Lake Champlain—May 1775

THE VERMONTERS WERE DRUNK. THE men had been assigned to commandeer a schooner belonging to a local Tory, Major Philip Skene. A wealthy British officer, Skene owned a substantial chunk of the real estate bordering southern Lake Champlain, the slender thread of water separating what is now Vermont and upstate New York.¹ These midnight raiders were also supposed to scrounge up any other boats they could find on the lake. Instead, their foray had uncovered a private cellar that belonged to the self-styled “Governor” Skene. Finding the cellar stocked with “choice liquors,” the men quickly abandoned the search for boats.²

It was about three o’clock in the morning on May 10, 1775, just three weeks after the battles of Lexington and Concord. America’s first offensive against a British target in the nascent and still undeclared Revolution was off to an inauspicious beginning—if it would begin at all. In a cove on Lake Champlain’s eastern shore, more than two hundred members of an American raiding party were hunkered down in a gloomy rain. They didn’t know what had become of the thirty or so men who had been dispatched to “liberate” Philip Skene’s boats. This raiding party needed those boats to carry them across Lake Champlain.

As the darkness that would cover their attack began to drift toward dawn, the joint commanders of the raid conferred. Should they postpone the attack? The two officers did not like or trust each other. They disagreed, and one of the men stoically and perhaps melodramatically declared that he would go it alone if necessary. Then, out of the darkness, a single thirty-foot scow appeared on the lake’s ink-black waters. Instead of securing enough boats to carry all 230 men across Champlain, the drunken boatmen had managed to produce only one, capable of holding about forty men. The two commanders agreed that they would press on with the attack with as many men as they could ferry across the lake in the next hour. As the weather worsened, the overloaded scow twice crossed Champlain’s ice-cold, wind-whipped chop. From the cove in what is today Shoreham, Vermont, the boat delivered fewer than ninety men to the New York side of the lake.

Stitched together out of militiamen from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the future Vermont, this patchwork raiding party made its way to the target—the imposing citadel of Fort Ticonderoga. Looming above Lake Champlain, Fort Ticonderoga, along with its smaller sister, Fort Amherst, some twelve miles to the north at Crown Point, was a valuable prize standing on blood-soaked ground. Although undermanned and suffering from years of neglect, the two British garrisons were stocked with gunpowder, cannons, and other artillery pieces that the ill-equipped and dysfunctional patriot army camped outside Boston so desperately needed.

Holding Fort Ticonderoga, once called the “Gibraltar of North America,” and the smaller fort at Crown Point would also mean securing control of a crucial waterway that linked Quebec and Montreal with New York City. Scraped out by the Ice Age glaciers, Lake Champlain and its adjoining valley of rich farmland and dairy pastures are wedged between New York’s Adirondacks and Vermont’s Green Mountains. From eastern Canada, boats carrying troops could travel down the St. Lawrence and Richelieu rivers to Lake Champlain, then sail south on the roughly 110-mile-long lake. A short portage from Lake Champlain’s southernmost tip brought an army to nearby Lake George in New York, and once across that lake, it was a mere eight-mile march to the Hudson River, just above Albany.

This largely water route was far more manageable for an army with horses and artillery than negotiating the several hundred miles of northern New York’s rugged Adirondack wilderness. It was also the fastest route between Massachusetts and Canada. Guns placed at Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point could easily stop any boats that reached the southern stretch of Lake Champlain, where it narrows to its thinnest point. Although still unsettled frontier wilderness for the most part, the area’s strategic value had been the reason for several devastating battles fought by the British and French around Lake Champlain and Lake George during the French and Indian War.

In August 1757, French forces under General Montcalm had defeated the British at Fort William Henry on Lake George. After surrendering the fort, a number of British civilians and “paroled” soldiers—soldiers who had agreed not to fight again for eighteen months under the European gentleman’s code of military honor—had been killed by the Abenaki and other Indian allies of the French; countless others were taken captive. The exact number of dead in this “massacre” remains uncertain, but has been reliably estimated at between 70 and 184 British and Americans, as well as many more Indians allied with the British and black servants killed or taken prisoner.³ But American and British wartime propaganda quickly inflated those numbers to more than a thousand, creating a wave of panic in New England and New York. More significantly, the “massacre” changed the rules of engagement between British and French during the rest of the war and further demonized native Americans. Finally, the incident also inspired the fictionalized version of events at the center of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1825 novel The Last of the Mohicans.

A year later, in July 1758, a British counterattack on what was then called Fort Carillon, on Lake Champlain, had resulted in a disastrous bloodbath. Some twenty thousand British soldiers, the largest force yet assembled in North America, was ordered into an all-out frontal assault on Carillon’s four thousand French and Indian defenders. The seven-hour battle saw wave upon wave of red-coated British soldiers decimated by French artillery as they attempted to cross the earthworks in front of Fort Carillon, littered with a forest of felled and sharpened trees. More than two thousand British soldiers died in what was called “one of the most incredible incidents of bravery and stupidity in the annals of the British army.”⁴ The French later abandoned Fort Carillon and the British moved in, renaming it Ticonderoga and then spending millions to fortify its defenses. After more than a decade of relative peace in what had become a colonial backwater, Fort Ticonderoga had fallen into disrepair. Now, taking this granite-walled citadel and securing Lake Champlain were crucial to any patriot hopes of containing Great Britain’s might.

With two-thirds of their total force left behind on the other side of the lake, the two American commanders were relying on surprise instead of superior numbers. They led the assault party, clambering up the steep slope from the lake shore. It was well past four in the morning when the raiders finally reached the main gate of the lightly guarded fort. Some forty British soldiers manned the garrison, most of them “invalids,” soldiers who were injured or otherwise unfit for regular army duty, along with some of their families. Despite a warning sent to Fort Ticonderoga a month earlier from Boston by General Gage, only a single sentry was posted, and he was asleep. Racing for the wicket gate, a small entryway through the fort’s larger wooden door, both American commanders later claimed they had been first through the broken entry. Taking credit for victory (or being denied it) and assigning blame for disaster were going to be central themes in the turbulent futures of these two American soldiers—both of whom would be called traitors.

As the Americans swept into the fort, the startled sentry attempted to get off a shot, but in the early morning rain, his damp musket misfired. The British soldier threw down his weapon and raced for the barracks to raise the alarm. He was chased and caught by some of the Green Mountain Boys, led by one of the American commanders, Colonel Ethan Allen. A second sentry appeared and fired at Allen himself but missed. He rushed at Allen with his bayonet fixed, but the six-foot-tall, powerful backwoodsman swung his sword, striking the man a glancing blow on his head, which was protected by a comb that kept his powdered white hair in place.

Allen demanded that the man bring them to the fort’s commandant, Captain Delaplace. But the junior of the two British officers at Ticonderoga, Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham, was the first to emerge and confront the Americans. With time enough only to grab his jacket, the half-naked Feltham had tried unsuccessfully to awaken Captain Delaplace. Breeches in hand, the young officer audaciously, if improbably, challenged the eighty or so musket-bearing Americans standing before him: “By what authority have you entered His Majesty’s fort?”

It was an excellent question. Still intent on finding the British commandant, Ethan Allen shouted, “Come out of there, you damned old British rat,” according to the accounts of his men. But in the oft-quoted—and most likely apocryphal—post-Revolutionary version of events, Allen, who favored the cadences of an Old Testament prophet, is said to have replied, “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.”

A noble sentiment, to be sure. But history can’t confirm whether Ethan Allen actually made that bold statement at this astonishing moment when a disorganized, ragtag band of ill-disciplined backwoodsmen captured one of the most important British fortifications in North America. Nor can Jehovah’s purported instructions to Allen be verified. The latter claim, however, was certainly untrue. The second Continental Congress was not yet in session and wouldn’t formally place the colonies in a state of defense for another five days. George Washington would not be named commander for more than a month. And independence was more than a year away. The orders to carry out this assault on a British fort, before hostilities had been formally declared by anyone on either side, had actually come from two separate sources. Neither of them possessed any authority to issue such orders, which was part of a problem of command that would soon worsen.

Colonel Ethan Allen and his men were operating under a directive that had come by way of Connecticut’s militia, even though Fort Ticonderoga was in New York’s territory, and most of Allen’s men were from the rugged Green Mountain wilderness that eventually became Vermont. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, and bound for Yale when his father died suddenly, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys were freelancers with an agenda very much their own. For five years, this self-appointed militia force had been trying to wrest the disputed territory known as the New Hampshire Grants from the control of New Hampshire and New York, which both laid claim to the area. If taking Fort Ticonderoga fit that agenda, it suited Allen. If not, as his life would later prove, he would follow his own path. In the words of Michael A. Bellesiles, a generally admiring modern biographer, Ethan Allen was “a scoundrel, a charismatic charlatan of enormous strength and courage, and a braggart of almost mythical proportions. In short, Allen was the ideal of the frontier redneck, Davy Crockett in a tricorne.”⁵

Allen’s co-commander carried orders issued in Cambridge and written by Dr. Benjamin Church, whose treachery to the patriot cause had not yet been revealed. The Massachusetts Committee of Safety, which also lacked any standing on which to send forces against a British fort in the neighboring colony of New York, was behind those orders. They had secretly elevated Connecticut militia captain Benedict Arnold to the rank of colonel, and he had ridden out of Cambridge with a satchel of cash, a handful of men, and the assignment to gather more troops to capture Fort Ticonderoga and its artillery. With a few dozen men recruited from western Massachusetts, Arnold had linked up with Allen’s force. It proved to be an uneasy alliance.

With the fort in their control, Benedict Arnold listened as Ethan Allen issued a blustering threat that any resistance would mean the deaths of all of the British men, women, and children in the fort. Still resplendent in the scarlet uniform of Connecticut’s Second Foot Guard, Colonel Arnold interceded, acting very much the gentleman-soldier. According to a British account of the incident, Arnold formally and more politely requested that Fort Ticonderoga’s commandant, Captain Delaplace, surrender Ticonderoga. Left with no other choice, Delaplace gave up the fort, along with his sword and pistols. The British prisoners would later be sent on to Connecticut.

While those prisoners were collected in the fort’s parade ground, more of Ethan Allen’s Vermonters poured into the compound, ultimately reaching about four hundred in number. One of their first discoveries was the cellar beneath the officer’s quarters, where they found ninety gallons of rum. Instead of stripping the fort of its cannons, the Vermonters soon got drunk and began to loot the barracks.

In his initial report on the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, Benedict Arnold wrote back to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, “On and before our taking possession here I agreed with Colonel Allen to issue further orders jointly, until I could raise a sufficient number of men to relieve his people, on which plan we proceeded…since, which, Colonel Allen, finding he had the ascendancy over his people, positively insisted I should have no command, as I had forbid the soldiers plundering and destroying private property. The power is now taken out of my hands and I am no longer consulted.”⁶ Allen had relieved Arnold of his joint command at gunpoint.

The attack on Fort Ticonderoga under Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold had been a misadventure of dueling orders, competing agendas and two considerable, conflicting egos. In short, it was entirely typical of the American effort in the earliest days of the Revolution, when nobody was actually in charge, there was not yet any thought of a grand strategy, and free spirits such as Ethan Allen sometimes reigned. Benedict Arnold’s report to Dr. Joseph Warren about the capture of Fort Ticonderoga barely revealed the convoluted twists the New Haven merchant-turned-soldier had taken in carrying out the plan.

Dispatched by Warren and the Massachusetts Committee, Arnold carried orders that seemed to hold some legitimacy. What he didn’t know was that while he had made the case for this attack to Warren, men back in Connecticut with whom Arnold had discussed Fort Ticonderoga and its easy pickings of cannons and powder, had moved to do the same thing. They sent sixteen Connecticut militiamen to meet up with Ethan Allen, in command of a group of irregulars who were, at that moment, wanted by the authorities in New York. In their efforts to liberate the future Vermont, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys had rankled the New York authorities, and there was a price of £100 on Ethan Allen’s head. In the eyes of the “Yorkers,” Allen’s men were little more than backwoods banditti.

When Benedict Arnold first arrived in the town of Bennington and met some of the Green Mountain Boys in the Catamount Tavern, which they had proclaimed the “capital of Vermont,” these backwoodsmen nearly shot the Connecticut dandy. First of all, Arnold wore a uniform that looked suspiciously like that of a British officer. He also possessed the haughty air of a gentleman that these backwoodsmen despised. When Arnold later met up with Ethan Allen, the leader of the Green Mountain Boys grudgingly deferred to Arnold and his orders from Massachusetts. But Allen’s men refused to obey Arnold and threatened mutiny, so the two officers had agreed upon a joint command. Allen even gave Arnold an antiquated blunderbuss, since he was carrying only a saber and pistols. Mutual suspicion and the desire to take charge of the expedition colored every move they both made. But in spite of all the misadventures, the capture of Fort Ticonderoga would soon have enormous reverberations. When Dr. Joseph Warren received Allen’s report a week later, he wrote, “Thus a War has begun.”⁷

While Arnold chafed at what he considered the undisciplined banditry of the Vermonters under Ethan Allen, the cannons he had come to collect were left sitting. Some of them were actually under water, as the lake had risen from the snowmelt and spring rains. Arnold was also unaware that Ethan Allen—in collusion with some of the Connecticut militiamen who had axes to grind against the New Haven merchant Arnold—was already undermining Arnold’s role in the capture of the fort. Dispatches critical of Arnold and placing Ethan Allen and other Connecticut men in the central role at Ticonderoga had made their way back to Connecticut. This sort of backstabbing, which diminished his accomplishments and authority, would torment Benedict Arnold throughout the war’s early years.

Often it has been said—particularly when it comes to warfare—that while success has a hundred fathers, failure is an orphan. In the case of Fort Ticonderoga, there were many fathers. In truth, the idea of taking Fort Ticonderoga seems so obvious as to make the question of credit fairly meaningless. The fort’s tactical value, its recent history, and the stores of munitions it held were all well known. But most immediate versions and the later legendary account of the Ticonderoga victory virtually ignored—or certainly diminished—the role of the man who played a key part in the attack’s success, largely because he would become the most vilified man in American history. Like some Soviet general whose image was removed from photographs after a Stalinist purge, Benedict Arnold and his leadership at Fort Ticonderoga, along with his other accomplishments, were deliberately erased from history.⁸

Despite Arnold’s broken reputation, much of that history is clear. In a document dated April 30, 1775, which he prepared for Dr. Warren and the Safety Committee in Cambridge, Arnold had specifically laid out the number of cannons and other guns at Fort Ticonderoga. He accurately noted that “Fort Ticonderoga is in a ruinous condition and has not more than fifty men at most.” In addition, he pointed out, a British sloop was on the lake. Familiar with the lake from his travels to Canada as a merchant, Benedict Arnold was also an experienced sea captain capable of commanding and sailing a sloop. In other words, Arnold was uniquely qualified for the assignment of taking Ticonderoga and securing Lake Champlain. Perhaps others had the same idea at the same time, but Benedict Arnold had the information and abilities to carry out this mission. The question of credit for success—or blame for defeat—would weigh heavily in his saga of patriotism falling prey to pride, power grabs, ambition, and ego. It ended as a tale of a heroic, if deeply flawed, character gone terribly wrong in the American Revolution.

 

FOR MORE THAN TWO CENTURIES, the name of Benedict Arnold has been synonymous with treachery. Arnold’s modern biographies typically begin with the fact that he was the would-be betrayer of West Point, the crucial fortifications controlling the Hudson River just north of New York City. In most tellings, Arnold is dismissed as a turncoat who ruthlessly brought down havoc and destruction on several American towns. But Benedict Arnold had begun the war as an idealistic patriot. His military successes, including numerous instances of conspicuous bravery, were so remarkable that he had earned the respect, friendship, and committed patronage of George Washington. James Thomas Flexner, one of George Washington’s greatest biographers and a man not usually given to hyperbole, wrote of him: “[A] genius in leading men and at fighting, Benedict Arnold was, in fact, the greatest combat general in the war on either side.”⁹

In pre-Revolutionary Connecticut, Benedict Arnold had lived a childhood and young manhood that reads like a Dickensian invention. A fourth-generation American, Benedict Arnold was born into an influential New England family in Norwich, Connecticut. The first Arnold in America, William, arrived with the great Puritan migration. Chafing at the constraints of Puritan Massachusetts, William Arnold and his son, the first Benedict Arnold, had moved to more tolerant Rhode Island. Benedict Arnold succeeded Roger Williams as the colony’s governor and served several terms, all the while amassing a considerable fortune in land. At his death, his Rhode Island holdings were split among several sons, and Benedict II inherited one piece, also later split among his sons. By the time Benedict IV received a portion of the Arnold inheritance, the great fortune had been considerably whittled down by being spread among so many heirs. In spite of his illustrious ancestry, Benedict Arnold IV was forced to seek work in neighboring Connecticut. Landing in the bustling port of Norwich on Connecticut’s Thames River, he found a job as a cooper, building barrels for merchant and trader Absalom King.

Enterprising and industrious in that fashion commonly described as the “Puritan work ethic,” Benedict Arnold rose from making barrels to command one of King’s trading ships, plying the waters of Long Island Sound, carrying timber, salt pork, and beef from Connecticut to the Caribbean in the 1730s, returning with molasses and rum. Eventually he became Absalom King’s partner and, when the merchant died, Benedict Arnold IV married his widow, Hannah, member of an old and prosperous Norwich family. He now controlled King’s ships, wharfs, and houses and the widow’s fortune. Arnold built the town’s grandest home and began a family. A son, named Benedict V, was born, but died in infancy.

On January 14, 1741, when the second Benedict Arnold V was born, his father was one of the most prosperous and admired men in Norwich, frequently elected to local offices. Wealthy, esteemed in the local Congregational church, and connected to the town’s original settlers through his wife, Captain Arnold had achieved Puritan Connecticut’s trifecta of social standing: money, godliness, or at least its appearance, and a connection to old blood. During the War of Jenkins’ Ear—the same war in which George Washington’s older brother had served—New England’s shipping business boomed, and Arnold supplemented his trading income by outfitting his vessels with cannons and attacking French and Spanish ships as a privateer.

When young Benedict was four years old, the on-again, off-again war with France came to New England. During what was called King George’s War in the colonies, the French and their Indian allies stepped up attacks on settlements throughout the Northeast. After Connecticut militiamen joined in the capture of the French fortress at Louisbourg in Nova Scotia in 1745, New Englanders remained constantly on alert for French or Indian attacks.

Still, the war had been typically good for the shipping and trading business, and Captain Arnold thrived. The Arnolds were sufficiently well-off to send young Benedict to boarding school in nearby Canterbury. During summers, he was taken on trading trips, sailing to the Caribbean with his father. But when another Anglo-French peace was made in 1748, the inevitable postwar bust followed. Captain Arnold’s once-busy ships were idled in a colonial depression, and the captain took to drowning his miseries in rum. Several bad business ventures plunged the family into debt, and Captain Arnold became a very public drunk. The family’s woes turned more tragic when two of Benedict Arnold’s three younger sisters died in a 1753 yellow fever epidemic while he was away at boarding school.

Suffering from yellow fever as well as alcohol-induced dementia, Captain Arnold descended further into dissolution, financially and personally. The business collapsed completely when Benedict was thirteen, and he was forced to leave school. Through a family connection, he was apprenticed in the successful apothecary and general merchandise store in Norwich owned by his mother’s cousins, Dr. Daniel Lathrop and his brother Joshua. Just before his fourteenth birthday, with his father in debtor’s prison, Benedict Arnold was legally bound over as the Lathrops’ indentured servant until he reached the age of twenty-one.

Instead of enduring the harsh and often cruel world of most eighteenth-century indentured servants, Benedict Arnold entered a halcyon period in the Lathrop household. A shrewd businessman, Daniel Lathrop received a contract to supply British troops when yet another Anglo-French war broke out in 1754, following Washington’s defeat at Fort Necessity. The doctor was an expert horse breeder and taught Benedict the finer points of horseflesh. Lathrop’s wife, Jerusha, who had also lost all three of her children to yellow fever, was generous, intelligent, and well-read. She had practically accepted Benedict into her house as if he was her own son.

In 1757, during the French and Indian War, the teenage Arnold enlisted in the Connecticut militia. At the time, indentured servants could join the militia only if granted permission, and Dr. Lathrop—himself a militia veteran during the previous war with the French—agreed to let him go. The decision came after the devastating defeat inflicted on the British at Fort William Henry, when the exaggerated reports of the massacre of British soldiers by the native allies of the French sent shock waves of panic through New England. The alarm after this defeat was short-lived, the militia was disbanded, and a disappointed sixteen-year-old Benedict Arnold returned to Connecticut without seeing action. But he had gotten a taste for army life and began to chafe at the tedium of being an apothecary’s apprentice.

In the early spring of 1758, Arnold slipped away from Norwich and walked south to New York, enlisting in a Westchester County militia company—this time without Dr. Lathrop’s permission. When his mother discovered what he had done, she arranged to have Benedict returned. Against his will, Arnold was brought back to the apothecary, embarrassed yet determined to make his way to the war. Again, he ran away to reenlist and was brought back, this time after Dr. Lathrop posted a reward for his return. On his third try, in 1759, Arnold finally joined the volunteers heading off to besiege Quebec and Montreal in the climactic battles of the French and Indian War.

Preparing another assault on Fort Carillon on Lake Champlain as a prelude for an invasion of Canada, Arnold’s company marched to Albany, New York. While in camp, Arnold learned that his mother was gravely ill, and he went absent without leave—not an uncommon occurrence among colonial militiamen, who often left the lines to return to their farms or tend to family business. He returned to Norwich and was safely hidden from authorities, even when an advertisement offering a reward for the now eighteen-year-old deserter was published in a New York newspaper. When his mother died in the summer of 1759, Arnold became the man of the house, responsible for his ailing, alcoholic, and destitute father and fifteen-year-old sister, Hannah. Once more, he was welcomed back by the obviously charitable and forgiving Lathrops, who helped Benedict with his mother’s funeral costs and then looked after Hannah when he returned to the army to finish his recruitment terms. The war was winding down, and Benedict Arnold had not seen action, but he had come to love the discipline of army life. When the North American phase of the fighting ended in 1760, the Lathrops took him back into the apothecary shop.

By the time he was twenty, Benedict Arnold was a hard-driving assistant with ambitions to open his own shop. With his father again jailed for public drunkenness, Arnold must have been humbled at how low the family’s status had tumbled. Clearly, he set his mind to revive his own fortunes and make his way in the world. To complete Benedict’s training in anticipation of opening another apothecary and general store, the Lathrops sent the young man to sea to learn the Caribbean trade. Eager to expand their businesses, they provided Benedict with cash to set up a shop after his father’s death. A year later, Daniel Lathrop gave Benedict the deed to the Arnold family house, which he had taken over. Arnold sailed to London to acquire goods for his new apothecary shop, general store, and bookshop, established in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1762. The home of Yale College, New Haven was a growing port that also served as Connecticut’s eastern capital. Arnold sold books, including medical texts, and surgical supplies to the Yale students. The shop offered the usual complement of eighteenth-century herbs and medicines, along with aphrodisiacs, including an exotic concoction called Francis’ Female Elixir. For a prospering colony that was beginning to forsake its Puritan past for more continental fashions, he also stocked the latest in stylish items from London—cold creams and cosmetics, earrings, buckles, and buttons.

Advertising himself as “Dr. Arnold from London,” the ambitious young merchant aggressively sought to expand. After paying off the last debts on his father’s Norwich house, he sold it at a profit and moved his sister to New Haven to manage his shop. With the proceeds from the sale of the house, Arnold bought a sloop that he named the Fortune, and set up a lucrative trade with the West Indies. As biographer Willard Sterne Randall points out, “Although his business thrived, he yearned to go to sea. Not only was there more profit for the middleman-merchant than for the retail seller of imported goods, but Arnold loved the life on a ship. He wanted to…trade in the Caribbean and Canada, now that there was peace in America.”¹⁰ Arnold added more ships and began to sail as captain, his flourishing enterprise growing to include a specialty in horses, which he sold in Canada and the West Indies.

Arnold also gained a reputation for a hot temper and an unwillingness to back down. Once he caught a young Frenchman at home with his unchaperoned sister. Arnold chased the man from his house and fired a pistol at him. While on a trading voyage, he was insulted by a British ship captain. Already chafing at the dismissive attitudes of Englishmen toward Americans, Arnold challenged the man to a duel. After a polite exchange of shots missed, Arnold threatened to kill the man. A few years later, the captain’s friends spread rumors that Arnold was involved with prostitutes and had syphilis. Those rumors reached all the way back to New Haven. Whether deliberate or accidental, deserved or not, Benedict Arnold had demonstrated a marked penchant for rubbing people the wrong way and creating enemies with long memories.

With the peace of 1763 another economic downturn hit New England hard, and in 1765 the Stamp Act further hurt American commerce. Like many New Englanders, Arnold simply ignored the requirements of the stamp tax. In essence, he had joined the ranks of such illustrious and successful American smugglers as John Hancock and the Brown brothers of Newport, Rhode Island. Arnold had also been drawn into Freemasonry, like so many men of the Revolutionary generation, joining New Haven’s lodge in 1765. Aside from providing fraternity with likeminded men, membership in the Freemasons offered access to the upper reaches of New Haven’s growing society, including the high sheriff of New Haven County. He introduced Arnold to his daughter, Margaret “Peggy” Mansfield, and the two married in February 1767. Soon they had three sons—Benedict, Richard, and Henry.

By 1767, the economic damage done by the taxes was threatening Arnold and other American merchants with ruin. Proud and ambitious, perhaps with a chip on his shoulder from seeing his father brought low, Arnold joined the growing ranks of Americans defying the Stamp Act. Emerging as a vocal political leader in New Haven, he began to write articles for the local press favoring American rights. Enlisting in the Sons of Liberty, he quickly demonstrated his natural leadership as the secret society grew more provocative and violent.

Arnold’s fiery personality and his proclivity for making enemies, along with his dedication to the Sons of Liberty, all came together during a dispute over money with a man who had once sailed with him, Peter Boles. When Boles informed royal authorities that Arnold was a smuggler, Arnold and some of his crewmen beat the man for collaborating with the tax authorities. When Boles didn’t leave town as he was told, he was given forty lashes by the Sons of Liberty, then ridden out of town on a rail. After hearing news of the Boston Massacre in March 1770, Arnold wrote to a friend, “Good God! Are Americans all asleep and tamely giving up their glorious liberties, or are they all turned philosophers, that they don’t take immediate vengeance on such miscreants.”

When Connecticut dispatched a delegation to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774, Connecticut sent three official delegates—chief justice of the colony’s superior court, Eliphalet Dyer; merchant-magistrate Roger Sherman; and New Haven merchant Silas Deane. At Deane’s invitation, Arnold unofficially joined the group.

Taller than average, handsome, with sharp, distinctive features, a talented horseman and reputedly a crack shot, Arnold clearly made an impression on other men. As one modern biographer puts it, “Quick-witted and articulate, full of energy almost to restlessness, bursting with confidence bordering on arrogance, Benedict Arnold was a force to be reckoned with.”¹¹ In the first days after their arrival in Philadelphia, the Connecticut delegation and some of the other New Englanders including Samuel and John Adams, toured Philadelphia like country-cousins, taking in the sights of America’s largest, most prosperous, and most well-organized city. Among their stops was a hospital and asylum administered by Dr. William Shippen, a physician and member of one of Philadelphia’s leading families. William’s nephew Edward Shippen, a judge, frequently entertained the congressional delegates during the next few months. It was here that Arnold first encountered Edward Shippen’s youngest daughter, fourteen-year-old Peggy, by most accounts already a charming, precocious, and stunning beauty. Most assuredly he did not meet another recent arrival in Philadelphia, Second Lieutenant John André, a British army officer who had landed in Philadelphia in transit to his regiment in Quebec. The three would cross paths in the future.

Although there is no specific record of Arnold encountering George Washington in Philadelphia, the young merchant with military ambitions surely would have attempted to cross paths with one of America’s most famous men. Now a wealthy planter and prominent member of Virginia’s delegation, Washington had more in common than he might have realized with the Yankee merchant, ten years his junior. Both lost their fathers at a fairly young age, both were Freemasons, and each would have admired the other man’s considerable horsemanship. Although Arnold’s military service during the French and Indian War was scant, the pair might have shared a certain martial ardor as well. And perhaps they both would have recognized that each possessed that charismatic quality of leadership. Their paths, too, would cross again.

When fighting did break out in 1775, Arnold was thirty-four, successful beyond his wildest ambitions, disciplined, and hard-driving. He had already taken a leading role in the command of Connecticut’s militia and, after Lexington and Concord, had been elected captain by the men, who included some Yale students with more enthusiasm than experience. Some of the more cautious leaders in Connecticut wanted to wait and see which way the winds would blow as patriot militia began to stream toward Boston, and they refused to give Arnold powder and guns from the colonial magazine. In another display of his fiery disposition, Arnold threatened to break into the armory and take them. He was given the keys to the magazine. Then he and his spiffily attired militia band set off for Boston.

 

IN THE WHIRLWIND OF EVENTS THAT followed the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775, Arnold had moved to reassert his command, especially as more of Ethan Allen’s men drifted away, apparently losing interest in the somewhat decrepit fort. He secured several of Major Skene’s boats, renaming two of them Intrepid and Liberty. Arming the boats with cannons and some swivel guns from the fort, Arnold sailed off to find the English sloop George, which he captured and renamed the Enterprise. With a handful of pilfered boats and captured artillery, Benedict Arnold had built what was essentially America’s first navy, and for the moment he held control of the crucial Lake Champlain waterway. From this position, Arnold envisioned a grander scheme. Believing that Canada was lightly defended and ripe for invasion, he wrote a detailed campaign plan and sent it off to Philadelphia, unaware that Ethan Allen had made a similar recommendation to Congress. Still trying to find its footing, uncertain if it wanted to fight or negotiate, and months away from declaring independence, Congress initially rejected the plan to invade Canada and then, as suddenly, reversed itself and accepted the idea.

Personally bankrolling his operations on Lake Champlain as finances from Massachusetts or Congress were practically nonexistent, Arnold was blindsided when another Connecticut officer arrived to assume command at Fort Ticonderoga. He was one of the Connecticut militia officers who had earlier refused Arnold the keys to the armory, and there was bad blood between them. Unaware that he had been the subject of damaging reports and a whispering campaign meant to undermine his role in the capture of Ticonderoga, Arnold was furious at this treatment, which he saw as a slight to his achievements. His record of expenditures was also being questioned in Massachusetts. As Arnold viewed every one of these reversals as an assault on his honor, his famous pique took over and he quit his command.

“I have resigned my commission, not being able to hold it longer with honor,” he wrote, just before learning that his plan to invade Canada had been accepted. Adding to the injustice in his eyes, New York’s Philip Schuyler, one of the Continental army’s new major generals, had been given command of the operation—his operation, to Arnold’s thinking. On his way back to Connecticut, a dispirited Arnold met with Philip Schuyler, born into one of New York’s most powerful families and wed into another. A veteran of the French and Indian War, Schuyler was a delegate to the Continental Congress and was chosen to command the Northern Department of the army when Washington was appointed commander in chief. Impressed with Arnold, Schuyler offered him a key staff position. But Arnold also received a much-delayed letter informing him that his thirty-year-old wife, Peggy, had died suddenly in his absence. He returned to New Haven and his three young motherless boys. Still intent upon a role in the invasion of Canada, he left the boys in the care of his sister, Hannah, and set off for Cambridge, where General Washington was now keeping the British at bay while attempting to mold a new American army.

Meeting Washington on August 15, 1775, Benedict Arnold laid out a plan for a secondary invasion of Canada while Schuyler, who had taken Arnold’s Ticonderoga nemesis Ethan Allen into his command, pursued the assault on Canada up from Lake Champlain. Arnold’s new plan called for a second attack aimed at Quebec, by traversing the Maine wilderness by canoe before winter set in. Confounded by the woes of the untrained, ill-fed army that had been presented to him, and the politicians he answered to, Washington apparently found Arnold a kindred spirit. As biographer Willard Sterne Randall commented, “Both understood…rule in war by an officer class which insisted on rank, order and discipline and emphasized leadership by personal example. Most of all, they were daring soldiers by inclination, and they sensed and admired this trait in others.”¹² Washington gave Arnold a new commission as a colonel and more than a thousand men for his Canadian venture. But Arnold had to first endure a humiliating committee of investigation that was challenging his actions and expenditures, based on the innuendo spread about him by some old Connecticut enemies. Despite his successes, and his own opinion of his abilities which were admittedly considerable, Arnold found his path constantly blocked by forces who wanted to undercut him. He was also learning, as George Washington was, that all was fair in politics and war.

I also give it in charge to you to avoid all disrespect or contempt of the religion of the country and its ceremonies. Prudence, policy and a true Christian spirit will lead us to look with compassion upon their errors without insulting them. While we are contending for our own liberty, we should be very cautious of violating the rights of conscience in others, ever considering that God alone is the judge of the hearts of men and to him only, in this case, they are answerable.

—George Washington, written orders to Benedict Arnold

Washington’s instructions to Arnold before sending him north hint at a little-noted aspect of America’s independence movement, one not usually mentioned in the same breath as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That was colonial America’s deeply held, sharp, and often virulent anti-Catholic (and anti-French) prejudices. Centuries of England’s religious turmoil and Protestant propaganda had left many Americans, particularly the Puritan stock of New England, violently anti-Catholic. In Boston, Catholic priests had long been banned, and November 5 (known as Guy Fawkes Day in England, commemorating a failed Catholic plot against Parliament) had come to be celebrated as “Pope’s Day.” As the pope was paraded in effigy through the streets, mobs were encouraged to lustily express their contempt for Roman Catholicism, and Boston’s authorities allowed South Side mobs to brawl in the streets against North Side gangs as a way to “blow off steam.”¹³ To America’s vast Protestant majority, the long history of Spanish “perfidies,” the purges of Protestants under Bloody Mary detailed in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the anti-Catholic rants of clerics such as Cotton Mather, and the fresh example of French Catholic–allied Indians massacring English settlers and soldiers were all bitterly held memories.

This centuries-old religious animus took a sharp political turn in 1774, when England passed the Quebec Act, along with the Intolerable Acts. The former law’s intent was to keep Canada’s largely French Catholic population pacified so that England would not have to garrison the massive territory. While Catholics were not allowed to hold public office in Canada, the Quebec Act recognized the Roman Catholic religion and restored Canada’s frontier borders. The law was not only considered a betrayal of Protestantism but also a direct assault on the land claims made by American speculators who had fought against the French and now felt stabbed in the heart by Parliament, creating another layer of American colonial resentment. After the Quebec Act was announced, Congregational minister (and later Yale president) Ezra Stiles screamed that it had established the “Roman Church and IDOLATRY.” A seemingly otherwise enlightened Dr. Joseph Warren deemed the Canadian charter “dangerous in an extreme degree to the Protestant religion and to the civil rights and liberties of all America.” New York’s John Jay, a delegate to the Continental Congress, spoke for many Americans when he expressed his fears of a wave of Catholic immigration that would, “reduce the ancient free Protestant colonies to [a] state of slavery.” Reacting to the act, Jay railed in “astonishment that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish…a religion that has deluged your island in blood and spread impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion throughout every part of the world.” (When later drafting New York’s state constitution, Jay, the future first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed erecting what he called “a wall of brass around the country” to keep out Catholics.)

Credit George Washington with more temperate views, a tolerance of other religious traditions that was far from common in eighteenth-century Christian America. Besides, Washington knew that if a Canadian invasion were to succeed and French Canadians to join the Americans in rebellion, he needed the goodwill of the predominantly Catholic population.

While Arnold prepared for this wilderness march to Quebec, his rival Ethan Allen was already assaulting Montreal. With only a handful of men, Allen had foolishly attacked the city late in September 1775. The attack was a fiasco, and the hero of Ticonderoga was captured by the British. His Revolutionary military career was over. In roundabout fashion, Allen was transported by prison ship to Ireland, Madeira, North Carolina, Halifax, and finally New York, which had by then fallen to British forces. Ethan Allen remained captive for more than two years, until he was exchanged for a British officer. Allen returned to the Republic of Vermont, where he was appointed general of the still-disputed area’s army by men with little love for either England or America, and lobbied for recognition of the state. When Congress refused, Allen began negotiating with the British governor of Canada for recognition of Vermont as a British province. For this, he was later charged with treason, but the charge was never substantiated. Allen always claimed that it had simply been a ploy to force Congress to recognize Vermont.

Following Allen’s defeat and capture, Benedict Arnold’s expedition into Canada deteriorated into a disaster of even greater proportions. With a force of eleven hundred men, Arnold had moved by river through Maine’s wilderness and over the Appalachian Mountains. Among his command was a young volunteer from a prominent New Jersey family. Aaron Burr was accompanied by a nineteen-year-old Abenaki woman the other men had nicknamed “Golden Thighs.”¹⁴ Her presence might have provided the few moments of solace enjoyed on what otherwise became a hellish march.

When he reached the outskirts of Quebec in November 1775, Arnold had fewer than seven hundred men still with him. Those who finished the trek had endured six weeks of starvation and disease, reduced to eating dogs to survive. About 150 of his men had died, mostly sickened by dysentery, a debilitating disease that causes diarrhea. Hungry, sick, and injured, many others had deserted during the grueling expedition through 350 miles of Maine’s rugged backcountry. Arnold then linked his forces with those of General Richard Montgomery, a former British officer who had joined the rebels and had replaced General Schuyler, who had since fallen ill. A few weeks after Ethan Allen’s failed attack on Montreal, Montgomery successfully captured the French citadel on November 13, 1775.

In a howling winter storm on December 31, 1775, Montgomery and Arnold led an American attack on the well-fortified city of Quebec but suffered another grievous defeat. As Richard Ketchum succinctly wrote about the battle, “Just about everything that could go wrong, did…Montgomery was killed, Arnold badly wounded, and another exceptional officer, Daniel Morgan captured. Even at that, the rebels nearly brought it off.”¹⁵ Ultimately the British prevailed, with hundreds of Americans left dead or captured in the futile attack. In a winter that was as unforgiving for the 350 American survivors of the battle for Quebec as Valley Forge later proved to be for Washington’s troops, the severely wounded Arnold maintained a halfhearted siege of Quebec, camped around the city.

Onto this abysmal scene, another old enemy arrived—smallpox. In Pox Americana, Elizabeth Fenn describes the state of the Americans outside Quebec: “The men were exhausted. Many were weak from starvation. They lived in close, unsanitary conditions, and with winter setting in, lodgings only became more crowded and contact more familiar. Very soon after arriving, a Massachusetts-born fife player made an ominous journal entry. ‘The small pox is all around us,’ wrote Caleb Haskell on December 6, 1775, ‘and there is great danger of its spreading in the army.’”¹⁶ In a humane act in the midst of war, the British commander at Quebec took in many of the American sick in an attempt to properly care for them. Benedict Arnold initially enforced the Continental army’s prohibition against inoculation, still a highly controversial expedient, but eventually looked the other way as the disease threatened his army.

In the spring of 1776, Arnold was relieved and returned to Montreal, where he continued to recuperate, having nearly lost his leg. By then, Henry Knox, a portly twenty-five-year-old bookseller from Boston, had finished the mission that Arnold had begun months earlier at Fort Ticonderoga. In doing so, Knox carried off one of the most extraordinary feats of the Revolution’s early days. Between December 5, 1775, and January 26, 1776, “Ox” Knox and his men had managed to transport sixty tons of cannons and mortars from Fort Ticonderoga to Cambridge. In the dead of winter, moving with ox-drawn sleds, they had negotiated the frozen Hudson River and then crossed the Berkshire Mountains, delivering the artillery to an overjoyed George Washington. Knox earned Washington’s permanent gratitude, friendship, and respect, and the bookish Quaker, with no real military experience, was placed in charge of Washington’s artillery. He remained one of Washington’s closest aides throughout the war, later becoming the nation’s first secretary of war when Washington was elected president.

In a dazzling engineering feat, the cannons Knox delivered were placed overnight on Dorchester Heights, overlooking Boston. The sight of this artillery greeting them one morning astonished the British, and General Howe, who had replaced the disgraced General Gage, reportedly exclaimed, “My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.”

The shocking new reality forced the British to abandon Boston, evacuating in hundreds of shiploads on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1776. They took along thousands of Boston’s Tory loyalists, who were forced to leave behind almost everything they owned. Almost unbelievably, Boston was in patriot hands. The British sailed first for Halifax and ultimately to New York, where George Washington also moved the bulk of his army in preparation for the next great engagement of the war.

Back in Canada, the “quiet war” was about to give way to a curious attempt at diplomacy. On April 29, 1776, Benedict Arnold turned out his men for a welcoming ceremony. At Montreal’s landing, he greeted a group of commissioners secretly sent by Congress hoping to persuade the people of Canada to unite with the American cause and create a fourteenth colony. The odd collection of dignitaries included a congressman, one of America’s richest men, America’s most famous man, the seventy-year-old Benjamin Franklin, and an American Jesuit priest. Having endured a rigorous winter journey from Philadelphia, Franklin, Maryland congressman Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll, a wealthy Maryland patriot, carried gold to resupply Arnold’s army and a printing press that would turn out propaganda to convince French Canadians to join the American cause.

The only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence (also the last surviving signer; he died in 1832), Charles Carroll was said to be one of America’s three richest men at the time. His grandfather had known Lord Baltimore, Maryland’s founder, and the Carroll family was among Maryland’s first rank, with extensive land holdings. Born in Maryland, young Charles Carroll was sent to France for a proper Catholic education, then unattainable in America, and returned to Maryland in 1764, fluent in French and heir to a massive estate called Carrollton. Drawn to the patriot cause, he became a leader of the opposition to the Stamp Act, persuading one owner of a ship loaded with tea to burn it rather than risk mob violence, as in Boston.

Although Carroll was not yet a member of Congress, his social status, his religion, and his fluency in French made him a clear choice to attempt to convince French Canadians to throw in with America. He brought along his cousin John Carroll, a Jesuit priest whose presence was meant to further reassure the Canadian Catholics, and especially their clergy, that their religion would be respected in America. (Father John Carroll became America’s first Catholic bishop and is credited with founding Georgetown University, America’s first Catholic university, in 1789.)

Whatever hopes the commissioners had of success were quickly dashed. The small, tattered American military presence in Canada was falling apart. A great many French Canadians who were asked to accept what was thought to be worthless Continental currency had been alienated by the Americans. The British, meanwhile, had moved to reinforce their garrisons in Canada, and within a few months the American army was driven out of Canada entirely.

With Canada lost, the recently promoted Brigadier General Benedict Arnold was ordered to block any British advance into New York from Canada. Having built a small flotilla on Lake Chaplain once before, he set about creating another navy on the lake. During the summer of 1776, Arnold built a collection of warships and gunboats with which to control Champlain’s waters. Manned mostly by farmers and backwoods militia men with precious little sailing experience, Benedict Arnold’s improvised navy accomplished the near-impossible: fending off a British fleet in a series of battles. Although ultimately chased from the lake after the battle of Valcour Island in October 1776, Arnold and his patchwork crews had sufficiently delayed the British advance. Faced by the onset of winter, and with Lake Champlain freezing over by November, the British abandoned the invasion of New York, which would have severed New England from the rest of the colonies, possibly putting an end to the Revolution. Like Bunker Hill, Arnold’s campaign on the lake had ended in an American defeat, but it still had saved the rebellion from greater disaster.

Returning to New Haven, Arnold mustered a small Connecticut militia that harassed the British at Danbury, Connecticut, where Arnold was injured again when his horse was shot from under him. A bigger wound was to his pride. Congress bypassed him, promoting several other generals over Arnold to major general. In yet another fit of petulance, he offered his resignation in July 1777. When Washington asked Congress to recommission Arnold, they complied, and he was sent north to join the armies preparing to confront British General John Burgoyne who, after a year’s delay created by Arnold, had embarked on the invasion of New York from Canada.

In a series of battles fought around Saratoga, New York, Arnold played a conspicuous and heroic role. At the battle of Bemis Heights on October 7, 1777, Arnold personally led his men who turned back part of Burgoyne’s army for the last time. Rallying the American troops from horseback, Arnold was shot, wounded in the same leg that had been injured at Quebec. Having suffered tremendous losses, Burgoyne surrendered his army in the most stunning victory of an otherwise largely unsuccessful American military campaign. The shocking news that Burgoyne had surrendered and most of his five thousand men had been paroled was the key to bringing the French into the war as America’s ally. With French troops, ships, and powder, the Revolution was given new life.

And Benedict Arnold had played a crucial role. He had demonstrated the courage and leadership skills that George Washington had recognized two years earlier in Cambridge. But once again, Arnold was denied glory. Another bitter feud, this time with General Horatio Gates, the American commander at Saratoga, meant Arnold received no official credit for his daring at Bemis Heights. Worse, he had been vilified by Gates for having disobeyed orders. Withdrawn to Philadelphia, where he convalesced, Arnold nearly lost his leg again. He continued his recovery with Washington at Valley Forge in the bleak winter of 1777–78.

Aftermath

Sir: The heart which is conscious of its own rectitude cannot attempt to palliate a step which the world may censure as wrong. I have ever acted from a principle of love to my country, since the commencement of the present unhappy contest between Great Britain and the Colonies. The same principle of love to my country actuate my present conduct, however it may appear inconsistent to the world, who very seldom judge right of any man’s actions.

—Benedict Arnold to George Washington, September 25, 1780¹⁷

Standing on the Saratoga Battlefield in upstate New York is a statue of a single boot. Its worn dedication reads, in part, to “the most brilliant soldier of the Continental army.” The statue anonymously honors the bravery and leadership of Benedict Arnold, the heroic officer who became the greatest villain in American history.

After Saratoga, Arnold’s fall from grace was as stunningly dramatic as the rest of his incredible life had been. In June 1778, Washington appointed Arnold military commissioner of Philadelphia, which had earlier been captured by the British but was back in American hands. Embittered at being passed over for promotion, disgruntled at having Congress question his wartime expenses—he had borne many of the Quebec campaign’s costs himself and expected reimbursement—Arnold threw himself into the whirl of Philadelphia’s social life and swiftly fell into debt. His extravagances drew attention, and Congress investigated his financial dealings as Philadelphia’s military commissioner. Faced with this investigation, Arnold complained to Washington, still a staunch defender, “Having become a cripple in the service of my country, I little expected to meet [such] ungrateful returns.” (The injuries to Arnold’s leg had shortened it by two inches, and he was now forced to wear a special boot.)

He also fell in love. During this time Arnold renewed his acquaintance with Peggy Shippen, the now eighteen-year-old daughter of Judge Edward Shippen. They were married on April 8, 1779. Peggy’s previous suitor, the English major John André, had left the city when the British withdrew. About a year later, Arnold sought and was given command of the fort at West Point, perched above the Hudson River in New York just north of New York City. The fort controlled Hudson River traffic.

In September 1780, while George Washington was traveling to visit Arnold and Peggy at their home in what is now Westchester County, New York, Major André was captured in civilian clothes. Stripped by the Americans who were planning to rob him, André was found carrying the plans for Arnold’s surrender of West Point to the British. With possession of the fort, the British could once again control the length of the Hudson River, reopening the possibility of an assault from Canada, which Arnold had fought so hard to prevent. For his betrayal, Arnold had been promised £20,000 and a brigadier’s commission. Knowing the plan was undone, Arnold raced off to safety aboard a waiting British ship, leaving behind Peggy and their infant son to contend with a shaken but enraged Washington.

When George Washington went to see Peggy Arnold, she flew into a fit of hysterics at the news, claiming that men were trying to kill her and her baby, even allowing her dressing gown to fall open, offering a glimpse of “her charms,” as genteel historians like to put it. Washington’s aide Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette, the young French nobleman whom Washington had practically adopted as a son, were both asked by Peggy to intercede with the general. She was clearly a talented actress and duped them all. Convincing Washington that she knew nothing of the plot, Peggy Shippen was allowed to return to Philadelphia with her six-month-old infant. On the ride back to her family’s home, she was unable to purchase food from anyone who knew who she was. It would be centuries before British military documents revealed the extent of her complete complicity in the plot.

On October 9, Arnold appeared in his new uniform, that of a British general. That same day, a letter appeared in a New York Tory newspaper, the Royal Gazette, addressed “to the Inhabitants of America.” In it, the turncoat attempted to explain his actions. Once again, anti-Catholic sentiment moved to center stage. Arnold claimed that he had been loyal to the American cause as long as it was a “defensive” war. But when France joined the American side, that had changed, claimed Arnold. It was, wrote Arnold, “infinitely wiser and safer to cast my confidence upon [British] justice and generosity than to trust a monarchy too feeble to establish your independency…the enemy of the Protestant faith, and fraudulently avowing an affection for the liberties of mankind while she holds her native sons in vassalage and chains.”¹⁸

Setting aside this sudden and convenient burst of anti-Catholic fervor, perhaps Arnold thought that he, like King Lear, was “a man more sinn’d against than sinning.” More simply, Arnold’s motives seem fairly clear: an ambition to rise in society born of his father’s dramatic fall; bitterness at being constantly slighted and passed over; and greed—his own and that of his young wife, who had a taste for the finer things. In the end, Arnold’s treachery did not affect the war’s outcome. Major André was hanged as a spy after Washington unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate an exchange for Arnold with General Cornwallis. Arnold was given a command, calling it the “American Legion.” He led this collection of loyalists and Continental army deserters against Richmond, Virginia, which they captured. Later, he moved north to attack New London, in his home state of Connecticut, burning it to the ground, in the hope it would divert Washington from Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. During the attack, surrendering patriot defenders were massacred by Arnold’s men. But the ploy failed as a diversion and Cornwallis surrendered his army to Washington, bolstered by French troops and a French fleet, in October 1781, essentially ending the Revolutionary War in America.

After the British surrender, the Arnolds lived in New York, still very much a loyalist stronghold, until 1783, when the treaty ending the war was signed. When some thirty-five thousand New York Tories evacuated the city, Arnold moved to New Brunswick, Canada, where he returned to his life as a merchant and shipper before finally moving to London in 1791. His son, Benedict VI, joined the British army against his father’s wishes and died in the Napoleonic Wars.

Benedict Arnold V, hero and traitor, died in London in 1801, at age sixty. There were four state carriages and seven mourning coaches at his funeral, and he was buried at the Church of St. Mary’s in Battersea. When the church was renovated a century later, his body was mistakenly disinterred and buried with a jumble of others in an unmarked grave.