In the years leading up to the Civil War, the story of Benedict Arnold had become a cautionary tale of tragic proportions. His treachery was part of the American creation myth, including symbolic elements of deceit and betrayal borrowed from Genesis. Not only had Arnold betrayed his country, but he had done so at the moment of creation, when its ideals and principals were taking their first gasps of breath. Now, as tensions flared between north and south, the story of Arnold’s treason became a metaphor for the sectional fears and interests that threatened to dissolve the Union.
Washington Irving, one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent men of letters, made Arnold’s treachery a warning in his Life of George Washington (1857), which Irving’s biographer Mary W. Bowden describes as “a great, five-volume plea that the Union be preserved.” Irving devotes fifty-nine pages to “a sad episode of our revolutionary history—the treason of Arnold.” Despite the “implicit confidence reposed in his patriotism by Washington,” Arnold “was false at heart,” guilty of “utter treachery,” and his reputation consequently suffered “absolute infamy.” Describing “this stupendous piece of treachery”—the plot to give up West Point—Irving writes that “its ultimate effect might be the dismemberment of the Union.” Irving reminds his audience that the purpose of the quintessential act of treason against America was an idea once despised as the act of a traitor, but now was openly debated. Arnold’s treason was a stunning betrayal of Washington, and Irving tells the Arnold story to caution against a new betrayal of Washington and the Union he stood for. Irving invites the reader to think about Washington’s reaction to the betrayal: “‘Whom can we trust now!’ was his only comment,” Irving recounts, “but it spoke volumes.” It would continue to speak, Irving hoped, to the Americans of the mid-nineteenth century.
Seven months before the first shots of the Civil War were fired, Arnold’s treason was on display in a full-page illustration in the Harper’s Weekly of September 29, 1860. Commemorating eighty years since Arnold’s betrayal, a cloaked Arnold meets André on the rocky shore of the Hudson, while just above their heads a snake winds around a branch and extends towards the two conspirators.
Titled “The Tempter and the Traitor—the Treason of Arnold on the Night of September 21, 1780,” the illustration places Arnold’s treason in the historical and literary context of a creation myth—specifically, of the fall of man. The dissolution of the American nation that Arnold failed to achieve, the illustration implies, may indeed come about in the months ahead—although now it would be the fault of many men, not just one.
Once the war broke out, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, frequently suffered from association with Arnold: “In American history the crime of Benedict Arnold disappears before that of Jefferson Davis,” explained Harper’s Weekly, arguing that Davis will in turn bear “the gloom of unrelieved infamy.” Another account explained that “Benedict Arnold was not a true American whose political views differed from those of Washington; he was a traitor. Thus also Jefferson Davis is not an honest political opponent; he is a rebel.”
Similar in some respects to modern-day internet memes, postal covers and illustrated envelopes were forums for political cartoons that linked secession to treason. One such illustration features Jefferson Davis with a winged devil—no less than the damned traitor Benedict Arnold—astride his back, descending into the swirling flames of hell, with a caption that reads, “The Traitor Arnold giving a warm reception to the Traitor Davis”:
Throughout the war, Benedict Arnold’s treason provided a metaphor of betrayal, particularly in the eyes of Unionists. In the chapter on Arnold in his History of American Conspiracies (1863), abolitionist Orville J. Victor likened the corrupt morals of Arnold and André to those of the southern rebels. “As in the War for the Union,” he wrote, “those in rebellion deemed it honorable to break oaths of allegiance,” similar to the way that “André and his employer assumed a new law of moral obligation to cover their wretched practices.” George Calvert offered a simple explanation of why he published Arnold and Andre: an Historical Drama in 1864: “The author deems the present a favorable time for the publication of a work which embodies the first American treason, now that our national life has been, and continues to be assailed by the most gigantic and the most wicked treason known to history.”
