Benedict Arnold

Turning Points

The procession was attended with a numerous concourse of people, who after expressing their abhorrence of the treason and the traitor, committed him to the flames, and left both the effigy and the original to sink into ashes and oblivion.โ€” The Pennsylvania Packet, October 3, 1780, describing a public rally in Philadelphia.

The second Battle of Saratoga happened less than three weeks after the first, on October 7, 1777, and led to the surrender of British general John Burgoyne and his several thousand troops. Commonly regarded as the moment that turned the tide in the Revolutionary War, this rebel victory convinced France that the Americans stood a real chance, leading to a formal alliance against the British and material supportโ€”soldiers, supplies, capitalโ€”the Americans desperately needed. Meanwhile, it turned a continental conflict into a global one, forcing the British to shore up their homeland and other colonies against the French threat, stretching the empireโ€™s resources ever thinner.

The man history credits more than any other with forcing Burgoyneโ€™s surrender was an individual of great ambition and intemperance, whose story weโ€™ve followed in two previous installments (here and here)โ€”the same man whose effigy those angry Philadelphians would burn (and hang) a mere three years later: New Havener Benedict Arnold. Having irretrievably offended General Horatio Gates, his former ally and commanding officer, following the first Battle of Saratoga, Arnold was ordered to sit out the second. Instead, seeing an opportunity to win more decisively than Gatesโ€™s conservative strategy would have allowed, Arnold defied the order and rode out to battle by himself, rallied the scattered rebels there and led them on a series of ferocious, fearless charges, breaking the enemyโ€™s lines and overtaking several key battlefield positions along the way.

sponsored by

NBC Connecticut

As nightfall descended, and as Gates dallied back at camp, away from the fighting, Arnold was leading the last charge of the battle when the odds finally caught up with him. His horse was shot; so was his legโ€”the same one thatโ€™d been shot at Quebec two years earlier. Not a moment later, the dying horse landed on the limb, mangling it beyond what the musket ball had already achieved. Between the bullet and the steed, Arnoldโ€™s leg was shattered, destroyed for a second time in service to America.

Four days later, after being carted 30 miles to a hospital in Albany, New York, Arnold, now incapacitated and more agitated than ever, had months of recovery time to stew on the various perceived indignities, inequities and losses heโ€™d suffered for the cause. Aside from the great dissatisfaction caused by losing the use of his leg, which exacerbated all other dissatisfactions, Arnoldโ€™s primary resentment at that time appears to have stemmed from two related circumstances: the tendency for other officers to steal or downplay the credit owed for his extraordinary military accomplishments; and the Continental Congressโ€™s promotion of other, less deserving officers above him.

Yet even Arnoldโ€™s many detractors couldnโ€™t deny his heroism at Saratoga. Three months later, at the end of January, 1778, Congress โ€œvoted to let George Washington โ€˜regulate the rank of Major General Arnoldโ€™โ€ (George Washington and Benedict Arnold: A Tale of Two Patriots by Dave R. Palmer, 2006), intended to allow the commander-in-chief to โ€œrestoreโ€ to Arnold the seniority heโ€™d long contendedโ€”to anyone who would listen, and many who wouldnโ€™tโ€”should already have been his.

sponsored by

Hopkins School - coed college preparatory school in New Haven

In May, with lingering mistrust of great portions of the revolutionary authorities, and still unable to stand on his leg, Arnold made his way back to New Haven, where โ€œhe was given a heroโ€™s welcomeโ€ฆ met on the road by the cadet corps and โ€˜a number of respectable inhabitants;โ€™ thirteen cannon were firedโ€ (The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John Andrรฉ by James Thomas Flexner, 1953). But he wouldnโ€™t be home for long; Washington valued him too much. After a few days, Arnold was summoned to Valley Forge, where he was given orders to lead the capital of the colonies, Philadelphia.

Officially, he was the cityโ€™s military commander. Unofficially, Arnold would use his military power to amass the socioeconomic kind. Having spent a good deal of money advancing the fight for independence, never recompensed; and having sacrificed plenty else in the war effort, Arnold decided to use his position to pay himself back, engaging in a spate of shady trade activities. He helped merchants get their goods through American blockades; used military property for private ends; and personally profited from the sale of goods seized from British loyalists. Meanwhile, he lived a proudly extravagant lifestyle, residing in lavish quarters and getting around town in โ€œan especially ostentatious carriageโ€ (Palmer, 2006). He openly fraternized with Philadelphiaโ€™s conservative high societyโ€”especially Peggy Shippen, the daughter of a prominent judge with Tory sympathies, who he would begin courting for marriage almost immediatelyโ€”which rubbed the cityโ€™s radical revolutionaries entirely the wrong way.

Suspicions about Arnoldโ€™s character, which had been floated many times and many ways before members of Congress in the preceding years, became easier to believe. Local politicians, most notably a man named Joseph Reed, began to grumble about Arnoldโ€™s abuses of power. Reed eventually leveled formal charges, prompting Arnold to take to the newspapers with a preemptive and not very honest strike, reading in part:

โ€ฆthe present attack upon me is as gross a prostitution of power as ever disgraced a weak and wicked Administration and manifests a spirit of persecution against a man (who has endeavoured to deserve well of this country) which would discredit the private resentments of an individual, and which ought to render any public body who could be influenced by it, contemptible.

Soon after, on April 8, 1779, Arnold and Shippen married, and, with new kinds of independence to fight forโ€”financial, for one, and legal, for another, both of which the British could provideโ€”โ€œtreason flowered almost instantlyโ€ (Flexner, 1953).

Well, the idea of it did, anyway. The actual intrigue was yet to come, as is our telling of it.

Written by Dan Mims. Image depicts โ€œBenedict Arnold,โ€ an engraving by Henry Bryan Hall (1879).

More Stories