On this day in 1780, George Washington rode up to Benedict Arnold's headquarters expecting breakfast with a trusted general, and instead walked into the discovery that his most brilliant officer had just tried to sell the Revolution to the enemy. Arnold escaped by a matter of minutes. It was one of the most dramatic mornings of the entire war.
The trap had been closing for two days. On September 23, militiamen had captured Major André with the West Point plans in his boot. Word of the arrest, and the incriminating papers, was now working its way through the American command, but through a chain of confusion and bad luck, a warning also reached Arnold himself first. On the morning of September 25, Arnold was at his headquarters, the Robinson house across the river from West Point, waiting for Washington, who was riding in after a conference in Hartford.
Then a messenger arrived with the news Arnold had been dreading: André was taken. Arnold understood instantly that the papers in André's boot were in his own handwriting, that the whole plot was exposed, and that he had perhaps minutes before he was arrested for treason and hanged. Washington was already almost at the door.
Arnold moved fast. He excused himself, went upstairs to his wife Peggy, told her the plot had collapsed, and then bolted. He raced down to the river, threw himself into his barge, and ordered his oarsmen to row for their lives downriver to the Vulture, the British warship waiting on the Hudson. He got away clean, rowing right past the defenses he had been planning to betray, to the safety of the enemy fleet. By the time Washington's men understood what had happened, the traitor was gone.
And then came the scene that people never forget. Washington arrived, toured West Point, found things oddly out of order, and then the captured documents caught up with him, André's confession and the plans in Arnold's own hand. The full magnitude of the betrayal hit him all at once. Benedict Arnold, the hero of Saratoga, the man he had trusted with the most important fortress in America, had conspired to hand it, and quite possibly Washington himself, to the British. Washington, normally so composed, was stunned. He is said to have turned to those around him and asked, almost in disbelief, "Whom can we trust now?"
Upstairs, Arnold's wife Peggy put on a spectacular performance, appearing to lose her mind with hysterical grief, convincing Washington and his officers that she was an innocent, distraught victim who knew nothing of her husband's crimes. They pitied her and let her go. Only much later did evidence suggest she had likely been in on the plot from the beginning. In the moment, her act helped complete Arnold's escape and protected her.
So the plot failed, but the traitor got away. West Point was saved, André would hang, and Arnold would live on as a British general, his name becoming the American synonym for betrayal. September 25 is the day the mask came off, the day Washington learned that the greatest battlefield general the Revolution had produced had become its greatest traitor, and stood there asking the hardest question a commander can ask: after this, whom can we trust now?