Treacherous Beauty Read online

  Despite trappings of elegance, the Shippens were considered to be an acceptably circumspect Quaker family. Edward’s wife and daughter signed the Quaker women’s annual declaration against fancy language, striped and gaudy clothing, overlong scarves, and hair piled high upon their heads.

  Four generations later, when Peggy Shippen was dressing for dances, such a pledge against extravagance would have been unthinkable. But perhaps Peggy could relate to another aspect of her ancestor’s life—how her great-great-grandfather experienced the family’s first major scandal in North America.

  A year after Edward’s second wife died, he married a third woman in a hurried fashion. Something had caused the woman’s “apron to rise too fast,” as one Quaker put it. She was pregnant. The sixty-seven-year-old newlywed was labeled an “old lecher” by that same Quaker, and an excruciating two-year period of reproach and humiliation ensued. Finally the Quakers accepted Edward’s testimony of sinfulness, and the text of his confession was distributed to other Quaker groups in New England, New Jersey, and Maryland, as well as overseas to Barbados, Antigua, and even London. That admission restored Edward to social acceptability. Before he died at age seventy-four, he was offered another term as Philadelphia mayor, but declined.

  Next came Peggy’s great-grandfather, Joseph, a country gentleman who fell away from the Quakers and left little of note to history except his money and his eldest son Edward, Peggy’s grandfather.

  This Edward, like the first Edward, had a talent for business. He married the daughter of his father’s second wife—more proof that the family by this time had rejected Quaker values. Under Quaker law, marrying a stepsister was the same as marrying a sister—the sin of incest. But that was no matter to Edward; he was a Presbyterian.28

  The young Edward was apprenticed to a wealthy Philadelphian who slipped on the ice and shattered his hip. Bedridden for three months and relying on crutches thereafter, the businessman gave Edward his power of attorney and made him a partner.

  Their business involved trading with Native Americans for furs and skins, including deer, raccoon, bear, mink, and otter. Those furs were shipped to England, and in return came knives, axes, gunpowder, blankets, and other goods in demand in North America. The enterprise involved a great deal of credit, forcing Edward to track down debtors, a job that increased his visibility if not his popularity.

  Edward plowed much of his money into real estate in the city and well beyond, acquiring land that later became the town of Shippensburg in south-central Pennsylvania. In 1744 he became mayor of Philadelphia. In 1758 he became a founding trustee of the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton University.

  Edward’s business and political interests thrived, but the pursuit of love proved disastrous for him, as it had for his grandfather and would for his granddaughter. His stepsister-wife died at age twenty-nine, leaving him with three small children. He waited eight years to remarry and then chose a woman whose husband had departed for the Caribbean island of Barbados several years earlier and had not been heard from since. The man was presumed dead, and Edward obtained the opinion of the Reverend Aaron Burr, president of the College of New Jersey, that the woman was free to marry him.29

  Weeks after the wedding, an unconfirmed report from Barbados indicated that the bride’s first husband was indeed alive. Edward’s business partner urged the newlyweds to split up, but instead they “agreed to separate beds,” in Edward’s words.

  For several years their anguish remained private and there was no sign of the missing first husband. But around 1750, authorities learned of the possibility that he remained alive, and a grand jury indicted Edward for adultery and his wife for bigamy. The crime of bigamy was punishable by thirty-nine lashes and life imprisonment, though it is doubtful that the wife of such a prominent person would have suffered that fate. In any case, executive clemency resolved the legal issues: The governor pardoned them both.

  But another form of punishment was administered through public humiliation—through the whispers of “so many spiteful enemies who are always wrongfully condemning us,” as Edward’s son Joseph described them. Edward’s wife departed to live with her parents while he and his friends collected witness statements to try to establish that the missing man’s funeral had taken place in Barbados. Eventually they claimed they had enough proof, and the unfortunate couple were reunited.

  Edward and his wife left the judgments of Philadelphia for a peaceful life in the frontier town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where they enjoyed many happy and vigorous years. Edward grew asparagus and peaches and danced a jig at a wedding at age sixty-nine. He was a great lover of learning and of life. A family history recalled that Edward believed that “a little wine upon the strawberries improves them very much.”30 An in-law and law clerk wrote: “In a minute, he relates to me ten different stories, interlarding each narrative with choice scraps of Latin, Greek, and French.”31

  Edward’s retreat to Lancaster provided a vital resource for historians, since his absence from the city compelled him to exchange frequent letters with his son, letters that tell the family’s story in depth and intimacy.

  Edward’s son—Peggy’s father—signed his letters to his father as “Edw. Shippen Jr.” Though generally assessed as being less colorful and original than his father, this Edward was a deep thinker and scholar in his own right.32 Given every chance at success, he took full advantage. He first became an apprentice to a respected lawyer, Tench Francis, who served for a time as attorney general of Pennsylvania. Then, at age nineteen, Edward received an expensive and invaluable gift from his father—a legal education in England.

  Getting there was an adventure. In a letter to his brother Joseph, Edward described a winter ocean voyage in which a storm nearly overturned the ship. “The sailors were so disheartened that they would not work a stroke, but quitted the deck, every man but one, and retired to their cabins to pray.”33 Eventually Edward and his fellow passengers arrived in London, “where we have had the pleasure of congratulating one another upon our deliverance.”

  Edward attended the Middle Temple, so named because it was home to the Knights Templar, the Roman Catholic military order that was disbanded in the 1300s but has survived as the subject of numerous documentaries and contemporary thriller novels.34 Edward enjoyed his own set of thrills in London, achieving an education unattainable in North America and having an enjoyable time while doing it.

  His father’s generous nature toward him is evident in a letter that urged him not to let his studies get in the way of having a good time: “I much approve of your conduct, for you will have an opportunity of reading books on your return, but not so good a one to read men; you may remember my advice to you upon parting (among other things) was to rise early and to study hard till dinner time that you might have the afternoons to look about you; and notwithstanding that you will cost me a great deal, yet if I had money to spare I would send you as much more.”35

  Peggy’s father toured Paris and Versailles and wrote that he enjoyed speaking French in “the metropolis of the polite worlds.” Then he returned to Philadelphia to make a career. It would have been difficult for him to fail, with so many blood relatives and in-laws in so many positions of power. The Shippens were virtual royalty, despite the occasional scandals. Happy to use his family connections to his advantage, Edward Jr. became a judge of the Admiralty Court, which enforced law from London in the colonies. He also served on the Philadelphia Common Council and was chief clerk of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

  But like the Shippens before him, he was not cynical or calculating about love.

  He considered Margaret Francis, the eldest daughter of his mentor Tench Francis, to be “the most amiable of her sex.” While many men of the era would have appraised a prominent lawyer’s daughter as an excellent catch, Edward thought his prospects were so high that he could have found an even wealthier family to join. He virtually apologized to his fat
her for his choice of a wife.

  “If I had obtained a girl with a considerable fortune, no doubt the world would have pronounced me happier,” but he preferred “internal satisfaction and contentment of the mind,” he wrote.36

  Margaret Francis came with a dowry of five hundred pounds, and Edward spent much of it on his library. As a gift, Edward’s father gave the young couple the fine house on Fourth Street.37 The newlywed Shippens promptly began their family. First came Elizabeth, the sister to whom Peggy was closest. Then Sarah and Mary, and yet another Edward. And then Peggy.

  The childhood of Peggy Shippen is not well documented. We know she received the common lessons for upper-class girls—in sewing, dancing, drawing, and music. It is unlikely that Peggy ever attended school, which would have been a rare privilege for a young woman in that era, though Peggy would send her own daughter to school decades later. Well-off children were more likely to be tutored. In any case, Peggy was well armed intellectually, and the quality of her later writings demonstrates her command of the English language.38 As an adult, she told her father that she had enjoyed “the most useful and best education that America at that time afforded.”39

  Sadly for historians, any letters written by Peggy in the first eighteen years of her life were lost or destroyed in the panic after Benedict Arnold’s treason was discovered. It is unknown whether her family and friends got rid of her correspondence because it contained incriminating evidence or because they feared that any innocent sentence could be twisted and wielded as a weapon against her.

  Peggy’s family and friends may have destroyed a part of her story, but enough remains from the surviving letters of her later years to indicate that she possessed a razor-sharp intelligence and a practical nature, the kind of pragmatism that would have sent her earlier letters to the fire. The destruction of her letters protected the myth of Peggy’s innocence—a most fortunate occurrence for her.

  Peggy was indeed lucky in life, except in the timing of her birth, which came only a few years before a wrenching war would ruin her chances at happiness. And she was lucky, except that her beauty brought her into the highest circles of fame, and intrigue, and danger. And she was lucky, except that when she found love, it was with a man incapable of returning the fidelity she showed him.

  Which means that Peggy Shippen, a princess of Philadelphia, wasn’t lucky in the least.

  Edward Shippen, Peggy’s father, steered a middle course through a bloody revolution and ultimately won the job of Pennsylvania chief justice—but lost his daughter to exile. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  CHAPTER 2

  No Safe Haven

  Peggy was not raised to be famous. She was raised to be a cultured woman, a credit to her family, a supportive wife to a worthy husband, and a vessel for the greatness of her children.

  “Needlework, the care of domestic affairs, and a serious and retired life, is the proper function of women, and for this they were designed by Providence,” declared Caleb Bingham’s American Preceptor, a textbook of the era that denounced modern female tendencies such as “a soft indolence, a stupid idleness, frivolous conversation, vain amusements, and a strong passion for public shows.”40

  Far from rebelling against the roles that society assigned to her, Peggy embraced them. She even adopted the self-deprecating writing style common to females of that period, with phrases such as “weak woman as I am.”41 But before she was ready for the “retired life” of a married woman, she was eager to sample the amusements of youth and the pursuits by handsome suitors.

  She seemed to grasp the importance of her good looks and her family’s affluence in the quest for the best match. Decades later she wrote bluntly that her daughter Sophia was well-read and cultured but there was “little chance of her marrying, having but a moderate share of beauty and no money.”42

  The young Peggy had neither of those problems. Instead, she was perfectly qualified to attract male attention in an era of great public fascination with the flowering of young women, as reflected in a 1754 almanac poem:

  At fourteen years young females are

  contriving tricks to tempt ye

  At sixteen years come on and woo,

  and take of kisses plenty,

  At eighteen years full grown and ripe,

  they’re ready to content ye,

  At nineteen sly and mischievous,

  but the Devil at one and twenty.43

  For Peggy and other young women gaining sexual power, there was peril in socializing. Any indiscretion might ruin a young woman’s prospects for a good marriage. And a pregnancy out of wedlock would likely make a hasty marriage decision for them. In some New England towns in the late eighteenth century, up to a third of the brides were pregnant at the altar, according to one study.44

  Women were likely to take the brunt of the blame for any sexual misconduct. According to the prevailing attitudes, females were less ruled by reason than males were, and thus were more prone to lustful temptation.

  Group activities were encouraged, such as polite conversation in the parlor, where young people of the opposite sex could be watched. For upper-class young ladies, sewing circles were a popular and safe way to pass the time, with one girl reading aloud while the others cut and stitched cloth. Peggy was known to gossip on occasion, but was discreet enough to maintain close and loyal friendships.

  Though Peggy would later be viewed as a scandalous party girl who dallied with men on both sides of the revolutionary struggle, a far more sympathetic portrait of her also survives. By these accounts, she was a homebody who doted on her family.

  A relative praised her as “so gentle and timorous a girl.”45 The daughter of a Shippen family friend recalled how her mother was impressed by Peggy’s “affectionate and exemplary conduct” and “great purity of mind and principles.” The friend’s daughter also noted: “Miss Peggy Shippen was particularly devoted to her father, making his comfort her leading thought, often preferring to remain with him when evening parties and amusements would attract her sisters from home. She was the darling of the family circle, and never fond of gadding. There was nothing of frivolity either in her dress, demeanor, or conduct, and though deservedly admired, she had too much good sense to be vain.”46

  In addition to her high regard for her father, Peggy adored her “Grandpapa” and looked forward to his visits to the city.47 Peggy’s grandfather likewise treasured the occasions when Peggy and her family made the two-day journey to Lancaster. When Peggy was fourteen, her grandfather wrote that he would duck out of his work as a court official when she visited next: “I will ride out more than once to meet her, though it is even on a court day.”48

  Undoubtedly, the two men who dominated Peggy’s childhood tried to shield her from the harsh uncertainties that steadily enveloped her family, her city, and all of North America.

  Peggy was two years old when a treaty ended the French and Indian War, part of a transatlantic struggle between Britain and France known in Britain as the Seven Years’ War. The British won the war and collected Canada as a prize, but they amassed debts that they tried to pay by imposing taxes on the American colonists. In the treaty that ended the fighting, the British also agreed to protect Indian lands by limiting westward expansion—another point of irritation with the colonists.49

  The Stamp Act, which imposed a tax on paper products, was passed by the British Parliament in early 1765, when Peggy was four years of age.50 Opposition to it was vocal in Philadelphia but achieved its full volume in Boston—a dynamic that would continue as New England’s radicals led the other colonists away from moderation and ultimately to revolution.

  “You observe by the public papers that great riots and disturbances are going forward in New England in opposition to the Stamp Act and stamp officers,” Peggy’s father wrote to his own father. “I think the act is an oppressive one, and I wish any scheme for a repeal could be f
allen on; but I am afraid these violent methods will only tend to fix chains upon us sooner than they would otherwise come. . . . Poor America! It has seen its best days.”51

  As the Stamp Act was about to take effect, he wrote his father again, noting that his newborn son “had just time enough to breathe about three weeks the air of freedom; for after the first of November we may call ourselves the slaves of England.”52

  Disapproving of the Stamp Act but also disapproving of its opponents, Peggy’s father simply avoided doing any business that would force him to take a stand. When the Stamp Act was rescinded the next year, Edward exulted to Peggy’s grandfather: “I am stopped with the joyful news of the Stamp Act being repealed. I wish you and all America joy.”53

  This easing of tensions was short-lived, and merely preceded such incidents as the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party and such measures as the “Intolerable Acts.” Even so, the idea of independence from Britain seemed a remote possibility, and was opposed by the Shippens and many if not most of their fellow colonists.

  The growing grievances led to a gathering of politicians—the First Continental Congress in 1774. Philadelphia was picked as the meeting site for many reasons. It had the lodging and amenities, and it was a good place to balance the conservatives of the South against the fire-breathers of New England.

  On September 28, 1774, Peggy’s father brought one of the delegates home for dinner. The guest was a tall, wealthy forty-two-year-old Virginia landowner who had become a land surveyor, then had gone into the military and barely survived the French and Indian War, with two horses shot from under him and four bullets whizzing through his coat.54 The man was George Washington, and his life was soon to become perilous again, with war less than a year away.