Arnold, looking back later, was painfully aware it was a single-minded drive for honor and respect which shaped his entire life that brought him to a court-martial table. But what more worthy passion could a man have? Had not the men who signed the Declaration of Independence famously pledged to each other “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”1 Honor was sacred. Particularly in a country of self-made men, honor mattered deeply because a man’s stature and reputation were in his own hands. Birth of course helped, class and education helped, and the Arnold family was blessed with illustrious beginnings in the New World and again at the time of Arnold’s birth. But the boundless possibilities, the great expectations for the boy’s future, were sadly squandered by the father who had bestowed them. By Benedict’s twelfth birthday his family’s honor and reputation were gone, sunk in shame and public humiliation. The responsibility to restore his own and his family’s honor had fallen to him and him alone. If there had been no great expectations to begin with, if they had not been dashed so cruelly, everything might have been different. He might have borne with more patience this loss of respect. Honor might have mattered less.
Benedict’s great-great grandfather, the first American Benedict Arnold, sailed from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with his family in 1636, not long after the arrival of its first planters. The Arnolds settled in the little port village of Hingham south of Boston. Within a year they were off again following the upstart Roger Williams into the wilderness and helping him found his new, more tolerant colony of Rhode Island. That first Benedict Arnold was an extraordinary man. He succeeded Roger Williams as president of the infant colony then went on to serve several terms as its governor. He was as enterprising as he was public-spirited—a successful farmer and shrewd merchant, reputed to be the richest man in the colony.2 What a model of honor, probity, and reputation for a boy to ponder and hope to emulate.
The problem was that as a thoughtful parent, Governor Arnold abandoned the English pattern of primogeniture and divided his property among his five sons. That pattern continued for several generations. The inevitable result was that the early fortune was dissipated and succeeding generations were left to fend for themselves with uneven success. Benedict’s own father, another Benedict, and his father’s younger brother Oliver had no great expectations at all. They were two younger sons in a family of six children. Their older brother, Caleb, seems to have inherited their father’s 140-acre farm.3 Their legacy was to be apprenticed as coopers, a useful trade but one offering a limited future.
The young cooper found work in Norwich with Absolom King, a prosperous merchant and captain. Like many enterprising merchants in Norwich at that time, King sailed his own ships to ports in Europe and the Caribbean. On the way back from a voyage to Ireland in September 1732, he died at sea, leaving his lovely wife Hannah to mourn him.4 Hannah was a young woman of twenty-five, of “good exterior and estimable qualities.” She belonged to the large Waterman family and was related to the Lathrops, one of the oldest and wealthiest Norwich families.5 The cooper courted the widow and on November 8, 1733, just over a year after King’s death, Benedict’s parents were wed.6At a stroke Benedict’s father’s fortunes changed. While his brother Oliver remained a cooper the rest of his life, Benedict’s father gave up the craft and took over the King business and property. The landsman turned into an able seaman. With great panache he followed in Absolom King’s footsteps and took to the sea, sailing north to Canada, south along the American coast as far as the Caribbean, and across the sea to England buying and selling cargoes. With the profits he built a fine, large house for his growing family with a shop next door where the goods purchased on his journeys were sold. In addition to his thriving business and frequent travels, Arnold’s father emulated that first Rhode Island Benedict Arnold by devoting himself to community work. He served as a collector, a selectman, a constable, and a militia captain. He became known as Captain Arnold.
Five years after their marriage Hannah and Benedict had their first child, a son who, as custom dictated, was named after his father. Sadly their first little Benedict died less than a year later when a wave of diphtheria, a fearsome child killer, swept through the area.7 Two years later, on January 3, 1741, a frigid winter day, a second son was born.8 They also named him Benedict and, probably fearing he too might die young, hurried their tiny infant off in the wintry cold to Norwich’s First Congregational Church for the Reverend Benjamin Lord to baptize. The congregation of family, friends, and neighbors prayed for the baby and welcomed him into the faith. Another year and baby Hannah, Benedict’s dear sister, was born. Then came Mary and another son, Absolom King, named for Hannah’s first husband. Last, in 1749 when Benedict was eight, baby Elizabeth was born. Little Absolom died when he was only two and a half, leaving Benedict his parents’ only son.
The joy and hopefulness of his childhood made its sad and sudden close hard for that only son. Benedict’s mother and father were devoted parents. It was a privileged and carefree time, full of grand possibilities. The boy had forests to explore. Mohegan Indians lived nearby. And the woods still harbored some exciting wildlife. Most of the wolves and even foxes had been exterminated but Norwich had an impressive number of bothersome snakes, particularly rattlesnakes and black snakes. The town was keen to eradicate them. Bounties were offered for bringing in a rattle or other proof a snake had been killed. Just before Benedict’s birth the bounty for killing snakes was raised to 10 shillings a head, although the snake killer was obliged to take an oath that he or she went out for no other purpose than to destroy snakes. Some Norwich women availed themselves of the opportunity to earn money this way. Tales of their prowess abounded. One year the Widow Woodworth was paid a bounty for twenty-three snakes and the Widow Smith for nine.9
Benedict’s childhood also had all the trappings of colonial civility. He lived in one of the finest houses in the town, staffed with servants and slaves. He was surrounded by a loving, prosperous, and prominent family. During the summers when Benedict was old enough his father took him on some of his voyages. Together they shared the excitement of Atlantic crossings and visiting ports from Canada to the Caribbean. It was a wonderful introduction to the sea and to his father’s business. But his father had other aims for his son.
Captain Arnold had never had the opportunity for more than a rudimentary education. Hannah was well educated for a woman of the time but women did not attend college or go into the professions. Both parents were determined to give their son the best schooling available, one that would open doors to future opportunities. Britain’s American colonies were more egalitarian than the Home Country but class still mattered, and education helped assure a better status.
Benedict was first sent to a school run by Dr. Jewett in the village of Montville, just south of Norwich.10 Hannah pressed Jewett to instill in her son “the first rudiments of religion and enforce virtue and explode all manner of vice.”11 If young Benedict proved “backward and unteachable,” she wrote, “pray don’t be soon discouraged.” She urged the schoolmaster not to “spare the rod and spoil the child.” It is unclear how often that rod needed to be applied to this small boy, but applying it was standard practice at the time, considered a duty by parents and teachers intent that youngsters become God-fearing and virtuous adults. If Benedict resented Hannah’s pious admonitions to her children to trust in God, and children easily tire of pious admonitions, he found himself echoing them when he had children of his own.12
In 1752 when Benedict was eleven it was time for more advanced schooling. With great pride and fanfare his mother and father arranged for him to go to Canterbury, Connecticut some twelve miles from Norwich to board with a relation of Benedict’s father, the Reverend James Cogswell. Like many ministers of the time, Rev. Cogswell took in boys and schooled them in the classics.13 The aim was to prepare them for higher education and, for some of them, the ministry. At Canterbury Benedict found himself laboring at the classic subjects required for learned men—Latin, the Bible, logic, mathematics, rhetoric, and history. Most of Cogswell’s pupils were destined to be enrolled at Yale College in New Haven. That was presumably Benedict’s parents’ plan for him, but he was not to be one of those fortunate sons.14
He was a lively, even bold boy but didn’t consider himself unruly or brave. Enemies then and since have told stories of misbehavior and even cruelty, behavior that might have been written off later as high spirits in any other boy. As the only son in a family of daughters, Benedict felt the need to prove his bravery, to play the manly part. Yet, keen as people were to find fault in later years he was remembered as having picked fights with the stronger boys, always protecting the weaker children.15 However boisterous and spirited he was, Benedict loved and respected his parents. He carefully kept the letters his mother wrote him while he was away at school. Five of these survive.16 They are full of a mother’s reminders to be pious and diligent. “Keep a steady watch over your thoughts and actions,” Hannah wrote him, “be dutiful to superiors, obliging to equals, and affable to inferiors, if any such there be. Always choose that your companions be your betters, that by their good examples, you may learn.”17 How many children of that time heard the same sound advice, perhaps in the very same words! Hannah then tucked shillings into that letter that he was to spend “prudently, as you are accountable to God and your father.”18
In 1753 while Benedict was away from home boarding in Canterbury, a terrible plague descended on Norwich. The highly contagious and deadly disease, diphtheria, struck the town. Adults sometimes became sick from diphtheria and pulled through. Most of its victims were children. It was one of the three most feared childhood killers in an age of childhood scourges.19 Hannah wrote to convey the dreadful news that his sisters Hannah, Mary, and little Elizabeth were deathly ill and that she and the captain were sick. His entire family was sick and possibly dying. Hannah’s fears for her son’s own health leap from the page: “My dear, God seems to be saying to all, ‘Children, be ye also ready!’” She pleaded, “improve your time and beg God to grant His spirit, or death may overtake you unprepared. . . . Your groaning sisters give love to you. God may mete you with this disease wherever you be, for it is His servant, but I would not have you come home for fear it should be presumption.” His distraught mother nonetheless closed her letter: “My love to you—beg you will write us. I have sent you one pound chocolate.”20
Dr. Benjamin Rush, the renowned colonial physician, referred to diphtheria as malignant sore throat. It was commonly described as “throat distemper” since the white fibers it produced in the throat quickly covered it. Fever followed with a rapid pulse, breathing problems, and lastly paralysis of the throat and heart failure. Death usually occurred within a week. The disease was spread through respiratory droplets from a cough or sneeze, and once exposed symptoms began to appear in two to five days. There was no cure.21 A deadly diphtheria epidemic struck Philadelphia in 1763, ten years after the Norwich outbreak, killing hundreds of children.
Hannah wrote to Benedict again on August 12 to tell him, “deaths are multiplied all around us and more daily expected.”22 In her letter of August 30 Benedict learned with some relief, “your poor sisters are yet in the land of the living.” Mary, who had been “just stepping on the banks of time” was “something revived,” but poor Hannah was “waxing weaker and weaker.”23 His father was “very poor” and his mother “had a touch of the distemper” although “through divine goodness it is past of [sic] light with me.” How was a boy to concentrate on memorizing those Latin verbs and mastering mathematics while his sisters and parents were grievously sick at home?
As it turned out it was eight-year-old Mary, “something revived” on August 30 who died. Nineteen days later little four-year-old Elizabeth passed away. Miraculously his sister Hannah, who had been “waxing weaker and weaker,” was spared along with his parents. Of the six Arnold children only Benedict and Hannah would survive to adulthood. It was a fearful toll.
Misery continued knocking on the Arnold door even after the sad loss of his two sisters. In fact, their troubles had begun even before the deaths of Mary and Elizabeth. Benedict’s father’s business was in serious decline. As a merchant who served as his own captain sailing from port to port on risky voyages buying and selling cargoes, everything depended on his energy, his skill, and his enterprise. His personal relationships with suppliers and customers were all-important. But Captain Arnold’s hard drinking, typical of the time and seafaring vocation, gradually became more and more uncontrolled and debilitating. It is unclear whether his business decline had caused the drinking, or the drinking caused the business decline. The latter seems most likely since the 1750s were overall a prosperous time for American long distance trade. Sea travel had become generally less dangerous, port times had shortened significantly, and insurance costs had decreased dramatically.24 The French and Indian War actually increased trade. Arnold’s business ought to have been flourishing. Perhaps bad luck or overextending his resources was the cause of his difficulties. How was a young schoolboy to know or understand the true circumstances of his father’s collapse? He only knew and felt the result. When Hannah wrote Benedict on August 12 of the dangers of the disease raging in Norwich and urged her son not to “neglect your precious soul, which once lost can never be regained,” she may have been thinking of her husband’s growing addiction. His hard drinking was increasingly interfering with his work and life and imperiling his very soul.25 It was terrible for a wife to watch. The sudden and painful deaths of his two little daughters added to Captain Arnold’s grief. Had their deaths been his fault? Was God punishing him for his pride or drinking by taking his children? Is that what his wife thought? Unworthy as he was, he had recovered from the disease that had killed his innocent little girls. In his despair Captain Arnold turned away from God and prayer, and to the bottle. Benedict’s much-loved father was increasingly unable to lead or even support his family.
Captain Arnold was not alone in succumbing to drink. Drinking was, or was certainly thought to be, a serious problem in colonial Connecticut from the earliest times. The Connecticut Assembly tackled the problem repeatedly, to little effect. One set of laws punished being drunk, another frequent drinking. In 1650 and 1709 the assembly passed laws punishing drunkenness with a ten-shilling fine.26 In 1676 the assembly turned its attention to habitual drinking with a law “to prevent the increase of drunkenness,” ordering constables to take “special care to notice” every person who frequents taverns and bars and to require them to forbear frequenting the places.” This law added, “if such person does not heed the warning and is found in such a place, he must forfeit five shillings or sit in the stocks for an hour.” Thirty years later the fine for drunkenness remained ten shillings but with a five-shilling penalty for drinking after nine o’clock in the evening.27 If the drinker was unable to pay he was to sit for one to three hours in the stocks. In 1716 the colony ordered that magistrates and other officials were to post the names of so-called “tavern-haunters” on the doors of every tavern in the town. Clearly this was a means of public shaming. Moreover, a listed tavern-haunter who entered a tavern was fined either twenty shillings, double the earlier fine or, if he could not pay, had to sit in the stocks for two hours unless he could find two sureties willing to take responsibility for his good behavior. A “common drunkard” could be incarcerated. For better or worse Hannah’s Lathrop relatives owned a tavern in Norwich and presumably extended credit to the Captain until his name appeared on the shameful list of tavern-haunters. Drinking in moderation was accepted but excessive drinking was considered a grave moral failing. Norwich residents were regarded as conspicuous examples of “Connecticut Steady Habits,” and moral failings were to be forcefully discouraged.28 Colonial taverns were meant to be located near a church, the better for members to see who frequented them. The presence of the church, it was hoped, would be a silent admonition for those planning on entering a tavern. Captain Arnold’s increasing alcoholism, with its eventual physical and mental deterioration threatened not only to destroy his shipping business but to bring very public disgrace to himself and his wife and children.
Poor Hannah! Despite her piety and prayers after losing two sons, she had just lost her two youngest daughters. There would be no further children. That terrible loss together with her husband’s failing business, his depression, and increasing alcoholism, might have driven a weaker woman to drink as well. But Hannah was made of sterner stuff. She now shouldered responsibility for holding her family together and keeping her husband’s business going. She was successful for a time.
In 1754, the year after his sisters’ deaths, the Arnolds still managed to pay Benedict’s school fees. In April his mother sent him fifty shillings and his father added twenty shillings for his personal expenses. But Captain Arnold’s condition and with it the family business continued to deteriorate. In late summer Hannah wrote Benedict that his father’s health was so poor he wasn’t certain he could make the short sail to Newport, Rhode Island.29 By the new year Hannah and Captain Arnold with great reluctance felt they had no choice but to give up their dream for their only son. Even by scrimping, they did not have the money to pay Benedict’s school fees. The great expectations for his future, the chance for a college education that would place him among the colony’s elite, vanished.
If it was a difficult decision for them it was worse for Benedict. He faced the humiliation of having to leave school and return home to Norwich. The return would be public. Everyone would know what had happened: his school friends, his neighbors, everyone. The cooper’s son would have to start his career with no better advantage than his own father had. Worse actually, because while Grandfather Arnold was a respectable farmer of modest means with little to give his six children, Benedict had the bitter disappointment of a sudden collapse of his hopes, coupled with public shame and debt. If he was to acquire personal honor after this deep disgrace, Benedict would have to earn it himself.