A Sorry Old Affair

THE TRAITOR AND THE SPY (431 pp.) --James Thomas Flexner--Harcourt, Brace ($5.75).

Even in a day when the traitor has become a headline staple, the name of Benedict Arnold remains the U.S.'s symbol of ultimate treachery. His was the classic sellout, the shocker that reduced a national hero to a despised knave. Yet there are still those ready to defend him as a maligned soldier who was goaded into villainy, and schoolteachers in his home state of Connecticut have complained that it becomes increasingly difficult to present him as a traitor.

This week there is black news for Arnold's sentimental defenders. In The Traitor and the Spy, Author James Thomas Flexner (Doctors on Horseback, A Short History of American Painting) has drawn their hero--and quartered him. His is the most carefully researched study of the Arnold-Andre story so far published, more searching even than the late Carl Van Doren's Secret History of the American Revolution, which showed Arnold for what he was. Cool, reasoned, and highly readable, The Traitor and the Spy may well stand as the last word on the subject.

Cash on the Barrelhead. That Benedict Arnold, apothecary, merchant, and self-made soldier was a hero on the battlefield has never been made more clear. In Connecticut, in Canada, on Lake Champlain and at Saratoga, he fought with the kind of superb gallantry that lesser men might call foolhardy. But Arnold off the field was a different man. Vain, querulous and greedy, he loved rank at least as much as he loved his country, and was not above using his position to line his pocket through fishy and degrading commercial deals. That he betrayed his country for reasons of political principle, Author Flexner shows to be sheer nonsense. Arnold wanted cash on the barrelhead (-L-10,000 plus -L-20,000 for West Point and an annual stipend of -L-500) and drove a Yankee bargain. And he never ceased complaining that he never got a fair price from the British for his treachery.

Another legend that dies hard is that Arnold's wife, lovely Peggy Shippen of the "heavenly bosom," was an innocent bystander. Author Flexner shows that she was bosom-deep in the mess from the start, and egged her husband on. On the evidence, Flexner suggests that the idea of turning traitor may have been hers in the first place. As much a woman as a conspirator, she added pretty feminine requests for silks and satins to her husband's treasonable letters to Major John Andre. That she had known Andre when the British held her native Philadelphia is certain; that they were old flames is not proved. But Peggy Shippen Arnold kept a lock of Andre's hair until the day she died.

Gibbet & Knot. Major Andre of the 54th Foot Regiment became the goat of the sorry affair. Handsome, cultivated, a poet-painter as well as adjutant general of the British Army in America, he was as eager for glory as Arnold. Let the American traitor turn over the fortress at West Point through Andre, and the young English major would be firmly set in his army career for life. Caught in civilian clothes at the very edge of success, tried and convicted as a spy, he gave the world a classic lesson in how a brave and debonair soldier should meet his death. Marching to his execution, on a hill west of Tappan, N.Y., he remarked to his captors: "I am very much surprised to find your troops under such good discipline, and your music is excellent."

He had hoped to be shot as a soldier, but when he faced the gibbet, hundreds heard him say in a clear voice: "I am reconciled to my fate, but not to the mode." He adjusted the knot himself.

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