So in Book No 11 for 2013 Treacherous Beauty, the authors Mark Jacobs and Stephen H. Case make the case (no pun intended, well maybe a little) that the subject of the book was the Scarlett O’Hara of the Revolutionary War: “a woman whose survival skills trumped all other values. Had she been a man, she might have been arrested, tried and executed. And she might have become famous. Instead, her role was minimized and she was allowed to recede into the background – with a generous British pension in hand” the Treacherous Beauty is Peggy Shippen, Mrs. Benedict Arnold!
John Andre
Once again, much like I felt after reading about the assassinations of both Garfield and McKinley I felt like saying, “Hey why didn’t I learn this in school”. We all learned that Arnold was a traitor and was going to allow the British to capture West Point and split the colonies and block their path from north to south, but did we learn that Mrs. Arnold was a co-conspirator and probably introduced Arnold to British Adjunct General John André who was Arnold’s British contact. Peggy had spent considerable time with Andre when the British were occupying Philadelphia!
Among the other things that I really didn’t know was the way that the conspiracy fell apart and Arnold fleeing down river from West Point into the arms of the British with the colonists hot on his heels or the capture of John André. I thought it was interesting that André was told by General Clinton, his commanding officer, not to: wear a disguise, not to go into enemy territory and don’t carry any documents – André did all three and it cost him dearly! I also discovered that Arnold and Peggy had children 5 surviving to adulthood with several serving in the British military and losing their lives fighting for their adopted country?
All in all Treacherous Beauty: Peggy Shippen, The Woman Behind Benedict Arnold’s Plot to Betray America was an enlightening read for anyone interested in American History! Here’s what James L. Nelson, author of Benedict Arnold’s Navy says about the book:
“At last, a serious work on one of the most fascinating and little known women in American history! Peggy Shippen was so much more that the wife of the famous traitor—she was a women with a foot in two worlds, an American whose life serves as a perfect illustration of the wild complexities of the Revolution. With Treacherous Beauty Mark Jacob and Stephen H. Case have done ample justice to the life and times of their subject with this fair-minded, well researched, and finely crafted biography, a gift to students of the Revolution eager to dig beneath the well worn surface of that conflict’s history.”
