Treacherous Beauty : Peggy Shippen, the Woman Behind Benedict Arnold's Plot to Betray America

Histories of the Revolutionary War honor several heroines. There's Betsy Ross, Abigail Adams, and Molly Pitcher. But there is no popular biography -yet-that focuses on one of the most remarkable women of the war, a beautiful society girl named Peggy Shippen, who befriended a handsome British spy and then married a crippled American revolutionary general twice her age. At a crucial juncture in the Revolutionary War, Peggy brought the two enemy warriors together in a treasonous plot that came perilously close to turning George Washington into a prisoner of war and possibly changing the outcome of the conflict. Peggy Shippen was Mrs. Benedict Arnold.   Peggy was to the American Revolution what the fictional Scarlett O'Hara was to the Civil War: a woman whose survival skills trumped all other values. Had she been a man, she might have been arrested, tried, and executed. And she might have become famous. But because of eighteenth-century views of women and her own guileful deflection of blame, Peggy's role was minimized and she was allowed to recede into the background with a generous British pension in hand. It took a century and a half for historians to begin to appreciate her true treacherous role during our nation's birth.