#general arnold

Lafayette’s rebuff so angered Arnold that he threatened to ship his American prisoners to the West Indies. When Lafayette sent lower-ranking officers to arrange the exchange, Arnold is said to have asked one of them, “What do you think the Americans would do with me if they should succeed in making me prisoner?” One of the American officers replied, “We should cut off the leg which was wounded in the country’s service, and we should hang the rest of you.”

The TURN Characters as John Mulaney Quotes (Pt.2)

Washington ordered Lafayette to hang Arnold is he captured him: "You are to do no act whatever with Arnold that directly or by implication may skreen him from the punishment due to his treason and desertion, which if he should fall into your hands, you will execute in the most summary way." Recognizing the enormous political consequences of the venture, Lafayette attacked his assignment with demonic energy. The vision of a French aristocrat-turned-American-republican capturing and executing an American republican-turned-British-aristocrat provoked devilish laughs as he pictured the effects on Patriot moral in America and on public sensibilities in England and France.

In fact, Washington's plan was simple: a multipronged attack, with Lafayette striking from the west, Steuben from the southwest, and Greene from the south, to force Cornwallis to the coast, where a French fleet would sail in from the east to block escape by sea. The combined armies of Washington and Rochambeau would then sweep down from the north to strike the decisive blow. It was important to move swiftly, however, before Cornwallis linked up with Arnold's force at Portsmouth and moved inland against Richmond, the primary arms munitions depot of southern Patriots.

Lafayette's concern for his men and his enormous personal investment in their welfare cemented their unquestioning loyalty and allowed him to lead them on a series of forced marches to Virginia, where he hopes to surprise Arnold and Phillips - to hang the first for treason and shoot the second to avenge his father's death. What Lafayette could not know as he left Baltimore was that he was initiating an historic campaign that would crown him, Washington, and Rochambeau with glory and create a new, independent nation.

After discovering Arnold’s treason, Washington summoned Wayne and his troops to man the West Point fortifications, and he put Nathanael Greene in command. Before taking his new post, Greene convened a court-martial in the Congregational Church in Tappan, New York, on September 29, appointing Lafayette, Henry Know, Lord Stirling, and eleven other major generals and brigadier generals to decide Andre’s fate. They were unanimous: captured using a false name, in civilian clothes, Andre had acted as a soy and had no recourse to treatment as a prisoner of war. They condemned the winsome young man to death, despite pleas from the locals to spare him. At noon, on October 2, 1780, they hanged him from a gibbet atop a thickly wooded hill and buried his body there, several hundred yards from the church and the sacred ground where Patriot soldiers lay buried. He was twenty-nine years old.

Without French support to launch a major offensive, Washington reorganized his forces, shifting to a defensive posture. He put the heroic general Benedict Arnold in charge of the quiet northern fortifications at West Point, and important defensive position, but far from any likely battle activity. After his daring capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, Arnold suffered a crippling wound in the disastrous American assault on Quebec the following year, and his injuries left him reluctant to assume any more battlefield commands. As a result, Washington gave Lafayette command of the Light Division, a unit more likely to see battlefield action as an advanced element of the Continental Army, encamped nearly fifty miles south on the west bank of the Hudson River, opposite New York.

When I parted from you yesterday, sir, to come and breakfast here with General Arnold, we were far from forseeing the event which I am now going to relate to you