General Waterbury and Colonel Wigglesworth rowed through the black waters that night to meet Arnold aboard the Congress. They were despondent, but Arnold had prepared for this moment. He had a plan, a desperate but doable plan. The fleet would escape that evening by slipping between the British ships blocking the Valcour channel then dash south to Crown Point and safety. It was an exceedingly risky strategy. Many of their vessels were badly damaged, some were leaking. The little fleet with its five hundred sailors had lost some eighty men killed or wounded, including many officers, with twenty others captured. If any of the British crews spotted them they would be vulnerable and readily destroyed. But what other option did they have?
It was a moonless night. They set out at seven o’clock. A heavy autumn mist rising from the lake shrouded the American ships as they began moving in single file. Their oars were muffled in shirts, their wounded kept below decks so their moans would not alert the enemy. Each ship was completely dark except for a small lantern in the stern and a shrouded one in the bow. A chalk mark on the rear rails, lit by a slit in the rear lantern, made the vessel’s stern just visible to the ship immediately behind. Wigglesworth in the galley Trumbull led. One by one the gundolas and smaller vessels followed in silence. The Congress, with Arnold aboard, and the Washington were last in line. The procession passed so close to the Carlton that they could hear its sailors chatting as they glided beside it. They were in luck. The British had moved their three large men-of-war a mile out from the western shore of the lake, inadvertently leaving a passageway for the American ships to slip through.1
The British commander woke with a shock the next morning to find the American fleet gone. Writing General Burgoyne, Carleton admitted he had gone to sleep “expecting in the morning to be able to engage them with our whole fleet, but to our great mortification,” he confessed, “we perceived at daybreak that they had found means to escape us unobserved by any of our guard boats or cruisers.”2 At first Carleton assumed his intended prey had gone north up the Valcour channel aiming to cut the British fleet off from the their land forces under Burgoyne. Had Carleton’s information on the depth of the northern end of the channel been better he would have realized escape in that direction was impossible. At any rate the British lost time sailing north rather than south looking for the American convoy.
Once the British turned south, they were hampered by a strong south wind making the journey upstream even more of a struggle. The wind played no favorites though, and slowed the Americans down as well. They had given the British the slip at Valcour Island but were still twenty-eight miles from Crown Point, plenty of time for the powerful fleet to catch them.
Arnold and his bedraggled fleet made for Schuyler Island seven miles south of Valcour Island to reconnoiter and make what repairs they could. The New York and the Providence were so badly damaged Arnold had their ordnance transferred to other vessels, then the two ships were towed off and sunk.3 The Jersey, so waterlogged it could not be towed or even burned, was allowed to sink where it was. Arnold, reporting to Gates, explained, “We remained no longer at Schuyler’s Island than to stop our leaks and mend the sails of the Washington. At two o’clock p.m., they weighed anchor, with a fresh breeze to the southward.”4
During the night the wind moderated. The British ships moving through the dark gained on them. The following day they caught up. In a last attempt to hold them off and protect the rest of his fleet Arnold turned his flagship, the Congress, and the Washington galley commanded by Waterbury to meet the enemy ships. The two ships fought fiercely while the rest of the fleet got away. Both ships took a terrible beating. The Washington was surrounded and badly damaged. Arnold explained, “The Washington galley was in such a shattered condition, and had so many men killed and wounded, she struck [her flag] to the enemy after receiving a few broadsides.”5 Waterbury decided to surrender to save his crew of some one hundred men. That left Arnold in the Congress to fight on alone. The British ships, in Arnold’s words, “kept up an incessant fire on us for about five glasses [hourglasses, in this case four hours], with round and grape shot, which we returned as briskly.” The Congress, surrounded by seven enemy ships, began receiving broadside after broadside. Through the smoke her flag, “Don’t Tread on Me,” could be glimpsed still flying. “The sails, rigging and hull of the Congress were shattered and torn in pieces,” Arnold reported, “the First Lieutenant and three men killed.” He was out of ammunition, twenty-seven of his seventy-man crew were dead or wounded.6 Still he would not surrender. Somehow he managed to break through the encircling ships with his little gundolas and made for a creek on the Vermont shore where the British vessels could not follow. Having run his ships aground Arnold ordered the crews to take their firearms and leap overboard. Holding their guns aloft, they waded to shore. That done he set fire to the Congress and the gundolas, while his men fired their weapons to keep any smaller British vessels at bay. Arnold stayed watching the fire until he was sure it had spread to all the vessels. The Congress’s flag was still flying as the flames consumed it. Leaping from his ship’s bow Arnold led his 150 exhausted men through the forest. They took an unusual route that enabled them to escape the waiting Indians. Thankfully they reached Crown Point safely.
There was no real safety at Crown Point though. The fort was vulnerable to an attack from the British fleet. Still, at least it was a temporary respite for Arnold and his weary officers and men. Exhausted as they were, their only option was to retreat further south, to Ticonderoga. Off they set trekking overland for another twenty miles, carrying their wounded in slings made from sails. On October 15, two days after Arnold’s fierce defense aboard the Congress, they reached Ticonderoga.
Five days later Carleton arrived at Crown Point. On November 3 he captured the fort. It was snowing heavily on the lake and the surrounding mountains were white with snow. The onset of winter gave Carleton a difficult choice. He could press on and attack Ticonderoga or retreat back to Canada and launch an invasion south again the next campaign season. Pressing on though, he risked his fleet becoming iced in on Lake Champlain, while he and his men faced a bitter winter in a remote part of northern New York. Carleton was a cautious man. He reckoned retreat made more sense. In early December he and his fleet headed north. Some of his bateaux and long boats had already left. On November 2 Lieutenant William Digby, with this group, reported that when they had gone some seventeen miles north a stiff wind forced the boats to take shelter in a creek.7 The British sailors dubbed the spot Destruction Bay when they discovered it was where Arnold’s men had endured the British bombardment. “Some of their dead,” Digby wrote, “were then floating on the brink of the water just as the surf threw them.” The British, out of decency, took time to retrieve the bodies and bury them. That evening snow fell softly, covering the newly dug graves.
The British fleet had been triumphant, but the obstinate defense Arnold’s men had put up meant there would be no British conquest of New York State, at least for that year. Arnold’s heroism, capping his astonishing trek through the Maine woods the previous year, was widely celebrated. Gates, writing to Schuyler with Arnold’s report, was relieved and delighted: “It has pleased Providence to preserve General Arnold. Few men ever met with so many hair breadth escapes in so short a space of time.”8 In Gates’s general orders on October 14 he gave thanks “to General Arnold and the officers, seamen and marines of the fleet for the gallant defense they made against the great superiority of the enemy’s force.”9 Even Arnold’s critics would later praise him. Jared Sparks writing some years later of Arnold’s life and treason, marveled, “There are few instances on record of more deliberate courage and gallantry than were displayed by him, from beginning to end of this action.”10 When Lieutenant James Dacre reported in London on the naval battle he pointed out that Arnold’s disposition of his force, his defense against a more powerful enemy, and the management of the retreat did him great honor.11 J. W. Fortescue, in his classic history of the British army, berates Carleton for failing to attack Ticonderoga rather than retreating adding: “Very different would it have been if the British had been commanded by such a man as Arnold, whose amazing skill, gallantry, and resource make him undoubtedly the hero of this short campaign.”12 At Ticonderoga Colonel Varick described Arnold’s escape as “a blessing from Almighty God.” America’s newspapers carried detailed accounts of the naval battle against the British and Arnold’s gallantry, often quoting Arnold’s original report.13 It was stirring stuff. The battle of Valcour Island was not a victory but was an inspiring example of colonial heroism and resistance in the face of superior force, an inspiration badly needed that autumn. Washington’s army had been beaten on Long Island in August and had been retreating ever since, into New York, New Jersey, then Pennsylvania. The only positive aspect of Washington’s continuing retreat was that the American army was still intact.
What Hannah made of her brother’s death-defying leadership on the lake and his near-miraculous escape can be guessed. Although relieved and thankful that God had spared him, she could not be happy at the way he risked his life, time and again. At any rate Arnold was heading home at last. He left Saratoga in November to set out for New Haven but never got there. On his way he stopped at Albany to pick up his cash box and confer with General Schuyler. He also needed to attend a hearing brought by Hazen claiming Arnold had harmed his reputation by alleging he had sold rum meant for the troops for his personal profit. The hearing on December 2 concluded that there was no real proof that Hazen had sold rum improperly. Arnold now hurried south to catch up to Gates. As always his celebrity and unflinching honesty caused problems that threatened his sense of honor. He was a hero, and deservedly so. The American public honored Arnold, his men loved him, but his pride and even, or especially, his success made for a growing number of enemies. John Brown, the oldest and most persistent, was not satisfied with the collapse of the summer’s court-martial against Arnold and was still lobbying the New England delegation in Congress, accusing him of plundering. Arnold was jealous of his reputation, but so were his enemies. And he had in one way or another reflected badly on them, sometimes just indirectly by making them look inadequate. They would not let it rest. The ranks of these men, determined to diminish him in order to exonerate themselves, continued to grow with every year, and would bedevil him for the remainder of his career in the American cause.
But there was a deeper problem, one quite beyond Arnold’s control. Arnold’s amazing military triumphs and continuing problems with personal enemies became tangled in the widespread suspicion of military officers. His very success made it worse. Even if he had been more willing to pander to the politicians in Massachusetts and Philadelphia it is uncertain that would have solved the problem. Yet experienced volunteers were needed if the British were to be defeated. And Arnold shared the increasing exasperation officers and soldiers felt at criticism and the woeful neglect of the army by civilians. He was loyal and had repeatedly risked his life and devoted his fortune to the cause. Why should politicians sitting smugly in their committee rooms doubt his dedication and look for flaws?
Arnold was anxious about the continuing accusations of John Brown, who had somehow managed to convince Congress to grant him the promotion and pay of a colonel, and to make this retroactive to November 29, 1775, the day Montgomery had originally promised it to him, before learning he had been plundering British prisoners. To preserve his own honor and reputation, Arnold decided to change his plans for returning home immediately and instead go with Gates to join Washington. He could then continue on to petition Congress and finally clear Brown’s charges against him.
The two men headed south marching their Ticonderoga regiments through the rolling mountains of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in the freezing winter weather, struggling through heavy snows. Just before they reached Washington’s camp a dispatch arrived from the commander asking Arnold to set out for Rhode Island immediately, as the British had invaded the state. A large British fleet had entered Newport harbor on Aquidneck Island followed by an army of seven thousand troops. There was no real resistance. The location had great strategic value for the British as Newport was the only harbor in the northern states that could be entered directly from the sea by large vessels without their having to wait for favorable winds. It also gave the British ships an opportunity to prey on colonial shipping. Rhode Island’s government had retreated to Providence where the state militia and the few regiments Washington could spare were housed at the College of Rhode Island, today’s Brown University.
Arnold decided to continue on to Washington’s camp before turning back north, assuming Washington would deal with Congress on his behalf. He and Gates caught up with the commander in chief on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. Arnold hadn’t met with Washington since setting off on the trek to Quebec. Because of the need for him to head to Rhode Island the two were together for only three days. Arnold took the opportunity to plead with Washington to hasten an exchange for the American prisoners still being held in Quebec. He brought to Washington’s attention three men in particular, Daniel Morgan, John Lamb, and Eleazer Oswald. In January 1777 all three men were officially exchanged and able to return to active service in the American cause. He also encouraged Washington to pursue his plan to attack the lightly guarded Hessian posts in New Jersey. Gates gave Washington quite the opposite advice, urging him to continue retreating to the hills and bide his time before contemplating an attack. Gates always seemed to prefer a defensive approach. Washington was more in tune with Arnold’s view and welcomed the Ticonderoga troops to his camp on December 21, just in time to take part in the dramatic crossing of the Delaware and the triumphant capture of the Hessian posts, and the battles at Trenton and Princeton that followed.
On his way to Rhode Island Arnold was, at long last, able to visit his family in Connecticut. He had been away a year and a half. Veterans from the Quebec campaign who were captured and had already been exchanged welcomed him with tears of thanks. Other veterans of his march through the wilderness of Maine turned out just to shake his hand. At every Connecticut town he entered—at Hartford, Middletown, and New Haven—he was hailed as a hero by admiring crowds. Cannon were shot off in salute.14 His old Foot Guards were assembled on the New Haven town green to salute him. And of course Hannah and his three little sons, now eight, seven, and four were delighted to have him home. After only a week, however, surely to their dismay, he was off again, although this time he would be based much closer to home.
One of Arnold’s new tasks was recruiting, a task for which his fame made him ideally suited. A new regiment was to be raised, and Arnold suggested Washington appoint John Lamb to head it. Lamb, now promoted to colonel, was one of those men imprisoned in Quebec and freed through Arnold’s good offices. Congress had promised to advance money to equip the new regiment, but when it hadn’t arrived Arnold wrote a note for the £1,000 needed and sent it to Lamb. Arnold’s brother-in-law, Samuel Mansfield, who had been with his fleet on Lake Champlain was, at Arnold’s urging, now made a captain. Arnold went on to raise some six thousand militia who were to join Washington at his winter camp in Morristown, New Jersey.
Arnold had been a widower now for more than a year. In his travels to Boston to recruit men he met and fell in love with Elizabeth DeBlois, a lovely young woman of sixteen. Party affiliation seems not to have mattered, as Elizabeth’s merchant father was a loyalist who had fled Boston when the British evacuated it in March. Perhaps Arnold’s visit to Hannah and his children reminded him of the need for a wife for himself and a mother for his sons, for a real home. Oddly, while Arnold was a daring military commander coolly facing death, he had never been especially successful with women. His wife Peggy had been aloof and plainly less in love with him than he with her. At any rate he approached Miss DeBlois delicately and indirectly, writing to Lucy Knox, the wife of Colonel Henry Knox and presumably a friend of the young lady, to pass along a letter to “the heavenly Miss DeBlois.”15 “I shall remain under the most anxious suspense until I have the favor of a line from you,” he wrote her, “who if I may judge, will from your own experience consider the fond anxiety, the glowing hopes, and chilling fears that alternately possess the heart of . . . your most obedient and humble servant, Benedict Arnold.”16 The answer came, equally indirectly, in mid-April when he was next in New Haven. The heavenly Miss DeBlois, as Lucy Knox explained in a letter to her husband, had “politely refused to listen to the general.”17
That winter the Rhode Island theater of war ground to a standoff. Arnold had suggested a more aggressive approach but Washington was against it. Instead, the militia lobbed cannon balls into the British garrison and occasionally sent raiding parties to Aquidneck Island. The British did not seem interested in expanding their territory, but for their part occasionally raided the mainland for supplies or to burn houses.
As Arnold bustled about in Massachusetts and Connecticut recruiting men for Washington’s army and fretting over John Brown’s success with Congress, the Congress reached a crisis in its attitude toward the army. The discussion got to the heart of Arnold’s real problem with authorities. It was more fundamental than Arnold’s prickly nature, although that didn’t help, or his sensitivity about honor, which was commonplace among men at the time, or even his friendship with Schuyler and Washington and reluctance to pander to the delegates of Congress. The real problem was the prevailing attitude of Americans toward full-time soldiers. Arnold knew that antipathy well. He shared it. Indeed, it was virtually bred in the bones of an Englishman. Englishmen had been fearful of royal mercenaries since the time of Magna Carta. More recent events had justified that hostility as professional soldiers in the pay of kings had destroyed individual liberties and representative assemblies on the Continent. England, as an island nation, was spared that fate since it was better able to dispense with a professional army, at least during peacetime. Englishmen preferred to rely on a citizen-militia, local men officered by local gentry. Only the crisis of civil war in the mid-seventeenth century convinced Parliament to create its own army and the results had been terrible. After defeating the armies of Charles I, General Oliver Cromwell, backed by Parliament’s soldiers, evicted its members and seized power. One-man government backed by military force had followed until the restoration of the monarchy. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 was adopted after another English monarch with a large standing army was deposed. To prevent this happening again that document insisted there could be no standing army in time of peace without the consent of Parliament. In addition, to ensure parliamentary control when armies were raised, Parliament passed the Mutiny Act forcing army commanders to return annually to Parliament for authorization to discipline their men and to get funding.
Yet fears persisted, as an English peacetime army became a fact of life. British pamphleteers in the eighteenth century penned tract after tract on the dangers of standing armies. These were widely read in America. In Commentaries on the Laws of England, a best seller in America as well as Britain when it appeared in 1765, William Blackstone, the great authority on common law, warned: “In a land of liberty it is extremely dangerous to make a distinct order of the profession of arms.”18 Blackstone advised Englishmen to look upon their own professional soldiers “as temporary excrescences bred out of the distemper of the State, and not as any part of the permanent and perpetual laws of the Kingdom.”19
Americans had had their own problems on that score. From 1660 more than half the men selected as colonial governors were army officers who had served as garrison captains in England.20 During the recent French and Indian War thousands of Americans serving alongside British regulars became disgusted with the low character of many soldiers, the brutal military discipline, and the way Americans were treated by British officers. Once the war finished the colonists were dismayed that the British government was stationing regulars in their major cities, sometimes quartering soldiers in their homes. Tensions between the soldiers and the colonial population were inevitable. Samuel Adams was quick to remind Americans that a professional army was “always dangerous to the Liberties of the People.” Soldiers would come to feel themselves a group apart from the community and become more attached to their officers than to their government. They learned to obey orders in an unthinking fashion. Adams warned that a standing army’s power “should be watched with a jealous Eye.” All these worries came to a head with the so-called Boston Massacre of 1770 where soldiers fired on a raucous dockside crowd, killing five civilians. Paul Revere quickly produced an engraving of the massacre driving home that lesson.
With this background in mind, with the example of the English Parliament’s disastrous experience with its own army, it is understandable that the Continental Congress was reluctant to accede to Washington’s call for longer-term enlistments and a more professional force. Just as the seventeenth-century English Parliament had found though, there was constant tension between having an effective military and maintaining civilian control. But this was an emergency. Britain had sent a fleet and troops of unprecedented size to suppress the rebellion. Washington was calling for recruits who would serve longer terms, three years or for the duration of the war, and would become experienced soldiers and permit more rational campaign planning. The solution, it seemed to the delegates, was to tighten still further their control of the army so it would never become a threat.
To ensure their army would not slip the reins, the Continental Congress insisted upon micromanaging every aspect of the war. That winter of 1776–1777, the delegates devised new measures to tighten their control. In December they promoted Thomas Conway from brigadier general to major general. Washington had opposed the elevation of the arrogant Irish soldier of fortune when there were so many more deserving and more senior American officers. Nevertheless, they made Conroy inspector general of the army in charge of drilling and training. And Conway was to report directly to the Board of War, not to Washington. Horatio Gates was appointed president of the Board. In sum, Washington was to be overseen and second-guessed by this new board staffed with officers junior to him. The lines of authority were confused and cumbersome and insulting.
But Congress was not done imposing controls. While Arnold was in Rhode Island and Massachusetts recruiting men for Washington’s army, Congress wrangled over new rules for army promotions, power that would ensure they made these decisions, not Washington. The commander in chief had assumed that in a republican army officers would be promoted though the ranks based on seniority and merit. There would be no buying commissions, the practice in the British army. But Congress viewed the emphasis on seniority and merit as depriving them of the power to decide promotions. They voted to deprive Washington of the power to appoint or discharge general officers. This suited John Adams, who argued during the debate: “I have been distressed to see some members of this house disposed to idolize an image which their own hands have molded. I speak here of the superstitious veneration that is sometimes paid to Genl Washington. Altho’ I honor him for his good qualities, yet in this house I feel myself his Superior. In private life I shall always acknowledge that he is mine. It becomes us to attend early to the restraining our army.”21 After further discussion they agreed on February 19 that in making promotions they pay “a due regard” to three criteria; the line of succession, the merit of the persons proposed [both Washington’s sensible criteria] and lastly the quota of troops raised by each state.22 Although not stating it in so many words, this last criteria tied the number of major generals a state could have to the number of men from that state in the ranks. Certainly the first two criteria were unexceptional. The third, however, worked against those and left the door open to lobbying and favoritism. Often it was favoritism that was to prevail.
The very day the debate concluded Congress acted. It promoted five officers to the rank of major general. Arnold was a brigadier general. He easily had met the first two of their three criteria. He was the senior brigadier general, and there was no doubt he had demonstrated great merit. Yet he was passed over for promotion while five officers junior to him in rank, one only a militia officer, were promoted.