The culprit was beyond reach; his ignorant and innocent wife had been seized by a despair which resembled madness. Major André was tried as a spy and condemned to suffer the fate of one. He was young, honest, and brave, brought up to another career, and driven into the army by a love disappointment. His tastes were elegant, his mind cultivated; he had not foreseen to what dangers his mission and the disguise that he had assumed, against the advice of Sir Henry Clinton, exposed him. "My mind is perfectly tranquil," he however wrote to his general when he was arrested, "and I am ready to suffer all that my faithful devotion to the king's cause can draw down on my head."
One thing alone troubled Major André's peace of mind. He dreaded the ignominy of the gibbet, and wished to die as a soldier. "Sir," wrote he to Washington, "sustained against the fear of death by the feeling that no unworthy action has sullied a life consecrated to honor, I am confident that in this supreme hour your Excellency will not refuse a prayer the granting of which can sweeten my last moments. In sympathy for a soldier, your Excellency will consent, I am sure, to adapt the form of my punishment to the feelings of a man of honor. Permit me to hope, that if my character has inspired you with some esteem, and if I am in your eyes the victim of policy and not of vengeance, I shall prove the empire of those feelings over your heart by learning that I am not to die on a gibbet."
With a harshness unexampled in his life, and of which he seemed always to preserve the silent and painful remembrance, Washington remained deaf to the noble appeal of his prisoner. He did not even do Major André the honor of answering him. "Am I then to die thus?" said the unfortunate man when he perceived the gibbet. Then immediately recovering himself, "I pray you to bear witness that I die as a man of honor," said he to the American officer charged with seeing to his punishment. Washington himself paid homage to him. "André has suffered his penalty with that strength of mind which might be expected from a man of that merit and from so brave an officer," wrote he. "As for Arnold, he lacks pluck. The world will be surprised if it do not yet see him hanged on a gibbet."