He reaffirm’d his hope to bring “A” & “B” together to “his” side. The tide had turn’d severely against the Iroquois. In reprisal for the massacres of Wyoming & Cherry Valleys, the “Americans” in May burnt the castles of the Onondagas. In August the Butler Rangers & the Mohawks were badly beaten at Newtown, near Elmira. And in the autumn, “American” troops swept thro the Finger Lakes & Genesee Valley country, destroying the castles, livestock, & orchards of the Cayugas & the Senecas, some 3,000 of whom, including the Brants, fled to Fort Niagara for refuge. The only hope now for the Six Nations, in Father’s view, was absolute British control of New York from Long Island to Lake Erie. And the best way to that control was the capture of the American post which dominated the Hudson Valley: West Point. But the post was heavily defended, if indifferently commanded; Clinton was sensibly reluctant to try it by storm…
Burr’s loyalty proved, if not unshaken, still immoveable: if he felt any attraction at all to the British side (so he replied to my father’s inquiry) it was the chance to live in New York with such clever company as Major André, the comical poet; but he expected to be able to move there as an American before very long. Arnold, on the other hand, was altogether disaffected when the court-martial, tho dismissing all the substantive charges, directed Washington to reprimand him on the two smallest counts, not to offend the Executive Council of Pennsylvania. As hundreds of Iroquois starved at Niagara, and as my father & Major André together readied for the New York press a topical parody of the old Scottish ballad of Chevy Chase (call’d “The Cow-chase”), my father was urging Arnold to demand from General Washington command of West Point by way of vindication of his honor, and negotiating with André, on Arnold’s behalf, the terms of that post’s betrayal!
By summer, when Arnold took command, the three of them had workt out the details of the proposal; little more was needed save signatures on the relevant documents & ground-plans of the fortifications.
A meeting was arranged at Haverstraw on the night of the autumnal equinox. John André, fetcht to the site on a British vessel, met Benedict Arnold under a flag of truce, deliver’d to him safe-conduct papers to New York, letters of commission, & details of the British attack to be made within a few days; he received from Arnold the plan of the fortress and disposition of the garrison. Before he could return to his ship, it was fired upon desultorily in the dark; my father, who had come ashore with André, signal’d the captain to drop downriver & await them; that worthy mistook the signal & return’d toward New York, leaving the two men stranded behind American lines. My father left André with Arnold & went ahead to scout safe passage overland. Next day the Major set out, in civilian disguise, carrying a false passport given him by Arnold. He got as far as Tarry town, almost out of danger, when my father, hurrying to rendezvous with him, fell in with two American militiamen on routine highway-watch, and to cover his own identity was obliged to show forged papers establishing himself as a New York state militiaman, one Van Wart. Minutes later they spotted André and, despite my father’s encouraging them to let the stranger pass, decided on a thoro search. In his stockings they found the incriminating plans.
The best Father could do was insist on taking the papers immediately to General Arnold, “to warn him of the impending attack.” Major André, no hand at intrigue, doubtless assumed that Father would destroy the evidence en route and thus put Arnold in position to order him releast. He did not betray “Van Wart’s” identity even when, to their chagrin, the militiaman in charge decided to hold the papers himself whilst my father notified General Arnold of the spy’s capture & the plann’d assault. He could then do nothing for poor brave André, only make good his own & Arnold’s escape to the British sloop-of-war Vulture.
When the treason came to light, Washington, embarrast by his earlier defence of Arnold, felt obliged to show no mercy to André, who was hang’d as a spy on 2 October. The whole British army went into mourning; in recognition of his poetical talents, a plaque in André’s honor was placed in Westminster Abbey. Joel Barlow, the newly-ordain’d Chaplain of the Massachusetts Brigade, preacht a fiery sermon on the treason of his former acquaintance, a sermon so aflame with patriotic indignation & literary ambition that its author was invited to witness his fellow poet’s execution at West Point on the following day and, shortly thereafter, to dine with General Washington & his staff. Of André, Barlow wrote in a letter home that he had never seen “a politer gentleman or a greater character of his age,” and that the Major died “with an appearance of philosophy & heroism.” But he was altogether more moved by the literary prospects which his chaplaincy appear’d to be opening: he seized the occasion of Washington’s dinner to lay upon the company Book I of The Vision of Columbus & a prospectus of the books to come.
I mention this coincidence, & this letter, because it argues against the notion entertain’d in some humors by my mother: that the man hang’d as John André was Henry Burlingame IV. Mother came to this notion out of mere despair, for we had no word from Father for a long while after André’s capture. Indeed, our subsequent communications were all of a less reliable character than those before; likewise Mother’s testimony, as unhappiness took its toll upon her judgement. Soon after Major André’s execution, the picaroon Joseph Whaland reappear’d down in the Maryland marshes and renew’d his piratical depredations on behalf of the British. We went down there in ’81 and ’82, my 6th & 7th years, and sometime during our stay my mother was visited by this Whaland. Him too she imagined in some weathers to be her lost husband. But Joseph Whaland, while elusive, resourceful, & ubiquitous, was more uncouth than Pontiac and could scarcely read, far less make verses. If he was perhaps my mother’s occasional lover, he was not her husband.
A likelier candidate is the anonymous author of the “Newburgh Letters” of 1783. Cornwallis had surrender’d at Yorktown; we had lost the war to the Americans; the two armies had disengaged whilst Ben Franklin negotiated with George III’s ministers in Paris. Burr had married the widow of a British officer and was preparing to move his law practice from Albany to New York as soon as the British evacuated that city; General Arnold, having burnt Richmond & attack’d New London for his new employers, was isolated & unhappy in England; Barlow, married & settled in Hartford, was grinding out Columbus’s vision and, having the good business sense to dedicate it to Louis XVI, was successfully drumming up an eminent list of subscribers. The back of the Iroquois was broken: they linger’d hopeless about Niagara, waiting for permission to relocate in Canada. Only Whaland’s picaroons, marauding freely all over the lower Chesapeake, still fought the war. Washington’s army, which he was holding in the Hudson Highlands until New York had been evacuated, was restless. The war was over; their pay was in arrears; Congress had no money; the Constitution had not yet been written; the political situation was in a flux. Colonel Nicola, in army headquarters at Newburgh, had already suggested that Washington assume the title of king, and the General’s famous letter of rebuke (27 May 1782) assured his leadership of whatever form of government the new nation adopted. Then appear’d in print, also at Newburgh, two unsign’d letters exhorting the army to depose Washington, march on Philadelphia, force Congress to pay their arrearages, & establish a triumvirate of military officers to govern the country.
The prime mover of this call to sedition was that same General Horatio Gates who had so tried Arnold’s patriotism after the victory at Fort Stanwix; Gates had delegated to his aide-de-camp, John Armstrong, the drafting of a call to mutiny. But Armstrong was no penman, and the texts of the letters are replete with signals from his & Burr’s old friend from Princeton, Henry Burlingame IV. And while Joseph Whaland’s last-ditch piracies cannot be construed in any way as strategic (on the contrary, they led Maryland gunboats into Loyalist hideouts on Tangier & Deal Islands, and dangerously close to Bloodsworth Island), the Newburgh proposals, regardless of their issue, were clearly in keeping with Father’s declared strategy of dividing & weakening the infant nation. Unfortunately, Washington exercised restraint, declared his sympathy for the grievances voiced in the letters, declined to seek out & punish their author & instigator, and successfully persuaded his officer corps to patience until the army could be demobilized.