America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (22 page)

Still, the war had been typically good for the shipping and trading business, and Captain Arnold thrived. The Arnolds were sufficiently well-off to send young Benedict to boarding school in nearby Canterbury. During summers, he was taken on trading trips, sailing to the Caribbean with his father. But when another Anglo-French peace was made in 1748, the inevitable postwar bust followed. Captain Arnold’s once-busy ships were idled in a colonial depression, and the captain took to drowning his miseries in rum. Several bad business ventures plunged the family into debt, and Captain Arnold became a very public drunk. The family’s woes turned more tragic when two of Benedict Arnold’s three younger sisters died in a 1753 yellow fever epidemic while he was away at boarding school.

Suffering from yellow fever as well as alcohol-induced dementia, Captain Arnold descended further into dissolution, financially and personally. The business collapsed completely when Benedict was thirteen, and he was forced to leave school. Through a family connection, he was apprenticed in the successful apothecary and general merchan-

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dise store in Norwich owned by his mother’s cousins, Dr. Daniel Lathrop and his brother Joshua. Just before his fourteenth birthday, with his father in debtor’s prison, Benedict Arnold was legally bound over as the Lathrops’ indentured servant until he reached the age of twenty-one.

Instead of enduring the harsh and often cruel world of most eighteenth-century indentured servants, Benedict Arnold entered a hal-cyon period in the Lathrop household. A shrewd businessman, Daniel Lathrop received a contract to supply British troops when yet another Anglo-French war broke out in 1754, following Washington’s defeat at Fort Necessity. The doctor was an expert horse breeder and taught Benedict the finer points of horseflesh. Lathrop’s wife, Jerusha, who had also lost all three of her children to yellow fever, was generous, intelligent, and well-read. She had practically accepted Benedict into her house as if he was her own son.

In 1757, during the French and Indian War, the teenage Arnold enlisted in the Connecticut militia. At the time, indentured servants could join the militia only if granted permission, and Dr. Lathrop— himself a militia veteran during the previous war with the French— agreed to let him go. The decision came after the devastating defeat inflicted on the British at Fort William Henry, when the exaggerated reports of the massacre of British soldiers by the native allies of the French sent shock waves of panic through New England. The alarm after this defeat was short-lived, the militia was disbanded, and a disappointed sixteen-year-old Benedict Arnold returned to Connecticut without seeing action. But he had gotten a taste for army life and began to chafe at the tedium of being an apothecary’s apprentice.

In the early spring of 1758, Arnold slipped away from Norwich and walked south to New York, enlisting in a Westchester County mili-

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tia company—this time without Dr. Lathrop’s permission. When his mother discovered what he had done, she arranged to have Benedict returned. Against his will, Arnold was brought back to the apothecary, embarrassed yet determined to make his way to the war. Again, he ran away to reenlist and was brought back, this time after Dr. Lathrop posted a reward for his return. On his third try, in 1759, Arnold finally joined the volunteers heading off to besiege Quebec and Montreal in the climactic battles of the French and Indian War.

Preparing another assault on Fort Carillon on Lake Champlain as a prelude for an invasion of Canada, Arnold’s company marched to Albany, New York. While in camp, Arnold learned that his mother was gravely ill, and he went absent without leave—not an uncommon occurrence among colonial militiamen, who often left the lines to return to their farms or tend to family business. He returned to Norwich and was safely hidden from authorities, even when an advertisement offering a reward for the now eighteen-year-old deserter was published in a New York newspaper. When his mother died in the summer of 1759, Arnold became the man of the house, responsible for his ailing, alco-holic, and destitute father and fifteen-year-old sister, Hannah. Once more, he was welcomed back by the obviously charitable and forgiving Lathrops, who helped Benedict with his mother’s funeral costs and then looked after Hannah when he returned to the army to finish his recruitment terms. The war was winding down, and Benedict Arnold had not seen action, but he had come to love the discipline of army life.

When the North American phase of the fighting ended in 1760, the Lathrops took him back into the apothecary shop.

By the time he was twenty, Benedict Arnold was a hard-driving assistant with ambitions to open his own shop. With his father again jailed for public drunkenness, Arnold must have been humbled at how | 181 \

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low the family’s status had tumbled. Clearly, he set his mind to revive his own fortunes and make his way in the world. To complete Benedict’s training in anticipation of opening another apothecary and general store, the Lathrops sent the young man to sea to learn the Caribbean trade. Eager to expand their businesses, they provided Benedict with cash to set up a shop after his father’s death. A year later, Daniel Lathrop gave Benedict the deed to the Arnold family house, which he had taken over. Arnold sailed to London to acquire goods for his new apothecary shop, general store, and bookshop, established in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1762. The home of Yale College, New Haven was a growing port that also served as Connecticut’s eastern capital.

Arnold sold books, including medical texts, and surgical supplies to the Yale students. The shop offered the usual complement of eighteenth-century herbs and medicines, along with aphrodisiacs, including an exotic concoction called Francis’ Female Elixir. For a prospering colony that was beginning to forsake its Puritan past for more continental fashions, he also stocked the latest in stylish items from London—cold creams and cosmetics, earrings, buckles, and buttons.

Advertising himself as “Dr. Arnold from London,” the ambitious young merchant aggressively sought to expand. After paying off the last debts on his father’s Norwich house, he sold it at a profit and moved his sister to New Haven to manage his shop. With the proceeds from the sale of the house, Arnold bought a sloop that he named the
Fortune,
and set up a lucrative trade with the West Indies. As biographer Willard Sterne Randall points out, “Although his business thrived, he yearned to go to sea. Not only was there more profit for the middleman-merchant than for the retail seller of imported goods, but Arnold loved the life on a ship. He wanted to . . . trade in the Caribbean and Canada, now that there was peace in America.”10 Arnold | 182 \

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added more ships and began to sail as captain, his flourishing enter-prise growing to include a specialty in horses, which he sold in Canada and the West Indies.

Arnold also gained a reputation for a hot temper and an unwilling-ness to back down. Once he caught a young Frenchman at home with his unchaperoned sister. Arnold chased the man from his house and fired a pistol at him. While on a trading voyage, he was insulted by a British ship captain. Already chafing at the dismissive attitudes of Englishmen toward Americans, Arnold challenged the man to a duel.

After a polite exchange of shots missed, Arnold threatened to kill the man. A few years later, the captain’s friends spread rumors that Arnold was involved with prostitutes and had syphilis. Those rumors reached all the way back to New Haven. Whether deliberate or accidental, deserved or not, Benedict Arnold had demonstrated a marked penchant for rubbing people the wrong way and creating enemies with long memories.

With the peace of 1763 another economic downturn hit New England hard, and in 1765 the Stamp Act further hurt American commerce.

Like many New Englanders, Arnold simply ignored the requirements of the stamp tax. In essence, he had joined the ranks of such illustrious and successful American smugglers as John Hancock and the Brown brothers of Newport, Rhode Island. Arnold had also been drawn into Freemasonry, like so many men of the Revolutionary generation, joining New Haven’s lodge in 1765. Aside from providing fraternity with like-minded men, membership in the Freemasons offered access to the upper reaches of New Haven’s growing society, including the high sheriff of New Haven County. He introduced Arnold to his daughter, Margaret “Peggy” Mansfield, and the two married in February 1767. Soon they had three sons—Benedict, Richard, and Henry.

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By 1767, the economic damage done by the taxes was threatening Arnold and other American merchants with ruin. Proud and ambitious, perhaps with a chip on his shoulder from seeing his father brought low, Arnold joined the growing ranks of Americans defying the Stamp Act. Emerging as a vocal political leader in New Haven, he began to write articles for the local press favoring American rights.

Enlisting in the Sons of Liberty, he quickly demonstrated his natural leadership as the secret society grew more provocative and violent.

Arnold’s fiery personality and his proclivity for making enemies, along with his dedication to the Sons of Liberty, all came together during a dispute over money with a man who had once sailed with him, Peter Boles. When Boles informed royal authorities that Arnold was a smuggler, Arnold and some of his crewmen beat the man for collaborating with the tax authorities. When Boles didn’t leave town as he was told, he was given forty lashes by the Sons of Liberty, then ridden out of town on a rail. After hearing news of the Boston Massacre in March 1770, Arnold wrote to a friend, “Good God! Are Americans all asleep and tamely giving up their glorious liberties, or are they all turned philosophers, that they don’t take immediate vengeance on such miscreants.”

When Connecticut dispatched a delegation to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774, Connecticut sent three official delegates—chief justice of the colony’s superior court, Eliphalet Dyer; merchant-magistrate Roger Sherman; and New Haven merchant Silas Deane. At Deane’s invitation, Arnold unofficially joined the group.

Taller than average, handsome, with sharp, distinctive features, a talented horseman and reputedly a crack shot, Arnold clearly made an impression on other men. As one modern biographer puts it, “Quick-witted and articulate, full of energy almost to restlessness, bursting | 184 \

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with confidence bordering on arrogance, Benedict Arnold was a force to be reckoned with.”11 In the first days after their arrival in Philadelphia, the Connecticut delegation and some of the other New Englanders including Samuel and John Adams, toured Philadelphia like country-cousins, taking in the sights of America’s largest, most prosperous, and most well-organized city. Among their stops was a hospital and asylum administered by Dr. William Shippen, a physician and member of one of Philadelphia’s leading families. William’s nephew Edward Shippen, a judge, frequently entertained the congressional delegates during the next few months. It was here that Arnold first encountered Edward Shippen’s youngest daughter, fourteen-year-old Peggy, by most accounts already a charming, precocious, and stunning beauty. Most assuredly he did not meet another recent arrival in Philadelphia, Second Lieutenant John André, a British army officer who had landed in Philadelphia in transit to his regiment in Quebec. The three would cross paths in the future.

Although there is no specific record of Arnold encountering George Washington in Philadelphia, the young merchant with military ambitions surely would have attempted to cross paths with one of America’s most famous men. Now a wealthy planter and prominent member of Virginia’s delegation, Washington had more in common than he might have realized with the Yankee merchant, ten years his junior. Both lost their fathers at a fairly young age, both were Freemasons, and each would have admired the other man’s considerable horsemanship. Although Arnold’s military service during the French and Indian War was scant, the pair might have shared a certain martial ardor as well. And perhaps they both would have recognized that each possessed that charismatic quality of leadership. Their paths, too, would cross again.

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When fighting did break out in 1775, Arnold was thirty-four, successful beyond his wildest ambitions, disciplined, and hard-driving.

He had already taken a leading role in the command of Connecticut’s militia and, after Lexington and Concord, had been elected captain by the men, who included some Yale students with more enthusiasm than experience. Some of the more cautious leaders in Connecticut wanted to wait and see which way the winds would blow as patriot militia began to stream toward Boston, and they refused to give Arnold powder and guns from the colonial magazine. In another display of his fiery disposition, Arnold threatened to break into the armory and take them. He was given the keys to the magazine. Then he and his spiffily attired militia band set off for Boston.

z

I n t h e w h i r lw i n d o f e v e n t s t h at followed the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775, Arnold had moved to reassert his command, especially as more of Ethan Allen’s men drifted away, apparently losing interest in the somewhat decrepit fort. He secured several of Major Skene’s boats, renaming two of them
Intrepid
and
Liberty.

Arming the boats with cannons and some swivel guns from the fort, Arnold sailed off to find the English sloop
George,
which he captured and renamed the
Enterprise.
With a handful of pilfered boats and captured artillery, Benedict Arnold had built what was essentially America’s first navy, and for the moment he held control of the crucial Lake Champlain waterway. From this position, Arnold envisioned a grander scheme. Believing that Canada was lightly defended and ripe for invasion, he wrote a detailed campaign plan and sent it off to Philadelphia, unaware that Ethan Allen had made a similar recommendation to Congress. Still trying to find its footing, uncertain if it wanted to fight | 186 \