Defiant Brides Read online

  ALSO BY NANCY RUBIN STUART

  The Muse of the Revolution:

  The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and

  the Founding of a Nation

  The Reluctant Spiritualist:

  The Life of Maggie Fox

  American Empress: The Life and Times

  of Marjorie Merriweather Post

  Isabella of Castille:

  The First Renaissance Queen

  The Mother Mirror: How a Generation of

  Women Is Changing Motherhood in America

  The New Suburban Woman:

  Beyond Myth and Motherhood

  Mrs. Margaret (Peggy) Shippen Arnold

  Mrs. Henry Knox

  A NOTE ON CURRENCY

  TO UNDERSTAND CURRENCY VALUES of late-eighteenth-century Colonial America and Great Britain in contemporary terms, I offer the following rough conversion methods: to convert late-eighteenth-century American dollars to contemporary American dollars, multiply the figure by 25; to convert late-eighteenth-century British pounds, multiply the figure by 150. For the former conversion, I relied upon the website MeasuringWorth and for the latter on Pounds Sterling to Dollars: Historical Conversion of Currency, maintained by Eric Nye of the University of Wyoming. Both conversions are approximations since monetary values changed during the years described in Defiant Brides.

  NRS

  CONTENTS

  List of Internal Pictures

  Preface

  PART I Defiant Brides

  1 “The Handsomest Woman in America”

  2 “The Best and Tenderest of Friends”

  3 “The Delight, and Comfort of Her Adoring General”

  4 “Our Sweetest Hopes Embittered by Disappointment”

  5 “Fortitude under Stress”

  PART II Tender Wives

  6 “As Good and Innocent as an Angel”

  7 “A Momentary Pang”

  8 “Haste Happy Time When We Shall Be No More Separate”

  9 “Yet We Wade On”

  10 “My Regret at This Cruel, Dreadful Separation”

  PART III Shadow Sisters

  11 “Illusive Bubbles”

  12 “An Irresistible but Invisible Force”

  13 “I Do Not Suffer My Spirits to Overcome Me”

  14 The Brides’ Legacies

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  LIST OF INTERNAL PICTURES

  FRONTISPIECE Mrs. Margaret (Peggy) Shippen Arnold. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP). Mrs. Margaret (Peggy) Shippen Arnold (DAMS 2819), Shippen Family collection of prints and portraits (3127). Mrs. Henry Knox. Silhouette by unknown artist, circa 1790. From Silhouette Collection. Silhouette number 1.51. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Author’s note: This silhouette of Lucy Flucker Knox is the only historically authentic image known to date.

  CHAPTER 2 Henry Knox, 1750–1806. Engraving by Hezekiah Wright Smith, ca. 1783–1790. Permission of the Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

  CHAPTER 3 Col. Arnold Who Commanded the Provincial Troops Sent to Quebec Through the Wilderness of Canada and Was Wounded in Storming that City Under General Montgomery, by Thomas Hart, print by William Abbatt, Tarrytown, New York, issued in London March 26, 1776. Permission of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library.

  CHAPTER 7 Major John André. Self-portrait. Etching by J. K. Sherwin, 1784. Permission of the Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

  CHAPTER 9 Portrait of Margaret Shippen Arnold and Child, by Daniel Gardner, c. 1783–1784. Courtesy of the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent Museum, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection.

  PREFACE

  LOVE STORIES FROM EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY America are rare and often fragmented. Fortunately enough of the correspondence of Lucy Flucker Knox (1760–1824) and Margaret (Peggy) Shippen Arnold (1760–1804) has been preserved to trace their controversial marriages and dramatic lives.

  Born four years apart to wealthy parents in pre–Revolutionary Boston and Philadelphia, Lucy and Peggy were intelligent, well-educated girls. As each developed into an attractive teenager in the mid-1770s, the political ferment of the American Revolution reached the boiling point. In the midst of that turmoil, both might have married men of their privileged class and led docile, if historically invisible, lives.

  Thankfully that did not happen. As the title of this double biography, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married, implies both teenagers bucked social convention. One married radical patriot and poor bookseller Henry Knox in 1774; the other wed the then-military hero Benedict Arnold in 1779. Coupled with the young women’s fateful marriages was their feistiness. Under different circumstances, Lucy and Peggy might have become friends.

  For generations, the books devoted to the Founding Fathers and the Revolution’s military leaders have dismissed both women as mere footnotes to history, either as laughable or trivial helpmates married to Knox and Arnold. A close examination of their lives tells quite a different story, revealing Lucy and Peggy as remarkably resilient women who intimately witnessed and participated in the Revolution’s turbulent course. The same spirit that impelled the annually pregnant Lucy to follow Henry Knox through the Revolution’s army camps also drove her mirror opposite, Peggy, to support Arnold’s betrayal of America and subsequently troubled life in England and the loyal colonies in North America later known as Canada.

  Superficially Lucy’s patriotism seems as commendable as Peggy’s treason is condemnable. Yet that is not quite fair. For all our glorification of its origins, the Revolution was not universally supported by the American colonists. An estimated one-third of those living in America’s thirteen states in the years following the Battle of Lexington and Concord doubted the wisdom of independence from the mother country. Some citizens remained Loyalists. Others, unnerved by the economic hardships of the war, hedged, declaring themselves neutralists. It was thus natural that as an enamored eighteen-year-old bride, Lucy would side with her husband, Henry Knox, to support the American Revolution. It was equally understandable that the teenaged Peggy Shippen would sympathize with her politically disappointed bridegroom, Benedict Arnold, to betray America to the British.

  That twinned blend of youthful defiance and dedication to their men, though a hallmark of adolescent passion in any age, drew me to research the lives of Lucy Flucker Knox and Peggy Shippen Arnold in the context of the American Revolution. At first I suspected that the two women must have met. Arnold, after all, had gallantly escorted Lucy and her toddler from New Haven in late spring 1778 to join her husband in Valley Forge. Eight months later, Henry Knox rode to Philadelphia to meet with Congress. From there he enthusiastically wrote his brother about Arnold’s engagement to the wealthy, beautiful, and accomplished Peggy Shippen. Lucy, however, had not accompanied him; then in the last weeks of pregnancy, she had remained in the Knoxes’ temporary home near the Middlebrook army camp. As their lives diverged, the two women had no other occasion to meet, although they knew about each other through their husbands. Nor have letters between Lucy and Peggy subsequently been discovered.

  Defiant Brides, nevertheless, traces Lucy and Peggy’s initially parallel lives, from those as smitten newlyweds to mature wives and mothers. While researching this book I found several frustrating gaps in each of set of their correspondences. Lucy rarely wrote to anyone other than her husband, and then only when separated from him during the war. Today
, most of her letters are preserved in archives, especially at the Gilder Lehrman Institute and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  Peggy’s correspondence from her youth and the early years of her marriage was lost, a consequence of Shippen’s decision to destroy it to protect her from accusations as Arnold’s co-conspirator. Fortunately, the Shippen family began saving Peggy’s letters after the September 1783 Peace of Paris, which formalized the British surrender. Today the Historical Society of Pennsylvania retains Peggy’s correspondence from the last twenty-one years of her life. Many of those letters also appear in Lewis Burd Walker’s 1900–1902 series in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.

  During the Revolution, Lucy and Peggy stood on opposite sides of the political schism, one as a staunch patriot, the second as a spy; one in shabby homespun, the other in silken English gowns; one in a log hut, the second in a luxurious townhouse; unwitting counterparts who lived dramatically different lives in the service of connubial love.

  As women, their personal evolutions also stand in sharp relief. Subsequent to the Revolution, the exiled Peggy endured hisses and taunts as a suspected accomplice to Arnold’s treason; crossed the Atlantic three times; excused her husband’s public, often fractious enmities with peers and business associates; and, after his 1801 death, resolutely paid off his debts. During those same years, Lucy’s devotion to Knox, her legendary hospitality, the deaths of ten of her children, and her obsession with cards transformed her into a superficially formidable, but ultimately sympathetic, character.

  Their attitudes towards their husbands were equally contrasted. Although lamenting her separations from Knox during the war, Lucy refused to be intimidated by his promotions as General George Washington’s chief of artillery and brigadier-general of the Continental army. In one of her letters, written during the siege of New York in 1777, she insisted upon having an equal voice in their marriage. Bluntly, she wrote that Knox must not “consider yourself as commander in chief of your own house, but be convinced . . . that there is such a thing as equal command.”1

  In contrast was Peggy’s solicitous attitude towards Arnold—“the General,” as she referred to him. During the tense days preceding a July 1792 duel in London between the contentious Arnold and the feckless Earl of Lauderdale, the frightened Peggy practiced restraint. To do so, as she later wrote her father, Judge Edward Shippen, in Philadelphia, had required “all my fortitude . . . [to] prevent [me from] . . . sinking under it, which would unman him [Arnold] and prevent his acting himself.”2

  Their marital styles were as significant as their political sensibilities. As the following pages reveal, Lucy, for all her patriotism and personal losses, was a temperamental, often difficult mate; Peggy, a shrewd accomplice to Arnold’s treason, endured emotional and financial hardships with genteel restraint. It was my hope that their pairing in Defiant Brides would transcend the coincidence of their “defiant” marriages to reveal how lapses in one of them inadvertently highlighted admirable traits in the other.

  Is treason or betrayal of others forgivable if the rest of that person’s life seems admirable? Do sacrifices for patriotism—or for any other pro-social cause—excuse selfishness or insensitivities towards a loved one? To make such judgments must be left to you.

  My goal was to capture the lives of Lucy Flucker Knox and Peggy Shippen Arnold beyond their iconic portraits as patriot and traitor, respectively, and depict them as human beings, as vulnerable, fallible, and praiseworthy as we are today.

  PART I

  Defiant Brides

  1

  “The Handsomest Woman in America”

  DAWN BROKE GRAY OVER Philadelphia on May 18, 1778, nearly nine months after thousands of scarlet-coated British soldiers occupied the once-patriotic Revolutionary stronghold. Added to the morning’s gloom was the surprise arrival of a committee of scowling Quaker women at Edward Shippen’s townhouse on Society Hill. Dressed in somber dresses and bonnets, the Friends minced no words: Judge Shippen must forbid his daughters from appearing that afternoon at the British gala known as the “Mischianza.”

  Warily, the balding forty-eight-year-old attorney listened to the Quakers’ rant about the costumes his teenage daughters would wear—low-cut beaded and bangled gowns, their heads covered in feathered turbans suggestive of a Turkish harem. Those outfits hardly befit the daughters of the distinguished Judge Shippen, the women railed. Their appearance in such risqué outfits would taint the family name, prominent for four generations in Philadelphia society, finance, and politics.

  Edward Shippen listened politely, steeled against their lecture, knowing that the Quakers had scolded other parents of daughters selected for the Mischianza. Nor did their warnings about his reputation threaten the judge. The truth was that he had little to lose. Three years earlier, during the first tumultuous months of the Revolution, Philadelphia’s radical patriots had eradicated Pennsylvania’s Crown-appointed ruling body, the Provincial Council, upon whose upper legislature he sat. Then, on September 26, 1777, the government changed again. That day, General William Howe and his troops marched into the city. Nobody resisted. Within a matter of hours, the British occupied Philadelphia’s public buildings, its officers quartered in some of its finest homes while other, more raucous red-coated men gathered in the city streets and squeezed into its taverns.

  From Edward Shippen’s perspective, predicting the war’s outcome seemed as dangerous as the lightning rod invented by his former Junto Club associate, Benjamin Franklin. Given the new political climate, the judge pandered to Philadelphia’s latest rulers by inviting them to the drawing room in his home on South Fourth Street. There the officers met the Shippens’ pretty daughters and soon invited them to English-style dinners, balls, and plays. After the first dreary years of the war, that seemed only fair. The Shippens’ three teenagers, Peggy, Mary, and Sally, had been cheated out of Philadelphia’s glittering social life just as they were coming of age.

  Had the judge’s youngest, seventeen-year-old Peggy, overheard the Quakers’ lecture on May 18, she would have scoffed. Since early winter, the petite, gray-eyed blonde had gloried in her role as the toast of the British officers. To her delight, the dashing Captain John André often escorted her to dinners, promenades, and plays. Once, in a teasing flirtation, the trim, dark-haired gallant presented her with a lock of his hair encased in a gold locket.

  Another of Peggy’s social triumphs was a special invitation from A. S. Hammond, captain of the British flagship, the H.M.S. Roebuck, whose men piped Peggy aboard that vessel for dinner and a ball with other well-born young women. So lovely and demure was the Philadelphia belle that Hammond later admitted he and his fellow officers “were all in love with her.”1 Others, like Captain Francis Lord Rawson of the British army, insisted that Peggy was “the handsomest woman” in America.2 Heady with admiration, Peggy was consequently thrilled when she learned that André—the self-appointed organizer of British galas—had selected her, the youngest of Philadelphia’s beauties, for the Mischianza, to be held in honor of General Howe’s imminent departure for London.

  Ironically, the politics behind that event meant little to the Quakers who confronted Judge Shippen that May morning, for they prided themselves on neutrality. The Friends’ apolitical stance had disgusted the patriots, especially those who had served on the second Continental Congress. Among them was Massachusetts delegate John Adams who, in 1777, acidly wrote his wife, Abigail, that the Quakers were “as dull as beetles. From these neither good is to be expected nor evil apprehended. They are a kind of neutral tribe, or race of the insipid.”3

  How seriously Peggy considered the political fallout from her flirtations remains a matter of historical debate. Subsequently, scholars have pointed to the Shippen family’s reaction to her behavior as a clue to her loyalties. Why else would the family have destroyed all her letters written during the war? The few descriptions of Peggy from friends and relatives in that era do not reveal which side she favored in the Revoluti
on—the patriots or the Loyalists. At seventeen, that conflict may have seemed less relevant to Peggy than her desire for good times. Those who knew her in 1777 and 1778 simply describe her as an accomplished Philadelphia belle, skilled in needlework, music, drawing, and dancing, and fond of stylish clothes. But beneath those gauzy symbols of feminine charm lurked a sensible young woman. “There was nothing of frivolity either in her dress, demeanor or conduct,” recalled a family friend, “and though deservedly admired, she had too much good sense to be vain.”4 Subsequent to the Revolution, the Shippens saved Peggy’s letters supporting the opinion that she was intelligent, well-informed, and pragmatic.

  A few traces of Peggy’s youthful personality are also preserved in sketches by John André. Most famous is one of her that captures her china-doll beauty as she smiled coyly in her Mischianza costume.

  By early 1778, Peggy; her sisters, Mary and Sally; and friends like Becky Franks, Peggy Chew, and Becky Redman attended dances hosted by British officers at Philadelphia’s exclusive City Tavern, Assembly balls, and plays at André’s newly built Southwark Theatre. In winter the belles frolicked with scarlet-coated officers at skating parties and sleigh rides along the Delaware; in spring they appeared on the arms of their British beaux for outings, cricket matches, and horse races.

  Little harm would come from allowing their daughters to participate, Judge Shippen and his wife, Margaret Francis, had decided. At the least it provided the girls with diversion, a reward for the dull months they had spent with their parents in the countryside when militant patriots had ruled Philadelphia from 1775 through summer 1777. At best, their daughters’ popularity, especially Peggy’s, served as social insurance for the judge’s family in the event that the British won the Revolution.