On October 2, 1780, Major John Andre was hanged at Tappan, New York, ten days after militiamen found papers in his boot describing the defences of West Point. He was 30, and he was the British army's deputy adjutant general. A board of Continental officers, with Lafayette and Nathanael Greene among them, ruled that he was a spy rather than a prisoner of war, and Washington signed the order.
Andre had met Arnold on the night of September 21 near Stony Point on the Hudson and had been given the papers and a pass in Arnold's hand. He was carrying them in his stocking when John Paulding, Isaac Van Wart and David Williams stopped him near Tarrytown on September 23. He was in civilian clothes, and that is the fact that decided the case. In uniform he would have been a prisoner.
The three militiamen refused his bribe and turned him over. That refusal is what Americans were told about for a century, and it is more complicated than the story: they were militia in disputed country between the lines, and what they did take was Arnold's horse and watch. Congress gave each of them a pension of 200 dollars a year and a medal.
Andre asked to be shot. He was refused. He wrote to Washington asking for that one thing, and Washington, who had been negotiating an exchange for Arnold, had to let the sentence stand, because Clinton would not hand Arnold over and no exchange could be made without him. Andre walked to the gallows. He tied the noose himself.
Arnold got away to the British lines, took a brigadier's commission and about 6,000 pounds, and spent the rest of the war raiding in Virginia and Connecticut and arguing about the money. He moved to London in 1781, never got the command he wanted, and died in 1801. Andre's body was moved to Westminster Abbey in 1821, and Washington's handling of the case is one of the cleaner episodes of a dirty war.