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The seeds of Benedict Arnold's treason were probably sown in Philadelphia, where he was forced to defend himself against court-martial charges brought by the Executive Council of Pennsylvania. Arnold's skills as a diplomat did not match his skills as a military leader, and he was popular neither with the civilians he attempted to govern nor the officers with whom he fought. He was considered to be impetuous and imprudent in speech, with an overbearing personality and aggressiveness.
During the long wait for his trial, Arnold's financial position deteriorated due in part to his preference for the high life, and in part to the slowness of Congress in reimbursing him for the monies which he advanced from his own pocket for the support of his troops. The complaints of his treatment were listened to with sympathy by his new wife, Peggy Shippen, and her decided Tory leanings most likely magnified Arnold's sense of ill treatment. It was probably in this time period that the first British overtures to him were made.
A year after charges were filed, Arnold was found guilty of two charges and, on 6 April 1780, received the ordered reprimand from General Washington. Though considered nothing but a tap on the wrist by many, Arnold perceived this sentence as a betrayal, even though he was subsequently given command over West Point.
It was in this state of mind that Arnold listened to an offer from Major Andre, the British adjutant-general. The offer was for 20,000 pounds and a commission as major-general in the British army if Arnold succeeded in turning West Point over to the British. If he tried and the takeover failed, he was still guaranteed his expenses and a commission as a brigadier-general.
But the plan never got that far because Andre was captured before he could return to his ship. The papers found on him were evidence of the plot and it was only because of a warning by a courier of Andre's that Arnold was able to flee in time to avoid arrest. Andre was executed as an enemy spy, and Arnold took up arms with the British for the remainder of the war.
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FROM http://www.iment.com/maida/familytree/arnold/arnold.htm
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* Benedict Arnold was born on January 14, 1741 in Norwich, Connecticut. Arnold was one of a number of Benedict Arnolds including his father and his great-grandfather, an early governor of Rhode Island. Arnold's mother was Hannah Waterman King, a wealthy widow, before her marriage to the elder Arnold. The family prospered until some poor business deals caused financial problems. Arnold's father turned to the local taverns for solace. Arnold attended school at Canterbury. While there, two sisters and one brother died from Yellow Fever.
Without money, Benedict Arnold was withdrawn from school. With the lack of the structure of formal schooling, and lax parental control, young Benedict was often in trouble. His mother finally found help from family: cousins Daniel and Joshua Lathrop took Arnold in as an apprentice to their large and successful apothecary business. He left his apprenticeship a couple of times to join the army for periods of time during the French and Indian War, but remained in the employ of his cousins for years.
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- U.S. Edition Wall Street Journal
August 14, 2018
Today's Paper
Books Bookshelf
‘The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold’ and ‘Turncoat’ Review: His Own Worst Enemy
Until he switched sides, Benedict Arnold was an American hero, though a prickly and prideful one.
By William Anthony Hay
May 24, 2018 3:50 p.m. ET
Dante’s ‘Inferno’ reserves hell’s lowest circle for traitors, placing Judas Iscariot and other such fiends in a frozen lake. At its very center stands Satan himself, guilty of treachery against God.
Americans have long seen Benedict Arnold in roughly the same terms—for his betrayal of George Washington and of his fellow colonists fighting for independence. “Since the fall of Lucifer,” Gen. Nathanael Greene wrote soon after the Revolutionary War, “nothing has equaled the fall of Arnold.”
Joyce Lee Malcolm describes “the most infamous man in American history” as a two-dimensional caricature in the minds of most Americans. His very name, Stephen Brumwell says, “remains synonymous with ‘turncoat’ and ‘traitor.’ ” Both authors argue, in different ways, that Arnold deserves a fuller consideration, though not necessarily an exculpatory one. Casting him merely as a latter-day Judas, they show, leaves aside important matters that shed light on both the man and the American Revolution.
Arnold’s treachery is usually put down to his stubborn pride and rivalries with fellow officers. Ms. Malcolm’s “The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold” does show that Arnold’s hunger for recognition and refusal to compromise embroiled him in conflicts that weakened his commitment to independence. Arnold was especially resentful, she notes, of the ill treatment he felt he had received from civilian politicians, who questioned his actions off the battlefield and his handling of his command’s financial accounts.
Americans burn Benedict Arnold in effigy during the Revolutionary War.
Americans burn Benedict Arnold in effigy during the Revolutionary War. Illustration: North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy
The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold
By Joyce Lee Malcolm
Pegasus, 410 pages, $27.95
Turncoat
By Stephen Brumwell
Yale, 372 pages, $30
Such second-guessing, though a personal insult to Arnold, expressed a broader political and social division, Ms. Malcolm argues. She draws on colonial history and the outlook of the 18th-century Atlantic world to describe a profound civilian distrust of professional soldiers and standing armies, a distrust that arose in England during Oliver Cromwell’s military dictatorship. Unlike a militiaman or an officer drawn from the gentry, who shared the ethos of the larger society, professionals were a breed apart whose foremost loyalty to the military caste made them a threat to liberty.
Ms. Malcolm, a historian at George Mason University’s law school, describes how tensions between George Washington and the Continental Congress, whose members had adopted this wary civilian view of the military, fueled ever greater discontent within the Continental Army. With low pay and poor supplies compounding the problem, many officers resigned. Ms. Malcolm suggests that Arnold—helped along by his prickly personality and the trauma of a crippling wound—reacted by switching sides.
Mr. Brumwell, a military historian and a biographer of George Washington, centers “Turncoat: Benedict Arnold and the Crisis of American Liberty” on the 1780 conspiracy—in which Arnold played a key role—to give West Point to the British and possibly enable George Washington’s capture. Deftly weaving that story into the larger military history of the American Revolution, Mr. Brumwell vividly sketches characters and recounts pivotal episodes. He argues that Arnold thought of himself as someone working to mend relations between Britain and America, welcoming terms that removed the grounds of the original quarrel. In short, he was moved by something more rational than pique and less petty than resentment.
Both authors trace Arnold’s origins and rise, finding there sources of his aspiration and defensiveness. His father, descended from a distinguished Rhode Island family, had moved to Norwich, Conn., where he sought his fortune as a cooper turned merchant. His decision to marry a socially prominent widow aided his commercial prospects, but his business faltered, and his alcoholism doomed it. Benedict, having been sent off to study in preparation for Yale, was called home to join his sister in supporting the family. His bright future had been seemingly plucked away, and he was wounded with embarrassment at the sight of his father making a spectacle of himself.
Soon apprenticed as an apothecary, Arnold eventually set up his own general-goods shop in New Haven and, with an eye to the main chance, began making merchant voyages to Canada and the West Indies. Marriage and a place in local society followed. But his business ventures were not reliably prosperous, and he was often his own worst enemy. After negotiating a bankruptcy settlement with his creditors, he pressed aggressively to collect the debts owed to him. When a sailor threatened to report him as a smuggler, Arnold led a gang that inflicted a lashing in reprisal. Honor—that is, personal standing and reputation—prompted duels and lawsuits. Ms. Malcolm aptly describes him as feisty.
Arnold’s election as a militia captain in 1775 gave his ambition a new focus. When news arrived of fighting at Lexington, he faced down the local militia’s reluctant commander in order to arm his troops and march them to Massachusetts. Once there, he volunteered to raise an expedition to seize Fort Ticonderoga, in upper New York state, with its British cannon and supplies. Ethan Allen provided the men who captured the fort—and took the credit—but Arnold did his part and secured Lake Champlain.
Late in 1775, George Washington sought to aid the invasion of Canada—set to go through New York state—by sending another force through northern Maine to surprise Quebec, and he gave Arnold the command. In the event, Arnold’s troops faced near starvation in a hastily improvised march through the wilderness. But Arnold reached Quebec with enough men to besiege the city. Gen. Philip Schuyler, who commanded the Americans’ northern theater, thought some future historian would make Arnold’s march “the subject of admiration.” Washington himself, praising Arnold’s “enterprising and persevering spirit,” told him that “it is not in the power of any man to command success, but you have done more—you have deserved it.”
When the Continental Army withdrew from Canada in June 1776, Arnold put together a fleet on Lake Champlain. Although a larger British force wiped it out in a hard-fought battle, the delay to the British southward advance gave the Americans a strategic victory. Mr. Brumwell rightly says that the significance of this effort is hard to exaggerate. Had the British reached the Hudson River while their other army had taken New York, the war might have been over before Washington struck back across the Delaware. Arnold played a crucial role again the next year, in 1777, when his leadership helped force Gen. John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, N.Y.
Just ahead of the Saratoga fighting, at Bemis Heights, Arnold was shot in the leg while leading a charge. Asked where he was hit, he gallantly replied: “I wish it had been my heart.” Had he indeed died in that battle, Mr. Brumwell says, he would be to this day a hero of the Revolution. As it was, he faced a long and difficult recovery that left him lame and more easily provoked than usual. Quarrels with other officers, including Horatio Gates, his superior—who took credit for Saratoga—heightened his frustrations.
Mr. Brumwell notes that Arnold had the misfortune of drawing “enemies who tore at him with the tenacity of mastiffs baiting a bull.” As commander in Philadelphia after the British withdrawal in 1778, he clashed with local politicians and radicals who, fired with egalitarian zeal, welcomed the chance to humble a man they thought excessively proud. Given his temperament, he was the worst possible officer to navigate contending factions. His decision, after his first wife died, to marry a woman whose family had loyalist ties made matters worse. Charges of his using military wagons for his own profit brought a court-martial in 1779 that drew a formal reprimand from George Washington.
By then, however, Arnold had opened communications with the British. A British peace commission in 1778 had conceded all American demands short of independence, effectively revoking the policies that had sparked the revolution. This peace effort, Arnold believed, showed that America’s true interests lay in reconciliation with Britain on terms of near autonomy. But his countrymen spurned that course in favor of an alliance with France, and Arnold chose to turn his coat.
Newly appointed commander of West Point, Arnold calculated that turning it over to the British, perhaps with George Washington himself, would end the Revolutionary War in a stroke by giving Britain control over the Hudson River. The conspiracy failed when Arnold’s British contact, Maj. John André, was seized by the colonists, with incriminating papers, on his way back to British lines.
Arnold fled to a British warship, and though the Americans made an offer to trade André for him, the British refused. André was hanged, and Arnold went on to lead British troops in Virginia. He survived the war and eventually settled in London, where he angled for a post in India but was never granted one. Though the British respected Arnold, they never trusted him. Mr. Brumwell quotes the keen observation—from a director of the East India Co. pondering Arnold’s audacious turncoat gamble—that “a fortunate plot holds you up as the savior of nations, a premature discovery brings you to the scaffold, or brands your name with dark and doubtful suspicions.”
Arnold’s remarkable story, admirably recounted by Ms. Malcolm and Mr. Brumwell, has the effect of making George Washington shine all the brighter by comparison. At Newburgh, N.Y., in 1783, Washington faced down a mutinous plot by disgruntled officers who had been denied pay and pensions. They shared many of Arnold’s resentments, but Washington won them over by persuasion rather than force and helped put the United States on a path of government under law rather than Cromwellian militarism. Such efforts helped to make him the wonder of his age, while his quondam protégé Arnold became a target of contempt.
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1741 - 1801 (60 years)
