When we last left New Havener Benedict Arnold, it was August 1775. Following a paper trail in the publications of the day, we got to know the unfamous, not infamous, Benedict Arnold—the merchant, the husband and the exceptionally committed revolutionary, risking life and limb without hesitation for the cause of America.
Over the next few years, his importance as a public figure would grow enormously, and so would the anxiety a keen observer might feel about Arnold’s deeper nature. Was he in it for the republic—or himself? A man of integrity—or expediency? A patriot—or a profiteer?
Just a few months into the Revolutionary War, even as Arnold the military commander secured major victories against the British, doubts were already backing their way into the papers. The Connecticut Journal, and New Haven Post-Boy, in a note reprinted from the New York Journal hailing Arnold’s victories and virtues, felt it necessary to admonish the man’s “enemies, who have… artfully endeavoured to misrepresent his conduct, and give a blameable aspect to [his] actions.”
According to various accounts, the man’s “enemies” tended to be his fellow officers in the Continental Army, driven to suspicion of Arnold’s character and motives by his headstrong nature, impolitic communication style and tendency to behave in ways easily interpreted as self-serving.
Fortunately for Arnold, he had already earned the trust of the officer whose opinion mattered most: George Washington, the commander of all the rest. In the fall of 1775, Washington granted Colonel Arnold command of about a thousand soldiers to mount a perilous sneak attack on the most important British stronghold in Canada, Quebec City.
The sneakiness was an intended consequence of the peril. Arnold and his men would be trekking through hundreds of miles of northern wilderness in increasingly bitter weather—a gauntlet that, as James Thomas Flexner noted in his 1943 book The Traitor and the Spy, Americans and British alike “considered impassable.” Pulling about 675 men through to the other side, with roughly a third of the original battalion lost either to death or desertion along the grueling trip, Arnold himself never wavered until a bullet tore through his leg during the attack.
As he was carried to a Catholic hospital nearby, his disarrayed and outnumbered forces were easily overwhelmed by the British defenders. With many captured or killed, the remainder of the rebel force, having pulled back and camped outside the city walls, were deprived of fresh provisions when the British cut off their supply lines. And of course, as 1775 turned to 1776—and as Arnold was promoted to the rank of brigadier general—sickness and harsh cold plagued the men, now forced to go to bed hungry in makeshift ice shelters, under constant threat of attack by a much stronger military force that could simply march out and annihilate them if it wanted to.
Somehow, despite it all, Arnold persuaded the vast majority of the roughly 500 remaining men to stay, mounting a symbolic standoff that saved face for the Continental Army and for Arnold himself. According to The Traitor and the Spy, Washington considered this “a truly amazing achievement” in command terms—one that, as the book puts it, “rivals Washington’s own achievement at Valley Forge.” Others, however, saw Arnold’s willingness to charge his men into an unwinnable battle—and to manipulate them into enduring extreme suffering for months on end—as an indication that Arnold valued his own ambition and pride above all else.
Months later, these suspicions would materialize surrounding a different matter altogether. During the rebels’ ultimate retreat from Quebec, Arnold had seized goods from local merchants for the benefit of the army, but the goods mysteriously disappeared en route. Moses Hazen, a colonel who already disliked Arnold, leveled the accusation that Arnold had flipped the goods for his own profit. Arnold, the ranking officer, went on offense, ordering a court martial of Hazen; but by the end of the proceedings, it was Arnold who was ordered arrested. That arrest was then prevented by General Horatio Gates, who felt Arnold was needed as a commander regardless of whatever misdeeds may have provoked the unfavorable ruling.
That was during the summer of 1776, at Fort Saratoga. A couple of years later—after Arnold had been passed over for promotion, tendering his resignation in response; after Washington had refused to accept that resignation; and after Arnold played the key role in the battle that turned the tide against the British, during which he would once again be shot in the leg—Hazen’s accusations would be mirrored, and magnified, in the colonial capital of Philadelphia, where Arnold had been appointed military commander.
There, General Arnold would also meet his second wife, Margaret “Peggy” Shippen. The well-to-do Tory would connect him to other influential Tories, softening his stance toward the British, solidifying his resentments against the revolutionaries and setting the stage for Arnold’s dramatic final turn.
But that’s a story for another day, coming next week.
Written by Dan Mims. Image features a mirrored version of “Benedict Arnold,” an 1879 engraving by Henry Bryan Hall. This updated article was originally published on May 14, 2014.
