[Footnote 46:  General Lafayette mentions a circumstance not previously known to the author, which serves to illustrate the character of Washington, and to mark the delicacy of his feelings towards even the offending part of that sex which is entitled to all the consolation and protection man can afford it.

The night after Arnold’s escape, when his letter respecting Andre was received, the general directed one of his aids to wait on Mrs. Arnold, who was convulsed with grief, and inform her that he had done every thing which depended on him to arrest her husband, but that, not having succeeded, it gave him pleasure to inform her that her husband was safe.  It is also honourable to the American character, that during the effervescence of the moment, Mrs. Arnold was permitted to go to Philadelphia, to take possession of her effects, and to proceed to New York under the protection of a flag, without receiving the slightest insult.]

The mingled sentiments of admiration and compassion excited in every bosom for the unfortunate Andre, seemed to increase the detestation in which Arnold was held.  “Andre,” said General Washington in a private letter, “has met his fate with that fortitude which was to be expected from an accomplished man and a gallant officer; but I am mistaken if at this time Arnold is undergoing the torments of a mental hell.  He wants feeling.  From some traits[47] of his character which have lately come to my knowledge, he seems to have been so hardened in crime, so lost to all sense of honour and shame, that, while his faculties still enable him to continue his sordid pursuits, there will be no time for remorse.”

[Footnote 47:  This allusion is thus explained in a private letter from Colonel Hamilton—­“This man (Arnold) is in every sense despicable.  In addition to the scene of knavery and prostitution during his command in Philadelphia, which the late seizure of his papers has unfolded, the history of his command at West Point is a history of little as well as great villanies.  He practised every dirty act of peculation, and even stooped to connexions with the suttlers to defraud the public.”]

From motives of policy, or of respect for his engagements, Sir Henry Clinton conferred on Arnold the commission of a brigadier general in the British service, which he preserved throughout the war.  Yet it is impossible that rank could have rescued him from the contempt and detestation in which the generous, the honourable, and the brave, could not cease to hold him.  It was impossible for men of this description to bury the recollection of his being a traitor, a sordid traitor, first the slave of his rage, then purchased with gold, and finally secured at the expense of the blood of one of the most accomplished officers in the British army.

His representations of the discontent of the country and of the army concurring with reports from other quarters, had excited the hope that the loyalists and the dissatisfied, allured by British gold, and the prospect of rank in the British service, would flock to his standard, and form a corps at whose head he might again display his accustomed intrepidity.  With this hope he published an address to the inhabitants of America, in which he laboured to palliate his own guilt, and to increase their dissatisfaction with the existing state of things.