A Treasury of Great American Scandals (21 page)

Benedict Arnold: Hero, Traitor, Whiner

 

 

 

It would have been better for Benedict Arnold had the bullet that tore through his leg at the Battle of Saratoga instead smacked him in the head. He would have died an American hero. But, alas, the Revolutionary War general survived and came to make his name synonymous with traitorous rat.

On the west bank of the Hudson River in upstate New York sits the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In 1780, it was a key American defensive position that Arnold plotted to surrender to the British—for cash. It was an epic betrayal by an American Judas, a scheme that, had it succeeded, could have so undermined the American quest for independence that today cricket might be the national pastime and “God Save the Queen” the national anthem. What made the man's treachery so astonishing—and what has made the name of Benedict Arnold one of the most puzzling in American history—was that he was not some insignificant mole out to make a few bucks at the expense of his countrymen, but a prominent general in the Continental Army. He was a man esteemed by George Washington himself and the apparent embodiment of American patriotism.

But true patriotism, historians have seen in hindsight, was impossible for Arnold. Despite his military successes and apparent ardor for his country, ultimately he struggled for no greater cause than Benedict Arnold. Nevertheless, his rise to military acclaim was impressive. He had been a New Haven merchant and trader (though not yet traitor) until Britain imposed on her colonies a series of repressive measures such as the Tea and Stamp Acts. Arnold, whose livelihood was at stake, joined the Continental forces immediately after the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War at Lexington. Commissioned a colonel, he proposed an assault on Britain's Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, in what is now upstate New York. Along with Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont, he took the fort and its desperately needed cannons in May 1775.

The following August, he presented himself to the new commander in chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, with a bold proposal to strike Quebec City, a major stronghold of British loyalists. The attack was repelled with staggering losses, but Arnold, wounded in the leg, doggedly maintained the siege with the few men left to him. Now a brigadier general, Arnold was charged with the task of blocking a British invasion of New England by way of Lake Champlain. With minimal resources, he assembled a fleet and successfully thwarted the enemy at the battle of Valcour Island in 1776.

The following year would mark Benedict Arnold's finest hour. The British intended to cut off New England from the rest of the colonies and try to crush the American revolt piecemeal. The plan culminated at the two battles of Saratoga in September and October 1777. Arnold fought fiercely, sustaining a devastating wound to the same leg that had been injured during the siege of Quebec City, and won a decisive victory for the new nation. It proved a turning point in the revolution, allowing Benjamin Franklin to forge a much-needed alliance with France and boosting the morale of the American forces with the very real possibility of ultimate triumph.

Impressive as his résumé may have been, the man himself was fraught with contradictions. Biographer Clare Brandt notes that “Arnold had astonishing physical valor but no moral courage; a rigid code of honor without a shred of inner integrity; superior intelligence with no understanding.” The battles he fought for America were a means of gaining the respect he craved, but his personal agenda would constantly interfere with the greater good of the fledgling nation.

Arnold had long had a special knack for making enemies. While planning the attack on Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, he managed to infuriate fellow officers by vehemently insisting that he command the operation even though he was a military neophyte who outranked the other officers only because of the haphazard organization of the military early in the war. Arnold's hunger for personal glory prevented him from taking a back seat, and no amount of cajoling from the other officers would make him waver. “By the time the meeting broke up,” Brandt writes, “the others would sooner have murdered Benedict Arnold than take orders from him.”

Of all the snits in which Arnold was perpetually engaged, his animosity toward the Continental Congress was the most chronic. During his military ascendancy, his exploits both heroic and petty were not lost on Congress, where he was viewed with both admiration and disdain. His accomplishments could not be ignored. Indeed, he was recognized as a vital part of the war effort, but many people saw him as a self-aggrandizing menace—“our evil genius,” as General William Maxwell dubbed him. Consequently, in what Arnold viewed as a deliberate slap in the face, he was passed over for promotion to major general in February 1777, only months after his success at Valcour Island. Doubling the insult, officers more junior were promoted.

“Congress have doubtless a right of promoting those [whom] . . . they esteemed more deserving,” he formally wrote General Washington, but “their promoting junior officers . . . I view as a very civil way of requesting my resignation as unqualified for the office I hold.” Only Washington's intercession made Congress reconsider, and Arnold got his promotion.

Then there was money—a passionate issue for Arnold with Congress and one that left him bitter. Like most other officers in the war, he often dug into personal assets to help feed and clothe his men and purchase supplies. Rarely could the Continental Congress, perpetually in dire financial straits, reimburse them. Without the authority to tax citizens, it had to rely on the goodwill of the people to pay for the war and, consequently, it was usually broke. Arnold's nagging requests for money were ignored. His resentment festered like the wound on his leg; he was disgusted with the country that so obviously failed to appreciate his service and personal sacrifice.

After Saratoga, Arnold was made military commander of Philadelphia, the nation's new capital after a British evacuation. It was an easy post for the disabled general, and although the revolution continued, he was no longer preoccupied with maintaining the appearance of supreme patriot. His sole concern was to use his position to his best economic advantage. He developed a lavish life style and, having fallen in love with a socially ambitious eighteen-year-old, Peggy Shippen, he needed cash. He found the solution in a series of enterprises that, if not outright illegal, were highly questionable. He made little effort to hide any of them.

Arnold married Shippen, twenty years his junior, in April 1779, but a cloud loomed over the festivities. Earlier the same month, Congress had ordered him court-martialed. His questionable financial schemes, it turned out, had not gone unnoticed. Among the charges was that he had issued an illegal permit to unload a captured enemy ship,
The Charming Nancy,
requisitioned twelve army wagons to transport its cargo to Philadelphia for sale, and received a large cut of the proceeds. When the allegations were aired, he immediately fired off a letter to George Washington: “If your Excellency thinks me criminal, for heaven's sake let me be immediately tried and, if found guilty, executed. I want no favor; I ask only justice.”

Within days of writing the letter, however, the audacious Arnold opened correspondence with the British and offered them his services. The court-martial found Arnold guilty on two of eight charges, and Congress demanded that Washington reprimand him. Washington obliged, writing that issuing a permit for
The Charming Nancy
was “peculiarly reprehensible” and using army wagons “imprudent and improper.” Meanwhile, Arnold's new relationship with the British was well under way.

Now considering Washington a personal enemy, Arnold was only too happy to get back at him by giving the British what they really wanted—the fort at West Point, Washington's pride and joy. But he needed a plan. Still maintaining the appearance of loyalty, Arnold lobbied Washington relentlessly for command of West Point. The unsuspecting commander in chief gave it to him. Complete ruin of the American cause was now imminent.

By 1780, only an infusion of French money, ships, and men gave the revolution its pulse. King Louis XVI, however, was beginning to fear that the American Revolution was doomed and was looking for any excuse to withdraw. Loss of West Point would have been a lethal blow to the Americans and would have provided Louis with the perfect excuse. A French withdrawal, ironically enough, would have been precipitated by the same man whose victory at Saratoga had convinced France to join the uprising in the first place.

But the plot failed. Arnold and his contact, Major John André, an adjutant to Sir Henry Clinton, the commander in chief of the British forces, met on the banks of the Hudson at midnight, September 22, 1780. Arnold handed over plans for West Point's defenses. But André, carrying the papers to the base of British operations in New York City, was captured by three militiamen. Arnold, who was awaiting a visit from Washington, learned of André's capture the next morning and fled in panic. He raced to the banks of the Hudson and ordered a boat to row him to a waiting British ship, the
Vulture,
which carried him to safety in New York. “One vulture . . . receiving another,” as Thomas Paine later described it.

Word of Arnold's treachery spread rapidly through the states, inciting spite and derision. “Whom can we trust now?” Washington asked upon his arrival at West Point. “Judas sold only one man,” Benjamin Franklin remarked, “Arnold three million. Judas got for his one man thirty pieces of silver, Arnold not a halfpenny a head. A miserable bargain!”

Arnold served the rest of the war as a brigadier general for the British. General Clinton put him in charge of a marauding expedition in Virginia, where Governor Thomas Jefferson offered a reward of 5,000 pounds for his capture. He forever sealed his infamy when he later led a raid against his former neighbors in Connecticut, burning to the ground the town of New London.

After the war ended in 1783, Benedict Arnold sailed with his family to England and spent the remaining twenty years of his life in bitter exile. A master of self-delusion, Arnold convinced himself—and pronounced publicly—that his switch of allegiance was noble and justified. Offering his services to Britain in the Napoleonic Wars, he was ignored and scorned as a traitor by his adopted country no less than by the country he betrayed. The British even gave him a lower military rank than had the Americans. Destitute, he did what would be expected of him: He whined and badgered King George III and his government for compensation for valiant services rendered. Defeated and ignored, Arnold died in 1801.

Aaron Burr: “ Embryo - Caesar”

 

 

 

Under the American system of justice, in which a man is deemed innocent until proven guilty, Aaron Burr was no traitor. A jury of his peers acquitted him of that high crime in 1807. But by the same standard, he was no killer either—even if he did shoot Alexander Hamilton clean through the gut.
²⁰
Because he was never tried for the murder, he was legally innocent of it.

Yes, the law was doubly kind to the nation's second vice president, and, except for a brief stint in debtor's prison, he remained a free man. History, on the other hand, has not been quite so benevolent, and today Burr would stand as a pillar of the American Hall of Shame. The slaying of Hamilton alone would probably not be enough to secure his place here—after all, lots of esteemed Americans lived and died by the Code Duello
²
—but his grandiose scheming afterward made him a shoe-in.

Aaron Burr had a crafty brilliance about him that he used to his best advantage. No one was ever quite sure what he was up to—only that, whatever it was, in all probability it was self-serving. “I found he possessed a talent of making an impression of an opinion upon the subject, on the person with whom he conversed, without explicitly stating or necessarily giving his sentiments thereon,” noted Senator William Plumber of New Hampshire. “In everything he said or did, he had a design—and perhaps no man's language was ever so apparently explicit, and at the same time so covert and indefinite.”

Because Burr was so adept at masking his intentions and shading the truth, the full extent of his mischief in the years following Hamilton's death—when the former veep was a reviled fugitive seeking his fortune in the American West—remains a mystery to this day. Thomas Jefferson, among others, believed he was engaged in treason, seeking to establish for himself a vast western empire based on the conquest of Mexico and the forced separation of the trans-Appalachian states from the Union. The president called this alleged enterprise, in which Burr reportedly intended to declare himself Emperor Aaron I, “the most extraordinary since the days of Don Quixot[e].” And though Jefferson was sharply criticized for publicly proclaiming Burr's guilt “beyond question” before he was ever tried, the president certainly had plenty of reason to believe his former vice president was up to no good.

Before leaving office, Burr confided his plans to Anthony Merry, Great Britain's minister to the United States, hoping for British financial and naval assistance in his schemes. In a letter dated August 6, 1804, Merry dutifully reported this delicious bit of intelligence to his boss back home: “I have just received an offer from Mr. Burr, the actual Vice President of the United States (which situation he is about to resign), to lend his assistance to his Majesty's Government in any Manner in which they may think fit to employ him, particularly in an endeavoring to effect a Separation of the Western Part of the United States from that which lies between the Atlantick and the [Appalachian] Mountains, in its whole extent. . . .”

Some historians believe that Burr's secret dealings with Britain, and later Spain, were a clever ruse—“a consummate piece of imposture,” in the words of one—designed not to aid in the dismemberment of the United States, as he told the ministers of those nations, but to raise funds for an invasion of Mexico. And though such an unauthorized attack on a foreign power certainly would have been illegal, Burr defenders note, it would not be treasonous.