“. . . 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
his court-martial, January 1780
“Treason! Treason! Black as hell—That a man so high on the list of fame should be guilty as Arnold, must be attributed not only to original sin, but actual transgression. . . . We were all astonishment, each peeping at his next neighbor to see if any treason was hanging about him: nay, we even descended to a critical examination of ourselves . . .”
—Adjutant General Colonel Alexander Scammell,
eight days after Arnold’s flight
Two centuries after Benedict Arnold’s death the most infamous man in American history remains a two-dimensional caricature in the minds of most Americans: wicked, self-serving, and greedy. Numerous books have now cast his young wife Peggy as equally evil, an Eve tempting her husband into treason. Yet Arnold repeatedly risked his life and sacrificed his fortune for the patriot cause. As for Peggy, the charges against her are based on flimsy evidence contradicted by her own actions, by eyewitness accounts, and by the historical record. Replacing the cardboard cutouts that pass for historical portraits of Arnold and Peggy with a more authentic picture makes their actions, if still culpable in Arnold’s case, at least more understandable; exonerates Peggy; and exposes the bitter animosities within the patriot party. It also helps us make sense of the wild fury that greeted Arnold’s betrayal, bringing us closer to the people and frightfulness of that time. That task is the aim of this book.
Arnold was a national hero before he abandoned the patriot cause, and no wonder. He has been reckoned the most brilliant officer on either side of the Revolutionary War. He had that rare ability to inspire men to follow him into the face of death, even when, as at the decisive battle of Saratoga, he was stripped of military command. J. W. Fortescue, author of a classic study of the British army, described Arnold as possessing “all the gifts of a great commander. To boundless energy and enterprise he united quick insight into a situation, sound strategic instinct, audacity of movement, wealth of resource, a swift and unerring eye in action, great personal daring, and true magic of leadership.”1
He was courageous, resourceful, and, like most men of his time and rank, keenly jealous of his personal honor. When he joined the British side he forfeited that honor forever. Americans greeted the news of his betrayal with outrage, burning him in effigy, while the British never fully trusted him. His was a tragic fall from fame to infamy. We are left wondering why Arnold abandoned the cause for which he sacrificed his health and wealth, and why—when so many others did the same, or prudently kept in contact with the British, or simply abandoned the patriot cause—Arnold’s treason has been branded singularly egregious. Contrary to prevailing myths numerous prominent Americans remained neutral, profiteered on the war, preferred the comparative safety of politics to the battlefield, or returned to their families and businesses when their commissions in the Continental Army proved dangerous and thankless. Yet Arnold alone bears the mark of Cain.
Are these questions worth answering? Isn’t it enough to know that whatever else he accomplished, the man was a traitor? In the early nineteenth century when Lewis Burd Walker, a descendant of Arnold’s second wife, approached publishers about writing a book about Arnold, he was assured no one would want to read about the traitor. Americans enjoy reading about the patriots of the founding era, as an ever growing library of books about them attests. Despite publishers rejecting Walker’s proposal, some books have also been written about “the traitor.” These and other studies that do grapple with why he committed treason and why his actions were deemed so egregious have arrived at various answers.
Arnold’s contemporaries and earliest biographers insisted that he was a vicious individual—period. Jared Sparks, later president of Harvard, set the tone for this wholesale blackening of Arnold’s entire life. Sparks finds no tale of Arnold’s sinfulness as a child too bizarre to be believed. His The Life and Treason of Benedict Arnold, published in 1835, informed readers that one of Benedict Arnold’s “earliest amusements” was to snatch baby birds from their nests in order “to maim and mangle” them “in sight of the old ones, that he might be diverted by their cries.”2 This naughty boy also enjoyed strewing broken glass in a nearby schoolyard so the children “would cut their feet in coming from the school.” For Sparks, only the timely death of Arnold’s devout mother relieved her “from the anguish of witnessing her son’s career of ambition without virtue, of glory tarnished with crime, and of depravity ending in infamy and ruin.”3 Here was a thoroughly bad child destined to mature into a very bad man. Arnold’s military achievements had already been dismissed by his personal enemies as merely self-serving, reckless bravado.
Charles Royster, in A Revolutionary People at War, writes that Arnold’s contemporaries “saw more than a criminal in Arnold—they saw a freak.”4 “They did not try hard to devise new ways to thwart potential traitors,” because “there could be only one Arnold and when his country talked about him, that is what they said—over and over, in exhaustive detail and fervent imagery—there could be only one Arnold.”5
This indictment begs the question why Arnold had behaved so heroically and generously. Was the dishonorable treatment he received over and over again from Congress and his rivals mere slights any right-thinking man should have ignored? Or were his attackers, especially those in Congress, anxious to diminish a popular general, frightened Arnold might copy Oliver Cromwell and seize power? Why the focus on Arnold’s supposed flaws anyway? Several later authors have presented a more balanced account, and I am greatly indebted to their work.6 Isaac Newton Arnold—a distant relation—published The Life of Benedict Arnold; His Patriotism and His Treason in 1880. He hoped, “The time may come . . . when there will mingle with his condemnation that infinite pity . . . that a nature so heroic and with a record so brilliant, should have been driven, by a sense of bitter wrong and the violence of his passions, to a crime so inexcusable.”7 More than a century later, in 1990, Willard Sterne Randall’s massive biography, Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor appeared. Seven years afterward James Kirby Martin produced an equally massive biography, Benedict Arnold: Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered, that unfortunately ends without covering Arnold’s growing defection, the influence, if any, of his young wife Margaret Shippen, his treason, and its aftermath. Dave R. Palmer pairs Arnold’s life with that of Washington in George Washington and Benedict Arnold: A Tale of Two Patriots, as does Nathaniel Philbrick in Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution. Apart from Philbrick none of these authors had the advantage of Russell M. Lea’s invaluable collection of Arnold’s war correspondence published in 2008, or knew of the cache of Arnold’s papers recently discovered in Quebec. None has reevaluated the role of his wife in the treason.
No less than seven recent books focus on the supposed wicked machinations of his beautiful young wife, Margaret Shippen.8 This trend began in 1941 when Carl Van Doren, in his Secret History of the American Revolution, claimed to have found convincing evidence she was an active promoter of his defection, overturning the long-held belief in her innocence. The daughter of a distinguished, neutral Philadelphia family is now viewed as having inveigled her husband into joining the British cause. Peggy is now nearly as infamous as her husband. However, my reexamination of Van Doren’s evidence, along with research into Peggy’s behavior, presents a compelling case for her innocence. Good story as these new books tell, they have damned an innocent woman. As George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Peggy’s family, those who knew her believed, she was not guilty.
A book about Arnold’s life and times is well worth bringing to a wider public because the story it tells is so illuminating. It provides a keener understanding of a talented and flawed man and the meaning of loyalty in the revolutionary context, but it also exposes the bitter tensions within the revolutionary cause and the impact of what was a civil war on the lives of ordinary people. Beyond its historical value Arnold’s story is a thrilling one. The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold casts a wide net, treating Arnold’s personal and public life and the lively cast of characters that peopled his world. The goal is to recover, as far as possible, both the man and his time, and to improve our understanding of both. The aim is not to condone Arnold but to understand why a man who had risked everything for the patriot cause took that desperate decision to turn against it, earning not the success he hoped for, but lasting opprobrium.
The book opens at the battle of Saratoga. Arnold, stripped of command by General Horatio Gates, bursts from his tent and leads the successful charge against the British but is grievously wounded. He is carried from the field, and General Gates, who never set foot on it during the fighting, takes credit for the spectacular victory. When Arnold returns home after a painful hospital stay the narrative then turns to Arnold’s childhood. That once happy period ended abruptly when his father’s business, and with it Benedict’s expectations, collapsed. Benedict was withdrawn from his boarding school and returned home to suffer the humiliation of an indebted and increasingly drunken father. He was apprenticed to kindly relatives and managed to restore his personal and family standing. But this background sets the stage for his lifelong struggle for honor and respect. The sense of shame the family suffered in the confines of a small Connecticut town and the eighteenth-century concept of personal honor would become a crucial facet of the young man’s life.
The biography deals with Arnold’s personal and professional life, the looming political crisis, and Arnold’s extraordinary military adventures—his storming of Ticonderoga, his harrowing trek through the wilderness of Maine to attack Canada, his amazing naval battle with ships he built against a powerful British fleet on Lake Champlain that saved New York, his relief of Fort Stanwix in 1777, his crucial leadership at Saratoga. These successes took place amid the unremitting attacks of personal enemies and the suspicion congressmen had of their own army officers, fearful one might become another Cromwell. To prevent this, Congress micromanaged the army and court-martialed officers on the slightest pretext. As a protégé of Washington and General Schuyler, and a popular hero, Arnold was attacked by those hostile to his patrons.
The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold tracks Arnold’s growing dismay and disaffection. As commander of Philadelphia he coped with the constant complaints of the radical Pennsylvania government and Congress’s neglect and disrespect. These culminated in his court-martial and conviction in the bitter winter of 1779. Finally, the book recounts Arnold’s approach to the British, the unfolding of his plot, the capture and execution of the much-admired spymaster, John André, and Arnold’s subsequent treatment by the British commanders. The sad fortunes of his lovely wife Peggy are detailed as she seeks to remain with her family in Philadelphia but is ordered to join her husband in exile by the Pennsylvania government.
The book follows Arnold and Peggy’s life after his flight. The British immediately tested Arnold’s conversion to their cause by sending him with a small troop of British and German soldiers on forays first into Virginia, home of his devoted friend and commander, George Washington, and then into Connecticut, his home state. The frustrating final years of Arnold and Peggy’s life in England and Canada, and final thoughts, conclude the book.
Why has Arnold’s treason been treated so particularly viciously? Perhaps his contemporaries’ singling him out for the harshest opprobrium is not surprising. Once the revolution’s heroic general defected, it served the interest of the patriot party and everyone whose devotion was somewhat suspect to distinguish Arnold from his former colleagues and from all those who remained quietly ambivalent. If Arnold was uniquely wicked everyone else was exonerated. Eliot Cohen, in Conquered into Liberty, suggests an explanation for this insistence on Arnold the villain:
The demonization of Arnold served a rhetorical purpose in a new United States struggling to establish its identity, and perhaps in a post–Civil War United States struggling to recover its unity. But the price . . . is unwarrantable and unjustly to forget or exculpate, the circumstances and individuals that drove him to betray his country, and to reduce a tragic figure to a mere caricature.9
To understand this complex man it is necessary to examine his personal and public life and the people who shared his time and place. It is necessary to pierce the memoirs of those contemporaries and historians who viewed Arnold through the lens of his defection and betrayal and instead see events as they happened.
Various aspects of the cultural world of late eighteenth-century America deserve attention and explanation in advance. For Arnold and most men of that era personal honor and reputation was of preeminent importance. This was particularly true for men born into the upper class but perhaps even more for those, like Arnold, aspiring to regain that status. Insults or slights to one’s honor or to the reputation of loved ones demanded to be challenged, even at the risk of death. Failure to do so likely meant disgrace. The Arnold family had been a leading family in the early history of Rhode Island. Arnold’s immediate family’s fortunes, so promising in his youth, suffered a catastrophic downturn as his father’s business collapsed and the senior Arnold became a public drunkard and debtor. When Benedict was abruptly recalled from the boarding school that was preparing him for entrance to Yale University, and enrolled as an apothecary apprentice, he dedicated himself to restoring his family’s social and economic status, and along with it his personal self-esteem and honor. This was an uphill struggle in a small Connecticut town whose residents kept a watchful eye on each other. Further, despite the opportunity America offered immigrants, class bigotry crossed the Atlantic with the settlers. America’s elite college-educated professionals and landowners often looked down on merchants, even successful ones.
Arnold’s problems with Congress were to some extent a reflection of the long-standing British prejudice against the military profession, especially professional armies. William Blackstone, in his bestseller, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published just before the American Revolution, insisted, “in a land of liberty it is extremely dangerous to make a distinct order of the profession of arms.”10 Blackstone counseled Englishmen to look upon 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.”11 The citizen militia, by contrast, was considered honorable, virtuous, and safe, or as the American Second Amendment would put it, “the necessary security of a free state.” Arnold started out in the Connecticut militia but joined the newly formed Continental Army and remained there. Patriots like John Adams had no patience with the slights America’s army officers felt when passed over for promotion. He famously likened them to monkeys scrambling after nuts. Yet Adams and other politicians, members of Congress and state assemblies, were equally, if not more, jealous of their prerogatives. Congress micromanaged its army, fearful of the possibility it might produce a popular general who would seize power and send the delegates packing. Thus the endless second guessing by those Fortescue labeled “the lawyers and praters at Philadelphia,” hauling before a court-martial any officer who abandoned a fort or fell victim to an ambush.12 Although Congress failed to pay Arnold and his men for years on end, the delegates insisted he account for every penny advanced for a campaign. George Washington had enormous patience with such meddling, but Arnold lacked the commander’s diplomatic gift. On the contrary, his brusque manner with militia officers he felt were behaving in a cowardly or undisciplined fashion earned him a growing list of tenacious enemies.
The patriots themselves were divided politically between moderates and radicals. This division became so bitter it led to a shoot-out in Philadelphia between moderates such as James Wilson and the militia of the state’s radical Executive Council. Even Lafayette was dismayed at factions within the Continental Congress, writing Washington, “There are open dissentions in Congress; parties who hate one another as much as the common enemy.”13 Once exposed the ugliness and division buried beneath the surface of the patriot side gives a different cast to Arnold’s experience and to our sense of the war.
This book begins just as Arnold receives a grievous wound to his leg as he is leading the decisive assault on the British lines at the battle of Saratoga. A large force of British and German soldiers, Canadians, and Indians under General John Burgoyne had advanced from Canada in 1777, part of an elaborate plan to conquer New York State. Washington had sent Arnold north to bolster the forces trying to stop the British army. On the day of the crucial battle Arnold had been confined to his tent by his angry commander, General Gates. Unwilling to be a bystander at so critical a time he galloped onto the battlefield to the cheers of the men. Without any official command, Arnold led them to victory, grievously wounded in the process. The narrative then goes back to his childhood and chapter by chapter follows the dramatic triumphs and bitter frustrations of his life. The final chapters trace his decision to abandon the American cause, his discovery and flight, and the tragedy this brought upon him and his entire family.
Arnold’s is a life worth retelling. It has been more than ten years since Martin’s incomplete biography was published. It is time to put Arnold’s life and tragedy in a more complete and nuanced context, one accessible to a larger audience. How else can we understand the sole memorial to Arnold’s contribution to the American cause, a stone carving of a boot, erected in 1887 at the Saratoga battle site? It is the only American war memorial that does not bear the name of its honoree, instead symbolizing Arnold’s leg, shattered leading the American army to victory at Saratoga. The dedication on the back of the marker reads:
In memory of the most brilliant soldier of the Continental Army who was Desperately wounded on this spot the sally port of BURGOYNES GREAT WESTERN REDOUBT 7th October, 1777 winning for his countrymen the Decisive battle of the American Revolution and for himself the rank of Major General.