The Commentaries

Benedict Arnold. Philadelphia, in the Province of Pennsylvania. Thursday, 8 April 1779.

Benedict Arnold is remembered in the Realm for his conduct at Saratoga. The war ended in 1779, while he was still its hero.

The Universal Register: The Four-Year War

He stood for the vows. He had made up his mind about that a month before, and nobody had been able to argue him out of it, and in the end nobody had tried.

The Judge’s front parlour on Fourth Street had been cleared of half its furniture and filled with candles and Shippens, and Arnold stood at the end of it in his blue coat with Major Clarkson’s arm under his left hand and his weight on his right leg, which was the good one, and the clergyman read the service at the pace of a man who had been told that the bridegroom was lame and had decided, out of kindness, to hurry. Arnold could have told him not to. The leg was two inches shorter than the other and the shoe on it was built up by a cobbler in Second Street to make the difference, and it hurt, as it always hurt, from the hip to the heel; but he had stood on it at worse times than this, and for worse reasons, and he would stand on it now until the thing was done.

She was eighteen. She stood beside him in white silk with her hands folded and her eyes on the book, very fair and very composed, and once, when the clergyman came to love, cherish, and to obey, she looked up at him sideways from under her lashes with an expression he could not read and did not need to, because he had seen it before, across a dinner table in the winter, and had gone home that night and written her a letter, and written it again, and torn up both.

The Judge stood behind her and gave her away. He did it gravely and correctly, as he did everything, a tall cautious man in a good wig who had sat out the occupation and the evacuation and the return of the Congress without saying a word to anybody that could be repeated, and who had written to a relation in December, as Arnold knew because Peggy had told him laughing, that his youngest daughter was much solicited by a certain General, and that whether anything came of it would depend on circumstances. Arnold had written to him in the autumn. He had said that his fortune was not large, but sufficient; that his public character was well known and his private one, he hoped, irreproachable; and that our difference in political sentiments will, I hope, be no bar to my happiness. The Judge had not answered that part. He had answered the rest, and the circumstances had been settled between them over Madeira in February, and here they were.

Then it was done, and he said the words, and she said hers, and the Shippens came forward in a body to kiss her, and Clarkson brought the camp stool he had kept behind the door, and Arnold sat down on the nearest chair and put his foot up on it, in front of everybody, and smiled at them all.

He was thirty-eight. He had a wife again, and a house on the Schuylkill that he had bought a fortnight ago and had not yet slept a night in, and a coach and four in the street outside, and he owed more money than he had ever owed in his life; and five days before, on the Saturday, the Congress of the United Colonies had resolved, at the instance of the Council of Pennsylvania, that he should be tried by a court-martial.

He had asked for one. That was the joke of it, and he was the only man in Philadelphia who seemed able to see it.

In February, when the Council published its eight charges in every newspaper in the city, he had gone to camp with his leg on fire and asked General Washington for a court-martial to clear his name, and the General had promised him one; and he had come home thinking that would be the end of it. A court of officers would hear the charges, and laugh at most of them, and he would be acquitted with a compliment, and Mr Reed could go back to governing Pennsylvania, at which he was very bad, instead of governing Benedict Arnold, at which he was worse.

It had not been the end of it. The Council had carried its charges to the Congress instead, with a great deal of paper, and the Congress had sent them to a committee, and the committee, under Mr Paca of Maryland, had reported on the seventeenth of March, very fairly as he thought, that two of the charges were fully obviated by clear and unquestionable evidence, that most of the rest were not matters for the Congress at all, and that the one about the militia sergeant he had himself admitted. He had admitted it. A sergeant of militia, a lad of good family, had been sent to fetch a barber to headquarters, and had complained of it to his father, who was Mr Matlack, who was the Council’s secretary; and out of that, and out of a pass for a lady to go into New York, and some wagons, and a ship called the Charming Nancy that he had let into port from the enemy’s lines on a paper signed at Valley Forge, Mr Reed had built eight charges and printed them in the newspapers and sent them to every one of the United Colonies, as though Arnold were a highwayman.

On the eighteenth he had resigned the command of the city, for the recovery of his health and wounds, and handed it to General Hogun, a quiet North Carolina man who did not know what he was being given. On the twenty-second he had bought Mount Pleasant, the Macpherson house on the river, which John Adams had once called the most elegant seat in Pennsylvania, and settled it on himself for his life and after that on his wife and children, so that whatever the Council took from him it could not take that. And on the third of April the Congress, which had been told by its own committee that most of the charges were nothing, had bowed to Pennsylvania anyway, because Pennsylvania was the province it sat in and Mr Reed had been to see a great many members, and sent the whole bundle to the Commander-in-Chief for trial.

So he would have his court-martial. He had asked for it, and he would have it, on the Council’s charges and at the Council’s time, which would be whenever Mr Reed had found enough witnesses; and in the meanwhile every man in Philadelphia who passed him in the street would know that he was a general officer under charges, and would look at the coach and four, and at the leg, and draw his own conclusions.

He had not told Peggy any of this in so many words. She had read it in the newspapers like everybody else. She had said, on the Sunday, that her father thought the Congress very weak, and that she thought Mr Reed a very vulgar man; and then she had asked him whether he would be married in his uniform, and he had understood that the subject was closed, and been grateful.

The house in Market Street was not his. He had to remind himself of that sometimes.

It belonged, as far as he could make out, to Mr Richard Penn, who had been Lieutenant-Governor once and was now in London, and had been there since he carried the Congress’s petition across in seventy-five; or to Mrs Penn, whose mother had built it, which came to the same thing. Sir William Howe had lived in it all the winter of the occupation. Arnold had taken it the week he came into the city, because it was the best house in Philadelphia and the military governor of Philadelphia ought to live in the best house, and he had filled it with servants and furniture and a French cook, and given dinners in it that were talked of, and had not been asked for a shilling of rent by anybody, because the owners were in London, and old Mrs Masters, who had built it and lived three streets off, had not yet found the courage.

He brought her home to it that night, in the coach, the half-mile from Fourth Street, with the Shippen candles going out behind them and the town dark on either side. She sat beside him with her hands in her lap and said that the house was too large and she would change everything in it, and that she did not care for the French cook, and that he was to put his leg up on the seat this instant or she would tell her father; and he put it up, and sat with his head back against the leather and his eyes shut, and listened to the horses, and was happy.

He had shown her the drawing once, or she had shown it to him: a head in profile, very fine, with her hair dressed high in the fashion the officers had brought, done by a Captain André of General Grey’s staff, who had drawn half the young ladies of Philadelphia that winter and written verses to the other half. She had kept it in a portfolio with her music. She had said that Captain André was very charming and very silly and drew rather better than he wrote, and that he was now on Sir Henry Clinton’s staff at New York, people said, and very much in his confidence; and Arnold had looked at the drawing for a long time, because it was a good one, and had not thought about Captain André again for nearly a month.

The court-martial was put off.

He had known that it would be. It had been ordered for the first of May, at camp, and at the end of April it was put off, because Pennsylvania wished for more time to bring its witnesses; and he understood, reading the letter at his table in Market Street with the leg up on its stool, that it would be postponed again, and again, as long as it suited Mr Reed, which would be as long as there was a campaign to postpone it for, which would be as long as the war went on.

The war, as far as he could see, was going to go on for ever.

He could read a balance. The money bought almost nothing. France and England fought over islands while the Congress asked for a Parliament neither army could force the King to grant. The men making money from paper needed the quarrel to continue. When it ended, men who had never been shot at would settle the terms, and give the soldiers certificates for their wages. He had certificates already.

He knew who would be remembered when it was done. He had read Mr Gates’s dispatches from Saratoga in the newspapers, in the hospital at Albany, with his leg in a box. He had not been in them.

On the fifth of May he wrote to the General. He did not write it well; he never wrote well when he was angry, and he was angry when he wrote it. He wrote that he had made every sacrifice of fortune and blood, and become a cripple in the service of his country, and had little expected to meet the ungrateful returns he had received of his countrymen; and he read it over and thought it was the truest sentence he had written in his life, and sent it.

Then he sent for Mr Stansbury.

Joseph Stansbury kept a china shop. He sold crockery and glass and mirrors, very good ones, out of London before the war and out of anywhere he could get them since, and he wrote verses for the newspapers, comic ones, about the Congress, which were printed without his name and which everybody knew to be his. He had stayed in the city through the occupation and done very well out of the British officers, and stayed after it and done rather less well out of the Americans, and he came to Market Street on a fine evening in the first week of May, by the garden door, as he had been asked to, with his hat in his hand and his round pink face carefully arranged into an expression of having no idea why he was there.

Arnold kept him standing for a minute, which was a habit. Then he told him to sit.

He had thought a good deal about how to say it, and in the end he said it plainly, because that was the only way he had ever said anything. He said that Mr Stansbury was known to have friends in New York. He said that Mr Stansbury might, if he chose, carry a message to those friends, and through them to Sir Henry Clinton, from a general officer of the Continental army who was disposed, on proper terms, to serve His Majesty; who could be of more use to His Majesty than any man in America; and who wished to know what His Majesty’s commander would think such service worth.

Stansbury did not drop his hat. Arnold gave him credit for that. He sat with it on his knees and looked at the general officer, and at the leg on the stool, and at the room, which had been Sir William Howe’s; and then he said, quite steadily, that he believed he could get to New York within the week, by Elizabethtown, if the general would give him a pass.

“You will have one,” said Arnold. “For your china.”

When he had gone Arnold sat for a long time in the dusk without ringing for candles.

He did not think he had done anything wrong. He had turned it over every way, in the nights since February, and he could not find the wrong in it. He had taken up arms in seventy-five against the King’s ministers, not against the King. Every man in the Congress had said so, and gone on saying so, and said it to France twice, in so many words, when France offered them the other thing. The King had never proclaimed them rebels. He had never put a man of them out of his protection, nor offered their slaves their freedom, nor done any of the things a King does to a rebellion; he had received their petition and kept their Grievances and gone on calling them his subjects, and his commissioners had come out last summer and offered them everything they had asked for in seventy-five except the one thing they had thought of since. Arnold had been the King’s subject at Quebec. He had been the King’s subject at Saratoga, by the Congress’s own account of itself. He would be the King’s subject in New York. A man who went from the one to the other was not crossing over to an enemy. He was going home, by a shorter road than the Congress meant to take, and on better terms.

That was what he told himself, in the dusk, in Sir William Howe’s room in Richard Penn’s house; and it was a good argument, as good as any of Mr Reed’s; and he noticed that he did not tell it to Peggy.

Stansbury came back at the end of the month with a letter.

It was from Captain André. It had been written at New York on the tenth, at the house of a clergyman named Odell, who wrote verses too, and it was very civil and very long and very careful, and Arnold read it upstairs in his dressing room with the door shut, by a candle, twice.

Sir Henry Clinton was obliged to the general for his sentiments. Sir Henry was persuaded that a man of the general’s abilities and situation might render very signal services, and that such services would be rewarded in proportion to their consequence; but he would wish, before anything was settled, to know more particularly what services the general had in contemplation. In the meantime there should be a correspondence. It should be in cipher. The key should be a book that both parties possessed and that nobody would remark in a gentleman’s library: Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, or failing that Bailey’s Dictionary. Each word to be given by three numbers, for the page, the line and the word in the line. The general would be known in the correspondence as Monk.

Arnold laughed out loud at that, alone in the dressing room, and then stopped, because he did not want to wake her.

He had a Blackstone. Every gentleman had a Blackstone. His was in four volumes, calf, in the library downstairs, bought for the look of it in New Haven ten years ago, and he had never read a page. He went down for it in his stockinged feet with the candle, one hand on the banister, stopping on every second stair because the leg would not take the stairs any faster, and brought the first volume back up under his arm, and sat down with it at the little table, and opened it, and began.

It was slow work. He had not known how slow. Every word had to be looked for, and found, and counted to; and Blackstone had not written his Commentaries for the convenience of a man offering himself to Sir Henry Clinton, and was full of words like hereditaments and escheat and very short of the plain English Arnold wanted. He had to hunt through forty pages for army. He found service easily enough, and King on almost every page, and a great many of the words he wanted were not where a man would look for them, or not in the first volume at all. He wrote that he was disposed to serve. He wrote what he knew of the army’s strength, which was a good deal, and of the summer’s plans, which was something, because he had dined with officers who talked; and he wrote that he would expect to be indemnified for any loss his service occasioned him, and that he would wish to know the terms before he went further. Then he counted it all into numbers, three to a word, in a column down the page, and it looked like a merchant’s tally, which he supposed it was.

At about one in the morning, hunting through the first book for a word he never found, he came on a page he read through by accident, the way a man reads a sign over a shop.

The king can do no wrong.

He sat and looked at it. It was in a chapter on the King’s prerogative. Blackstone called it an ancient and fundamental maxim; he said that whatever was exceptionable in the conduct of public affairs was not to be imputed to the King, nor was he answerable for it personally to his people; and a little further on, that the King was not only incapable of doing wrong, but even of thinking wrong, and could never mean to do an improper thing.

He thought that it was what the Congress had been saying for four years. It was the whole of their case, the reason they could fight the King’s army and drink the King’s health and not be hanged for it: that the King could do no wrong, and it was all the ministers. It had never occurred to him before that it worked the other way. If the King could do no wrong, then a man who served the King could not be doing wrong either. It was in Blackstone.

He did not use the sentence. There was no word in it he needed. He turned the page, and went on hunting, and found the word, and counted it.

It went to New York in the first week of June, in Stansbury’s luggage, on a sheet made out in Stansbury’s hand as an invoice for glass, with the numbers between the lines in an ink that could not be seen until the paper was held to the fire.

He did not watch it go. He was at Mount Pleasant that morning with Peggy, walking very slowly along the terrace above the river, because she had said that she wished to see the house she had been given, and that he was to come and tell her where everything was to go.

It was a fine morning, already warm. The Schuylkill went by below them, brown and quick, and the house stood behind them on its rise, square and handsome, with its red quoins and the two little houses that flanked it, and the long view down the river. She walked with her hand on his arm and talked about curtains, and about her sisters, and about a dinner she meant to give at which Mr Reed was not to be asked, and he walked beside her with his stick and his built-up shoe and agreed with everything, and was conscious all the time of the letter going north on the Elizabethtown road at a walking pace, in a box of invoices, with his name on it in numbers.

At the end of the terrace she stopped and looked down at the water.

“You have been writing very late,” she said. “I see the light under the door.”

“Accounts,” he said.

“Of course.” She did not look at him. “You must not tire yourself. My father says you work harder than any man in Philadelphia, and he does not mean it as a compliment, but I do.” Then she turned round, and smiled at him, and tucked her hand further into his arm. “Come and tell me where the harpsichord is to go.”

He went. He did not know what she knew. He had never told her anything, and she had never asked, and he could not have said, walking back along the terrace on her arm in the June sun, which of them that arrangement suited better.