19
OFF TELLER’S POINT, Hudson River, September 22, 1780

The night air was cold, as the boat pushed off from the British sloop. In the clear sky the high wooded banks of the river were barely visible as the two rowers heaved on their oars; muffled with sheepskins, they made no noise in the rowlocks.¹

In the stern sat Major John André, huddled inside a heavy blue watch cloak that he wore over his uniform. He was heading for a predawn meeting that would send into action up the Hudson a force of 5,000 British troops waiting poised at New York under the cover story that they were destined for the Chesapeake.

For André it would be the climax of eighteen months of planning since the May day last year when Joseph Stansbury, a Tory from Philadelphia, had first called at British headquarters with a fantastic proposition: Benedict Arnold had decided that the best way he could “serve his country,” as he was to write later, was by “accelerating the termination of this unhappy contest.” Arnold of all people! The almost legendary rebel leader who had led his men on the incredible expedition up the Kennebec to the St. Lawrence; the man who with homemade ships had held off Carleton at Valcour; the general whose brilliant attack on the Hessian redoubt at Freeman’s Farm had forced Burgoyne to abandon the British lines.

Stansbury indicated that the outright rejection of the British peace proposals after Saratoga and the alliance with the Catholic France had led Arnold to question whether Congress was still acting in the interests of the American people.

Twenty-eight years old, good-looking and highly talented—a writer and artist as well as an officer—André was adjutant general of the British army and responsible for running the headquarters staff. One of his duties was to control the network of British spies, but none of his agents was in a top position such as that occupied by Arnold. André reported immediately to Clinton that the possibilities were endless—a fact Arnold had already recognized, for he was demanding a guarantee, whether his efforts were successful or not, of £10,000.

Clinton did not mind paying for results and on some scale, as he was soon to demonstrate, but he was not committing himself until he knew what he was getting for his money. It was a sensible precaution since suddenly Arnold’s position had become precarious. He was facing a court-martial on charges that he had used his position as commander of Philadelphia, a nonfield appointment resulting from his leg wound at Freeman’s Farm, for commercial exploitation—an allegation that had been made against him before in regard to his activities in Canada in 1776.

For months, while he negotiated with the British about more spectacular plans, Arnold supplied information to André through a series of go-betweens, writing always under the cover name of “Gustavus” or “Monk.” In his replies, the young adjutant general adapted his own name to “John Anderson.”

At one stage, negotiations between Arnold and the British broke down over the issue of the guaranteed payment to the general. When contact was renewed a few months later, there had been two important new developments. First, Arnold had been acquitted of the main charges in his court-martial, though reprimanded on minor counts, and thus was no longer suspended from army command. Second, Charleston was going to fall to the British at a time when, as Arnold pointed out, the Revolution was coming under great stress. Thus any major strike against the rebel army he could engineer in collaboration with the British would be doubly catastrophic.

Clinton was now clear what form this collaboration should take. In 1777 Howe had forced him to evacuate the forts in the Hudson highlands that had fallen to him so easily just before Saratoga. He wanted them back. Overlooking the river from their craggy heights, they were always the key to the control of the upper Hudson and in British hands could divide America. Now their strategical value was even greater because at West Point, a little downstream of Fort Montgomery, the rebels had established their main Northern supply base. The capture of the highlands, following on the shattering effect of the surrender of Charleston, would be certain to have traumatic repercussions.

Moving with great care, Arnold sought the command of West Point, an appointment which included responsibility for the whole area. It took him several months to achieve his object. At one stage, in fact, Washington offered him the left wing of the Continental Army, expecting him to grasp eagerly at this opportunity of getting back into action. He was a little surprised when Arnold pleaded his leg was still giving him trouble and repeated his request for West Point. Eventually, the rebel commander agreed, and the general took up his new post in early August.

By then there were other reasons Clinton wanted to launch his spectacular assault plan. The expected French fleet had arrived in America in July, and even though Arnold had alerted André to the important fact that its destination was Rhode Island, which the British had evacuated last year because they did not have the ships or troops to hold it, Arbuthnot ignored Clinton’s suggestion that he should challenge the enemy ships.

Rhode Island had thus become a French base occupied by Lieutenant General Comte de Rochambeau and 6,000 troops brought to America by the fleet. Unlike D’Estaing’s instructions before him, Rochambeau’s orders were to place himself under the command of Washington. It was the beginning of a new French initiative—and a fairly desperate one at that. The court at Versailles was beginning to question whether the high cost of their two-and-a-half-year-old alliance with the Americans was merited by the limited results. Under these circumstances, the dramatic British capture of the highlands, coupled with the equally dramatic defection of one of the rebels’ most brilliant generals, was certain to make a deep impression on the French. Just how rotten, they might ask, was the rebel army that they were now supporting in some strength? To what extent could its leaders be trusted? If so celebrated a man as Arnold had returned to the royal allegiance, what other generals were also in touch with British headquarters?

As Clinton saw it, there was no time to waste. Quite apart from the generally demoralized state of the rebel army, Washington and Rochambeau—as he knew from Arnold—were preparing an attack on New York. His own plan to make a fast strike at Rhode Island in July had failed in mid-execution because Arbuthnot suddenly went to sea with all his ships, thus removing the vital naval cover for the assault. The admiral’s strange explanation was that he believed the French were about to sail and wanted to position his ships to challenge them.

Clinton’s bitter conflict with Arbuthnot was to prove expensive to the British. Had the attack on Rhode Island been successful it could well have altered drastically the course of events that were now in motion.

Ironically, and certainly unwittingly, Arnold was already predicting the pattern that these would take in a warning to André that another fleet would soon be on its way from Brest with 2,500 more troops. “If this division should arrive soon,” he wrote, “they will probably make the French fleet nearly equal, perhaps superior to the British and there is some expectation of a reinforcement from the West Indies.” Because of this the rebel “affairs, which do not wear a pleasing aspect at present, may soon be greatly changed.”

This did not strike Clinton as too serious a danger at the moment. Admiral Thomas Graves had just arrived with some new ships of the line from England, and Sir George Rodney had brought his fleet into New York from the West Indies. But without question the strike at West Point should be made before the French reinforcements arrived.

By the end of August Clinton was pressing hard for action. There seemed little reason for further delay; Arnold was now in command at West Point, and the British had agreed to his full price of £20,000. Already he had weakened the highland defenses under the pretext of having them strengthened. He had made gaps in the walls of several forts—a preliminary to rebuilding. Most important, on the grounds that the heavy chain boom that stretched across the river as a barrier to attacking ships needed repair, Arnold had ordered the removal of one of the 240-pound links for examination, bridging the gap only by a piece of rope that would part the moment it was struck by a ship under way.

All that remained to transform the plan into action was a meeting between Arnold and a British officer to settle the final details of the assault and to tie up the last unsettled aspect of the financial arrangement. For although Clinton had agreed to the price for the successful capture of West Point, he still refused to be committed on a firm payment in the event of failure—and on this Arnold was determined. Also, Clinton, wary of espionage, wanted to make certain he was not being hoaxed into a clever trap by the rebels and that André’s contact was truly Arnold.

The arrangements to meet seem to have been made more complicated than necessary. Arnold strongly resisted the suggestion that he meet André as a British officer, while Clinton was adamant that André should wear his army uniform, was not to go within the rebel lines and was to receive no documents.

After several abortive attempts to meet Arnold lower down the river, on Wednesday, September 20, André went aboard the British sloop Vulture, which was anchored upstream off Teller’s Point, not far from the town of Haverstraw and only 18 miles below West Point. This stretch of the river, like the country on either side, was a kind of neutral territory between the British and American lines and, as a result, was the scene of constant skirmishing between regular patrols and Loyalist and rebel militia.

André alerted Arnold to the fact that he was on board the sloop by signing the words “John Anderson, Secretary” to a formal complaint by the Vulture’s captain that one of his boats had been fired on while carrying a flag of truce. It produced the required result. Soon after midnight on Friday, a boat came alongside the sloop with a man named Joshua Smith, who bore a note from Arnold saying he would conduct André to a “place of safety.”

Although he would have preferred to have met Arnold on the ship, André went with Smith to a landing place a little upriver on the west bank of the Hudson in Haverstraw Bay, where he met Arnold “hid,” as Smith was to testify later, “among the firs.”

There is no official record—no reports by André or Arnold—of what plan was agreed to at that meeting in darkness, although both François de Barbe-Marbois, secretary to the French legation in Philadelphia, and Lieutenant George Mathew² of the Cold-stream Guards, both of whom could have had special knowledge, wrote dogmatic assertions of the arrangements. The British would attack simultaneously by land and water. Arnold would weaken the defense forces at the assault points by sending detachments to other parts of the highlands where they could be surprised by British units. The fortifications had already been opened up, and the chain boom was no longer a barrier to the ships. When the British were three miles from West Point, two of Clinton’s officers, in American uniforms, were to ride ahead to Arnold at full gallop to obtain his final instructions.

One part of the plan, according to Lieutenant Mathew, was that Arnold should rig a fake resistance at one of the forts and send a desperate message to the army for reinforcements. Because of the importance of the highlands, Washington would almost certainly command the relief force in person and might be captured in the ambush.

The attack would begin in four days’ time—during the early hours of Tuesday, September 26. From the British point of view, it was a brilliant plan. All that was necessary to launch it into action was for André to return to New York. Arnold had brought with him some papers, mainly details of the West Point defenses written in his own handwriting, and at his urging André placed them between his stockings and the soles of his feet.

It was now nearly daylight, but when the two men returned to the waiting boat, the oarsmen complained that they were too tired to row against the flood tide back to the Vulture. So Arnold decided that André should spend the day in hiding at Smith’s house, a couple of miles up the riverbank, riding there on a spare horse he had with him.

On the way they were challenged by a rebel sentry, who let them pass as soon as he recognized Arnold, but André was alarmed, for he knew he was now within the rebel lines.

From the house during the day, they heard the sound of guns as rebel artillery, brought up by some keen militiamen on the east bank of the Hudson, bombarded the Vulture. Arnold and Smith decided it would be safer for André to go back to New York by land, rather than attempt a return by boat to the ship, which might well be under surveillance by rebel patrols. To do this dressed as a British officer with his scarlet regimentals under the blue watch cloak would make discovery highly probable; so apprehensively—for as long as he was in uniform, he could not be accused of spying—André agreed to replace his jacket with a civilian coat supplied by Smith. He also took some papers with details of West Point, most of which were written in Arnold’s handwriting.

He had now disobeyed all three of Clinton’s orders.

That night he started on his journey accompanied by Smith. They had a pass signed by Arnold, ordering the guards at King’s Ferry to let them through.

They crossed the Hudson without incident, and in the morning Smith, who had been warned the Loyalist militia was active in the area, left André to continue the journey alone.

On the road André did meet three militiamen, but they were not Loyalists, a fact he unwisely failed to determine before revealing his association with the “lower party” (i.e., downriver). They grabbed him, searched him, found Arnold’s papers in his stockings and took him to the nearest rebel army outpost at North Castle.

Meanwhile, the Vulture, damaged by the rebel guns, was still anchored near Teller’s Point. André had been gone for forty-eight hours, and her officers had now become very anxious. They were not left in doubt much longer. The next day Arnold’s barge, flying a flag of truce, bore down swiftly on the sloop. In the stern was the general, a pistol in each hand.

The news of André’s capture had reached Arnold that morning at his house while he waited for Washington to join him for breakfast. His escape from arrest for treason on a spectacular scale had been narrow.

Clinton abandoned his assault plan, though Arnold pressed him not to, assuring him, according to Rodney, that he would “answer with his head” if the forts were not “taken in ten days.”

Clinton must have been tempted, for a fast strike would have seemed practical. The troops were embarked on the assault ships: the physical defenses of the forts were still weak; the chain boom across the river was still faulty. But Washington’s troops in the area were double the number of Clinton’s attack force, excluding militia, and since failure “would be death to our cause in the present stage of the war,” he decided the risk was too great. “The impropriety of the measure under such circumstances,” he told the complaining Germain acidly, “must be obvious to Your Lordship.”

The troops, who should have taken the highlands, sailed south toward Cornwallis. And Clinton devoted all his energies to trying to save his young adjutant general, whose capture plagued him with bitter self-doubts whether his orders had been explicit enough. Both he and Arnold wrote to Washington insisting that André had left the Vulture under a flag of truce sent by the commanding officer of West Point, which, as Arnold asserted, he was within his rights to dispatch. Under these circumstances, he could not be regarded as a spy. They warned that if he were executed, they would retaliate by carrying out death sentences on forty South Carolinians who were under arrest for breaking their oaths of allegiance to the King.

The arguments had little effect. Rebel officers negotiating with Clinton’s representatives indicated that André, already found guilty on spying charges by a hastily convened army board, would be freed on only one condition: the return of Arnold to face trial.

It was an impossible proposition for Clinton. Had he agreed, it would have ended any hope of further high-level defections, and he was in touch, as he told Chief Justice William Smith, with other rebel generals. Even more important, it would have done immeasurable damage to the Secret Service. It was vital that spies could trust in British sanctuary if they sought it as Arnold had.

So André, standing on a wagon as a drop, was hanged on a hill just outside Tappan Village.

Despite the failure of the plan, Clinton rewarded Arnold well. He was made a brigadier general in the British army and given £6,315 in cash for the property he had lost; his wife and sons were awarded income for life.

Having changed sides, Arnold grasped the royal cause with almost as much enthusiasm as he had opposed it in storming Quebec. In an address to the “Inhabitants of America,” he denounced “the impolicy, tryanny and injustice [of Congress] which, with sovereign contempt of the people of America, studiously neglected to take their collective sentiments of the British proposals of peace.” He mocked that France was “too feeble to establish your independency which was, so perilous to her distant dominions [because it might be infectious], the enemy of the Protestant Faith.” He issued a call to those “officers and soldiers of the Continental Army who . . . are determined to be no longer the tools and dupes of Congress or of France” to join a corps he was forming on the same service conditions enjoyed by British troops.

At another level, he wrote long memorandums to Clinton and Germain suggesting ways of bringing wholesale defections in Washington’s army, including the ingenious suggestion that the British should offer them land as an inducement, with the acreage depending on rank. “Money,” he wrote, “will go further than arms in America.”

In strategic terms, the arrival in New York of Arnold could not be compared with the capture of West Point, but because of his reputation, its impact on the already weakened morale of the rebel army was enormous. And this was an area of warfare which Clinton was studying very closely, deploying every technique he could apply to the widening of the internal fissures that might cause its collapse.

On January 3, 1781, news arrived in New York that suggested the crash was in motion. On New Year’s Day, the Pennsylvania Line—an entire corps of 2,500 of Washington’s best troops, commanded by General Anthony Wayne—had mutinied at Morristown. With a battery of complaints, including arrears of pay, poor food, inadequate clothing and technicalities about their term of service, they had marched to Trenton under the leadership of a committee of sergeants to demand justice from Congress.

Even the crusty old Admiral Arbuthnot shared the optimism of the general he disliked so much that “the crisis of the Rebellion was coming.”

Promptly Clinton reinforced his army on Staten Island at the mouth of the Raritan River and sent messengers to the mutineers offering British protection and the immediate payment of all money due them from Congress. There were no strings to the offer, though they could join the army if they wished, other than “laying down their arms and returning to their allegiance.”

For nearly two weeks Clinton heard nothing; then he learned that two of his messengers had been hanged at a crossroads just across the Delaware from Trenton. Sadly Clinton wrote Germain that “the malcontents had wanted chiefly to be out of military service—not at all to change sides.” But many of the Pennsylvanians were permitted to leave the Continental Army.

By then the New Jersey regiments had mutinied, too. Again Clinton, moving much more cautiously, tried to exploit the situation, but this time Washington realized the danger of contagion and treated the mutiny harshly. He promptly executed the leaders and asked Congress to permit him to increase his flogging sentences to 500 lashes. The Americans, too, it seems were becoming “bloodybacks.”

Although the results of the mutinies were disappointing to Clinton, the discontent they reflected was encouraging. Also, the general had great hopes that negotiations with Ethan Allen, whose attempt to set up Vermont as a fourteenth American province had been deflected and shelved by Congress, would bring him the support of the tough men of the Green Mountains in return for royal recognition of the state.

That January while Clinton was trying to exploit the natural erosion in Washington’s army, the British were campaigning again, and the commander in chief had wasted no time in using his new general. Arnold’s reputation for fast and brilliant maneuvers would, he hoped, have a great impact on the Americans once these qualities were employed against them. Halfway through December, Arnold sailed from New York with nearly 2,000 men for Portsmouth, the Virginia port at the mouth of the James River near the entrance to the Chesapeake.

Clinton had good reasons for sending him there. If Arnold could destroy the rebels’ magazines and cannon foundry on the James River, the main source of their armament, he would provide a diversion in the South to help Cornwallis, as well as give him a base on the Chesapeake for future actions.

Despite his brilliant victory at Camden, Cornwallis needed a diversion. He had learned the bitter truth that while there was a nucleus of Continental troops in the South, the territory under his control would be racked constantly by revolt.

After Camden, he had advanced into North Carolina to Charlotte but had not been able to press on farther, as he had intended. Throughout the fall, the border country had been the scene of constant battles, raids and counterraids. Tarleton and the Loyalists had been in regular and very bloody skirmishes—some of them involving large numbers—with the rebel guerrilla leaders such as Sumter, Marion and Colonel Elijah Clark.

Then in October had come the trauma of King’s Mountain when Major Patrick Ferguson and 1,000 Loyalists had been surrounded by frontiersmen from Black Mountain in the west. Yelling “Tarleton’s Quarter,” they had killed him and massacred many of his men and later hanged some of the prisoners their officers had eventually persuaded them to take, treating the remainder with what Cornwallis complained formally was “an inhumanity scarcely credible.”

The Black Mountain men came from Indian country into which the white Americans were encroaching constantly, and temporarily Cornwallis forced them home by rousing the tribes to attack their home farms. But the effect of King’s Mountain was disastrous to the British. “No sooner had the news of it spread through the country,” Clinton related, “than multitudes of disaffected flew to arms from all parts and menaced every British post on both frontiers.”

Immediately Cornwallis dropped back over the border to Winnsboro while he completed his plans for a new offensive. Months ago he had reached the conclusion that the only way to calm the Carolinas was to strike north at Virginia. This would force the Continentals to drop back to counter his move and thus make the activities of the rebel militia easier to contain.

Cornwallis had been unable to march until January because he did not have enough men or transport, since Clinton had taken many of the army’s wagons back to New York when he sailed from Charleston. But in December reinforcements under General Leslie had arrived at Charleston, and a message had come from Clinton that Arnold was on his way to Portsmouth, Virginia.

The time for his big forward movement had arrived. It coincided with the return from London of Major Alexander Ross, Cornwallis’ aide-de-camp, whom he had sent home to report in person on the news of Camden, the normal practice with big battles. Ross told him he was regarded with warm enthusiasm in Whitehall and St. James’s, while official attitudes to Clinton were growing cool. Just as Burgoyne at the end of 1776 had seemed the active hard-hitting general Britain needed, in contrast with the cautious Carleton, now Cornwallis was seen as a man of dynamism compared to a wearying and overcareful Clinton.

Throughout the war, both for international and domestic imperial reasons, there had been an urgent need for a quick ending of the Revolution. Now in the autumn of 1780, the crisis that faced the King and his ministers was more serious than any that they had yet faced.

Britain itself was marked by great unrest. In the spring the religion-motivated Gordon Riots had produced a state of civil war in London that the troops had put down only with considerable killing. In the House of Commons Lord North had barely succeeded in fending off an opposition move to strip away the royal right to dissolve Parliament, and there were so many waverers in the ministry that the King had taken the rare step of summoning the Cabinet to his presence in order to stiffen their resolve. The British national debt had nearly doubled since the outbreak of the rebellion, and despite the lowering of physical standards and raising recruitment bounties, the sources of new troops were nearly exhausted.

Far more serious was the growing threat of Russian participation. In May the Empress Catherine had astonished the King—who again, as in 1775, had been led by his ambassador to believe that he could expect military assistance—by issuing a declaration of “Armed Neutrality” that in effect contested the blockade right of British cruisers. At the same time she was promoting the idea of a league of the northern neutral powers. This would make her an ally of Holland, with whom Britain was locked in a serious quarrel over the issue of supplying the King’s enemies with naval stores, especially copper; there had already been some incidents when British blockade cruisers boarded and searched Dutch transports in the Channel.

If Russia entered the conflict with Holland on the side of France and Spain, the result could only be catastrophic for Britain. Against this ominous background it became imperative to crush finally the Revolution in America—a goal that did not now seem too remote in London. For both the rebels’ powerful European supporters were known to be tiring of a war in which the gains had not yet matched the enormous cost; in fact, Spain had responded well to the peace feelers.

For Germain the most tantalizing aspect of his post as the director of the war in America was that the Revolution seemed so often to be at the point of collapse—as, in truth, it was. One major effort was all that seemed necessary to produce the desired result, but always the Colonial Secretary was frustrated by commanders in chief who complained constantly about the shortage of troops and such mundane details as communications and transport. However, Cornwallis with his brilliant Tarleton had shown what could be done when well-trained troops were properly used against very superior numbers of rebels.

After Saratoga, when he had become so vulnerable to opposition attacks, Germain’s impatience had driven him to become ever more strident and dogmatic. Now with Britain faced by these new threats he became increasingly dictatorial. He had always tended to interfere, but now he moved very close to an attempt to exercise direct control from London over a war 3,500 miles away. He was one of the architects of a tragedy whose roots were to lie in the conflict of personalities.

Clinton, who, unlike Germain, realized that he could not supervise personally a campaign so far from New York as the Carolinas, had agreed to permit Cornwallis to report direct to London. He had also given him freedom of action but laid down the overall policy that whatever his junior general did, he was not to risk losing Charleston or South Carolina.

It was heady news that Ross brought back from London to Cornwallis. Clearly he was soon to be commander in chief under especially glorious circumstances. In fact, Germain sent a message to Clinton that if he could not “remain in good humor,” his resignation would now be acceptable, but Clinton did not then act on the suggestion. His friends reported that there were press attacks on him at home; all the signs indicated that he was being shouldered out. If he left his post now, it would be under conditions of cold criticism, so he ignored Germain’s hint.

Buoyed up by the new confidence in London, Cornwallis completed his plans for his big strike north. As soon as Leslie brought up the reinforcement from Charleston, he would have an army of 4,000 men. Since General Nathanael Greene, who had now replaced Gates as rebel commander in the South, had barely 3,000, many of them unreliable militia, the British would be a far superior force.

Greene was a highly able general, and he had Daniel Morgan, who, as the British had already discovered, was probably, after Arnold, the most brilliant of the rebel field officers. Greene could not risk a straight confrontation but he could threaten Cornwallis’ offensive. This he did by splitting his army, normally regarded as bad tactics in traditional warfare, and placing the two sections on the British flanks where already he had militia guerrillas operating.

If Cornwallis moved forward, he would be in danger from both sides. If he tried to solve the problem by striking at either rebel force, the other would be free to sweep through South Carolina. Daniel Morgan commanded one unit of 1,000 men high up the Broad River, far to the west of the British camp at Winnsboro. Greene himself was with his main army, commanded by General Huger, which now moved to the Pee Dee River to the east of Cornwallis’ position.

If Cornwallis was to advance, he had to destroy one of them, and the force he chose for his target was Morgan. On January 7, having heard that Leslie had marched from Charleston, Cornwallis put his troops in motion slowly and very carefully, moving northwest between the Broad and Catawba rivers, keeping a wary eye on Greene, who was now in his rear.

Believing that Greene’s scope for action would be temporarily curbed by the approach of Leslie from the southeast, he left a strong garrison at Camden and sent Tarleton with a big detachment up the west side of the Broad River to find Morgan. His orders were to defeat him or to drive him across the Broad River, where Cornwallis could pounce on him.

That was the theory. In fact, Morgan was on the Pacolet River much farther west than Cornwallis had expected. Also, it was not the weather for campaigning in Carolina. Because of the heavy rains, the many rivers that flowed down from the Appalachians had flooded over their banks and turned normally passable swamps into lakes. By January 12 Tarleton knew where Morgan was—or, rather, where he had been, for he was on the move all the time. But he could not attack him because the fast swollen waters of the Enoree were impassable. Impatiently, while his scouts ranged up the river searching for a crossing place, he lay camped on a plantation waiting for the flood levels to subside.