. . . I have suffered, in seeing the fair fabric of reputation, which I have been with so much danger and toil raising since the present war, undermined by those, whose posterity (as well as themselves) will feel the blessed effects of my efforts . . .”
—Benedict Arnold, summation, at Court-Martial1
Great God! Is it possible that, after the bold and perilous enterprises which this man has undertaken for the service and defense of his country, the loss of his fortune and the cruel and lingering pains he has suffered from the wound received fighting their battles, there can be found among us men so abandoned to the base and infernal passions of envy and malice as to persecute him with the most unrelenting fury, and wish to destroy what alone he had the prospect of saving out of the dreadful wreck of his health, fortune and life; his character?
—Silas Deane to Nathanael Greene,
May 29, 17792
It was with immense relief that Major General Arnold, leaning heavily on his cane, entered the smoky warmth of Norris’s Tavern that frigid morning of 1779, two days before Christmas. With some difficulty he settled himself at the long table before the fire in the improvised courtroom, ready for the start of his much-delayed court-martial.
There he sat, dressed in the buff and blue uniform of his rank, a wounded warrior. But there are worse blows for a proud man than a crippled leg. It had been nearly a year since the Pennsylvania executive council broadcast their charges against him to every state. He had suffered from months of humiliation, frustration, and dishonor, unable to respond. The court-martial was the only way to clear his name. God willing, vindication was at hand.
He had hoped the trial could be held in Philadelphia and spare him the eighty-mile journey to the army’s winter headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey. That proved impractical. December was never an auspicious time of year for travel, and he was still crippled and had to go by coach. This year such a journey was especially treacherous. Snow had begun early. There were four snowstorms in November and another seven in December. When he finally reached Morristown it lay under two feet of snow. The condition of the army gathering there was even more miserable than usual. Officers not fortunate enough to have the use of a house slept in tents on the frozen ground. Still they were luckier than the 10,800 ragged and hungry Continental soldiers in nearby Jockey Hollow, frantically building huts to house themselves and their officers before they sickened from the bitter cold. None knew, as the court-martial convened that day, that before their deliberations were done the worst snowstorm of a frigid century would smother the encampment in another four to six feet of snow, marooning them all.
None of the eight charges the Pennsylvania council had levied against him back in February were for cowardice or the questionable surrender of a fort, the usual accusations of an officer’s failings. No one would dare accuse the country’s best general, its “Hannibal,” of cowardice. Instead, he faced accusations alleging that during his service as commandant of Philadelphia he had misused his authority to enrich himself.3 It was painful that after a lifetime overcoming the humiliation of his childhood, and even after his brilliant military success, his personal honor should be besmirched in this way. Painful almost beyond endurance.
Scanning the faces of the thirteen officers now seating themselves around him to hear his case, Arnold was keenly aware what a disastrous mistake it had been for Washington to select him as commandant of Philadelphia. It may have seemed the perfect post for him while his leg healed, since he could not yet ride a horse let alone take the field. But Washington was certainly aware that for all Arnold’s genius as a military commander this political minefield would be treacherous to negotiate. For a proud man like Arnold, and a protégé of Washington, it proved impossible.
He trusted Washington and his fellow officers to protect him from the vicious slurs and ultimate disgrace proposed by the Pennsylvania executive council and his enemies in Congress. He knew now that was naïve. Over and over again Washington had shown him every sign of his high estimation. When Arnold was recuperating with his sister and sons in New Haven, Washington had sent him a magnificent present of a pair of French epaulettes and a sword knot, one of three he had been sent by a French gentleman. His fellow officers shared his resentment of civilians with their demeaning, miserly attitude toward the army that kept them free. Most of the officers were men of property. They were patriotic but sensitive about their personal honor. Yet the importance of honor seemed to escape John Adams and many of his fellow delegates who mocked the army’s officers as “Mastiffs, Scrambling for Rank and Pay like Apes for Nuts.”4 Early in the war when Washington had suggested offering a bounty for a year’s enlistment, Adams had warned that only “the meanest, idlest, most intemperate and worthless” men would sign away their liberty on such terms.5 Of course such bounties had become routine to fill the ranks. Washington, writing from Valley Forge, had pleaded with Congress: “We should all be considered . . . as one people, embarked in one cause, in one interest, acting on the same principle and to the same End.”6 The very jealousy of the army’s proper “subordination to the supreme Civil Authority,” he warned, is a likely means to produce a contrary effect.” Unfortunately for Arnold the warning had gone unheeded.
Apart from worries about death or disfigurement from battle or disease in camp the soldiers had the problem of supporting themselves and their families while on duty. Congress had been printing currency with abandon and it was rapidly becoming worthless. By the time Arnold’s court-martial convened, a captain’s annual pay would buy only a pair of shoes. An ordinary private’s pay, when he got it, bought virtually nothing.7 Many officers had resigned their commissions in disgust. Arnold remained confident the court-martial would exonerate him and preserve his good name and reputation. He was anxious to have his case heard, the sooner the better.
The officers and Washington were, as he had predicted, sympathetic to his plight. But, as it turned out, that had not helped. He had underestimated the Executive Council’s determination to punish him and their ability to intimidate Congress and Washington to achieve it. He had also underestimated Washington’s need to defer to Congress and the Executive Council. Arnold’s frustration grew with the months of delay that prevented him from erasing the very public stain on his reputation and honor. Over and over again during his military service men jealous of his achievements or angry over his brusque behavior toward them had accused him of wrongdoing and belittled his valor as recklessness. But occasional good sense on the part of the authorities and the need for his help on the battlefield had brought investigations to an end, leaving his reputation spotless. This time was different. His enemies were more powerful and his defenders weaker. His use on the battlefield was much diminished. He was expendable.
Arnold’s hope for a speedy resolution to clear his name was not to happen. First the Council approached Congress with their charges. Congress appointed a committee to investigate. Arnold testified, but despite repeated requests for evidence to support their charges, the council failed to respond. Ultimately the committee dismissed six of the eight charges.8 Nevertheless, Reed managed to overturn the report and had four charges sent to a court-martial. Arnold resigned his commission on March 19 but that did not cool the Council’s fervor. In April the Pennsylvania Council threatened Congress with secession if it did not insist upon a court-martial for Arnold.9
Washington had originally scheduled the trial for May 1.10 Learning of this date Reed responded in high dudgeon, claiming he needed more time for witnesses to be present, openly warning Washington: “Such is the dependence of the Army upon the transportation of this state [Arnold was accused of using twelve public wagons for private purposes] that should the court-martial treat it as a light and trivial matter, we fear it will not be practicable to draw forth wagons in the future, be the emergency what it may, and it will have very bad consequences.”11 Arnold probably did not know of the threat, or Reed’s pretence that the Council asked “nothing of Congress but that he should not continue to command in this state”—he had already resigned his post after all. Washington agreed to postpone the court until July 1, eliciting from Arnold the warning of his own danger, that “a set of artful, unprincipled men in office may represent the most innocent actions and, by raising the public clamor against your Excellency, place you in the same situation I am in . . . I have nothing left but the little reputation I have gained in the Army,” he pleaded. “Delay in the present case is worse than death.” He reminded Washington that the Council had already had three months to produce their evidence and reckoned they “wish to put it [the court-martial] off until the campaign opens, considering undoubtedly that the service will then prevent the court-martial from sitting, and cause the trial to be postponed until the end of the campaign.”12 And that, of course, was exactly what had happened. Washington was in the embarrassing position of having to postpone the court-martial time after time to conciliate the Pennsylvania Council, and then the campaign season demanded his attention and he could not spare the officers for a trial.
In the meantime Arnold continued to live in Philadelphia awaiting his court-martial. With the well-publicized Council charges against him, he often found himself harassed by local people as a reputed friend to loyalists. That first summer at his post, there were well-placed fears that patriots who fled the city during the British occupation would be eager for vengeance against neighbors who had remained. That didn’t happen. Captain Charles Willson Peale, a radical, noted in his diary, “to my surprise, I have not seen or heard of one rude encounter.”13 In July councilors grumbled of “a great unwillingness in the People of the City to give the necessary information against the disaffected.”14 Reed, Peale, and the radicals were disappointed in the public. They were also furious that when Peale presented Arnold with a long list of suspected enemy sympathizers, Arnold refused to arrest them. The Council’s animosity and the mob’s anger were increasingly aimed at prominent local moderates, chief among them the state’s well-known attorney general, pamphleteer, signer of the Declaration of Independence, James Wilson. Wilson became unpopular for defending, successfully, those the Council had accused of treason. Of twenty-three men who stood trial for treason between September 1778 and the following April, only four were found guilty, and even in these cases the juries had asked for leniency against the death penalty.15 The jury acquittals made the radicals angrier still. Wilson would defend hundreds of suspected loyalists.
During 1779 radical anger against the moderates increasingly turned to organized mob violence. Wilson was a leader of the moderate group, Arnold a supporter. But Arnold would arrive too late to help his friends on October 4, when the crisis came. Fearing an armed confrontation Wilson, Robert Morris, Captain George Campbell, Colonel Stephen Chambers, Peggy’s brother-in-law Edward Burd, and thirty other republican moderates barricaded themselves in Wilson’s house. To the strains of fifes and drums two hundred of Reed’s radical stalwarts armed and supported by the militia, marched from the commons to Wilson’s house and surrounded it.16 The crowd grew by another two hundred as enraged men, some apparently convinced the high prices from a depreciating currency were due to a loyalist plot, joined the march and converged on Wilson’s home. When they arrived Captain Campbell went to a third storey window and began shouting down at the mob, waving a pistol. Someone in the crowd fired at him. He shot back hitting a few members of the crowd. Then he was hit. Wilson’s other friends began firing from the upstairs windows, at first driving the crowd back. But the mob surged forward, led by men carrying hammers and bars of iron. Suddenly the front door was battered down and the crowd burst in. An exchange of gunfire took place on the stairway. Chambers was shot and killed before the mob was driven from the house and a stack of furniture braced against the door.
Arnold, hearing the commotion, rushed to Wilson’s home. Stones were flung at him as he reached the crowd. He had just pulled out his pistols, his back to a wall, when Reed arrived and challenged him: “What are you doing here, General? You have no more voice in the military affairs of this city.”
“You’ve raised a riot, Reed,” Arnold responded, “and now you have no power to quell it.” At this point Continental soldiers appeared and the violence stopped. The toll was serious. One of Wilson’s friends had been bayoneted and six or seven men lay dead, others were badly wounded. Reed’s response was to arrest everyone inside and outside the house. Arnold, Wilson, Morris, and their fellow republicans were released once they posted bail, but Reed released the members of his militia mob and got an amnesty for them.
Two days later, as Arnold was returning from meeting with a group of moderates at Grey’s Ferry, he was attacked in the street by a violent mob. He drew his pistols to defend himself and threatened to shoot two men who tried to reach him.17 Angry and embarrassed, he wrote Congress: “A mob of lawless ruffians have attacked me in the street and threaten my life, now I am in my own house, for defending myself when attacked.”18 He appealed for their help. “As there is no protection to be expected from the authority of the state for an honest man, I am under the necessity of requesting Congress to order me a guard of Continental troops.” He concluded, “This request I presume will not be denied a man, who has so often fought and bled in defense of his country.” Alas it was denied. Arnold was not popular in Congress and Congress was not in a position to preempt the authority of the Pennsylvania government. Arnold was curtly informed that his application “ought to be made to the Executive Authority of the state of Pennsylvania in whose disposition to protect every honest citizen Congress have full confidence.”19 It was humiliating treatment.
Still, now that the court-martial was to convene at last, Arnold believed he would have the wholehearted sympathy of his fellow officers. The charges would be dismissed, his name cleared. The assurance he had written Washington back in May still held. “I have no doubt,” he wrote, “of obtaining justice from a court-martial, as every officer in the Army must feel himself injured by the cruel and unprecedented treatment I have met with.”20 Major General Benedict Arnold was ready to defend himself with his usual vigor.
Courts-martial were surprisingly common among the officers of the American army. The Continental Congress repeatedly brought charges against any generals whose efforts had not met with success. In 1777 Congress ordered a court-martial for Major General Philip Schuyler for abandoning Fort Ticonderoga to the British. As his friend, Arnold was surely well aware of Schuyler’s plight. About the same time Congress ordered Schuyler’s court-martial, it ordered a court-martial for Major General Arthur St. Clair, previously a British general, on suspicion of disloyalty. Congress had no real evidence against Schuyler or St. Clair, and there had been a long delay in their trials, comparable to Arnold’s but worse in that the two men were suspended and unable to prepare any defense because Congress had not formulated any charges. After six months of delay a committee of Congress had to order their colleagues to send Washington their charges. It was another four months before that was done. St. Clair’s court-martial took place a full year after the original complaints were made. In the end charges that he had advance notice of British movements and failed to stop them were dismissed, and St. Clair was acquitted with highest honors. The same court tried Schuyler who was also acquitted.
Then there was luckless John Sullivan, another major general, who got similar treatment later that year for failing to charge at Staten Island. Congress ordered Washington to suspend him but Washington needed good officers, and Sullivan saw action at Brandywine and Germantown. Even the renowned Anthony Wayne found himself investigated after a surprise attack on his forces resulted in 150 deaths. Outraged, Wayne demanded a court-martial to clear his name. Sullivan, now exonerated, presided, and Wayne was acquitted with the highest honors. Major General Robert Howe, who was presiding over Arnold’s own court-martial, had himself been court-martialed after failing to successfully defend Savannah. In due course Howe too had been acquitted. Washington seems to have selected Howe to preside at Arnold’s trial not only for his experience in the dock but because, like Arnold, he had suffered from poor relations with local politicians, in his case those in South Carolina and Georgia. Howe even fought a duel with a man who accused him of not properly defending Charleston.21
Many members of the court were known to Arnold, seasoned veterans of the struggle. There was General Henry Knox, for example, a Bostonian now in charge of the army’s artillery. The winter after Arnold and Ethan Allen surprised and captured Fort Ticonderoga, Knox managed to haul the fort’s cannon all the way to Boston. Knox was a tall, husky man with a booming voice, the seventh of ten sons. He had little formal education but became a self-taught expert on artillery. Like Arnold he had needed to work as a youth. Knox’s father had squandered the family fortune, then abandoned the family when Knox was nine, forcing the boy to leave school. He found a job in a bookstore and eventually owned his own bookshop. Arnold’s father had a successful shipping business, but when it failed he fell into debt and became a public drunk. Arnold was removed from boarding school and instead served an apprenticeship to an apothecary. Knox, as Arnold later would, married the daughter of a loyalist. Then there was William Irvine, now a general too, originally a surgeon in the British navy. Irvine had served in the attack on Canada led by Montgomery and Arnold, and had been taken prisoner in Quebec. He was later exchanged. The judge advocate for the trial whose responsibility it was to present the case was General John Lawrence, a twenty-nine-year-old New York lawyer who had emigrated from the west of England in 1767, been admitted to the bar in 1772, and three years later joined the American army.
In many ways the procedure of a court-martial was little different from that of a civilian court. The jury was comprised of thirteen officers chosen from different regiments, including a president who presided, and a vice president. The accused individual could ask that any particular officer be dismissed. The trial then began with the judge advocate reading the charges and asking the accused how he wished to plead. Witnesses could be called as the prosecution’s case was presented and were questioned by the members of the court and cross-examined. When the prosecution’s case was complete the accused was invited to make an opening statement, submit his evidence, and call his own witnesses. The jury’s deliberations were secret and, except in a capital case, only a simple majority was needed to find guilt. If the verdict was “guilty,” the jury was asked what punishment they recommended.
With everyone settled around the table the court-martial was ready to proceed. Arnold was asked how he pleaded. He replied, “Not Guilty.” He would defend himself. The Pennsylvania council then began their presentation with their proceedings from February 3, when they announced their original eight charges against Arnold, a clever way of getting all these on the record, then moved to the four counts Congress had forwarded for the court’s consideration.
First: That while in Valley Forge in the Spring of 1778 Arnold had given permission for a ship belonging to people in Philadelphia residing with the enemy and “of disaffected character” to enter an American port without permission from the state or from Washington.
Second: He had the shops and stores of Philadelphia shut on his arrival but made purchases for his own benefit “as is alleged and believed.”
Third: Imposing menial offices upon the sons of freemen while on militia duty then claimed he had the power to do so. The charge added that Arnold claimed it the “duty of the militia to obey ‘every order of his aids’ (not a breach of the laws and constitution) as his . . . without judging of the propriety of them.”
Fourth: Appropriating wagons of the state called forth on a special emergency last autumn to transport private property, and that of persons who voluntarily remained with the enemy last winter [stayed in Philadelphia], and were deemed disaffected to the interests and independence of America.22
Arnold did not deny the allegations of permitting the Charming Nancy to enter port, or using public wagons for moving private property, but had reasonable explanations for each of these. The ship’s captain, Robert Shewell, he pointed out, had appeared with the militia and done militia duty, and in short was not unfriendly to the American cause. As for the wagons, they were idle and he had offered to pay to have them remove property from a part of New Jersey in imminent danger of falling to the enemy.23 On the charge of shutting the shops in Philadelphia, his proclamation was in compliance with Washington’s instructions and the resolution of Congress “to establish military law in this city [Philadelphia] and suburbs, until the civil authority of the state can resume the government thereof.” 24
Witnesses appeared for the Council and were closely questioned by the court and Arnold. William Matlack, the aggrieved militia soldier, testified to his dismay at the order to fetch a barber. Arnold questioned the witnesses himself and produced various documents. On Matlack’s complaint, he explained that in his view the militia on duty take on the character of soldiers and that this policy was supported specifically by laws in several states where militia, when called up, are subjected to the same rules and discipline as the Continental Army. In any event Matlack’s complaint involved a very minor incident.25 There was much discussion about the details of his use of the wagons and the fact that they were ordered to cross over the state line to New Jersey.
The Council hastened to add one of their main grievances, Arnold’s moderation toward loyalists. They complained of Arnold’s discouragement and neglect to “civil, military and other characters, who have adhered to the cause of their country with an entire different conduct toward those of another character, are too notorious to need proof or illustration.”
Not until January 21 did Arnold get to make his opening statement. Despite the number of witnesses to be examined, it was probably the terrible weather that had occasioned the long delay. Dr. Thacher wrote of the fierce blizzard that struck January 3: “No man could endure its violence many minutes without danger of his life.”26 During the night several of the officer’s marquees were ripped and blown down, trapping their occupants. The next morning officers had to be rescued. Soldiers were found in their tents “buried like sheep under the snow.”27 Witnesses who had testified and Council members may have left before the blizzard, but it is likely many if not most of them were marooned in the town, living on reduced rations, clustered in distinctly uncomfortable proximity to their adversaries.
Arnold introduced a series of witnesses and documents. Finally, summing up, he began by submitting testimonials including a letter from Washington dated July 1777, when the commander was worried about Burgoyne’s march into New York State and was sending Arnold north to bolster the defense. In it Washington described Arnold as “active, judicious and brave, and an officer in whom the militia will repose great confidence,” adding, “I am persuaded his presence and activity will animate the militia greatly, and spur them on to a becoming conduct.” Clearly the commander thought highly of his good relations with the militia.
Arnold appealed to his judges and former colleagues:
Is it probable that after having acquired some little reputation, and after having gained the favourable opinion of those whose favourable opinion it is an honor to gain, I should all at once sink into a course of conduct equally unworthy of the patriot and soldier? No pains have been spared, no artifice has been left untried to persuade the public that this has been the case.28
He then went over every charge. He submitted correspondence between the Pennsylvania council, the committee of Congress and himself, including his plea in a letter to John Jay of March 17, 1779, for an immediate decision on the charges against him in which he wrote: “I flatter myself, that every member of that honorable body must have some idea of what I have suffered on this occasion, and that they will relieve me from a situation, the cruelty of which is beyond my power to express.” He had resigned his post the next day. Arnold then broke into an emotional account of the toll the Executive Council’s vendetta had taken, “the pain and anxiety I have suffered, in seeing the fair fabric of reputation, which I have been with so much danger and toil raising since the present war, undermined by those, whose posterity (as well as themselves) will feel the blessed effects of my efforts, in conjunction with you and others, in rescuing them from a tyranny of the most cruel and debasing nature.”29
The following day he rested his case with a prayer: “I have looked forward with pleasing anxiety to the present day when, by the judgment of my fellow soldiers, I shall (I doubt not) stand honorably acquitted of all the charges brought against me, and again share with them the glory and danger of this just war.”30 The court adjourned to consider its verdict.
On January 26 everyone returned to Norris’s Tavern and the court reconvened. The judge advocate asked Howe to report the decision of the jury. As Arnold held his breath the reply came: The court found him guilty of two charges—that he should not have let a ship in possession of the enemy enter an American port was “irregular,” and his use of wagons, although paying for them, was “imprudent and improper” and should not have been made. They dismissed the two other charges. When asked what sentence they recommended, Howe replied that for the two infractions Arnold was to receive a reprimand from Washington. It was a terrible and unexpected blow.
On February 12, 1780, Congress formally approved the verdict but, typically, did not communicate this to Washington for several weeks. On April 6 Washington’s letter of reprimand, written as gently as the commander felt comported with the letter of the sentence, was dispatched to his best general:
Dear Sir:
The Commander-in-Chief would have been much happier on an occasion of bestowing a commendation on an officer who has rendered such distinguished service to his country as Major General Arnold. But in the present case a sense of duty and a regard to candor oblige him to declare that he considers his conduct in his issuance of the permit as peculiarly reprehensible, both in a civil and military view, and in the affair of the wagons as imprudent and improper. As I am with great respect, Dear Sir, your most obedient servant.
G. Washington
He included with the formal reprimand a personal letter, off the record, that he hoped would console Arnold.
Sir:
Our profession is the purest of all. Even the shadow of a fault tarnishes the luster of our finest achievements. The least indiscretion may rob us of the public favor, so hard to be acquired. I reprimand you for having forgotten that, in proportion as you have rendered yourself formidable to our enemies, you should have been guarded and temperate in your deportment toward your fellow citizens. Exhibit anew those noble qualities, which have placed you on the list of our most valued commanders. I will myself furnish you, as far as it may be in my power, with opportunities for regaining the esteem of your country.
As I am with great respect, Dear Sir, your most obedient servant,
G. Washington31
It was all entirely too late. A final humiliation, no matter how tactfully couched. Perhaps if his fellow officers had found him innocent and dismissed the charges confirming his service with the highest honors, he could have gotten past the frustration and dishonor of the past year. But not now. Back in May after Congress had been pressured into agreeing to some four charges against him, and Washington had been pushed into postponing, for what was to be the first of many times, the court-martial to restore his good name, he was contacted by a British commissioner on a peace mission to the Congress.