André hangs at Tappan; he placed the noose himself
For nine days, Major John André had been a prisoner of the army he'd nearly helped defeat at West Point. On October 2, 1780, Continental soldiers led him to a gallows in Tappan, New York, where he placed the noose around his own neck and faced death, by eyewitness accounts, without visible fear. George Washington had refused André's plea to die by firing squad, the death of a soldier rather than a spy. The conspiracy had already collapsed before the hanging, but both armies were startled by how calmly the condemned man had gone.
Washington refused to grant André a soldier's death. The message was plain: treason and espionage would be punished regardless of rank, even though officers like Hamilton had grown to admire the prisoner. That resolve, applied against a man many Americans privately liked, set an early precedent for how the republic intended to treat betrayal from within its own ranks.
QHow much money was Benedict Arnold promised for handing over West Point?
Twenty thousand pounds, a fortune in 1780 currency, was the price Arnold negotiated with the British for surrendering the fort and its garrison. He never collected the full sum. The plot collapsed before West Point changed hands, and Arnold fled to a British warship with only a fraction of what he'd been promised, spending the rest of his life as a paid exile, never fully trusted by the cause he'd joined.
QWhat happened to the three militiamen who caught André?
John Paulding, Isaac Van Wart, and David Williams stopped André on the Albany Post Road and searched him out of simple wartime caution, not because they suspected a spy ring. Congress later voted each man a silver medal and a lifetime annuity for the capture, an unusually durable reward for what began as a roadside stop of a stranger in civilian clothes who said the wrong password to the wrong men.
QDid André try to bluff his way past his captors before they searched him?
He did, and it nearly worked. André asked the three militiamen if they belonged to "the lower party," meaning the British, whose lines lay to the south. They said yes, so André dropped his guard and identified himself as a British officer traveling on urgent business, only for the men to reveal they were actually American and detain him on the spot, a single misjudged word that unraveled the entire scheme.
