Treacherous Beauty Read online

  Washington may have been an impressive guest at the Shippen home that day, though dinnertime was never his finest hour. One biographer described meals with him as “excruciating” and noted his habit of using his knife and fork as drumsticks, tapping on the table to cope with his unease at small talk.55

  Fourteen-year-old Peggy dined with Washington that day, and a family relationship was established that would later prove crucial to her freedom. She would admire him her entire life, writing after his death a quarter century later: “Nobody in America could revere his character more than I did.”56

  Certainly Washington didn’t consider Peggy’s family to be a collection of toadies subservient to the whims of King George III across the sea. But as the political atmosphere became increasingly polarized, the Shippens were often mislabeled as Loyalists. Of course, public opinion in general was ill-defined and volatile, allowing for radical activists like the Sons of Liberty to deliver inspiration through persuasive essays and impose fear through cruel mob tactics such as tar-and-feathering.

  In 1777, with the Revolutionary War under way, a writer identified only as “S.” in the Pennsylvania Packet newspaper divided the citizenry into five political categories:

  •The “Rank Tories” were defined as Loyalists who favored “unconditional submission to Great Britain.”

  •The “Moderate Men” preferred a continued place in the British Empire and took a stand “to hate the people of New England and to love all Rank Tories.”

  •The “Timid Whigs” were open to independence but pessimistic about the colonists’ ability to resist British power.

  •The “Furious Whigs” hurt the cause of liberty by their indiscriminate violence.

  •And the “Staunch Whigs” were depicted as heroes, resolute and resilient, who “would rather renounce their existence than their beloved independence.”57

  Peggy’s family fit into none of these categories neatly. Her father and grandfather might have been considered “moderate men” who opposed independence, but they had sympathy toward New England, not antipathy. When the Intolerable Acts were imposed to try to bring the colonists to heel, “Grandpapa” Shippen contributed ten pounds to ease the suffering of Bostonians. He also was active in Lancaster’s citizen committees, which aimed to build strength and solidarity as resistance to British rule grew.

  Peggy’s father would not go that far. Educated in England and seen as a symbol of the old guard, he was under the Patriots’ constant suspicion. But he was not a Loyalist; he was merely a Shippenist, seeking to preserve his family’s long-held privileges against any challenges from either liberty-minded firebrands or authority-imposing British officials.

  While the Shippens experienced life under severe political pressure, they did so with rich food in their stomachs and fine carpets underfoot. Peggy’s father wrote Edward Sr. that the boycott of British tea was inconvenient, forcing the family to adopt coffee drinking. His wife “has searched every shop in town for a blue and white china coffee pot, but no such thing is to be had, nor indeed any other sort that can be called handsome. Since the disuse of tea, great numbers of people have been endeavoring to supply themselves with coffee pots. My brother, having no silver one, has taken pains to get a china one, but without success.”58

  Soon the quest for a handsome coffee pot would be far from Edward’s mind. Events had started spinning out of control.

  In March 1775 Patrick Henry raised patriotic fervor by telling the Virginia Convention, “Give me liberty or give me death!” The next month in Massachusetts, the Revolutionary War erupted, with violent clashes of British forces and armed colonists at Lexington and Concord.

  Uncertainty reigned, but some members of the Shippen family finally took a stand. Peggy’s cousin Neddy Burd, who served as a law clerk to her father in Philadelphia, volunteered as a lieutenant in a Pennsylvania rifle battalion and set off for Boston to oppose the British, inspiring Peggy’s father to write a letter rebuking him. “I wrote him my sentiments about this step the other day,” Edward told his father, “and represented to him that not having been used to the woods; nor to hunting, nor to use of rifles, he would be deemed a very unfit person for that service, and that it would appear to all the world a ridiculous thing for a young man bred in an office to attempt to command riflemen, who are expected to be men bred in the woods and enured to hardships.”59

  Peggy’s grandfather also disapproved, but Neddy would not relent.60 The news was especially painful to the Shippens because he not only was a beloved cousin but also was romantically involved with Elizabeth “Betsy” Shippen, Peggy’s oldest sister.

  Another Shippen—Dr. William Shippen, the alleged “graverobber” who was Peggy’s father’s cousin—also cast his lot with the revolution, becoming director of hospitals for the Continental Army. And one of Peggy’s cousins on her mother’s side, Tench Tilghman, became a trusted aide to General Washington.61

  The Revolutionary War was a civil war, with many families deeply divided. But Peggy’s father tried to defy that painful reality by clinging desperately to neutrality. It was as if Edward had lashed his arms to two different ships that were leaving port in opposite directions.

  In early 1776, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense pushed the colonies well past the point of no return. Its sales in that year alone were estimated at a staggering half million—in other words, one copy for every five colonists.62

  Edward wrote to an in-law: “A book called Common Sense, wrote in favor of a total separation from England, seems to gain ground with the common people; it is artfully wrote, yet might be easily refuted. This idea of an independence, though some time ago abhorred, may possibly by degrees become so familiar as to be cherished. It is in everybody’s mouth as a thing absolutely necessary in case foreign troops should be landed, as if this step alone would enable us to oppose them with success.”63

  Indeed, the British were taking steps to remind the colonists of their military might. Two warships, the Roebuck and the Liverpool, came up the Delaware River in early May of 1776 to test Philadelphia’s defenses. A hurriedly assembled flotilla chased them away, with minimal casualties on both sides but enough booming of cannon to alarm the citizenry, including the Shippens.64

  Edward decided to lead his family’s retreat from Philadelphia.

  He picked an improbable new career—rural shopkeeper—and set up near Flemington, New Jersey, about fifty miles northeast of Philadelphia, on 260 acres of land featuring a home recently built by John Reading, former governor of the colony of New Jersey.65 Putting a happy face on a less than ideal situation, he described their new residence as a “fine house” on “a clever tract of land with a good deal of meadows.” Granted, the house would have to be shared with another family come winter, but there was no reason to complain.66

  It’s safe to say that Peggy loathed her rural exile. In a letter later in life, she made clear that she considered herself a city sophisticate, describing the prospect of associating with regular country people as “extremely painful” and the atmosphere in a country town as even worse, “chiefly composed of card-playing, tattling old maids, and people wholly unaccustomed to genteel life.”67

  But at least rural New Jersey seemed safe. Writing to an in-law, Edward declared: “Every moderate-thinking man must remain silent and inactive.”68 It was quite a contrast to Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty or give me death,” but it perfectly reflected Edward’s formula for survival.

  The shopkeeping was a failure, and the Shippens never felt at home. It is not difficult to imagine Edward and his wife enduring the grumbling of four daughters and a son who were accustomed to city comforts.

  Meanwhile, within two blocks of their home in Philadelphia, a crowd gathered on July 8 and heard the reading of a new document completed a few days earlier, a document that would transform the colonies and rewrite the Shippens’ lives. The Declaration of Indepe
ndence announced that the crown’s control was over. A new Pennsylvania constitution soon followed, abolishing the government that had brought the Shippens their wealth.

  There was, of course, the likelihood that the British would quash this uprising, as they had done with so many others as they extended their global empire. Many observers, especially in England, viewed the developments as little more than a fit thrown by a bunch of toddlers. “I look upon America to be our spoilt child,” said British general John Burgoyne.69 Even a delegate to the Continental Congress, John Dickinson, had embraced the metaphor nearly a decade earlier, urging colonists to “behave like dutiful children who have received unmerited blows from a beloved parent.”70

  Yet the American independence movement had grown up enough to be dangerous in all the colonies. For the first year of the war, combat was largely confined to the Boston area. But cannon, cleverly captured at Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in upstate New York by Colonel Benedict Arnold, were even more cleverly emplaced on Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston Harbor, frightening the British into sailing away.

  The king’s army went briefly to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then south to New York City, where heavy fighting resumed in August 1776. There were three major engagements: at Brooklyn, White Plains, and Fort Washington, near the east end of the present-day George Washington Bridge. Each battle was a disaster for George Washington and the Continental Army.

  One of the New York casualties was Neddy Burd, who by this time was the fiancé of Peggy’s sister Betsy. Word came back that Neddy had been killed in action. The news plunged the Shippens into grief, but then a more reliable report indicated that Neddy had been captured rather than killed.71 He was being held on one of the notorious prison ships off Long Island, where thousands died from malnutrition, scurvy, typhus, dysentery, and bayonetings by guards. Few prisoners lasted six months, and far fewer made it a year. Neddy was fortunate enough to be freed after three months.72

  The remnants of Washington’s army retreated across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. Peggy’s family also decided to leave New Jersey, but for a different reason. New Jersey’s legislature passed a measure in October “to punish traitors and other disaffected persons.” Edward was given two choices: renounce all allegiance to the king, or be tried for treason.

  The Shippens initially returned to their home on Fourth Street, but fears grew that Philadelphia might come under siege or fall to the enemy. There were even rumors that the city would be put to the torch rather than surrendered. The city’s Council of Safety advised that women and children flee the city to avoid “the insults and oppressions of a licentious soldiery” if the British should take Philadelphia.73

  Peggy’s father moved his family out of the city to a farm near the Schuylkill River four miles upstream from the Delaware. “I live near the Falls of Schuylkill, a very clever retired place,” he wrote his father.74 But both father and son were watching their wealth drain away, as he noted in the same letter: “I think another summer must necessarily show us our fate. If the war should continue longer than that, we are all ruined as to our estates, whatever may be the state of our liberties.”

  While Peggy and her family lived quietly near the Falls, her father feared seizure of their Fourth Street mansion as a barracks for colonial troops. He went into the city nearly every day “that I may be seen in and about my house, which is constantly opened every day, and has all the appearance of being inhabited, and is really lodged in by two or three women every night,” most likely his servants.75 “By this means I hope to escape the mischief,” he wrote.

  A most surprising development relieved British pressure on Philadelphia. On Christmas night, Washington and his troops crossed the Delaware and attacked Trenton, New Jersey, where the British had stationed a force of Hessian soldiers. The Hessians were expecting festivities, not hostilities, and about a thousand were captured along with a young Philadelphian named Edward Shippen, Peggy’s brother.

  The eighteen-year-old Edward had been on a business errand in New Jersey when he ran across three Loyalist cousins who persuaded him to join the British army with them. The cousins moved on to New York, leaving Edward with the Hessians in Trenton, where Christmas frivolity ensued until Washington spoiled the party.

  The young man’s capture, coming at a time when his father was desperately trying to avoid any appearance of Loyalist sympathies, might have proved disastrous to the entire family. But luckily for the Shippens, Washington determined that young Edward had taken no action against the colonial forces and that he was, in essence, a dolt. The gracious general released the young man, dispatching him to his family near the Falls.

  In explaining the incident, Peggy’s father showed himself to be a bit of a dupe, writing: “Though I highly disapproved of what he had done, yet I could not condemn him as much as I should have done, if he had not been enticed to it by those who were much older, and ought to have judged better than himself.”76

  Even so, Peggy’s father, who had briefly tried to turn over some business affairs to his son so that the family could make money, gave up the idea. He vowed never “to put it again in his power to trade or make any improper use of money.”77 From then on, it was clear to Peggy’s father that if he wanted to discuss business with one of his offspring, he would choose his youngest daughter.

  A higher priority than his wallet was his freedom, and that was under great threat as Pennsylvania’s revolutionary government rounded up suspected Loyalists. A group of militiamen showed up with a warrant for his arrest and were persuaded to relent only upon his pledge not to leave the farm or speak of politics. Later the State Council loosened the reins, allowing Edward to travel anywhere in Pennsylvania.78

  Though Peggy’s father must have felt vulnerable to arrest or banishment at any time, he was saved from such a fate by his many friends and admirers, such as Thomas McKean, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who declared his “special trust and confidence” in Edward’s patriotism.79

  By March 1777 it was obvious to Edward that the British forces of General William Howe would soon be in Philadelphia, with “General Washington’s army in no condition to prevent him.” Then, he predicted, the American army would lay siege “and the country will be laid waste by the two contending parties.”80 Peggy’s father, though not always astute about politics and war, was an accurate prognosticator this time. But he didn’t see a clear path to safety.

  “In this dreadful situation of affairs I am at a loss to know how to dispose of my family,” he wrote his father. “Advantages and disadvantages present themselves by turns, whether I determine to remain in Philadelphia or remove to a distance.”

  At some point, either before the British captured Philadelphia or immediately afterward, the Shippens moved out of the increasingly dangerous countryside and back into the city, which posed its own dangers.

  Improbably, the next nine months would be one of the most wonderful periods of Peggy’s life.

  CHAPTER 3

  Enter André

  The bells of the Shippens’ Christ Church—the bells that had killed that very first ringer back in 1754—were taken out of the city to prevent the advancing British from melting them down for ammunition.81

  But the belles of Philadelphia remained.

  Dressed in their fine gowns and high hair, Peggy Shippen and other young aristocratic women were ready to be courted by the sharply uniformed officers who conquered their city in the first weeks of autumn 1777.

  To most Americans, the times were grim and desperate. At least a dozen Tory spies and recruiters were executed that year, so many that 1777 was known as “the year of the hangman” because the sevens in 1777 looked like gallows.82 But to Peggy and her lavishly attired friends, the sevens might just as easily have represented bowing gentlemen asking them to dance.

  The British occupation, rather than spoiling the ladies’ party, simply brought a new set of admirers
and a new style and abundance of dances and dinners. A series of galas known as the Dancing Assembly had been a tradition in Philadelphia for three decades, serving the dual function of fun and social stratification. The families of import-export merchants were welcome; shopkeepers’ kin were not. Lawyers and doctors could join; artisans could not. The Assembly was tightly run. Dancers formed themselves into sets of exactly ten couples, first come, first served. Minuets were performed first, then country dances. If a gentleman or lady arrived alone, a partner would be assigned by lot, with no protest allowed. And the gentleman would be considered rude if he did not have tea with the lady the next day, to see if their relationship might go further. For those who preferred not to dance, card tables were provided. Wine, rum, and coffee were served, along with a modest supper consisting of tea, chocolate, and a hard cake called rusk.83

  But the Dancing Assembly system was far too tidy and controlled for a year like 1777. As the war brought social chaos to Philadelphia, the Assembly met irregularly, and enterprising British officers filled every vacuum with their own dizzying series of social events, creating an atmosphere of festivity that the city had never before seen. The British also brought new rules. While the provincial custom called for the ladies to keep the same dancing partner all night, the opposite was true with the British.84

  At the center of the celebration—and the new level of romantic competition—were four young ladies: two Peggys and two Beckys.

  There was Peggy Shippen, of course, and her friend Peggy Chew, whose father had served as attorney general and chief justice of Pennsylvania.85 Then there was Becky Redman, daughter of a former high sheriff of Philadelphia, and Becky Franks, daughter of a prominent importer who had brought the Liberty Bell to town.86