Peggy Arnold May Have Faked a Breakdown to Fool Washington
She tangled her hair, screamed about spirits, and accused Washington of trying to kill her baby.
American Scandal · Benedict Arnold | The Execution | 4On the afternoon of September 25, 1780, Peggy Arnold laid her infant son in his crib at Robinson House, the West Point headquarters where her husband commanded.
She tousled her hair into a mess, loosened her morning gown, opened the bedroom door, and screamed for help.
Historians and the dramatization suggest she may have planned the scene. In that account, she had spent the day thinking about what she would do when General George Washington learned of her husband's betrayal.
That morning her husband, General Benedict Arnold, had learned that his British contact had been caught carrying documents describing West Point's fortifications, some written by Arnold himself. Arnold had fled for the Hudson River, leaving Peggy to face Washington.
Colonel Richard Varick, Arnold's 27-year-old military secretary, stumbled from his sickbed with a fever to find her collapsed on her knees in the hall.
Peggy told him they meant to murder her baby son, Edward. When Varick tried to lift her, she shrieked and pulled away.
She said her husband was gone, carried into the sky by spirits. In reconstructed dialogue, Peggy tells Colonel Varick, “They put hot irons in his head,” and says the irons bedevil her too.
Varick promised to bring Washington, the commander of the American army, to cure her. Peggy went limp and let him lead her back to bed to wait.
When Washington entered, Peggy was still in her gown with her hair tangled. She stared at him and said he was not Washington at all.
She clutched Edward tighter and accused the general of being sent to murder her child. Asked where her husband was, she rolled her eyes and pointed upward, insisting he had gone through the ceiling.
Washington, who had just learned of Arnold's plan to surrender West Point to the British, did not know what to make of her.
He decided she was an innocent young mother, abandoned that morning and broken by disgrace. He did not interrogate her about the plot, or press her on what she knew.
He went downstairs to dinner and told his officers that Mrs. Arnold was sick and the general was away.
By then Arnold had escaped down the Hudson on the HMS Vulture. He left letters insisting Peggy knew nothing and asking Washington to protect her.
Peggy had a choice, to join Arnold in British-held New York or go back to her relatives in Philadelphia. She chose Philadelphia, preserving the appearance of innocence she had tried to create upstairs.
Questions people ask
Was Peggy Arnold actually involved in the treason plot?
Most historians now believe she did. She had known British Major John Andre socially in Philadelphia, and scholars say she served as a go-between for Andre and her husband for more than a year. Washington never charged her.
What happened to Peggy Arnold afterward?
She returned to her family in Philadelphia, then later joined Arnold in New York. After the war the couple moved to England with their sons. She died in London in 1804 at age 44, three years after her husband.
Who was the British contact Arnold was working with?
Andre was a 30-year-old British Army major and adjutant general who negotiated with Arnold. Captured in civilian clothes with West Point papers in his boot, he was convicted as a spy and hanged at Tappan, New York, on October 2, 1780.