(1741-1801)
[Illustration: Benedict Arnold.]
Some of Arnold's biographers have declared that he was a very
vicious boy, and have chiefly illustrated this fact by painting him
as a ruthless robber of birds'-nests. But a great many boys who
began life by robbing birds'-nests have ended it much more
creditably. The astonishing and interesting element in Benedict
Arnold's career was what one might term the anomaly and incongruity
of his treason. Born at Norwich, Conn., in 1741, he was blessed from
his earliest years by wholesome parental influences. The education
which he received was an excellent one, considering his colonial
environment. Tales of his boyish pluck and hardihood cannot be
disputed, while others that record his youthful cruelty are
doubtless the coinings of slander. It is certain that in 1755, when
the conflict known as "the old French war" first broke out, he gave
marked proof of patriotism, though as yet the merest lad. Later, at
the very beginning of the Revolution, he left his thriving business
as a West India merchant in New Haven and headed a company of
volunteers. Before the end of 1775 he had been made a commissioned
colonel by the authorities of Massachusetts, and had marched through
a sally-port, capturing the fortress of Ticonderoga, with tough old
Ethan Allen at his side and 83 "Green Mountain Boys" behind him.
Later, at the siege of Quebec, he behaved with splendid courage.
Through great difficulties and hardships he dauntlessly led his band
to the high-perched and almost impregnable town. Pages might be
filled in telling how toilsome was this campaign, now requiring
canoes and bateaux, now taxing the strength of its resolute little
horde with rough rocks, delusive bogs and all those fiercest
terrors of famine which lurk in a virgin wilderness. Bitter cold,
unmerciful snow-falls, drift-clogged streams, pelting storms, were
constant features of Arnold's intrepid march. When we realize the
purely unselfish and disinterested motive of this march, which has
justly been compared to that of Xenophon with his 10,000, and to the
retreat of Napoleon from Moscow as well, we stand aghast at the
possibility of its having been planned and executed by one who
afterward became the basest of traitors.
During the siege of Quebec Arnold was severely wounded, and yet he
obstinately kept up the blockade even while he lay in the hospital,
beset by obstacles, of which bodily pain was doubtless not the
least. The arrival of General Wooster from Montreal with
reinforcements rid Arnold, however, of all responsibility. Soon
afterward the scheme of capturing Quebec and inducing the Canadas to
join the cause of the United Colonies, came to an abrupt end. But in
his desire to effect this purpose Arnold had identified himself with
such lovers of their country as Washington, Schuyler, and
Montgomery. And if the gallant Montgomery had then survived and
Arnold had been killed, history could not sufficiently have
eulogized him as a hero. Soon afterward he was promoted to the rank
of brigadier-general, and on October 11, 1776, while commanding a
flotilla of small vessels on Lake Champlain, he gained new celebrity
for courage. The enemy was greatly superior in number to Arnold's
forces. "They had," says Bancroft, "more than twice his weight of
metal and twice as many fighting vessels, and skilled seamen and
officers against landsmen." Arnold was not victorious in this naval
fray, but again we find him full of lion-like valor. He was in the
Congress galley, and there with his own hands often aimed the cannon
on its bloody decks against the swarming masses of British gunboats.
Arnold's popularity was very much augmented by his fine exploits on
Lake Champlain. "With consummate address," says Sparks, "he
penetrated the enemy's lines and brought off his whole fleet,
shattered and disabled as it was, and succeeded in saving six of his
vessels, and, it might be added, most of his men." Again, at the
battle of Danbury he tempted death countless times; and at Loudon's
Ferry and Bemis's Heights his prowess and nerve were the perfection
of martial merit. It has been stated by one or two historians of
good repute that Arnold was not present at all during the battle of
Saratoga; but the latest and most trustworthy researches on this
point would seem to indicate that he commanded there with discretion
and skill. He was now a major-general, but his irascible spirit had
previously been hurt by the tardiness with which this honor was
conferred upon him, five of his juniors having received it before
himself. He strongly disliked General Gates, too, and quarrelled
with him because of what he held to be unfair behavior during the
engagement at Bemis's Heights. At Stillwater, a month or so later in
the same year (1777), he issued orders without Gates's permission,
and conducted himself on the field with a kind of mad frenzy, riding
hither and thither and seeking the most dangerous spots. All concur
in stating, however, that his disregard of life was admirable, in
spite of its foolish rashness. In this action he was also severely
wounded.
One year later he was appointed to the command of Philadelphia, and
here he married the daughter of a prominent citizen, Edward Shippen.
This was his second marriage; he had been a widower for a number of
years before its occurrence, and the father of three sons. Every
chance was now afforded Arnold of wise and just rulership. In spite
of past disputes and adventures not wholly creditable, he still
presented before the world a fairly clean record, and whatever minor
blemishes may have spotted his good name, these were obscured by the
almost dazzling lustre of his soldierly career. But no sooner was he
installed in his new position at Philadelphia than he began to show,
with wilful perversity, those evil impulses which thus far had
remained relatively latent. Almost as soon as he entered the town he
disclosed to its citizens the most offensive traits of arrogance and
tyranny. But this was not all. Not merely was he accused on every
side of such faults as the improper issuing of passes, the closing
of Philadelphia shops on his arrival, the imposition of menial
offices upon the sons of freemen performing military duty, the use
of wagons furnished by the State for transporting private property;
but misdeeds of a far graver nature were traced to him, savoring of
the criminality that prisons are built to punish. The scandalous
gain with which he sought to fill a spendthrift purse caused wide
and vehement rebuke. For a man of such high and peculiar place his
commercial dabblings and speculative schemes argued most deplorably
against him. There seems to be no doubt that he made personal use of
the public moneys with which he was intrusted; that he secured by
unworthy and illegal means a naval State prize, brought into port by
a Pennsylvanian ship; and that he meditated the fitting up of a
privateer, with intent to secure from the foe such loot on the high
seas as piratical hazard would permit. His house in Philadelphia was
one of the finest that the town possessed; he drove about in a
carriage and four; he entertained with excessive luxury and a large
retinue of servants; he revelled in all sorts of pompous parade.
Such ostentation would have roused adverse comment amid the simple
colonial surroundings of a century ago, even if he had merely been a
citizen of extraordinary wealth. But being an officer intrusted with
the most important dignities in a country both struggling for its
freedom and impoverished as to funds, he now played a part of
exceptional shame and folly.
Naturally his arraignment before the authorities of the State soon
followed. The Council of Pennsylvania tried him, and though their
final verdict was an extremely gentle one, its very mildness of
condemnation proved poison to his truculent pride. Washington, the
commander-in-chief, reprimanded him, but with language of exquisite
lenity. Still, Arnold never forgave the stab that was then so
deservingly yet so pityingly dealt him.
His colossal treason--one of the most monstrous in all the records
of history, soon afterward began its wily work. Under the name of
_Gustavus_ he opened a correspondence with Sir Henry Clinton, an
English officer in command at New York. Sir Henry at once scented
the sort of villainy which would be of vast use to his cause,
however he might loathe and contemn its designer. He instructed his
aide-de-camp, Major John André, to send cautious and pseudonymic
replies. In his letters Arnold showed the burning sense of wrong
from which he believed himself (and with a certain amount of
justice) to be suffering. He had, when all is told, received harsh
treatment from his country, considering how well he had served it in
the past. Even Irving, that most dispassionate of historians, has
called the action of the court-martial just mentioned an
"extraordinary measure to prepossess the public mind against him."
Beyond doubt, too, he had been repeatedly assailed by slanders and
misstatements. The animosity of party feeling had more than once
wrongfully assailed him, and his second marriage to the daughter of
a man whose Tory sympathies were widely known had roused political
hatreds, unsparing and headstrong.
But these facts are merely touched upon to make more clear the
motive of his infamous plot. Determined to give the enemy a great
vantage in return for the pecuniary indemnity that he required of
them, this unhappy man stooped low enough to ask and obtain from
Washington, the command of West Point. André, who had for months
written him letters in a disguised hand under the name of John
Anderson, finally met him, one night, at the foot of a mountain
about six miles below Stony Point, called the Long Clove. Arnold,
with infinite cunning, had devised this meeting, and had tempted the
adventurous spirit of André, who left a British man-of-war called
the Vulture in order to hold converse with his fellow-conspirator.
But before the unfortunate André could return to his ship (having
completed his midnight confab and received from Arnold the most
damning documentary evidence of treachery) the Vulture was fired
upon from Teller's Point by a party of Americans, who had secretly
carried cannon thither during the earlier night. André was thus
deserted by his own countrymen, for the Vulture moved away and left
him with a man named Joshua Smith, a minion in Arnold's employ. Of
poor André's efforts to reach New York, of his capture and final
pathetic execution, we need not speak. On his person, at the time of
his arrest, was found a complete description of the West Point post
and garrison--documentary evidence that scorched with indelible
disgrace the name of the man who had supplied it.
On September 25, 1780, Arnold escaped to a British sloop-of-war
anchored below West Point. He was made a colonel in the English
army, and is said to have received the sum of £6,315 as the price of
his treachery. The command of a body of troops in Connecticut was
afterward given him, and he then showed a rapacity and intolerance
that well consorted with the new position he had so basely
purchased. The odium of his injured countrymen spoke loudly
throughout the land he had betrayed. He was burned in effigy
countless times, and a growing generation was told with wrath and
scorn the abhorrent tale of his turpitude. Meanwhile, as if by
defiant self-assurance to wipe away the perfidy of former acts, he
issued a proclamation to "the inhabitants of America," in which he
strove to cleanse himself from blame. This address, teeming with
flimsy protestations of patriotism, reviling Congress, vituperating
France as a worthless and sordid ally of the Crown's rebellious
subjects, met on all sides the most contemptuous derision. Arnold
passed nearly all the remainder of his life--eleven years or
thereabouts--in England. He died in London, worn out with a nervous
disease, on June 14, 1801. It is a remarkable fact that his second
wife, who had till the last remained faithful to him, suffered
acutely at his death, and both spoke and wrote of him in accents of
strongest bereavement.
To the psychologic student of human character, Benedict Arnold
presents a strangely fascinating picture. Elements of good were
unquestionably factors of his mental being. But pride, revenge,
jealousy, and an almost superhuman egotism fatally swayed him. He
desired to lead in all things, and he had far too much vanity, far
too little self-government, and not half enough true morality to
lead with success and permanence in any. The wrongs which beyond
doubt his country inflicted upon him he was incapable of bearing
like a stoic. Virile and patriotic from one point of view, he was
childish and weak-fibred from another. He has been likened to
Marlborough, though by no means so great a soldier. Yet it is true
that John Churchill won his dukedom by deserting his former
benefactor, James II, and joining the Whig cause of William of
Orange. If the Revolution had been crushed, we cannot blind our eyes
to the fact that Arnold's treason would have received from history
far milder dealing than is accorded it now. Even the radiant name of
Washington would very probably have shone to us dimmed and blurred
through a mist of calamity. Posterity may respect the patriot whose
star sinks in unmerited failure, but it bows homage to him if he
wages against despotism a victorious fight. Supposing that Arnold's
surrender of West Point had extinguished that splendid spark of
liberty which glowed primarily at Lexington and Bunker Hill, the
chances are that he might have received an English peerage and died
in all the odor of a distinction as brilliant as it would have been
undeserved. The triumph of the American rebellion so soon after he
had ignominiously washed his hands of it, sealed forever his own
social doom. That, it is certain, was most severe and drastic. The
money paid him by the British Government was accursed as were the
thirty silver pieces of Iscariot; for his passion to speculate
ruined him financially some time before the end of his life, and he
breathed his last amid comparative poverty and the dread of still
darker reverses.
Extreme sensitiveness is apt to accompany a spirit of just his
high-strung, petulant, and spleenful sort. Beyond doubt he must have
suffered keen torments at the disdain with which he was everywhere
met in English society, and chiefly among the military officers whom
his very conduct, renegade though it was, had in a measure forced to
recognize him. When Lord Cornwallis gave his sword to Washington,
its point pierced Arnold's breast with a wound rankling and
incurable. He had played for high stakes with savage and devilish
desperation. Our national independence meant his future slavery; our
priceless gain became his irretrievable loss. It is stated that as
death approached him he grew excessively anxious about the risky and
shattered state of his affairs. His mind wandered, as Mrs. Arnold
writes, and he fancied himself once more fighting those battles
which had brought him honor and fame. It was then that he would call
for his old insignia of an American soldier and would desire to be
again clothed in them. "Bring me, I beg of you," he is reported to
have said, "the epaulettes and sword-knots which Washington gave me.
Let me die in my old American uniform, the uniform in which I fought
my battles!" And once, it is declared, he gave vent to these most
significant and terrible words: "God forgive me for ever putting on
any other!" That country which he forswore in the hour of its direst
need can surely afford to forgive Benedict Arnold as well. Grown the
greatest republic of which history keeps any record, America need
not find it difficult both to forget the wretched frailties of this,
her grossly misguided son, and at the same time to remember what
services he performed for her while as yet his baleful qualities had
not swept beyond all bounds of restraint.
[Signature: Edgar Fawcett.]