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Benedict Arnold

The man whose name is the very eponym for treason was born in Norwich, Connecticut, on January 14, 1741, a fifth-generation New Englander whose great-grandfather, also named Benedict Arnold, had been the first governor of Rhode Island. He lived with his pious Puritan mother and his devoted sister in a big gambrel-roofed white frame house on the outskirts of town. Arnold’s father, who had owned and sailed ships in the Caribbean trade, was an alcoholic. As his father’s business slipped toward bankruptcy, Benedict was sent off at eleven to a relative’s church school, where he learned Greek and Latin. At thirteen, after his father’s arrest for public drunkenness, he was yanked out of school and briefly roamed the Norwich waterfront, distinguishing himself for feats of strength and public pranks. Five feet ten, barrel-chested and muscular, with dark hair and gray eyes, proud despite his father’s disgrace—and perhaps the fiercer because of it—Arnold was often in trouble until, in 1754, he was consigned to an eight-year apprenticeship with his mother’s cousin, Dr. Daniel Lathrop.

No one has ever fully explored the inner geography of Benedict Arnold’s heart. The springs whence flowed his mad, desperate courage lie so close to the sources of his cynical, calculated treachery that the channels quickly merge, making it impossible to follow the bravery without being overwhelmed by the darkness—which leaves him, to our lasting fascination and bewilderment, among the hardest human beings to understand in American history.

Did he become a traitor because of all the injustice he suffered, real and imagined, at the hands of the Continental Congress and his jealous fellow generals? Because of the constant agony of two battlefield wounds in an already gout-ridden leg? From psychological wounds received in his Connecticut childhood when his alcoholic father squandered the family’s fortunes? Or was it a kind of extreme midlife crisis, swerving from radical political beliefs to reactionary ones, a change accelerated by his marriage to the very young, very pretty, very Tory Peggy Shippen?

Arnold, the “ferocious and ubiquitous Arnold,” the “best battlefield commander on either side during the Revolution”—the man who no less an authority than Lord Germaine, the British secretary of state, warned was “of all the Americans, the most enterprising and dangerous”—managed between the autumn of 1775 and the autumn of 1777 to accomplish feats that can only be described as astonishing: leading in person one of the most daring wilderness marches in the history of warfare; building the first American navy and using that navy in a battle that held off a British invasion for a crucial season; playing, a year later, a key role in what is generally agreed was one of the most important battles not only of the American Revolution but of world history.

The St. Lawrence–Richelieu–Lake Champlain– Hudson northern waterway leads from Quebec City, for so many years the Gibraltar of North America, into the deep, strategic heart of New York and New England. The military historian John Keegan refers to this as “the blood-stained warpath,” and well he might. From Samuel de Champlain’s first battle with the Iroquois in 1608 to Thomas Macdonough’s naval victory at Plattsburgh in the War of 1812, this was the scene of almost constant back-and-forth fighting.

The best—and worst—years of Benedict Arnold’s life were spent here. He had been traveling back and forth to Quebec ever since he was a teenage trader (and smuggler), and even his eventual treachery, the selling to the British of West Point with its command of the Hudson, was an attempt to unlock this corridor by yet another means.

When Colonel Arnold arrived at Washington’s headquarters outside the besieged Boston in the late summer of 1775, he had already done his share of fighting along Lake Champlain; it was he who along with the equally courageous and quarrelsome Ethan Allen had surprised Fort Ticonderoga on the night of May 10 and won for the colonies its urgently needed cannon. Now here he was back in Cambridge, ready to carry out an audacious plan in what would be the first American offensive of the war.

While Gen. Richard Montgomery led an army up the “traditional” Lake Champlain route to the St. Lawrence toward Quebec, Arnold would lead his own army on a daring, surprise march through the trackless wilderness of Maine (then part of Massachusetts), forming the right flank of a pincers that would win Quebec—and Canada—for the rebel cause.

Arnold was given a thousand men (among them, a number who went on to become famous or infamous—Daniel Morgan, Henry Dearborn, and those future traitorous rascals James Wilkinson and Aaron Burr) and the challenge of sailing them up the Maine coast into the Kennebec River. There they were to board hastily constructed six-man bateaux to carry on the upriver trip to the Height of Land portage and the run down the tumultuous Chaudière River to the gates of Quebec. All that could be found for guidance was a map drawn by the British cartographer John Montresor in 1761, a map that Arnold didn’t realize had been purposely altered to deceive any potential enemies. Arnold, relying on this poisoned document, thought the distance his army would have to travel was 180 miles when it was actually more than 300, the first of the miscalculations and nasty tricks of fate that would dog the expedition right from the start.

The supply of food began to run out as the soldiers slogged through Great Carrying Place, a shortcut of ponds and bogs that led westward from the Kennebec to the Dead River; game was scarce, and by the time they reached Canada, the men were reduced to eating their leather moccasins. An unusually late New England hurricane struck while they were on the Dead, turning that placid stream into a raging torrent. The hurricane was followed by a blizzard, and a third of Arnold’s men under Col. Roger Enos turned back.

Arnold, who always believed in leading from the front, found the strength of soul to rise above all of this. There had been “a thousand difficulties I never apprehended,” he wrote in his report to Washington; one of his officers called him a “man of invincible courage; ever serene, he defies the greatest danger—you will find him ever the intrepid hero.” He was, more than one of the numerous diarists on the expedition wrote, “beloved by his soldiers.”

The Chaudière, which leads 100 miles to Quebec City, was so rapid from all the rain that it swamped most of Arnold’s boats, nearly drowning Daniel Morgan at the falls in St. Martin. Still, it was a picnic compared with what they had faced in Maine, and soon the army was in Quebec proper, waiting for Montgomery’s forces to join them from Montreal. An assault was planned for the first snowy night, which turned out to be December 31, 1775. Arnold, leading his men through the narrow streets of the Old Town below the cliffs of the fortress, was wounded in the leg, while Montgomery died leading the other fork of the pincers. With Dan Morgan captured, the leaderless men had no choice save surrender or retreat.

Arnold’s adventures in Canada weren’t over yet. His little army kept up a brave “siege,” but once spring came, a British fleet arrived from England and set in motion a semiprecipitous American retreat south along the St. Lawrence to Montreal, then, via the Richelieu, to Lake Champlain. Typically, Arnold made sure he was the very last American to quit Canada, shooting his horse a few minutes before the British arrived, then hopping the last boat to leave St. John.

Naval command of the lake was going to be imperative; Arnold, who had once sailed his own ships in the West Indies trade, proved just the man to hastily improvise a fleet. (The original, Philadelphia, Arnold's flagship, dredged from the lake bottom, is now owned by the Smithsonian.)

Valcour Island was a brutal eight-hour-long mutual pounding, capped by one of Arnold’s most audacious enterprises: He escaped certain destruction by slipping his badly damaged fleet away under the noses of the British during the night, passing very close to the spot you’re standing on. Carleton, badly stung, lost all heart for his invasion and withdrew to Canada, giving the American forces enough breathing space to re-group. The great naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan summed it up best: “Save for Arnold’s flotilla, the British would have settled the business. The little American navy was wiped out, but never had any force, big or small, lived to better purpose.”

Arnold had been far from idle since Valcour Island. He had been dispatched to the west to deal with the right side of the British pincers, turning it back at Fort Stanwix, and now here he was back at Saratoga, under the command of Horatio Gates. No two men ever hated each other more; it didn’t help that in the first of the two Saratoga battles, Freeman’s Farm on September 19, Arnold won most of the glory for himself (and how often Arnold fought in foliage season!). Now, as fighting broke out on October 7, Arnold had been effectively relieved of his command, forced to stand idle as a spectator while his best troops came up against stiff British resistance and the battle’s outcome seemed suddenly in doubt.

This is a key moment in Arnold’s life, and it’s important to try to understand what was in his heart as he rode back and forth on his charger, forbidden to take part in the battle yet compelled by a fury he was powerless to stop. The fury came from so many sources, so much hurt and so much courage, that it’s almost impossible for us to comprehend, but surely part of it was his overwhelming sense that this landscape, this corridor, this waterway was his. Hadn’t he won it for himself on the excruciating portage over the Height of Land, or on the dark snowy streets of Quebec, or on the brilliantly whitecapped water off Valcour Island? This was his land, to defend to the last drop of his being, his to win for his country, his, ultimately, to one day sell for good British gold.

Arnold finds it impossible to resist his own courage. He gathers up some men, leads the vital charge that wins the Breymann Redoubt for the Americans, seals the victory, and, just as he crashes into the redoubt, is shot in the same leg that was wounded at Quebec.

Historians for years have always insisted that it would have been better for Arnold’s reputation if he had been killed at the peak of his glory in Saratoga, yet perhaps they miss the point. In a very real sense he was killed at Saratoga: the good Arnold, the one that for three brilliant years courageously overrode all his demons. Almost certainly Arnold sensed this himself. Henry Dearborn rushes up to him, asks where he’s been shot. “In the leg,” Arnold tells him, then, in what is surely one of the saddest lines from American history, adds, “I wish it had been my heart.”

In April 1779 Arnold married Peggy Shippen, who, at nineteen, was exactly half his age. A month later he sent word secretly through a Philadelphia Loyalist that he was ready to so over to the British army, and on May 10 he opened negotiations with Henry Clinton, the British commander in chief. That summer Arnold resigned as military governor and with his new wife moved into a smaller house owned by his father-in-law. In late December 1779 Arnold faced a court-martial at Dickerson’s Tavern in Morristown, New Jersey. He indignantly denied all charges and opened his own defense with an impassioned speech. “When the present necessary war against Great Britain commenced,” he said, "1 was in easy circumstances and enjoyed a fair prospect of improving them. I was happy in domestic connections and blessed with a rising family, who claimed my care and attention. … I sacrificed domestic ease and happiness to the service of my country, and in her service I sacrificed a great part of a handsome fortune. 1 was one of the first who appeared in the field and, from that time to the present hour, have not abandoned her service.” Insisting that he was being persecuted by Pennsylvania authorities for his open associations with accused Loyalists, he argued, “It is enough for me to contend with men on the field.”

Although there were those on the court-martial board who thought that Arnold should be cashiered from the army—and although documents discovered years later showed him to have been considerably more dishonest than the authorities suspected— its presiding officer, Maj. Gen. Robert Howe, who himself had clashed with revolutionary civilians as the military governor of Charleston, concluded that there was insufficient evidence on most counts. Arnold was convicted of only two misdemeanors: granting an illegal pass for the cargo vessel Charming Nancy and misappropriating public wagons. The board further recommended that Congress instruct Washington officially to reprimand Arnold.

The commander in chief did rebuke Arnold, characterizing his conduct in the Charming Nancy affair as “peculiarly reprehensible,” but in fact, Washington’s chiding was as mild as it could be without openly insulting the court-martial board, and he did not exclude Arnold from his plans for the coming campaign. Washington would soon offer Arnold a post of honor, command of the left wing of the main Continental Army. Arnold, however, was angry and dispirited.

Two more blows came almost immediately from Congress. On April 27, 1780, two weeks after Arnold’s official reprimand, the Board of Treasury ruled that, despite the fact that Arnold had never been paid as a Continental officer and that he had pressed for his back wages for more than a year, he owed Congress more than three thousand pounds.

One month later, in May 1780, Arnold’s request to be appointed to a naval command in the Caribbean was discouraged by Washington and rejected by Congress. Meanwhile, Arnold’s negotiations with the British had broken down when Clinton refused to pay him a flat fee of ten thousand pounds no matter what services Arnold was to render. Now he resumed his secret correspondence, filling coded letters with military intelligence and with predictions that the Revolution would soon collapse because Congress had ruined the economy. He noted the rap²d depreciation of Continental currency and scarcities of such basic commodities as flour as well as Congress’s failure to obtain vital loans because “their time is taken up in trifles.”

Arnold now asked Clinton for command of a Loyalist army as well as for financial compensation for the losses he said he had sustained as a result of Congress’s refusal to settle his accounts. He also suggested a way to bring about the surrender of the vital American fortress at West Point. By mid-June 1780, when he rode north to join Washington on the Hudson, Arnold wrote to Maj. John André, Clinton’s adjutant general and head of his secret service, “I expect soon to command West Point.”

Never losing faith in his troublesome field officer, Washington was perplexed by Arnold’s reluctance to accept his left wing but nevertheless changed his command assignments and gave Arnold West Point, augmenting it with responsibility for all works and men between Albany and New York City.

From his new headquarters on the Hudson, Benedict Arnold began systematically to weaken West Point’s defenses. On September 16 he learned that Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Henry Knox, and their combined staffs would be crossing the Hudson at Peekskill en route to Hartford for secret talks with the French command. “I shall be at Peekskill on Sunday evening,” Washington wrote confidentially to Arnold. Arnold was to hand-pick fifty guards and forty spare horses to escort them. “You will keep this to yourself, as I want to make my journey a secret.” Arnold knew how rarely Washington traveled without his army and how vulnerable he would be. At once he sent off his most trusted courier to Clinton under an illegal flag of truce. If the message arrived in time and the British chose to move quickly, they could easily capture Washington as he crossed the Hudson on September 18. Arnold also informed Clinton that Washington would be spending the night at an inn at Peekskill within an easy ride of the nearest British dragoons.

Although Arnold personally led his hand-picked guards to meet Washington on the eighteenth, ostensibly to deliver a memo on conditions at West Point, his message did not reach Clinton in time, and the British raid never came. Instead, a solitary vessel, the three-masted sloop of war Vulture, arrived in Haverstraw Bay, twelve miles south of West Point. Aboard was Maj. John André, Arnold’s inexperienced twenty-nine-year-old spymaster, who, like Arnold, had insisted to Clinton that a face-to-face meeting between Arnold and André was needed to confirm Arnold’s identity and to plan in detail the surrender of the key American stronghold. The British commander had reluctantly acquiesced to sending André on the mission, and he had given three orders intended to safeguard the young officer: He was not to go behind enemy lines; he was not to disguise himself but was to wear his British uniform; and he was to carry no compromising papers. If he violated any of these rules of war, he could be hanged as a spy.

André violated all three. Shortly after midnight on September 23, he landed at the foot of Long Clove Mountain, two miles below Haverstraw and well behind American lines. He concealed his British uniform under a dark caped coat. After talking with Arnold until first light, André left carrying Arnold’s pass, made out under a false identity, “John Anderson,” and five documents in Arnold’s undisguised handwriting, among them a summary of the American army’s strength and displacement and a report of the troops and ordnance at West Point and their weak spots. Concealing the messages between a sock and a conspicuously English boot, he changed his uniform for an old claret coat, a yellow waistcoat, and breeches.

Arnold then made arrangements for André to be rowed back to the Vulture, but the oarsman, up all night and increasingly suspicious, refused to take him, and André wound up riding south through the American lines and hiding for the night in a farmhouse. The next morning, as he approached a British outpost near Tarrytown, André mistook three men who sprang out into his path as Loyalists; one of them wore a captured green and red Hessian uniform. André identified himself as a British officer and then foolishly presented Arnold’s pass, which said he was a civilian. The three American militiamen, who were absent without leave from their unit and had intended to rob him, now searched the oddly dressed spy and found the compromising documents. They decided they would receive a reward if they turned their captive over to the nearest American outpost.

At nearby North Castle, John Jameson, the American colonel in charge, had earlier received instructions from Arnold that a John Anderson might cross the lines from New York City. But although he did not recognize the handwriting, Jameson was puzzled by the papers “Anderson” carried and by the fact that he had been found behind the lines. He rushed word to Arnold of Andr»’s capture but dispatched the confiscated papers, which he characterized as being of “a very dangerous tendency,” to Washington. The messenger, unable to find the general that night, returned to North Castle. Only Jameson’s unintentional warning allowed Arnold to escape in his barge to the Vulture.

When Washington arrived from Hartford at Arnold’s headquarters the next morning, September 25, he went upstairs with Lafayette to the rooms reserved for them to await the noonday meal. After they had inspected the defenses, Jameson’s messenger arrived after riding all night with a packet for the commander in chief. As Washington broke open the seal and paged through the documents in Arnold’s handwriting, the incredible truth struck him: Benedict Arnold had gone over to the British.

Remarkably clear-headed under fire, Washington was the only one at West Point that day to act calmly. He immediately ordered Alexander Hamilton and James McHenry to go after Arnold. Amid shouted orders Lafayette came into the dressing room where Washington was sitting, head down, hand trembling with its sheaf of treasonous papers, murmuring to Henry Knox, “Arnold has betrayed me. Whom can we trust now?”

Arnold’s new compatriots never really warmed to him or trusted him fully. When he proposed an attack on Philadelphia to capture Congress and destroy military targets, Clinton turned him down. In December 1781 Arnold left the United States on the same ship as Earl Cornwallis, recently vanquished at Yorktown. Arnold finished the war as a retired British colonel on a half-pay pension, living out his life in exile in England, Canada, and the West Indies. He died heavily in debt in 1801.

Arnold never returned to the United States during his twenty-year exile, and he rarely spoke of it. He never ceased to see himself as a hero, but he was content, he wrote a friend shortly before his death, with obscurity in exile; contentment was “the greatest happiness to be expected in the world.” In England, he concluded, he was “comfortable but not sufficiently elevated to be the object of envy and distinction.”

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