Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/20

210 WORKMEN AND HEROES nymic replies. In his letters Arnold showed the burning sense of wrong from which he believed himself (and with a certain amount of justice) to be suffering. He had, when all is told, received harsh treatment from his country, considering how well he had served it in the past. Even Irving, that most dispassionate of historians, has called the action of the court-martial just mentioned an " extraor- dinary measure to prepossess the public mind against him." Beyond doubt, too, he had been repeatedly assailed by slanders and misstatements. The animosity of party feeling had more than once wrongfully assailed him, and his second mar- riage to the daughter of a man whose Tory sympathies were widely known had roused political hatreds, unsparing and headstrong. But these facts are merely touched upon to make more clear the motive of his infamous plot. Determined to give the enemy a great vantage in return for the pecuniary indemnity that he required of them, this unhappy man stooped low enough to ask and obtain from Washington, the command, of West Point. Andre, who had for months written him letters in a disguised hand under the name of John Anderson, finally met him, one night, at the foot of a mountain about six miles below Stony Point, called the Long Clove. Arnold, with infi- nite cunning, had devised this meeting, and had tempted the adventurous spirit of Andre, who left a British man-of-war called the Vulture in order to hold converse with his fellow-conspirator. But before the unfortunate Andre could return to his ship (having completed his midnight confab and received from Arnold the most damning documentary evidence of treachery) the Vulture was fired upon from Teller's Point by a party of Americans, who had secretly carried cannon thither during the earlier night. Andre 1 was thus deserted by his own country- men, for the Vulture moved away and left him with a man named Joshua Smith, a minion in Arnold's employ. Of poor Andre's efforts to reach New York, of his capture and final pathetic execution, we need not speak. On his person, at the time of his arrest, was found a complete description of the West Point post and garrison documentary evidence that scorched with indelible disgrace the name of the man who had supplied it. On September 25, 1780, Arnold escaped to a British sloop-of-war anchored below West Point. He was made a colonel in the English army, and is said to have received the sum of ,6,315 as the price of his treachery. The command of a body of troops in Connecticut was afterward given him, and he then showed a rapacity and intolerance that well consorted with the new position he had so basely purchased. The odium of his injured countrymen spoke loudly through- out the land he had betrayed. He was burned in effigy countless times, and a growing generation was told with wrath and scorn the' abhorrent tale of his tur- pitude. Meanwhile, as if by defiant self-assurance to wipe away the perfidy of former acts, he issued a proclamation to " the inhabitants of America," in which he strove to cleanse himself from blame. This address, teeming with flimsy prot- estations of patriotism, reviling Congress, vituperating France as a worthless and sordid ally of the Crown's rebellious subjects, met on all sides the most coi^ temptuous derision. Arnold-passed nearly all the remainder of his life eleven