[FN] Letter of Washington to General Arnold, August 3,1790. See, also, note of Sparks to the same, and other antecedent letters.
It would be foreign to the main design of the present work, to recapitulate the history of this memorable instance of the blackest treachery. Suffice it to say, that, after his arrest, the conduct of Andre was characterised by candor, manliness, and honor. He was tried by a board of officers, and convicted on his own frank confessions, without the testimony of a single witness. His main object, after he saw his destiny was inevitable, was to relieve himself from the reproach of having been guilty of any act of personal dishonor; and to show that in fact he had bean compelled to assume the disguise in which he was taken, by Arnold himself. And when he had expiated his error by his life, the feeling was almost universal, that the iron hand of the law-martial had fallen upon the wrong individual. For, although, in regard to Andre himself it was doubtless right, under the circumstances of the case, that justice should be inexorable; yet humanity cannot but weep over the hard fate of the victim, while it marvels that an inscrutable Providence did not so order events as to bring Arnold to the gibbet on which the youthful stranger so nobly died. "Never, perhaps, did a man suffer death with more justice, or deserve it less," was the remark of a gallant soldier who was in attendance upon him during his imprisonment; and the account of his character, written by that officer, and his demeanor during the trying scenes intervening between his arrest and execution, cannot be read without exciting emotions of high admiration and profound regret. [FN] Happy, however, was his fate, compared with that of the arch-traitor, whose moral leprosy, like the plague-spot, caused him to be shunned through life by all honorable men--an object of loathing and scorn, to fill--unregretted by anyone--a dishonorable grave!
[FN] The document referred to is a letter published in the Pennsylvania Gazette of October 25th, 1790, written, as was supposed, by Alexander Hamilton, at that time an Aid-de-camp to the Commander-in-chief. There is, either in the library or the picture gallery of Yale College, New-Haven, a likeness of Major Andre, sketched upon paper, by himself, but a short time before his execution.