author Brian Carso

Benedict Arnold

books about Benedict Arnold

Why a Novel about Benedict Arnold

by

Gideon’s Revolution tells a fictional story, based on true events, of a spy mission to capture Benedict Arnold. Near the end of the novel, Gideon Wheatley, a former officer in the Continental Army, reflects on his namesake, the Gideon of the Old Testament, who instructed his small army of men to blow their trumpets in unison to frighten off their numerically superior enemy.  It’s now twenty years after the Revolution, and as Wheatley prepares to tell his audience about Arnold’s treason, he wonders if his story might have a similar power—not to disperse an enemy, but rather to unify the spirit of a new nation. He recalls the battle cry of his own soldiers as they readied to fight the British Army:

With the fury of a windstorm their voices gathered into one, swelled by the echoes of history and myth. The sound swept over us, and those who were tired drew strength from it; those who were fearful gained courage; and those who were uncertain found conviction.

Perhaps, he wonders, his story might similarly inspire the citizens of the new republic.

As we enter a new year that has already reserved a place in our history books, another story comes to mind: an anecdote about a Mrs. Powell, who greets Benjamin Franklin as he emerges from the Constitutional Convention in September 1789.  “What have you given us,” she asks about the new plan for government, “a monarchy or a republic?” To which Dr. Franklin replies, “A republic—if you can keep it.”  It’s an answer that highlights the fragility of self-government, and it suggests a follow up question: How do we keep it?

The stories we tell might be part of the answer.

William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, observed that “the only true and natural foundations of a society are the wants and fears of individuals.” This is instructive for historians and storytellers alike. In the case of Benedict Arnold, for instance, his heroism at Saratoga and his treachery at West Point tell a tale of intrigue, but the real mystery lies in his wants and fears.  What did he desire so much that he would betray his countrymen, and what kept him awake at night, rattled with fear, such that he could not resist treason?

Bringing wants and fears to life: this is the heavy lifting of the historical imagination.  It is the taproot, too, of moral instruction.  We encourage empathy not by admonishing a person to walk the same mile as another, but rather to walk a mile in his shoes.  Because the experiences of life, though infinite in variety, are repetitive in their forms, we have the imaginative power to connect with every human being who has ever walked the earth, even if the only evidence of their existence is a handful of once-buried artifacts…and their stories.

When stories illustrate our common humanity, they compel us to action.  For all the abolitionist fervor delivered by William Lloyd Garrison’s highly rational essays, for instance, it was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictional Uncle Tom’s Cabin that made northern whites feel the brutality of slavery. To that end, no story in American literature is more poignant than the account Frederick Douglass gives of being taken as a child from his mother, as simply told in the first two pages of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.  There could hardly be a more powerful evocation of our most basic wants and fears.

In 1857, as the specter of disunion appeared on the horizon, Washington Irving published his monumental Life of George Washington.  Irving devoted 59 pages to the treason of Benedict Arnold as a warning against a new betrayal of America’s democratic principles. The history of the nation’s founding, he argued, was the centerpiece of “a universal tie of brotherhood—a watchword of our Union.” Four years later, Lincoln called upon the same unifying heritage when he evoked the “mystic chords of memory” to summon the better angels of our nature.

Those mystic chords are most readily heard in the stories we share. Asked, as we are today, to choose between loyalty to the principles of self-government or the whims of one man or movement, we would do well to revisit the story of Benedict Arnold and the whole repertoire of our common stories. Through the lessons of relatable characters—our companions, then and now, in this grand experiment—our shared identity might be renewed.  And from them, one hopes, the tired may draw strength, the fearful gain courage, and the uncertain find conviction.

Benedict Arnold’s Treason and the Civil War: A Metaphor of Betrayal

by

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.”

Benedict Arnold in effigy

Benedict Arnold’s Infamy Begins

by

As word spread of Arnold’s betrayal, how did people make sense of it? In the late afternoon of September 30, 1780, seven days after Major André was captured and Arnold’s plot was revealed, an effigy of Arnold was paraded through the streets of Philadelphia and burned on High Street hill. A Philadelphia newspaper, The Continental Almanack, described the parade in detail: a stage was erected on a cart, upon which sat the figure of Arnold, dressed in his regimental uniform. Arnold’s effigy “had two faces, emblematical of his traitorous conduct.” In his left hand he held a mask, which he used to hide his evil character, and in his right hand he held a letter “from Belzebub, telling him that he had done all the mischief he could do, and now he must hang himself.” Behind Arnold stood the Devil, “dressed in black robes, shaking a purse of money at the general’s left ear, and in his right hand a pitchfork, ready to drive him into hell as the reward due to the many crimes which the thirst for gold had made him commit.” Written on transparent paper that was illuminated from behind by a large lantern was the charge against Arnold. The people who lined the way could see that this was “MAJOR GENERAL BENEDICT ARNOLD, late COMMANDER of the FORT WEST-POINT,” and that “THE CRIME OF THIS MAN IS HIGH TREASON.” Accordingly, the newspaper explained, “The effigy of this ingrate is therefore hanged (for want of his body) as a Traitor to his native country, and a Betrayer of the laws of honour.”

A row of Continental Officers and a guard of the City Infantry marched with the cart, as well as a line of men walking and on horseback, while fifes and drums played the Rogues March. When the procession ended on High Street hill, a number of speakers declared “their abhorrence to the Treason and the Traitor,” after which they committed the figure of Arnold “to the flames, and left both the effigy and the original to sink into ashes and oblivion.”

As this very public shaming demonstrates, Arnold was portrayed as a figure with two faces: one a virtuous patriot and general, the other a money-hungry traitor, with a mask to conceal this second, diabolical face. In this way it was easily understood how he could have received the esteem of his countrymen—and of Washington himself—while at the same time being profoundly corrupt. Arnold’s two faces provided a degree of moral separation from his countrymen: Arnold’s character contained a hidden, traitorous other, unlike his fellow revolutionaries, whose visages were straightforwardly virtuous and uncomplicated by duplicity. Furthermore, Arnold is portrayed as a servant of the Devil, while the Creator is leagued with the revolutionaries, giving them hope for a quick resolution to the war despite the military setbacks of 1780, and furthering the implicit suggestion that Providence would only side with a virtuous people. Arnold, on the other hand, has chosen self-interested gratification over virtue. In the parade of his effigy, before any clues surfaced about the motivation behind Arnold’s betrayal, it was money that the Devil held beside Arnold’s head. Not having Arnold himself to prosecute, nor his body to hang, Arnold’s countrymen vented their anger while consciously initiating a long, slow prosecution of a different kind: the damnation of the traitor’s fame.

Meanwhile, as we now know, General Washington had a plan to do better than burning Arnold in effigy.  His secret mission, he hoped, would bring the traitor back to face a trial…and, most certainly, the gallows.