a life devoted to honor, I feel confident that in this my extremity, your Excellency will not be deaf to a prayer the granting of which will soothe my last moments.  Out of sympathy for a soldier, your Excellency will, I am sure, consent to adapt the form of my punishment to the feelings of a man of honor.  Permit me to hope that, if my character have inspired you with any respect, if I am in your eyes sacrificed to policy and not to vengeance, I shall have proof that those sentiments prevail in your heart by learning that I am not to die on the gallows.”

With a harshness of which there is no other example in his life, and of which he appeared to always preserve a painful recollection, Washington remained deaf to his prisoner’s noble appeal:  Major Andre underwent the fate of a spy.  “You are a witness that I die like a man of honor,” he said to an American officer whose duty it was to see the orders carried out.  The general did him justice.  “Andre,” he said, “paid his penalty with the spirit to be expected from a man of such merit and so brave an officer.  As to Arnold, he has no heart. . . .  Everybody is surprised to see that he is not yet swinging on a gibbet.”  The passionate endeavors of the Americans to inflict upon the traitor the chastisement he deserved remained without effect.  Constantly engaged, as an English general, in the war, with all the violence bred of uneasy hate, Arnold managed to escape the just vengeance of his countrymen; he died twenty years later, in the English possessions, rich and despised.  “What would you have done if you had succeeded in catching me?” he asked an American prisoner one day.  “We would have severed from your body the leg that had been wounded in the service of the country, and would have hanged the rest on a gibbet,” answered the militiaman quietly.

The excitement caused by the treachery of Arnold had not yet subsided, when a fresh cup of bitterness was put to the lips of the general-in-chief, and disturbed the hopes he had placed on the reorganization of his army.  Successive revolts among the troops of Pennsylvania, which threatened to spread to those of New Jersey, had convinced him that America had come to the end of her sacrifices.  “The country’s own powers are exhausted,” he wrote to Colonel Lawrence in a letter intended to be communicated to Louis XVI.; “single-handed we cannot restore public credit and supply the funds necessary for continuing the war.  The patience of the army is at an end, the people are discontented; without money, we shall make but a feeble effort, and probably the last.”