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Chapter 7 Major Andre's Exhumation Michael Meranze In the centre of the road stood an enormous tulip tree which towered like a giant above all the other trees in the neighbourhood, and formed a kind of land mark. Its limbs were gnarled, and fantastic, large enough toform trunks for ordinary trees, twisting down almost to the earth, and rising again into the air.It was connected with the tragical story of the unfortunate Andre, who had been taken prisoner hard by; and was universally known by the name of Major Andre's tree. The common people regarded it with a mixture of respect and superstition, partly out of sympathy for thefate of its ill starred namesake, and partly from the tales of strange sights, and doleful lamentations, told concerning it. —Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1819) In Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine boldly declared, "Wehave it in our power to begin the world over again." Independence from Britain, he insisted , would mark new beginnings and create the possibility of retracing the steps of humanity and avoiding prior errors: "Asituation, similar to the present, hath not appeared since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand."1 Corpses, however, haunted Paine's new world. Voice of Reason though he was, Paine found the imaginary call of the cadaver palpable and powerful . Reconciliation was impossible, he pronounced, in part because "the blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'TIS TIME TOPART'."2 On the subject of monuments, he ironically pondered the honors due the disgraced British general William Howe. "Theusual honours of the dead," Paine insisted, "arenot sufficiently sublime to escort a character like you to the republic of dust and ashes; for however men may differ in their ideas of grandeur and government here, the grave is nevertheless a perfect republic . Death is not the monarch of the dead, but of the dying."3 In Paine's 124 MichaelMeranze rhetoric, the dead and violent death shadowed not only the New World but also the very shape of a republic. Yet, corpses and violence were more than a rhetorical matter. The American republic, after all, was founded amid war and bloodshed. From the remarkable brutality of the fighting between Whigs and Tories in the Southern backcountry, through the intensified struggles on slave plantations , to the unburied bones of rebels who died in Britain's infamous prison ships, the military struggle against British authority left deep scars of death and desolation on the American landscape and in the American imagination. Debates over monuments and memories were deeply charged political issues.4 No corpse haunted the early republic more than John Andre's. On October 2, 1780, the American army executed Andre, adjutant general of the British army, at their camp at Tappan, New York. His execution marked one of the most traumatic moments of the American Revolution. The autumn of 1780 sawthe nadir of the American war effort. Andre had spent months in secret negotiation with Benedict Arnold, leading to a plan to seize the American garrison at West Point. Dispatched for confidential face-to-face discussions with Arnold, he had been unable to return to British lines and was captured by a group of irregular soldiers. Taken to the American army, Andre was tried by a board of general officers who sentenced him to be executed as a spy.Despite British efforts to obtain his release , and Andre's ownpleas to be shot as a gentleman rather than hanged as a common criminal, Andre met his fate at the gibbet. Coming on the heels of the British occupation of Charleston, the news of Arnold's altered allegiance stunned the American Revolutionaries. Simultaneously, Andre's capture threw the British high command into despair. During Andre's captivity , Americans struggled to understand Arnold's actions amid widespread fears of further treason. The British,frantically seeking to save their officer, issued threats and offered entreaties, while the Americans purportedly sought to exchange Andre for Arnold. In the midst of this vortex of politics and emotion, Andre died a dramatically stoic death at the gallows, a death admired and remembered bymany.5 Signifying both the necessityof independence and the loss that independence entailed, Andre's hanged body materialized the collective fate of eighteenth-century Anglo-American empire and the violence that surrounded the founding of the United States. His death triggered an ongoing transatlantic debate. In history, literature, memoir, political argument, and public...

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