Treacherous Beauty: Peggy Shippen, the Woman behind Benedict Arnold's Plot to Betray America
“Treacherous Beauty fills an important gap in American history with its in-depth narrative of the treason of Benedict Arnold and his beautiful young wife, Peggy. This excellent book is also the story of a star-crossed love affair beyond anything that a playwright could imagine.”—Arthur S. Lefkowitz, author ofGeorge Washington’s Indispensable Men “Treacherous Beauty is history at its most engaging: familiar in its context, but surprising, even enlightening, in its detail. It is, in fact, surprising that those who care about America’s past have not been enlightened about Peggy Shippen before.”—Eric Burns, author ofVirtue, Valor, and Vanity “At last, a serious work on one of the most fascinating and little known women in American history! Peggy Shippen was so much more that the wife of the famous traitor—she was a women with a foot in two worlds, an American whose life serves as a perfect illustration of the wild complexities of the Revolution. With Treacherous Beauty Mark Jacob and Stephen H. Case have done ample justice to the life and times of their subject with this fair-minded, well researched, and finely crafted biography, a gift to students of the Revolution eager to dig beneath the well worn surface of that conflict’s history.”—James L. Nelson, author ofBenedict Arnold’s Navy "Chicago Tribune deputy metro editor Jacob and Case, an American Revolution Center board member, detail Peggy’s role as go-between and document her later life in London. They succeed in capturing the period atmosphere as they adroitly interweave military maneuvers with the shadowy machinations. The book also benefits from rarely studied correspondence by Peggy to her son Edward provided by her descendant Hugh Arnold." --Publishers Weekly