Word: traitor
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Gibbet & Knot. Major André of the 54th Foot Regiment became the goat of the sorry affair. Handsome, cultivated, a poet-painter as well as adjutant general of the British Army in America, he was as eager for glory as Arnold. Let the American traitor turn over the fortress at West Point through André, and the young English major would be firmly set in his army career for life. Caught in civilian clothes at the very edge of success, tried and convicted as a spy, he gave the world a classic lesson in how a brave and debonair soldier...
...TRAITOR AND THE SPY (431 pp.) -James Thomas Flexner-Harcourt, Brace...
Even in a day when the traitor has become a headline staple, the name of Benedict Arnold remains the U.S.'s symbol of ultimate treachery. His was the classic sellout, the shocker that reduced a national hero to a despised knave. Yet there are still those ready to defend him as a maligned soldier who was goaded into villainy, and schoolteachers in his home state of Connecticut have complained that it becomes increasingly difficult to present him as a traitor...
This week there is black news for Arnold's sentimental defenders. In The Traitor and the Spy, Author James Thomas Flexner (Doctors on Horseback, A Short History of American Painting) has drawn their hero-and quartered him. His is the most carefully researched study of the Arnold-André story so far published, more searching even than the late Carl Van Doren's Secret History of the American Revolution, which showed Arnold for what he was. Cool, reasoned, and highly readable, The Traitor and the Spy may well stand as the last word on the subject...
...that dies hard is that Arnold's wife, lovely Peggy Shippen of the "heavenly bosom," was an innocent bystander. Author Flexner shows that she was bosom-deep in the mess from the start, and egged her husband on. On the evidence, Flexner suggests that the idea of turning traitor may have been hers in the first place. As much a woman as a conspirator, she added pretty feminine requests for silks and satins to her husband's treasonable letters to Major John André. That she had known André when the British held her native Philadelphia...