“. . . if the conflict at Saratoga was one of the great battles which have influenced the fate of nations; if this was the decisive contest of the Revolution; if it was fought by Arnold, and his blood contributed to the victory, should he not have the credit, so dearly earned? Give all honor to Schuyler; give to Morgan, Stark, Dearborn, and others, all praise as brave partisans, but let history be just and truthful, and record that Benedict Arnold was the hero of the campaign of 1777, and of the battles of Saratoga.”
—Isaac Newton Arnold,
The Life of Benedict Arnold
As Benedict Arnold and his horse fell, Captain Dearborn called out, asking where Arnold had been hit. “In the same leg,” Arnold answered, “I wish it had been my heart.”1 It was late afternoon on October 7, 1777 at Bemis Heights, the second and final battle of Saratoga. The American forces were fighting desperately to stop General John Burgoyne’s troops from breaking through and moving south to take the city of Albany, on their way to separating New York from New England. The British were just as desperate, their dwindling force needing a victory before winter. After hours of fierce fighting Arnold discovered the British sally point, the spot where their lines opened for retreating soldiers, the point where the British army was most vulnerable. He immediately rallied the men and led a furious charge at it. The German defenders panicked, turning to take one final volley. One bullet hit Arnold’s splendid, dark horse, killing the powerful animal. Arnold was a superb rider. Other horses had been shot under him in other battles, in some battles two horses had been shot. As this horse fell though, a musket ball struck Arnold’s left leg shattering the bone just above the knee. It was the same leg injured a year earlier during the unsuccessful assault on Quebec. Arnold shouted to his men as he fell, “Rush on, my brave boys, rush on.!”2 And rush on they did, streaming through the British embankment. The day would be theirs.
Arnold waved off the first officers who rushed to help him. A surgeon glancing at his injury feared his leg might need to be amputated.3 Arnold would listen to “no such d—d nonsence,” insisting “if that was all the surgeon had to say, the men should lift him upon his horse, and he would see the action through.” It was a wounded Hessian soldier who had managed to lift himself up and shoot Arnold. John Redman, an American private, had seen Arnold fall and rushed to bayonet the German. But Arnold shouted to Redman from the ground where he lay helpless and in pain, “Don’t hurt him, he did but his duty, he is a fine fellow.”4 Major John Armstrong, whom Gates had sent to intercept Arnold caught up with him now to return him to headquarters. Arnold would have none of it. In the end it was the men of Asa Bray’s Connecticut militia company, proud the fighting general was one of their own, who placed him gently on a litter and carried their bleeding hero to the field hospital. Afterward he had endured the three-day trip down the Hudson River to Albany fifty miles away, where the military hospital was already overflowing with injured and dying men of both armies.
While Arnold lay in excruciating pain in the military hospital in Albany, General Horatio Gates, who had never set foot on the battlefield that day, was negotiating the terms of surrender and taking credit for the victory. Gates was jealous and vindictive, especially since Arnold was the hero of the battle at Freeman’s Farm in September, the first phase of what was to be the battle of Saratoga. Gates had stripped Arnold of his command and, when Arnold decided to yield to the entreaties of other officers and men and remain in the camp, Gates confined him to his tent. But even without any command Arnold could not remain idle while the men were fighting and had galloped off to join them. It was Gates who chose to remain in his tent that day.
Benedict Arnold was just thirty-six. He was solidly built. As an old soldier who served with him at Bemis Heights put it, “there wasn’t any waste timber in him.”5 His complexion was ruddy from outdoor living since childhood, his height middling, his hair dark, his eyes gray. “Dark Eagle,” an Indian guide had dubbed him during the harrowing trek through the Maine wilderness to Quebec. Before the war he was a successful Connecticut merchant, captaining his own ships in the Atlantic trade. Much of his fortune was now gone, spent on the patriot cause or ruined by the war. The merchant turned soldier had turned out to be a military genius: brave, inspiring, insightful, driven as were so many men of his generation, with the quest for honor and jealous of personal reputation. His exploits had made him one of the revolutionary army’s best-known heroes, a legend. The troops loved him. “He was our fighting general,” that old soldier explained, “and a bloody fellow he was. He didn’t care for nothing; he’d ride right in. It was ‘Come on boys’—’twasn’t ‘Go, boys.’ He was as brave a man as ever lived.”6 Arnold was brusque though, and dogged by a growing and tenacious string of enemies who accused him of being reckless, greedy, self-serving, and dishonest. The greater his fame, the greater their determination to destroy his reputation. The long agonizing months in the military hospital in Albany gave him ample time to reflect on where all his courage and zeal for the patriot cause had brought him.
Albany with its three hundred houses was 160 miles north of New York City.7 Some one thousand sick and wounded men were crowded into the city. The substantial military hospital there, built during the French and Indian War, could accommodate five hundred patients in forty wards. The old Dutch church and several private homes were also turned into hospitals.8 The injured foreign soldiers were under the care and management of their own surgeons. Dr. James Thacher, a surgeon with the American army at Albany, was present at some of the more serious operations and praised the English surgeons for their skill and dexterity. However, he found some of the German doctors “the most uncouth and clumsy operators I ever witnessed, and appear to be destitute of all sympathy and tenderness toward the suffering patient.”9 Like military doctors before and since, Dr. Thacher found the long hours and terrible wounds “a fine field for professional improvement. Amputating limbs, trepanning fractured skulls, and dressing the most formidable wounds, have familiarized my mind to scenes of woe.” Still Dr. Thacher had a kind heart. “A military hospital,” he judged, “peculiarly calculated to afford examples for profitable contemplation and to interest our sympathy and commiseration.” Dr. Thacher described the grim atmosphere in that hospital where Arnold languished month after weary month. The hospital made for odd bedfellows. Arnold was placed next to British Major John Dyke Acland, whose troops had battled the Continentals so obstinately on Bemis Heights.10
The surgeons wanted to amputate Arnold’s leg. That was a sensible precaution. A badly wounded limb could putrefy, get gangrenous, and result in death. But if his leg were amputated above the knee Arnold would be a cripple for the rest of his life. He was a widower with three young sons. His wife had died two years earlier, while he was away on duty. What sort of future would he or they have now? Better death than such a life. Better to have been hit in the heart, as he told Captain Dearborn, than live in that helpless condition. He was still a young man and had always been physically active. So he chose to endure the pain of a slow recovery—splinters of bone could not be removed—with its risk of death but hope for healing. He was not a patient patient, however. After spending a night watching “the celebrated General Arnold,” Dr. Thacher found him “very peevish, and impatient under his misfortunes, and required all my attention during the night,” though the good doctor confessed he managed to slip away for an hour to write a letter to a friend.11 General Lincoln was also a patient in the Albany hospital. He was second in command at Saratoga but, like Gates, was not on the field where the battle took place that last day. Lincoln was an able commander though, and more diplomatic than Arnold. Gates had assigned him to lead the right wing on October 7, but the action was on the left and center. He received a wound to his right leg in a skirmish the following day.
By December 20 Thacher cheerfully noted that the wounded soldiers committed to his care in October “have all recovered” and he had received “a generous and handsome present” from Dr. Potts the surgeon-general for his good work. The hospital was now so quiet he obtained a forty-day furlough to visit friends in New England.12 Yet when Dr. J. Brown, another army surgeon, visited the hospital the day before Christmas, both Arnold and Lincoln were still there. Dr. Brown found General Lincoln “in a fair way of recovery” behaving as “the patient Christian.”13 “Not so the gallant General Arnold,” he wrote, “for his wound, though less dangerous in the beginning than Lincoln’s, is not in so fair a way of healing. He abuses us for a set of ignorant pretenders.”14 They were not pretenders, of course, but with the skills they had they could not make him whole.
The formal surrender of the British army took place on October 17, ten days after the battle. General Burgoyne had little option. His army was surrounded. His retreat had been cut off. Winter was coming on and he was short of provisions. His ranks were devastated by the loss of too many officers and men, with no hope of reinforcements. During four hours of fighting, more than one third of the British troops involved were wounded, killed, or taken prisoner.15 Roger Lamb, a private in the British army wrote,: “Few actions have been characterized by more obstinancy in attack or defence.” Burgoyne’s 62nd regiment that began fighting with 350 men by early evening had only four or five officers and sixty soldiers who were still effective. One artillery detachment had its captain and thirty-six of its forty-eight men killed or wounded.16 At first Gates demanded unconditional surrender.17 When that was rejected he abruptly switched tactics, agreeing to unusually generous terms for fear that General Clinton might bring a British army from New York to rescue Burgoyne. According to the agreed upon terms the British troops were to march out of their camp with the full honors of war, laying down their weapons under the supervision of their own officers. Their army would then be given safe conduct to Boston where a British fleet would be allowed to return them to England, terms that Congress ultimately would not carry out.
For the British regulars honorable terms could not disguise the sadness and humiliation of the occasion. Barely 3,500 of Burgoyne’s men remained, the remnant of the seven thousand man force that had left Canada.18 “About 10 o’clock we marched out,” Lieutenant Digby wrote, “with drums beating and the honors of war, but the drums seemed to have lost their former inspiring sounds, and though we beat the Grenadiers march, which not long before was so animating, yet then it seemed by its last feeble efforts as if almost ashamed to be heard on such an occasion.”19 Near to tears himself, Digby was struck by the demeanor of the ragtag American troops that lined the field: “I shall never forget the appearance of the troops on our marching past them. [A] dead silence universally reigned through their numerous columns and even then they seemed struck with our situation and dare scarce life up their eyes to view British troops in such a situation. I must say their decent behavior during the time (to us so greatly fallen) merited the utmost commendation and praise.”20
Gates had given his young adjutant, Major James Wilkinson, the honor of reporting the wonderful victory directly to Congress. Protocol demanded Gates report it to Washington instead, but he deeply resented the commander in chief and, helped by supporters in Congress, had been agitating to replace him. Bypassing Washington was an act of insubordination. Washington learned of the triumph of his northern army informally from another officer. Wilkinson was in no hurry to deliver the exciting news to Congress and took fifteen days to reach them, stopping along the way to do a little courting. Congress overlooked his cavalier behavior in its jubilation over the victory and, somewhat reluctantly rewarded Wilkinson with a lieutenant colonelcy as Gates had asked, thereby bypassing many experienced field officers of higher rank, needlessly upsetting many good men.21 Congress was also intent upon honoring Horatio Gates, the triumphant general. On November 4 delegates voted that a gold medal should be struck in his honor stamped horatio gates, duci strenuo, comitia americana: The American Congress to Horatio Gates, the gallant leader.
All the undeserved tribute lavished on Gates simply added to Arnold’s misery. Congress had still not even given him the seniority he deserved when it promoted five junior officers, including Lincoln, ahead of him earlier that year. When an adjustment was suggested the supporters of Gates, who ignored or denigrated Arnold’s key part in the battles of Saratoga, objected to the restitution of his seniority. Members of Congress would only gradually learn the truth. Nonetheless, since Arnold was grievously wounded there was sympathy for him. On November 29 the delegates, when adjusting other men’s ranks, finally agreed to issue a commission to restore the “rank & precedence” Arnold sought.22 The commission itself and attached message written by Henry Laurens, president of the Congress, was very grudging. It never mentioned Arnold’s spectacular deeds on the battlefields and other outstanding service. Laurens merely wrote politely, “Permit me to assure you sir I respect your character as a citizen and soldier of the United States of America, that I rejoice at your recovery from the dangerous wounds which you lately received in the defense of your country, that I wish you perfect health and a continued succession of honor.”23 Not only was his leadership and valor never mentioned but there was something in Laurens’s personal note that implied that he was speaking for himself, not the delegates. On January 20 Washington wrote from Valley Forge with Arnold’s commission, apologizing for his tardiness. Whatever the aspersions on his character by others, the commander clearly held Arnold in the highest esteem and understood who the actual hero of Saratoga was. “May I venture to ask whether you are upon your legs again,” Washington inquired, “and if you are not, may I flatter myself you will be soon? There is none, who wishes more sincerely for this event, than I do or who will receive the information with more pleasure. I shall expect a favorable account upon this subject, and as soon as your situation will permit, I request that you will repair to this Army, it being my earnest wish to have your services in the ensuing campaign.”24
Arnold had endured the indignity of having been passed over for promotion by five men junior to him, none of whom had been so distinguished, putting the cause ahead of his pride. He had endured other aspersions on his honor for the same reason. Benjamin Lincoln, however, who as one of these five officers now junior to Arnold, was so upset that Arnold was to get seniority over him, he apparently considered resigning in protest. Washington soothed Lincoln’s feelings, honoring both Arnold and Lincoln with handsome gifts of epaulets and sword knots sent to him by an admiring French gentleman.
By late February Lincoln was able to travel. On February 23, helped by his son, he arrived at his family home at Hingham, Massachusetts.25 Arnold would spend that winter in Albany, still unable to walk. By late winter or early spring he finally left the hospital, still grievously disabled. Passing through Kinderhook, New York on his way home to Connecticut, a doorpost of the house he was to stay in had to be removed to permit his litter to enter.26 He was carried on to Middletown, Connecticut receiving a grand reception. He spent several weeks at Middletown, only a day’s journey from New Haven, resting and recuperating at the home of his old friend, Comfort Sage. Sage was, like Arnold, a successful merchant and served as a lieutenant colonel in the Connecticut militia. While there Arnold learned to walk on crutches. He and Sage discussed various financial opportunities to help replenish his depleted fortune and Arnold became part owner of a privateer. Finally, on May 4, he reached New Haven and his own home where his dear sister, Hannah, and young sons awaited him.27 An enthusiastic crowd turned out to welcome him back—military officers, militia members, local dignitaries, friends, and neighbors. He was home for the first time in just over a year.
As the long days in the hospital had stretched into weeks and then months of pain, impatience, and frustration, Arnold couldn’t shake from his mind the triumphs and turmoils of his life, his pursuit of honor, and the growing numbers of his detractors. He had become a hero to many Americans in and out of the military but an enemy to others. He was generally disliked by Congress, where soldiers, especially popular ones unwilling to spend time courting the delegates, were regarded with suspicion. Because he was held in high esteem by Washington and General Schuyler, their enemies regarded him as an enemy. His every daring and heroic deed was branded by his detractors as sheer recklessness, bravado, self-aggrandizement. Congressmen sitting comfortably through endless meetings, insisting on approving every promotion, questioning the patriotism of any officer who suffered a defeat, doling out niggling funds to the troops, and leaving them in wretched condition, demanded he account for any perceived financial irregularity. These men who never saw a battlefield during the war for independence set themselves up to judge him, who had risked his life time after time, and generously gave of his fortune to help the cause. He was tired of it all, all the personal animosities, all the carping, the constant pain. His whole life seemed to have led up to that moment on Bemis Heights, stripped of all command but commanding the love and loyalty of the men in the decisive battle of the Revolution. Had that musket ball pierced his heart rather than his leg, bringing death at the moment of his greatest triumph, he would have died one of America’s greatest heroes. He wanted to lay down his life for honor and the patriot cause. Having lost his chance to die for the cause, could he live for it in this reduced state, seeing Gates honored for his work, bedeviled by men determined to vilify him? How to maintain dignity and respect in these circumstances?