

And yields Cornelia all his heart!¹²

To refer to Ovid was to liken Hamilton to some cynic who knew how to pick up women. Webb’s muse prodded him to even greater heights of doggerel: Cornelia was “a beautiful brunette.” Webb’s ink was hardly dry before Hamilton bent his knee to another lass, one Polly, then broke her heart, too. Hamilton, according to Webb’s doggerel, was usually “one who laughs life’s cares away” but that was only on the surface, and that was about to change.

On February 2, 1780, Steuben’s aide-de-camp, Major Benjamin Walker, wrote him that Elizabeth Schuyler, the second daughter of Major General Philip Schuyler, had just arrived at headquarters in Morris-town. Steuben replied that he was not especially interested in the twenty-three-year-old Betsy. He had written to her father in Albany, but it had been to procure some wolf skins. Schuyler, baron of a fourth-generation lumber- and flax-producing and fur-trading empire with vast holdings along the Mohawk River and around Albany, had been unable to fill his request: the snows were too deep that winter. Schuyler sent the news to Steuben with Betsy and hoped that the “most gallant men about Morristown” would “strive to take her hand…I mean at a dance.” Walker was too embarrassed to meet Schuyler’s daughter and escort her to the house of her aunt, Mrs. John Cochrane, near Morristown because his uniform coat was falling apart.

Elizabeth Schuyler’s arrival at the headquarters assemblies with her beautiful married one-year-older sister, Angelica, brought back pleasant memories to another of Washington’s aides, Tench Tilghman of Maryland. Tilghman had met them five years earlier when he had served on General Schuyler’s staff in Albany, and when Betsy was eighteen. “I was prepossessed in favor of this young lady the moment I saw her”:

A brunette with the most good-natured, lively dark eyes that I ever saw which threw a beam of good temper and benevolence over her whole countenance…Mr. Livingston informed me that I was not mistaken in the conjecture that she was the finest-tempered girl in the world.

Betsy was a strong, outdoors-loving young woman, Tilghman recalled. When a number of young American officers and young ladies from Albany had ridden out to visit the falls of Cohoes on the Hudson (before the discovery of Niagara Falls, the scenic wonder of New York), Betsy Schuyler had impressed Tilghman with her cheerful, energetic spirit: “I fancy Miss Schuyler had been used to ramble over and climb grounds of this sort, since she disdained all assistance and made herself merry at the distress of the other ladies.”¹³

If Tilghman still had any interest in Betsy Schuyler, he was quickly brushed aside by the bold Hamilton, who, by his own account, had become known for his cavalrylike advances on the latest feminine arrival in camp. As he wrote to Betsy’s younger sister Margarita soon afterward,

Phlegmatists may say I take too great a license at first setting out, and witlings may sneer and wonder how a man the least acquainted with the world should show so great facility in his confidences—to a lady.

But it appears that it was Hamilton who was now swept off his feet, or was pretending to be, by Betsy. He described her in a letter to John Laurens in Philadelphia as

Most unmercifully handsome and so perverse that she has none of those pretty affectations, which are the prerogatives of beauty. Her good sense is destitute of that happy mixture of vanity and ostentation which would make it conspicuous to the whole tribe of fools and foplings as well as to men of understanding, so that as the matter now stands it is very little known beyond the circle of these. She has good nature, affability and vivacity unem-bellished with that charming frivolousness which is justly deemed one of the principal accomplishments of a belle.

In short, she is so strange a creature that she possesses all the beauties, virtues and graces of her sex without any of those amiable defects…Several of my friends, philosophers who railed at love as a weakness, men of the world who laughed at it as a fantasy, [she] has presumptuously and daringly compelled to acknowledge its power…I am myself of the number.

Betsy had overturned “all the wise resolutions I had been framing for more than four years past,” Hamilton confessed. “From a rational sort of being and a professed condemner of Cupid [she] has, in a trice, metamorphosed me into the veriest inamorato you perhaps ever saw.” Translation: Betsy was not a belle yet she had attracted the flirtatious man-about-camp Hamilton. It was as if he was surprised that someone, on the surface at least, so plain, amiable, and artless could ensnare him, the playboy. That was, after all, his well-cultivated reputation. Had not Martha Washington named her prowling camp cat, Hamilton?¹⁴

What may have added to Betsy’s appeal was the breadth of her accomplishments. General Schuyler had seen to it that his daughters learned French as well as the Dutch they spoke at home and the English they spoke everywhere else. She also was an accomplished artist. When Hamilton had known Betsy only for several weeks, he was writing to Betsy’s younger sister, alluding to her talent at portraiture:

I venture to tell you that, by some odd contrivance or other, your sister has found out the secret of every thing that concerns me and though I have not the happiness of a personal acquaintance with you, I have had the good fortune to see several very pretty pictures of your person…Among others, your sister carries a beautiful copy constantly about her, elegantly drawn by herself, of which she has two or three times favored me with a sight.¹⁵

Meeting Betsy Schuyler drew Hamilton overnight into a social whirl at a level that had been beyond his reach. During his Elizabethtown schooldays, when he had first met Betsy’s close friend Kitty Livingston, he had only been an outsider, a scholarship boy from the islands. But now, when the two young women sent a note to him shortly after their arrival at Morristown in February 1780, asking him to take the reins for a sleigh ride, Hamilton the West Indian, aware of his inexperience, quite wisely had to beg off. He turned the task over to their mutual friend Tilghman. But he was still “unwilling to lose the pleasure of the party” and joined the gay company of New York and New Jersey sleigh-riding aristocrats.¹⁶

His party-going was soon cut short by another round of futile prisoner of war negotiations at Perth Amboy that took him away from headquarters for most of March 1780. He was only able to dash off a “hasty letter,” but his friend Webb kept him posted about Betsy, her friends, and her dancing partners. On March 17, Hamilton wrote to tell Betsy of his “happiness” that, according to Webb, she had not forgotten him:

Every moment of my stay here becomes more and more irksome but I hope two or three days will put an end to it. Colonel Webb tells me you have sent for a carriage to go to Philadelphia. If you should set out before I return, have the goodness to leave a line informing me how long you expect to be there.

Betsy had never visited Philadelphia:

I beg, too, you will not suffer any considerations respecting me to prevent your going, for though it will be a tax upon my love to part with you so long, I wish you to see that city. It will afford you pleasure and whatever does that will always be most agreeable to me. [But] you must always remember, your best friend is where I am.

It would be a long time before Hamilton understood why, at dinners with British and American negotiators, the Schuyler sisters were “the daily toasts of our table.” Captain James Beebe, an American engineer, seemed enamored of Betsy’s young sister Peggy, but Hamilton didn’t “think him clever enough for her.” Hamilton set himself up as Betsy’s adviser on family matters: “He sings well and that is all.” Betsy had asked him to inquire after Captain Oliver Delancey, a wealthy New York City Loyalist who was on the British headquarters staff—and, some Loyalists gossiped, was more than a colleague to British Adjutant General John André. “I am told he is a pretty fellow,” Hamilton said of Delancey. André was head of the British Secret Service in New York. Betsy had not told Hamilton why the British officers asked about her. Five years earlier, André, taken prisoner by Schuyler’s forces at the fall of St. Jean-sur-Richelieu, had spent more than a month as Schuyler’s houseguest at Albany en route to a year’s captivity in Pennsylvania. During that time, eighteen-year-old Betsy obviously became smitten by André, an accomplished painter, poet, and musician. He had become an intimate of the Schuyler family to the extent that, from his house arrest in Pennsylvania, he felt free to call on General Schuyler to discharge a debt for him in Albany. One family historian recently observed that “Betsy appears in particular to have cherished the memory of the handsome young British officer, despite the fact that he had become the head of British intelligence.” All that Hamilton would say on the subject at this point was, “I have learnt a secret by coming down here,” adding only that he had suddenly grown “tired of our British friends”:

They do their best to be agreeable and are particularly civil to me but, after all, they are a compound of grimace and jargon and [outside] of a certain fashionable routine are as dull and empty as any gentlemen need to be. One of their principal excellencies consists in swallowing a large quantity of wine every day.

As he wrote this letter, another letter from Betsy arrived. Hamilton quickly responded:

I cannot tell you what ecstasy I felt in casting my eye over the sweet effusions of tenderness it contains. My Betsy’s soul speaks in every line and bids me be the happiest of mortals. I am so and will be so.

The courier between these two lovers, Captain Richard Kidder Meade,

had the kindness to tell me that you received my letter with marks of joy and that you retired with eagerness to read it. ‘Tis from circumstances like these we best discover the true sentiments of the heart.

But Hamilton was already half an hour late for a prisoner of war negotiation with the English. “Adieu, my charmer. Take care of yourself and love your Hamilton as well as he does you.”¹⁷

In early April, Betsy had traveled to Philadelphia with her father, now a New York delegate to the Continental Congress. The general had met Hamilton several times at headquarters in Morristown and had already grown fond enough of Hamilton that he had lobbied Congress for Hamilton’s appointment as secretary to the American mission to France when Hamilton was nominated by his friend John Laurens. But there was “one obstacle which prevents me from making up my mind,” Schuyler wrote Hamilton. He would tell Hamilton “when I have the pleasure of seeing you.” Schuyler was also working to help Hamilton and his fellow soldiers win some adjustment to their pay to make up for the runaway inflation that had rendered them impoverished.¹⁸

Schuyler took quickly to young Hamilton. Perhaps he was trying to help Hamilton receive higher pay because he could see where the relationship between his daughter and the impecunious young aide-de-camp was heading. Land rich, from a long line of Hudson River Dutch patroons, and autocratic in public life, Schuyler ruled rigidly over his household as if it were his fort. Biographer and sometime Washington aide David Humphreys, who knew Schuyler well, described him as

aristocratic in feeling and convinced of the propriety and the observance of dignities. He brought to the performance of his own duties an orderly mind and prompt execution, the same qualities he demanded of others.¹⁹

Two of Schuyler’s four daughters had already eloped. Schuyler shared with Hamilton a devotion to Washington and deep suspicion of Congress: to Hamilton on April 8, 1780, he confided his loathing of “the pride, the folly and perhaps, too, the wickedness of some members.”²⁰

But it was to Betsy’s mother that Hamilton must write if he wanted to “be united to your amiable daughter,” as he put it in a letter on April 14, 1780. Apparently, none of Betsy’s letters to Hamilton survives. As was frequently done at the time, she must have destroyed them after his death. But whatever she wrote him to spell out her acceptance of his suit, he “took the earliest opportunity” to forward it to Betsy’s mother at Albany along with his own letter, thanking Mrs. Schuyler in advance for her “acceptance” of him:

I leave it to my conduct rather than expressions to testify the sincerity of my affection for her, the respect I have for her parents, the desire I shall always feel to justify their confidence and merit their friendship.²¹

It would take Hamilton another two months before he got around to write to his closest friend, Laurens, of his engagement to marry Betsy Schuyler, and then his tone sounded offhand, almost flippant. He may have been attempting delicacy: Matrimony was not Laurens’s favorite subject. “Have you heard I am on the point of becoming a benedict,” Hamilton wrote as if in afterthought at the end of a long letter of military news:

I confess my sins. I am guilty. Next fall completes my doom. I give up my liberty to Miss Schuyler. She is a good-hearted girl who I am sure will never play the termagant. Though not a genius, she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes—is rather handsome and has every other requisite of the exterior to make a lover happy. And, believe me, I am lover in earnest, though I do not speak of the perfections of my mistress in the enthusiasm of chivalry.²²

It may have taken Hamilton so long to send Laurens such a subdued letter because of his embarrassment at being unable to arrange a prisoner exchange that would have freed Laurens from parole in Philadelphia. Hamilton was careful not to gloat over his great good fortune in marrying the daughter of one of America’s wealthiest and most powerful men, facts that he did not even have to mention to his best friend.

Sometime that summer, when Hamilton learned of a ship sailing for the Caribbean, he sent off a letter to his father. He told Betsy that he knew from his involvement in planning joint operations with the French that his father would be safe. But, he reported to his fiancée, he “pressed [his father] to come to America after the peace.” Another ship was about to sail with another letter in which Hamilton would tell his father about his “black-eyed daughter [-in-law]” who would be, Hamilton promised, “the blessing of his gray hairs.”²³

As the summer of his anxious, discontented waiting for war against the British, for marriage to his black-eyed fiancée, dragged on, Hamilton wrote Betsy a series of remarkable love letters that he intended her to heed carefully, that she would have done well to think more than once about. In July 1780, he wrote her tantalizingly from a militia general’s house in Paterson, New Jersey:

Here we are, my love, in a house of great hospitality—in a country of plenty—a buxom girl under the same roof—pleasing expectations of a successful campaign—and everything to make a soldier happy who is not in love and absent from his mistress. It is a maxim of my life to enjoy the present good with the highest relish and to soften the present evil by a hope of future good.

When he did not hear back from Betsy in two weeks, Hamilton chided her for “negligence”:

For god’s sake My Dear Betsy try to write me oftener and give me the picture of your heart in all its varieties of light and shade. Tell me whether it feels the same for me or did when we were together, or whether what seemed to be love was nothing more than a generous sympathy. The possibility of this frequently torments me.

When letters still came too infrequently for him in August, after only a wait of one week, Hamilton began his next note, “Impatiently My Dearest.” He longed “to see the workings of my Betsy’s heart” in “those tender moments of pillowed retirement when her soul abstracted from every other object delivers itself up to love and to me.”

Part of Hamilton’s anxiety seemed to be over money:

Do you soberly relish the pleasure of being a poor man’s wife? Have you learned to think a homespun preferable to a brocade and the rumbling of a wagon wheel to the musical rattling of a coach and six? Will you be able to see with perfect composure your old acquaintances flaunting it in gay life, tripping it along in elegance and splendor, while you hold an humble station and have no other enjoyments than the sober comforts of a good wife?

Any inheritance he expected from relatives in St. Croix was dwindling but “I have not concealed my circumstances from my Betsy”:

They are far from splendid; they may possibly be even worse than I expect, for every day brings me fresh proof of the knavery of those to whom my little affairs are entrusted.

When Betsy enclosed a song she had written with a letter in late August, Hamilton eagerly responded on September 3 from Liberty Pole, New Jersey:

The little song you sent me I have read over and over. It is very pretty and contains precisely those sentiments I would wish my Betsy to feel, and she tells me it is an exact copy of her heart.

Whatever the lyrics of this song, like all her letters to Hamilton, she destroyed it. But she saved his words to her. The twenty-five-year-old man of the world spoke of women to his sheltered country belle, with

experience I have had of human nature, and of the softer part of it. Some of your sex possess every requisite to please delight, and inspire esteem, friendship and affection. But there are too few of this description. We are full of vices. They are full of weaknesses.

EVEN THOUGH he had become Washington’s confidant and chief aide, by mid-1780, the sixth year of the Revolutionary War, Hamilton was chafing for a field command or a diplomatic posting that would enhance his personal prestige and release him from the tedium of his desk job at headquarters. With Charleston and Savannah in British hands, the talk at headquarters in Tappan turned again to an assault on New York City. Hamilton eagerly seconded Lafayette’s proposal for an all-out attack that would rekindle lagging French enthusiasm for the war and placate Hamilton’s own rage at reports his agents kept bringing him from inside New York City. To repatriate American honor, the first assault should be on Fort Washington, which had surrendered so ingloriously in 1776, Hamilton argued. But Washington, as usual, urged caution. He refused to risk an attack until he could be supported by the French navy and army.

All of New York City, Hamilton was well aware, had been turned into a fortress. Looking through a telescope from Elizabethtown Point, on the New Jersey shore, he could no longer see any trees. The population of Manhattan, down to only five thousand when the Americans fled in 1776, five years later had reached a record thirty-three thousand. An estimated fifty thousand Loyalist refugees had crowded behind British lines in and around New York City—and that was only the civilian population. Tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors were rotated through the city, some forty thousand in the initial landings in 1776 alone. The Revolutionary War was making a seaport town into a metropolis. Soldiers, sailors, and their dependents crowded not only Manhattan but Long Island, Staten Island, and Westchester County as well. The burgeoning Loyalist population created demand for farm products from the nearby countryside and finished goods from England, but it also brought divided and shifting loyalties, a perfect setting for espionage.

James Rivington, printer of the Gazette who had been twice mobbed by the Sons of Liberty, became one of the most valuable American spies, helping to obtain the code signals of the British fleet with the aid of former Loyalist businessman turned journalist Robert Townsend on Long Island. The Samuel Culper Ring at Oyster Bay on Long Island sent female spies into the city under the pretext of taking baskets of food to relatives. They signaled that they were carrying information on the movements of British troops by first hanging a black petticoat and the prescribed number of white handkerchiefs from a clothesline. It was dangerous work: one woman agent known only as Code Number 355 had been captured in 1779 and died aboard the prison ship Jersey; another helped some two hundred American prisoners escape before she fled with a two-hundred-pound price on her head. Spies were summarily executed by hanging. They were not entitled to death by firing squad, which was normally accorded to gentlemen. Lieutenant Nathan Hale, a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher who was a Yale graduate, had been sent behind British lines to record troop strengths. He was hanged from a tree, in a British artillery park, now Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library. His last letter to his family was torn up by the notorious British Provost Marshal William Cunningham.

The most unlikely people seemed to be the best spies and spy catchers. Hamilton’s friend and delegate to the Continental Congress, John Jay, later to become the first chief justice of the United States, was the leading spy catcher in New York State. In the relative seclusion of Setauket, Long Island, Major Benjamin Talmadge, Nathan Hale’s classmate at Yale, used the code name John Bolton as he masterminded spying on Long Island. He enlisted Lieutenant Caleb Brewster to run a fleet of whaleboats to carry messages at night to Washington’s outposts in Connecticut. A local woman, Anna Smith Strong, coordinated Brewster’s comings and goings, using laundry on her clothesline to post signals. A black petticoat meant the whaleboat had arrived to carry information across the sound. The number of petticoats indicated which cove or inlet in Setauket Harbor would be used to take messages to Connecticut. From there, tavern owner Austin Roe carried the messages in his supply cart into the city. In emergencies, farmer Abraham Woodhull, code-named Samuel Culper, daringly rode into town with messages in his saddlebags, risking search by British pickets. Once he was accosted and searched thoroughly by four armed men who tore apart every pocket, the lining of his clothes, his shoes, and saddle—probably intending to rob him. For him to be in the city at night when he was a farmer from Long Island was already suspicious. In Culper’s intelligence pipeline came the day-to-day movements of the British army and navy and their supply distribution, news of unusual boat building, a warning that the British were about to flood the city with counterfeit money printed on British ships in the harbor. And funneling much of this vital intelligence over to Hamilton at Washington’s mountain stronghold was his former guardian and oldest friend, Hercules Mulligan. As a tailor he eavesdropped on British and Loyalists. He knew of urgent deadlines for orders of uniforms—and of their weight and fabric. From his brother’s supply house, he knew in detail of troop movements and timetables for deliveries and destinations of provisions. From his own sources and from scores of operatives on Long Island, Manhattan, and Staten Island, details of troop and ship numbers, movements, and construction crossed at night by row-boat with Mulligan’s servant, Cato, pulling on the muffled oars to the Jersey shore.

Outside British-occupied towns, life was hard for most Americans—and harder to bear as the war dragged on, especially since everyone could read in the newspapers and garner from gossip reports of the opulence and gaiety inside New York City. A frenzied social whirl included fox hunting and golf, billiards at the King’s Head Tavern, horse racing on Long Island at Hempstead Plains and at Ascot Heath, only five miles from the Brooklyn ferry. There were two cricket clubs, the Brooklyn and the Greenwich, to square off on Bowling Green. There were concerts and assembly balls at City Tavern on Broadway where Captain Horatio Nelson and Prince William Henry (later King William IV) danced with Loyalists’ daughters. The John Street Playhouse came back to life as the Theatre Royal, reopening in January 1777 with Perrault’s Tom Thumb. Among 150 performances over the next six years were plays by Shakespeare and Sheridan. Up to 750 British officers and their belles crowded in to watch fellow officers, known as “Clinton’s Thespians,” perform before sylvan sets often designed and painted by John André and his friend Oliver Delancey. In summer, there were saltwater bathing parties; in winter, skating on Fresh Water Pond. Here, Prince William enjoyed being pushed around in a chair on skates by an orderly while he fondled the wife of Commissary General Joshua Loring. All year round, amid a terrible shortage of housing, some of the most fashionable houses around the burned-out ruins of Trinity Church brimmed over with prostitutes. Services at St. Paul’s Chapel on Pearl Street at the foot of Broadway provided a favorite time to troll for trollops. As one visitor described them, these were “some of the handsomest and best-dressed ladies I have ever seen in America. I believe most of them are whores.”²⁴

For those Americans unfortunate enough to be in New York City against their wills, there was unimaginable suffering. Thousands of American prisoners of war were being held in and around the city. All attempts at a general prisoner exchange had come to naught. Eight hundred private soldiers were crammed in the New Gaol, renamed the Provost’s Prison, in City Hall Park. Hundreds more were starving, lice-infested, in Livingston’s vast Liberty Street sugar warehouse, in Van Cortlandt’s warehouse at the northwest corner of Trinity churchyard, and at Rhinelanders, at the corner of Rose and Duane Streets, next door to Hercules Mulligan’s swank haberdashery. In Dissenter churches such as the Middle Dutch Church on Nassau Street and North Dutch Church on William Street, half-naked, hungry American soldiers squatted on filthy straw, suffering from smallpox, cholera, and yellow fever as they fought swarms of rats and insects for scraps of food. Each morning the “dead cart” came to drag away the Revolutionaries’ withered corpses; each night, Provost Marshal Cunningham strode through, cracking his bullwhip and rasping, “Kennel, ye sons of bitches!” Some two thousand inmates who for some reason earned his special attention were poisoned by arsenic placed in their flour rations or were spirited out at midnight and hanged from a portable gallows on Chambers Street in Greenwich Village as neighbors followed orders to keep their shutters, and their mouths, closed. Cunningham later confessed the mass hangings before he himself was hanged in London for forgery.

But the worst agony for an American prisoner was to be consigned to one of the prison ships across the East River in Wallabout Bay. Aboard twenty decommissioned men-of-war, some 11,500 Americans, nearly half the number killed in combat in the entire Revolution, died wretchedly, packed together in reeking holds with little or no food as they were beaten by their guards. At first, the hulks housed the prisoners from the Battle of Long Island. After they died off, the ships were used exclusively for American seamen captured by privateers and British men-of-war. One tough Nantucket sailor who somehow survived remembered “mere walking skeletons” who were “overrun with lice from head to foot.” Most died of dysentery in part because only two prisoners at a time were allowed to go above decks to relieve themselves. The rest stayed below, defecating away their lives, covered with their own filth. Bodies were cast overboard each morning after the cry, “Prisoners, bring out your dead” or were dumped into mass graves ashore. For years, their bones washed up on the beaches of Wallabout Bay.²⁵

HAMILTON’S MORALE, like that of most Americans, was at its lowest in 1780 as the slow-moving Revolution dragged on. In part because the value of Continental currency had plummeted, inactive fighting men became mutinous. At Morristown in May 1780, troops of the Connecticut Line who had not been paid for five months and subsisted on short rations for several weeks prepared to march home. When their commander tried to stop them, one of the men punched him. A regiment of the Pennsylvania Line called on Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs to seize the mutineers’ leaders. At gunpoint, he confined the men to their huts. The next month, thirty-one men of the First New York Brigade, Hamilton’s old unit, deserted from Fort Stanwix at Oriskany. They appeared to be heading for the British lines. Lieutenant Abraham Hardenburgh led Oneida Indian auxiliaries in pursuit. They shot thirteen of Hamilton’s former comrades. It was the only time in the history of the United States Army that an officer employed Indians to kill white soldiers.

In June 1780, while the main British army besieged Charleston, South Carolina, its best troops siphoned off from New York City, Hessians and Loyalists again invaded New Jersey. When Hamilton and Lafayette urged a swift counterattack on thinly garrisoned New York City, Washington remained adamant that the attack on New Jersey was only a diversion. The ultimate British objective, he insisted, was to the north, the Hudson Highlands with its fifteen-mile chain of forts leading up to West Point. Washington considered West Point “the key to America.” As long as the Americans held it, the army could maneuver and neutralize the British base at New York City, keeping the British in constant fear of attack, without risking American troops. The Hudson was also the link between the French army and navy, based in Newport, Rhode Island, and the main American base at Tappan. West Point was also roughly equidistant between the American winter encampment in Morristown, New Jersey, and supply bases at Albany, at Hartford, and in northwestern Pennsylvania.

At West Point, the two-hundred-foot-deep channel narrows and bends nearly ninety degrees, then immediately bends another ninety degrees, squeezing between high cliffs on the west bank and the rocky shore of Constitution Island to the east. By the late summer of 1780, the guns of ten forts bristled at West Point. British men-of-war daring to run this gauntlet against the river’s strong tidal current would still have to come about twice under lethal broadsides from the forts’ cannon. The guns protected a 1,097-foot-long iron chain, each twelve-by-eighteen-inch link of two-inch-thick bar iron weighing one hundred pounds, which floated on log pontoons just below the river’s surface and could tear out the hull of any passing ship.

Returning victorious from South Carolina in late July 1780, the British commander Clinton called off a planned British attack on Rhode Island and withdrew his armies from eastern Long Island and New Jersey into his lines in New York City in a move that startled the Americans. Clinton was waiting for the final arrangements for American Major General Benedict Arnold to betray the Hudson River forts. They had been secretly negotiating through intermediaries for eighteen months since an embittered Arnold, repeatedly passed over for promotion, had been convicted by a court-martial of unauthorized use of army wagons while he was military governor of Philadelphia. Arnold had received only a formal reprimand from Washington, but his extreme pride could not stand the slightest public rebuke.

On the last day of July 1780, Arnold overtook Washington, Hamilton, Lafayette, and Knox on a high bluff opposite Peekskill, New York, where they were watching the last of the American soldiers being rowed across the Hudson. Off and on for weeks, unsuspecting members of Congress sympathetic to the twice-wounded Arnold had been prodding Washington to give him the command of West Point. But Washington was reluctant: he was short on battle-seasoned major generals. He needed Arnold to command half his best infantry in the field and expected Arnold to accept, gratefully. That hot afternoon, Washington later recalled, Arnold “asked me if I had thought of anything for him?” Washington was pleased to see Arnold back in the fight. Yes, yes, he answered, smiling. He was to command the army’s left wing. Hamilton, sitting on his horse, close to Arnold, later testified at a court-martial that Arnold’s face turned dark red. Arnold remained adamant that he was not ready, that his wounds from Saratoga, nearly three years ago, had not completely healed. Two days later, Washington relented and issued orders for Arnold to take command of West Point.²⁶

Arnold soon learned by a coded message from New York City that Clinton had approved his 20,000-pound request for payment for betraying West Point and its 3,086 men. He began systematically to strip the garrison, ordering two hundred soldiers upriver to cut firewood, and two hundred downriver on outpost duty. He detached precious artillerymen to escort Loyalist prisoners on a slow march to Washington’s base camp at Tappan. In all, in six weeks he reduced West Point’s garrison by half, not even protesting when Washington requisitioned four companies of artillery.

At a September 6, 1780, council of war at Tappan, Washington raised questions about West Point that no one but Arnold, who was absent, could answer. Washington assigned Hamilton to draft the queries and send them off to Arnold. Arnold sent back an express rider to Washington’s camp to say he would “do myself the honor to deliver [his report] in person.” Arnold now had the perfect excuse to gather up-to-the-minute intelligence at Washington’s headquarters. At West Point, he took an inventory of cannon and the detailed orders to be followed by the garrison “in case of an alarm.” In addition, he wrote a second secret report for the British, analyzing the defects of West Point’s forts. But in his covering letter to Washington, he insisted that a British attack would not be “very dangerous.”²⁷

On September 18, 1780, Benedict Arnold personally led his life guards to meet Washington and his entourage at King’s Ferry to accompany him across the Hudson to Peekskill, where Hamilton joined them. After supper, Hamilton read over a pair of letters Arnold gave him that he had just received from a Loyalist officer requesting a meeting. Hamilton later told a friend that Arnold “asked for Washington’s opinion of the propriety of [complying] with [the Loyalist’s] request.” According to Hamilton, Washington dissuaded Arnold from meeting the Loyalist and “advised him to reply that whatever related to his private affairs must be of a civil nature, and could only properly be addressed to the civil authority.” American policy was that Loyalists were considered civilian traitors to the United States, not legitimate military personnel. Riding along with Washington’s party, Arnold turned over his long, written answer on West Point’s defenses to Washington. Hamilton had just received and turned over to Washington a warning from Hercules Mulligan in New York City that one of the American generals “high up” was in league with the British. Hamilton later recalled that “Arnold was very anxious to ascertain from [us] the precise day of [Washington’s] return.”²⁸

Hamilton’s recommendation that Washington refuse to write an order for a flag of truce blew Arnold’s cover for an open meeting with the Loyalist Colonel Beverley Robinson and with John André, the British spymaster. Instead, after returning to West Point, Arnold decided to write a coded message to the Loyalist Robinson to be transmitted to Sir Henry Clinton: the British could capture Washington, his generals, and his entire staff when they came to West Point “to lodge here on Saturday night next [September 24].”²⁹ It had been essential that Arnold get the message to Robinson, who knew the lay of the land at West Point intimately. Arnold was writing the message from Robinson’s own house, now serving as the quarters of West Point’s commandant. If the British wanted to bag Washington, Lafayette, Knox, and Hamilton, what would become the core of the American government, as well as capture the garrison of West Point, there would be no better time. Arnold’s message reached Clinton in New York City on September 19. It made Clinton so sure of the success of Arnold’s treasonous coup that he requested ships to be ready to dash up the Hudson as soon as spymaster André returned from a secret meeting with Arnold. Hercules Mulligan learned of this sudden troop movement when the British ordered provisions from his brother’s firm, along with the place and time of delivery. Mulligan could possibly have warned Hamilton that the British were bound for West Point. But, ignoring direct orders from Clinton, André had come up the Hudson in a British warship, the Vulture, and was rowed ashore. In a secret nighttime meeting, Arnold handed André the top-secret summary of the American army’s strength he had gleaned at headquarters, his reports to Washington on West Point and the minutes of Washington’s September 6 council of war, then rode back upriver to West Point to await the British attack.³⁰

PEGGY SHIPPEN Arnold planned a breakfast reception for the commander-in-chief’s arrival the morning of September 25, but Washington took a longer route back from his conference with the French command in Hartford for security reasons. Alexander Hamilton rode ahead to tell her Washington would be late and that breakfast should go ahead without him. Peggy stayed upstairs with her baby, Edward, in the master bedroom during breakfast. She was still exhausted from nine days in an open wagon as she moved her household from Philadelphia to West Point. Intimately involved in Arnold’s plot, she had encoded and decoded messages and met go-betweens for fully nineteen months to shield Arnold’s identity. She would later receive a handsome royal pension “for services rendered” in the conspiracy. She also was terribly fond of John André, who had frequently visited her family before and during the British occupation of Philadelphia. In fact, she may have been in love with him. When she died, she was wearing a locket of his hair around her neck. No doubt, she was anxious over the safety not only of her husband but of her old friend. She planned to go downstairs later, when Washington arrived.

Hamilton was at the table with Arnold; with a neighbor, Dr. Eustis, the fort’s physician; and with Lafayette’s aide, James McHenry. They had just been served when a courier clambered into the room, handing Arnold an express message. André’s luck had just run out as he approached the British lines half a mile north of Tarrytown. Three young New York militiamen who were absent without leave from their unit had banded together to waylay and rob Loyalist travelers. They forced André into the woods, strip-searched him, and found only his watch and a few Continental dollars. They were on the point of letting him go when one decided to yank off his boots. Inside one, he had discovered Arnold’s papers. Benedict Arnold did not take time to read the rest. Excusing himself, he vaulted upstairs to Peggy. Their plot had been discovered. The incriminating papers were on their way to Washington. Arnold instructed Peggy to burn all their other papers and stall for time. Running down to the Hudson riverbank, Arnold commandeered a boat, stepped into it, and cocked his pistols. He promised his crewmen two gallons of rum each to take him downriver.

Just after Arnold fled and before Washington arrived, Hamilton could hear Peggy Arnold shrieking as she ran down the upstairs hallway. Hamilton rushed up the stairs to find her in her dressing gown, screaming, her hair disheveled. She was struggling with two maids, who were trying to get her back into her bedroom. At a subsequent court-martial, Hamilton testified that “Mrs. Arnold’s unhappy situation called us all to her assistance.” Hamilton described her “hysterics and utter frenzy.” She was “raving distracted.” When Hamilton assured her that Arnold would soon return, she cried, “No, no, he is gone forever!” Peggy “fell to her knees at my feet with prayers and entreaties to spare her innocent babe.” Hamilton helped to carry her “to her bed, raving mad.” When Washington arrived, Hamilton told him of his suspicions about Arnold’s treason. After a cursory glimpse at the papers found in André’s boot, Washington ordered Hamilton to go after Arnold.³¹

Hamilton and McHenry spurred their horses down the shore road a dozen miles to Verplanck’s Point, trying to intercept Arnold in his barge, but he had already reached the British sloop-of-war Vulture, where he had his life guards taken prisoners of war. Hamilton later bemoaned to his fiancée, Betsy, that they were “much too late.” From Verplanck’s Ferry, Hamilton sent a quick message to Washington:

Dear Sir,

You will see by the enclosed we are too late. Arnold went by water to the Vulture. I shall write to General Greene advising him [that], without making a bustle, to be in readiness to march and even to detach a brigade this way, for though I do not believe the project will go on, it is possible Arnold has made such dispositions with the garrison as may tempt the enemy in [West Point’s] present weakness to make the stroke this night and it seems prudent to be providing against it. I shall endeavor to find [Return Jonathan] Meigs and request him to march to the garrison [at West Point] and shall make some arrangements here. I hope Your Excellency will approve these steps as there may be no time to be lost.³²

To Greene at Orangetown, New Jersey, Hamilton dashed off another message:

Sir,

There has just unfolded at this place a scene of the blackest treason. Arnold has fled to the enemy. André the British adjutant general is in our possession as a spy. His capture unraveled the mystery. West Point was to have been the sacrifice, all the dispositions have been made for the purpose and ‘tis possible, tho’ not probable, tonight may still see the execution. The wind is fair [for a British naval attack]. I came here in pursuit of Arnold but was too late. I advise your putting the army under marching orders and detaching a brigade this way.³³

Then, to Washington, he fired off another terse message.

Hamilton knew that Washington would remember that Meigs had marched with Arnold to Quebec. Hamilton acted quickly, decisively, confident that the stunned Washington would not countermand his initiative. Hamilton sent off the courier toward West Point, where he knew Washington would be taking emergency measures to shore up the fort’s defenses in case the British did attack. He added a brief postscript: “The Vulture is gone down to New York.”³⁴

When Peggy Arnold learned that Washington had come back from West Point, she cried out again that “there was a hot iron on her head and no one but General Washington could take it off, and [she] wanted to see the general.” When Hamilton returned from his unsuccessful pursuit of Arnold, Dr. Eustis and Varick went to Washington’s room and told him all they knew. Then he accompanied Washington to Peggy’s bedside. Clutching her baby at her breast, Peggy said, “No, that is not General Washington; that is the man who was going to assist Colonel Varick in killing my child.” Washington retreated from the room, certain that Peggy Arnold was mad but no conspirator.³⁵

Hamilton wrote to Betsy Schuyler the morning after Arnold’s defection that the aftermath of the treason was a “scene that shocked me more than anything I have met with.” Hamilton told her he had gone “in pursuit of him but was much too late,” to his utter “disappointment”:

On my return, I saw an amiable woman frantic with distress for the loss of a husband she tenderly loved…It was the most affecting scene I ever was witness to. She for a considerable time entirely lost her senses. The General went up to see her and she upbraided him with being in a plot to murder her child. One moment she raved; another she melted into tears. Sometimes, she pressed her infant to her bosom and lamented its fate…in a manner that would have pierced insensibility itself.

All the sweetness of beauty, all the loveliness of innocence, all the tenderness of a wife and all the fondness of a mother showed themselves in her appearance and conduct. We have every reason to believe she was entirely unacquainted with the plan…She instantly fell into a convulsion and he [Washington] left her in that station.³⁶

That day, September 25, Hamilton visited Peggy Arnold again:

This morning, she is more composed. I paid her a visit and endeavored to soothe her by every method in my power, though you may imagine she is not easily to be consoled.

Peggy Arnold, he added, was “very apprehensive” that her Philadelphia neighbors would take out their resentment on her if, as Hamilton had proposed to Washington, she be allowed to go home to her family:

She is very apprehensive the resentment of her country will fall upon her (who is only unfortunate) for the guilt of her husband. I have tried to persuade her, her apprehensions are ill-founded, but she has too many proofs of the illiberality of the state [Pennsylvania] to which she belongs to be convinced.

Hamilton was completely taken in by the scene Peggy stage-managed, the beautiful and disheveled mother with her babe in arms:

She received us in bed with every circumstance that could interest our sympathy. Her sufferings were so eloquent that I wished myself her brother, to have a right to become her defender. As it is, I have entreated her to enable me to give her proofs of my friendship.

If Hamilton could forgive Arnold “for sacrificing his honor,” he told Betsy, “I could not forgive him for acting a part that must have forfeited the esteem of so fine a woman”:

At present, she almost forgets his crime in his misfortune, and her horror at the guilt of the traitor is lost in her love of the man…Time will make her despise, if it cannot make her hate.³⁷

Peggy Shippen could not have played a more brilliant part to a wider audience. Hamilton not only sent a letter describing the scene to his fiancée but also sent it off for publication in the New York Packet and Pennsylvania Gazette. It was soon reprinted all over North America and Europe. The next day, Peggy summoned Hamilton to her room and appealed to him to intercede with Washington for a pass for her to leave with her baby. Washington saw no reason to stop her. He, too, believed Peggy Arnold. Hamilton was able to come back almost immediately and tell her that she could go either to her father’s home in Philadelphia or to her husband in New York City. She chose Philadelphia. Her deception was now complete.

In the gravest crisis of the Revolution, Washington refused to concede publicly the possibility that the Arnold-André conspiracy had included betraying him to the British, in effect carrying out a military coup. To Joseph Reed in Pennsylvania, Washington confided there had been those who had reasons for doubt, especially Hamilton. “I am far from thinking,” Washington wrote, “he [Arnold] intended to hazard a defeat of this important object by combining another risk, although there were circumstances which led to a contrary belief.” One of these, as Hamilton pointed out, was Arnold’s precise knowledge of Washington’s movements and his timetable. To Major General William Heath, Washington acknowledged that Arnold “knew of my approach and that I was visiting [“Beverly”] with the Marquis [de Lafayette].” Hamilton wrote a full report to his friend, John Laurens, still on parole in Philadelphia. He concluded that, while Arnold would have been “unwise” to try to capture Washington at the same time he surrendered West Point, “there was some color for imagining it was a part of the plan to betray the General into the hands of the enemy. Arnold was very anxious to ascertain from [Washington] the precise day of his return, and the enemy’s movements seem to have corresponded to this point.”³⁸

To his friend, Laurens, Hamilton confided,

My feelings were never put to so severe a trial. I congratulate you, my friend, on our happy escape from the mischiefs with which this treason was big.

It would be the twentieth century before the opening of the British headquarters papers at the University of Michigan proved what Hamilton refused to believe—that a young and beautiful woman was capable of helping Benedict Arnold plot the greatest conspiracy of the American Revolution and then completely fool the veteran warriors around her. To Betsy Schuyler, Hamilton revealed the extent of his own guile-lessness in the presence of a clever and manipulative woman:

We have every reason to believe she was unacquainted with the plan and that her first knowledge of it was when Arnold went to tell her he must banish himself from his country and from her forever. She instantly fell into a convulsion and he left her in that situation.

Not only did Peggy Arnold dupe Hamilton, but Hamilton also felt great sympathy for the captured spy André. When he was asked to write and sign a letter to Clinton in New York City proposing a trade of Arnold for André, he declined it, as he explained to Betsy a week later after André’s execution. But he apparently wrote over his protests a similar letter at Washington’s instruction proposing just such a bargain to save André’s life. He generally considered Washington’s treatment of André too harsh, he told Betsy:

It was proposed to me [by Washington] to suggest to him [André] the idea of an exchange for Arnold, but I knew I should have forfeited his [André’s] esteem by doing it, and therefore declined it. A man of honor could not but reject it and I would not for the world have proposed to him a thing which must have placed me in the unenviable light of supposing him capable of meanness. I confess to you I had the weakness to value the esteem of a dying man because I reverenced his merit…I wished myself possessed of André’s accomplishments for your sake.

Hamilton undoubtedly had satisfied his curiosity by this time about the extent of Betsy’s involvement with André during his stay at the Schuyler mansion five years earlier, and he now intervened on André’s behalf with Washington, he reported to Betsy, “to justify myself to your sentiments.” Hamilton’s regard for Betsy and how the news must be devastating her more than any regard for André led him to intercede with Washington to grant André’s last wish. Rather than the ignominy of being hanged like a common criminal, André asked an officer’s honorable execution by firing squad:

I urged a compliance with André’s request to be shot and I do not think it would have had an ill effect, but some people are only sensible to motives of policy [did he mean Washington?] and sometimes from a narrow disposition mistake it. When André’s tale comes to be told and present resentment is over, the refusing him the privilege of choosing [the] manner of death will be branded with too much obduracy.³⁹

In his carefully oblique criticism of Washington to the daughter of one of his top generals, Hamilton must have realized he was treading a dangerous line. Again and again, he had argued for mercy for prisoners, so much on his mind. Of all the officers and men at the execution place at Tappan, Hamilton seemed the one most capable of identifying with the condemned young artist. “Never,” Hamilton wrote in admiration, to John Laurens, “did a man suffer death with more justice or deserve it less.” André’s graceful conduct as a condemned man deeply impressed Hamilton, filling him with “the weakness to value the esteem of a dying man because I reverenced his merit.”

To Laurens, Hamilton was less sentimental, more clinical as he reported his observations of a condemned gentleman:

There was something singularly interesting in the character and fortunes of André. To an excellent understanding well improved by education and travel, he united a peculiar elegance of mind and manners and the advantages of a pleasing person…His sentiments were elevated and inspired esteem. They had a softness that conciliated affection. His elocution was handsome; his address easy, polite and insinuating. By his merit he had acquired the unlimited confidence of his general…⁴⁰

When Betsy first learned of André’s capture, she immediately asked Hamilton for further details. Hamilton promised by return messenger “a particular account of André”—and he spared her no details. Yet he expressed his fear that Betsy would admire the picture he painted of the romantic prisoner so much that she would forget Hamilton, grieve more deeply for her lost love. Hamilton wished he was “possessed of André’s accomplishments.” Comparing himself unfavorably with André, he asked, “Why am I not handsome? Why have I not every acquirement that can embellish human nature?” He wanted to be, in his fiancée’s eyes, “the first, the most amiable, the most accomplished of my sex.” When Betsy did not write back to him by the third day after she learned of André’s execution, he was tortured by her silence. She did not write to him often enough, he complained to her: “I ought at least to hear from you by every post, and your last letter to me is as old as the middle of September.” When another week passed and still no letter came from Betsy, he reproached her again. “I tell you, my Betsy, you are negligent. You do not write me often enough. Take more care of my happiness.” But Betsy’s gloom only deepened as she approached the day of her wedding to the man who had helped to execute the man she had so long loved. And the picture of John André, smiling down at Hamilton from the gallows as he put the rope around his neck himself, would haunt Hamilton in the months ahead. Betsy’s silence lengthened. By the middle of October, two months before their scheduled wedding day, he begged her not to wait to find out until “the day before we are married that you ‘can’t like the man’; but of all things I pray you don’t make the discovery afterwards, for that would be worse than all.” Two weeks later, he wrote uneasily, “It is still a fortnight since I have received a line from my charmer.” The specter of André sleeping with his Betsy now intruded on his dreams of Betsy. He wrote to her of “a charming dream” that, when he arrived in Albany, he found Betsy sleeping “on a green near the house.” Beside her he could see “in an inclined posture stood a gentleman whom I did not know.” He was holding one of her hands, “fixed in silent admiration.” When Hamilton challenged him, the stranger “insisted on a prior right.” It was a recurring nightmare for Hamilton, André’s “prior right,” and he begged Betsy to reassure him: “Tell me, I pray you, who is this rival of mine? Dreams, you know, are the messengers of Jove.”⁴¹

To Laurens, Hamilton intimated he was proud that, “in the whole progress of the affair” he had treated André “with the most scrupulous delicacy.” André had “acknowledged the generosity of [my] behavior towards him in every respect.” Hamilton visited André frequently in his last hours, taking personal responsibility for his treatment and winning him one major concession: pen and paper to write a farewell letter to General Clinton. André also used Hamilton’s notes to him in one last venture back into the world he had wanted and had left behind for the army. On the backs of Hamilton’s notes to him, André had drawn pictures of the woman who brought him his last meal from Washington’s table, of the boat on the Hudson passing dark cliffs as it brought him to meet Arnold, of himself, quill poised, writing his last letter to his patron—and probably one of his lovers—General Clinton. In his long letter to Laurens, Hamilton quoted André’s last words to him: “‘I would not for the world leave a sting in his mind that should embitter his future days.’ He could scarce finish the sentence, bursting into tears in spite of his effort to suppress them.” Hamilton told Laurens that by contemplating André’s fate, he had become “aware that a man of real merit is never seen in so favorable light as through the medium of adversity.” The “maxims and practices of war are the satire of human nature,” he added. “They countenance almost every species of seduction as well as violence.”⁴²