“I FEEL myself exceedingly distressed,” George Washington wrote to the governor of Delaware on June 19th 1782. The situation, he later confided, had filled him with “the keenest anguish”. It was “a great national concern”, he told Congress, when asking it how he should proceed. Yet he “never had a doubt” about the propriety of his decision.

Others certainly did: the whole Western world was in uproar. “Every humane feeling revolts,” lamented Alexander Hamilton, soon to become America’s first Secretary of the Treasury. John Adams, who was trying to persuade the Dutch to recognise the fledging republic, worried that Washington’s actions would besmirch its reputation. The Comte de Rochambeau, commander of the French troops who had helped defeat the British at Yorktown in 1781, thought Washington’s proposal would be regarded abroad as “an act of injustice and of barbarity”. It was. “The public prints all over Europe resounded with the unhappy catastrophe,” recalled the Baron von Grimm, a German man of letters. He had just been to the Abdir theatre in Paris to see a play depicting Washington wrestling with his conscience. “The first question asked of all vessels that arrived from any port in North America,” von Grimm claimed, was whether Washington had carried out his threat.

The threat in question was to execute a prisoner-of-war, in contravention not only of the norms of the day, but of an international agreement that Washington himself had signed. As he readily conceded, the prisoner concerned had done nothing wrong. Worse, he was young and handsome, at least according to the etchings sold in the streets of Paris and London. But he was also a British captain, and thus precisely the victim Washington needed.

Charles Asgill was one of thousands of British soldiers captured at Yorktown. The surrender had been a gentlemanly affair: Washington invited Lord Cornwallis, the British commander, to dine with him on the night he conceded defeat. When the victorious Americans seized the money with which Cornwallis had been paying his army’s expenses, Rochambeau promptly lent him some. The captured officers, having pledged not to take up arms against America again, were freed “on parole”, meaning that they were duty bound to return to captivity if the Americans requested it. Cornwallis, for one, quickly embarked for London.

But the rank and file were marched off to prison camps in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. One officer stayed behind for every 50 captive soldiers, to ensure that they maintained discipline and were treated properly. “The benevolent treatment of prisoners, which is invariably observed by the Americans, will be extended to them,” Washington had assured Cornwallis before the surrender. More particularly, the 14th of the “articles of capitulation” signed by Washington, Cornwallis and Rochambeau explicitly barred any departure from the agreed terms “on pretence of reprisals”. In other words, the Americans and French would not punish the surrendering soldiers in retaliation for any subsequent provocation by the British.

That Britain was on the verge of giving up on its rebellious colonies was not then clear. It would be over four months before Parliament voted against pursuing the war further, and almost two years before the two sides concluded a formal peace treaty. British forces remained in control of New York, Charleston and other big cities, and skirmishes continued. Among the least willing to give in were the “loyalists” or “refugees”—Americans who had sided with the British, and in many cases been dispossessed by the revolutionaries as traitors.

Outraged loyalists seized Huddy from prison, took him back to New Jersey and hanged him from a tree

Five months after the surrender at Yorktown, in March 1782, loyalist militiamen captured a fort on the New Jersey coast. They razed the fortifications and brought the revolutionary commander, Captain Joshua Huddy, to New York as a prisoner. A few days later Philip White, a loyalist soldier, was killed in Monmouth county, New Jersey. Accounts of his death differ: his brother Aaron, captured with him, signed an affidavit attesting that he was killed while trying to escape. Aaron later recanted, claiming that his captors had threatened to kill him unless he signed; the truth, he now maintained, was that the American militiamen had executed Philip White in cold blood.

Outraged loyalists scoured New York for a scapegoat, and happened upon Huddy. They seized him from prison, took him back to New Jersey and hanged him from a tree. They left a note on his body: “Up goes Huddy for Philip White”. The refugees, the note threatened, would hang another revolutionary every time a loyalist was killed.

Now it was the revolutionaries’ turn to be outraged. Whipped into a fervour by a local clergyman (American politics has not changed that much), the citizens of Monmouth county petitioned Washington to avenge Huddy’s hanging, by bringing “a British officer of the same rank to a similar end”. Such a response would be justified for four reasons. First, because killing Huddy without even the pretence of a trial had been “barbarous in the extreme, and most certainly demands redress”. Second, to ensure such atrocities “shall not become general”. Third, because Congress itself had resolved in 1778 that if America’s enemies “persist in their present career of barbarity, we will take such exemplary vengeance as shall deter others from a like conduct.” And fourth, to prevent the enraged people of Monmouth retaliating in so fearsome a manner that “humanity itself may shudder”.

The necessity of vengeance

Washington responded sympathetically to the petition. He wrote to his generals to ask whether it would be reasonable to retaliate. All 25 who replied thought it would, although 22 suggested he first contact the British commander-in-chief, Sir Henry Clinton, to see if he would hand over Huddy’s killers. Washington duly wrote to Clinton, who acknowledged that the hanging was a “barbarous outrage”, but argued that “to sacrifice innocence under the notion of preventing guilt…would be adopting barbarity, and raising it to the greatest height.” He had ordered an inquiry into Huddy’s death, and promised to bring those responsible to trial.

Clinton’s promise was genuine. Although he departed shortly afterwards for Britain, his successor as commander-in-chief, Sir Guy Carleton, initiated a court-martial against Richard Lippencott, the loyalist officer who presided over Huddy’s end. Washington dismissed these proceedings as inadequate. He seems to have concluded that resolute action was needed, and that delay would signal weakness. He asked his staff to find a British captain who had surrendered unconditionally, and could therefore be executed without violating the rules of war. Unfortunately, no such prisoner was found. So two weeks later, in spite of the terms of the surrender at Yorktown, Washington ordered Moses Hazen, the general in charge of the prisoners from the battle, to pick a British captain and send him to Philadelphia to be executed. Nominating a prisoner entitled to protection was a “disagreeable necessity”.

Just why Washington resorted to this course is something of a mystery. Later in life, he falsely blamed his underlings—presumably because this was not conduct becoming of a gentleman. He was not only breaking his written undertaking at Yorktown, but also sullying the honour of the French generals who had signed their names with his. The terms of the surrender aside, his willingness to execute a prisoner for someone else’s crimes made a mockery of his lofty talk of Americans’ fine moral sentiments. The concern that loyalist raiders might be emboldened or anger boil over in Monmouth if nothing was done seems meagre justification.

Washington, of course, is not the only general to have put expediency over principle in wartime, or to have resorted to flimsy rationalisations for doing so. To this day American politicians debate whether they should accord captured terrorists the same rights as other criminals, or whether the exigencies of unconventional warfare necessitate some relaxation of the rules of engagement: whether, in the defence of freedom, it is sometimes necessary to stoop to brutality—even, notoriously, to torture. Washington was wrestling with an age-old dilemma. But he was also perversely stubborn.

There were 13 British captains among the prisoners in Pennsylvania (full disclosure: one of them, John Perryn, was your correspondent’s great-great-great-granduncle). They were summoned to the Black Bear Inn in Lancaster on May 26th, where the embarrassed General Hazen explained Washington’s orders. He asked them to nominate a victim, but they refused, on the grounds that the whole exercise was a violation of the terms of their surrender. So the general had their names written on pieces of paper and placed in a hat; 12 blank sheets were placed in another hat, along with one marked “unfortunate”. A drummer boy was instructed to draw a name from the first hat; another then picked a sheet from the other. Ten names and blank sheets were chosen. On the 11th draw, the unlucky lot was selected, along with Asgill’s name.

One account maintains that Asgill, who had just turned 20, staggered with despair; only when a fellow officer hissed “Don’t disgrace your colours!” did he recover his composure. If anyone was behaving shamefully, of course, it was Washington. Asgill wrote to him, pointing out that he was “under the protection of a treaty in which the honour and faith of nations are the pledges”. He reminded Washington that “the fourteenth article of the capitulation” barred reprisals. He had done nothing to violate the terms of his parole, and was “perfectly innocent of Captain Huddy’s death”. Given “your excellency’s known character,” he concluded, he had “every right and reason to expect” that Washington would relent.

Major James Gordon, the most senior of the British officers in Pennsylvania, who had been present at the inn, also expressed his “astonishment” that the commander-in-chief had ordered a British captain “to suffer an ignominious death…in direct violation of the articles of capitulation”. That was not the only letter he fired off. He also pleaded on Asgill’s behalf to the Comte de Rochambeau, the French ambassador, America’s secretary of war and various congressmen. He even tracked down Captain Huddy’s widow, and persuaded her to intercede on Asgill’s behalf.

Washington ignored these pleas. “All argumentation on the subject is precluded on my part. My resolutions…remain unalterably fixed,” he declared to the officer to whose custody Asgill had been transferred. Washington was so determined, in fact, that he let it be known that he would “receive no application, nor answer any letter upon the subject”. Yet his conscience appears to have been needling him; at any rate, he postponed the execution to allow Asgill’s comrades to appeal again to Carleton, the British commander-in-chief, to make some other restitution for Huddy’s death.

That bought Asgill some time, during which anguished letters were dispatched across the Atlantic and condemnations multiplied. Asgill’s family was tireless. His father, also named Charles Asgill, was a wealthy banker who had served as Lord Mayor of London in 1757. The coach he commissioned for his investiture gives a sense of his wealth and ambition: it cost £1,000, more than the vehicle used at the time for royal coronations, and was smothered with elaborately carved curlicues, garlands, scallop shells and cherubs, all carapaced in gilding. No subsequent Lord Mayor has ever thought to replace it; it is still in use today.

The elder Asgill became a baronet in 1761, the year before his son’s birth. Young Charles had an impossibly privileged upbringing. The family lived on Portman Square in London, a grand and fashionable spot. When the hurly-burly of city life became too much, they retreated to a Palladian villa on the Thames in Richmond, on the site of a former royal palace. Asgill was sent to Westminster, one of Britain’s most prestigious schools, rounding out his education at the University of Göttingen in Germany. In 1778, just before his 16th birthday, he joined the army. His was just the sort of life that Washington himself had forlornly aspired to. Washington’s older brothers had been sent to British boarding schools, but his father died when he was 11, straining the family’s finances. That not only denied him an expensive education, but prevented him buying a commission in the British army. Instead, he became an officer in the local militia: a Huddy rather than an Asgill.

Good King Louis

Asgill’s lot did not seem quite so enviable in the summer of 1782, however. For obvious reasons, no one in Britain had much clout with Washington, so Asgill’s mother, who was of French descent, wrote a melodramatic appeal to the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes: “Surrounded as I am by objects of distress, distracted as I am by fear and grief, no words can express my feelings or paint the scene.”

Nonetheless, she had a go. Sir Charles, she claimed, was so ill that she did not dare tell him what was happening to his son, for fear the news would send him to his grave. (In the end, he lived another six years.) Her daughter, “seized with fever and delirium”, would not stop “raving about her brother”. Asgill himself was “as dear as he is brave”. “Let me again supplicate your goodness,” she concluded, “Let me respectfully implore your high influence in behalf of innocence, in the cause of justice, of humanity, that you would dispatch a letter to General Washington from France.”

Vergennes obliged. In his letter he mentions that he had shown Lady Asgill’s plea to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who were moved by her son’s plight. “The goodness of their majesties’ hearts induces them to desire that the inquietude of an unfortunate mother may be calmed, and her tenderness reassured.” This was not a formal demand that Asgill be freed, but as France was bankrolling the revolution (and supplying troops and ships), ignoring it would have been rash.

Even as Vergennes’s letter was crossing the Atlantic, Washington’s best hope for a face-saving solution was evaporating. In July the court-martial of Lippencott, the militia colonel who had presided over Huddy’s hanging, cleared him. He had acted, the court concluded, on the orders of New Jersey’s political leaders in exile, as he was obliged to. (The ultimate leader of the exiles was William Franklin, the last royally appointed governor of New Jersey, who had taken refuge in New York. His more famous father, Benjamin, commenting on the Asgill affair, said the only solution was for the British to give up Huddy’s murderer, not realising that his son would become a prime suspect.)

Washington was running out of excuses to delay the execution. But he was clearly getting cold feet. Not only had the controversy reached fever pitch; the war was as good as over, making exemplary bloodshed pointless. He decided to refer the issue to Congress, now offering Carleton’s willingness to investigate as a reason to hold off: “An act of retaliation upon an innocent person, before the result of his inquisition is known, would be considered, by the impartial and unprejudiced world, in an unfavorable and perhaps an unjustifiable point of view.”

According to one member of the committee set up to decide Asgill’s fate, Congress “spent three days in warm debate”. America’s politicians were as enthusiastic about capital punishment then as they are now, however: “A very large majority of Congress were determined on his execution, and a motion was made for a resolution positively ordering the immediate execution.”

Then, on the day of the vote, completely by chance, Vergennes’s letter arrived, forwarded by Washington. It “operated like an electric shock”. Congress, doubtless seeing the difficulty in turning down a polite request from its benefactor, reversed itself. It passed a resolution the same day, stating “that the life of Captain Asgill should be given as a compliment to the King of France.” Washington was directed to release him right away.

He wrote to tell Asgill the good news, insisting, with great cheek, that he was as relieved as Asgill would be. The hostage raced to New York as soon as he was freed. He was in such haste to flee that he hired a small boat to chase a ship that had just departed for London, catching it 12 miles out to sea.