Benedict Arnold
Patriot and Traitor

Willard Sterne Randall

[Excerpts from the biography of Arnold, published by William Morrow and Company, 1990. Whether, as is the general case, one considers Arnold a traitor to the cause of the rebellion against Great Britain, or as a man who acted to prevent the destruction of valued traditions and meritocracy by radical intolerence, biographer Willard Randall provides a compelling context for Arnold's decision]

PAGE 401-403

On May 11, 1778, … Benedict Arnold, ignoring George Washington's advice, had returned to active duty, reporting to Washington's headquarters at Valley Forge, where the survivors of a winter of terrible suffering were preparing to pursue the retreating British. Within a day's march of the indolent British, Washington and his dwindling army had undergone five months in sharp contrast to the relatively luxurious conditions enjoyed by Howe's army. The sufferings at Valley Forge had tempered Washington's winter soldiers into even tougher fighters but had deepened the rift at headquarters, leaving a legacy of bitterness that would finally engulf Benedict Arnold during the next year.

When the army arrived on the wind-whipped hillsides of Valley Forge in mid-December, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Dearborn, who had been with Arnold at Quebec and Saratoga, noted that his men had for three days been "without flour or bread and are living on a high uncultivated hill in huts and tents, lying on the cold ground." Washington had ordered his army to build log cabins and fireplaces from the thick woods surrounding them. It took a month to get the soldiers under a city of roofs and walls made without nails. …Half the army had neither clothing nor blankets and had to stay in smoke-filled, drafty, crowded cabins day and night. Few men were available for duty, as Washington discovered when he had to abandon his plans for an attack on the lethargic British. The clothing shortage was only a prelude to the slow starvation that took the lives of 2,500 men -- one in four in his army -- over the next few months. Washington could see that his men were near mutiny-or desertion. From the huts of one unit after another he heard the chant "No meat, no meat."

Three times that winter, Washington's food supplies dried up completely as the states, each required by the new Articles of Confederation to feed and provision their own troops, failed to provide any food whatsoever even as farmers near Valley Forge refused to accept Continental money, preferring to sell their goods for hard cash to the British. New York's quota of grain was being sold at high prices to New England civilians and at higher prices to British troops inside New York City. By the third week of February, the last food at Valley Forge had been consumed: there were no rations at all for the men. Desperate, Washington sent his fittest troops on foraging raids, seizing grain from nearby farms and livestock from as far away as Salem, New Jersey, where they took eight hundred cattle from Loyalist farmers. For the moment, the army was saved. In April, when the shad migrated up the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, Washington sent his cavalry into the river to stir up the fish while his men caught thousands of them. The celebration over a feast of fish was surpassed only by joy at the news, on May 6, that France had joined the Americans in making war against England.

It was the first good news Washington had received in a winter of contention among his officers and their political allies in Congress that had almost led to Washington's overthrow as commander in chief in a shadowy affair known as the Conway Cabal. …Despite Washington's stubborn stalemate at Germantown, his brave stand on the Delaware, and his successful bottling-up of Howe inside Philadelphia, there were more and more politicians and not a few generals who believed that the Virginian was not up to snuff as commander in chief.

By September 1777, they had begun to organize opposition to Washington. John Adams objected not only to Washington's competence but also to his popularity: "The people of America have been guilty of idolatry in making a man their God," he said in a letter that was rewritten as part of an anonymous circular, 'Thoughts of a Freeman," that was circulated among prospective adherents to the anti-Washington faction. One copy, sent by the influential Philadelphia revolutionary Dr. Benjamin Rush to Patrick Henry in Virginia, so alarmed Henry that he sent it directly to Washington. By this time, Washington was beginning to hear who else was involved: Sam Adams, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, and Thomas Mifflin. Mifflin, who had been Washington's original aide-de-camp in 1775 and had been promoted to quartermaster general of the army, had fallen out with Washington when the commander in chief had refused to put all of his troops into a do-or-die defense of Mifflin's native Philadelphia, deciding instead to reinforce the Northern Army and try to ward off Howe outside Philadelphia. It was Mifflin who had proved such a disastrous supply officer at Valley Forge, rarely showing himself in camp and spending much of his time plotting against Washington. Resigning from Washington's staff in November, he had become a member of the new Board of War, supporting its president, Gates, and working quietly behind the scenes with other anti-Washington generals, including Wilkinson…


PAGE 406-409

"To the great joy of the army," Benedict Arnold arrived at headquarters on May 21, 1778, in his carriage from New Haven. In the camp, many of the men who had suffered with Arnold during an even worse winter at Quebec had come out onto the company streets to cheer for him. It took four men to help him into the Dewees mansion for an emotional reunion with Washington, who had not seen Arnold since he had been shot at Saratoga. Arnold's leg had not healed entirely: he still was unable to stand without a crutch. He propped his leg on a stool as he chatted with Washington, who had urged him not to risk coming back yet. But Arnold wanted some role in the new campaign, even if it was obvious that he was not ready to sit on a horse. ...Arnold and Washington sat down to talk: both Arnold and Lincoln, also still recuperating, were to be kept in reserve.

But Washington immediately brought up the need for a new command, a military governorship of Philadelphia, eastern Pennsylvania, and southern New Jersey. Philadelphia was crammed with goods, much of which the army needed. The British, according to Washington's spies, would only be able to transport a small fraction of what was crowded into stores and warehouses. There was also a large neutral population of Quakers, and there were many revolutionaries in Pennsylvania, just itching for revenge against anyone they perceived as a Tory collaborator with the British. Washington also wanted to soothe thousands of artisans he needed to go on with war work, not flee the city. Furthermore, at least four times, Washington had had to shift his main army to protect the capital whenever the British wished to feint toward the city: a strong military command headed by a respected officer who could quickly raise militia, as Arnold had often demonstrated he could, would not only protect the capital but give Washington's main field army much greater flexibility, allowing it to press the British without having to worry about another attack from the rear. With French entry into the war, the American capital could not be packing lip and moving constantly, and a well-known and respected general was needed to deal as an equal with high-ranking officers. Would Arnold be willing to take the governorship until he was ready to fight? Arnold cheerfully accepted the high-level rear-area assignment.

It was probably the worst mistake either man ever made, placing Arnold in the middle of a murderous four-way political crossfire: a struggle for control of the nation's capital involving the radical new revolutionary government of Pennsylvania, the anti-Washington, anti-Schuyler, and anti-army factions in the Continental Congress, and the army, which was to be represented only by Major General Benedict Arnold. On May 30, Arnold took an oath of allegiance. It may have seemed a mere formality at the time, and being forced by Congress to take such an oath must have annoyed Arnold. He waited until the last possible day stipulated by Congress, and then, on May 30, his friend Henry Knox administered the oath at the Valley Forge Artillery Park, where Arnold now had his headquarters as the military governor of the region.

By the end of May, as it became obvious that the British pullout from Philadelphia was imminent, Arnold was busy making plans for a peaceful takeover of the city under martial law. First, he appointed his staff. Throughout his convalescence at Albany and in Connecticut, Major David Solebury Franks had been by his side. Franks was the sort of dashing, quick-witted young man Arnold liked and trusted. Because he was the son of a rich Jewish merchant who was a leading supporter of Quebec Governor Carleton, he was under suspicion by revolutionaries who assumed that many of the wealthy were fence-straddling with a family member on whichever side won the war. Many prominent families, including the Franklins and the Livingstons, were eventually laid open to this charge.

Franks had taken great risks for the Revolution, had lent the Americans in Canada whatever money he had, had broken with his father when he left Montreal as an unpaid volunteer on Arnold's staff. When Arnold was appointed military governor, he was able to reward Franks with a major's commission in the Continental Line as his aide-de-camp. …As his other aide, Arnold restored to his mess another young patrician who had a knack for arousing criticism: Matthew Clarkson had been the first Schuyler partisan to be forced out by Gates at Saratoga and he was now rewarded for his loyalty to Arnold by being appointed to his personal staff as major aide-de-camp. Arnold's appointments connected him to Schuyler and the New York "gang" and to David Franks of Philadelphia, one of America's wealthiest and most controversial merchants, who had been acting as commissary to prisoners on both sides and whose daughter, the witty and acerbically outspoken Loyalist Rebecca Franks, was riot only her father's greatest political liability but Peggy Shippen's closest friend.

On June 18, 1778, only three weeks after Arnold's appointment as governor, the last British soldiers sailed across the Delaware River toward New York. Fifteen minutes later, Arnold's advance guard of light infantry under Captain Allen McLane rode into the city with Major Franks, who carried Arnold's orders, proclamations to be printed in the newspapers, and authority to find him suitable headquarters. The high-spirited Franks had no trouble choosing as Arnold's headquarters the Penn mansion at Sixth and Market streets, until a few hours before, the headquarters of General Howe. The next day, June 19, at the last possible moment, Washington's orders to occupy the capital reached Arnold, and he rode into the city in his coach-and-four with his livened servants and aides and orderlies at the rear of a parade of Massachusetts Continentals assigned to his garrison contingent led by Philadelphia light horse. Thousands of pro-American Philadelphians lined his route, cheering their liberators. Arnold could see that they were pinched and hungry-looking after the British occupation. What he also saw was a scene of devastation: the city had been turned into a British armed camp, whole neighborhoods of houses on the north, west, and southern fringes burned or dismantled for firewood, virtually every wood fence in the city consumed, gravestones overturned as Presbyterian cemeteries were used to exercise horses, churches stripped of their pews and galleries and pulpits to warm the hearths of barracks and billets. The miles of abatis had been flooded, ringing the city with an immense moat. Windows in some public buildings had been left broken for eight months since the British men-of-war Augusta and Merlin had exploded. Building interiors had been ruined by moisture and littered with trash, exteriors stripped of their shutters to provide fire-wood. All of the furnishings of Independence Hall had been burned to warm five companies of British artillery quartered on the first floor; windows and shutters upstairs had been nailed shut to keep wounded Americans from escaping, and other prisoners had been locked in the basement. The city's neat squares and commons had been churned to mud and littered with the debris of a departing army. Near Independence Hall, at present-day Washington Square, was the city's potter's field: returning revolutionaries found it cut with long, freshly filled trenches, the mass graves of some two thousand American prisoners of war who had died in the city that winter. The streets were jammed with broken-down conveyances and the carcasses of horses worked to death in their traces. Only the square-mile enclave of handsome brick townhouses of the city's wealthy Quakers and Loyalists, their shops, meetinghouses and market sheds, appeared conspicuously unscathed by British depredations. Inside his father's mansion on South Fourth Street, Judge Shippen watched nervously with his daughters as the American cavalrymen went by, going grimly to their assigned duty stations.

For two weeks, Congress, sitting at Lancaster, had been debating what to do about Philadelphia. When Congress learned from spies inside British lines that some Philadelphia Tory merchants were trying to hide their goods, then sell them at far higher prices once Continental paper money replaced British gold and silver, Congress had passed a resolution ordering the army to suspend all business transactions in the city once it was reoccupied. An embargo on all trade was to be enforced by General Arnold. Congress asked Washington to prevent plundering or the "removal, transfer or sale of any goods, wares of merchandise in possession of the inhabitants" until a joint committee of Congress and the supreme executive council of Pennsylvania could "determine whether any or what part thereof may belong to the king of Great Britain or to any of his subjects." Public stores belonging to the enemy would be seized. Washington empowered Arnold to "adopt such measures as shall appear to you most effectual, and at the same time, least offensive, for answering the views of Congress."

At the same time, by a resolution passed on June 4, Congress, had forbidden any molestation or pillaging of the inhabitants: it would be Arnold's most difficult duty to see that this order was carried out. There was sharp disagreement over how harsh the treatment of Loyalist Philadelphians should be. Congressman Gouverneur Morris of New York thought all citizens should be confined to their houses and forced to pay a collective tribute of £100,000 to the American cause, individual amounts to be determined by wealth and degree of cooperation with the British; Congressman Joseph Reed of Pennsylvania thought that about five hundred Tories of all ranks and stations should be charged with treason and hanged and their property seized by the state. Congress, primarily concerned with any supplies that might have been left by the British and with any goods that belonged to people who could be regarded as British subjects, took milder action, …


PAGE 418

General Arnold's orders from Washington, a rewritten version of a congressional resolution, brought him into immediate contention with radical Pennsylvania revolutionary leaders long before they objected to his inside trading on his new position as military governor by making Arnold the independent military commander of the nation's capital and its environs. "You will take every prudent step in your power," Washington had instructed Arnold on June 19, "to preserve tranquility and order in the city and give security to individuals of every class and description; restraining, as far as possible, till the restoration of civil government, every species of persecution, insult or abuse, either from the soldiery to the inhabitants or among each other." Arnold took his orders at face value: to him "every class and description" included not only neutral Quakers but staunch Loyalists who had stayed behind when the British left. There was no looting by the returning American army or by angry revolutionaries, who had every reason to hate the avowed Loyalists and neutrals who had helped the British and probably prospered from their presence while fully half the American army died a day's ride away. Governor Arnold refused to make any distinctions: all Philadelphians were entitled to his protection if not his friendship, even if it meant that Patriots' anger and frustrated demands for vengeance were soon redirected toward him.


PAGE 425-431

The combination of the most radical Whig state constitution and the largest proportion of Loyalists, neutral Quakers, and pacifists led to persecution in Pennsylvania in the dying months of 1778. There were many Pennsylvanians who were not warlike and, like Judge Shippen, would have preferred to remain neutral, but the British invasion left them exposed to charges of collaboration with the enemy by radical Whigs who had displaced more moderate revolutionaries. The Loyalists were not all periwigged Society Hill merchants. There were Loyalist settlers in the northeastern Wyoming Valley who had been swamped by settlers from western Connecticut and who saw the Revolution as a land grab by the likes of Ethan Allen. There were white settlers all along a five-hundred-mile frontier who chose not to fight Indians loyal to the British crown. There were devout Anglicans, Methodists, Quakers, Mennonites, Schwenkfelders, Moravians, Dunkards, and a host of other sects who either upheld the English crown because it was the settled and established order or because they abhorred violence.

In every feud-ridden neighborhood in every sizable town and county there were two parties: inevitably, one chose the Whig side, one the Tory. Some were victims of religious persecution, like German Dunkard preacher Christopher Sauer, a pacifist whose every scrap of property was confiscated because he did not support the Whigs and who later became a British spy; and his rival, politically innocent German Lutheran clergyman Henry Muhlenberg, who led his congregation off to war and became a patriot general. There were pacifists like Philadelphia merchant Samuel Shoemaker, who served as a magistrate before and during the British occupation but were put on a list of 498 prominent Pennsylvanians accused of treason and who chose to flee to New York City. There were pacifist Quaker schoolmasters like historian Robert Proud, who was accused of treason but stayed on in the city. There were opportunists like merchant Oswald Eve, who thought the British had the money to win and would make him rich: they failed and he fled.

So widespread was Loyalist resistance to the Revolution in Pennsylvania that the radical Whig revolutionaries had to resort increasingly to force when persuasion failed. The Whig radicals by the summer of 1778 would no longer tolerate neutrality or dissent. Since 1776, the Pennsylvania government and the laws it had passed had grown more radical and more repressively anti-Loyalist. First, the Revolution had shattered the Penn proprietary party which had ruled the province since William Penn had founded it in 1682. Penn's heirs, John and Richard Penn, and their top appointed officials had long tried, by manipulating voting districts and proroguing and dissolving the legislative assembly at will, to thwart growing numbers of frontiersmen and radical Presbyterians clamoring for a voice in government all through the long imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. Until the mid-1760s, Philadelphia Quakers controlled most of the power; then, the Anglicans won many converts from their ranks and accrued power and influence. Benjamin Franklin, the political mastermind of Pennsylvania politics, had long led the Quaker party and opposed the Penns, who were growing fabulously wealthy on the sale and rental of their lands.

When the Revolution came, Franklin was the only leader of the party which had so long opposed the Penns to join the revolutionary leadership. He helped to drive the Penns from power and set up the most radical state government with the aid of propaganda writer Thomas Paine. The new government had no governor and no assembly; it was ruled by a revolutionary committee directly elected by the people. Any powers not specifically granted to this supreme executive council were carried out by ad hoc revolutionary committees or clubs, which became increasingly radical. For its power, the council depended on laws, newspaper propaganda, and the support of the clubs, often in the streets. As the Pennsylvania revolution became more radical, revolutionary leaders had to be imported from outside the state to run its government; no Pennsylvanians of wealth or education would serve with the radicals. The vice president of the council was Joseph Reed, a Trenton, New Jersey, lawyer and bankrupt merchant; the leading radical propagandist was Tom Paine, a former corsetmaker from England. The attorney general was Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant, also a New Jersey lawyer. The chief justice was Thomas McKean, from Delaware. Reed himself could find not one able lawyer in the state whom he considered radical enough to work for the Whig side. He wrote to Connecticut to former admiralty judge Jared Ingersoll, who had gone back home to New Haven to escape the war, that it was the perfect moment for his son, Jared, Jr., to come back to Philadelphia to begin a flourishing career on the radical side. "Our lawyers here of any considerable abilities are all, as I may say, in one interest, and that not the popular one." Reed was offered the state's presidency in the summer of 1778, but did not agree until the council hired him as special counsel to prosecute suspected Loyalists, for a handsome £2,000 a year plus his expenses and a confiscated Loyalist mansion, horses, and carriage.

Among the lawyers in the "interest" opposing Reed and the radicals were two signers of the Declaration of Independence, John Ross of Lancaster and James Wilson of Philadelphia, who successfully defended hundreds of accused Loyalists prosecuted by Reed in the state courts. Two other signers, Dr. Benjamin Rush and John Dickinson, also signed petitions pleading for clemency for Tories condemned to death.

As late as 1777, the radical Whigs had such a tenuous grip on power in Pennsylvania that they had had to decree that there could be no treason against the state before passage of the new state constitution of February 11, 1777. Justice McKean ruled that there had been an interregnum from the end of proprietary government until the formal creatin of the new state on that date. For the better part of one year, the choice of sides was legal. Since there had been no laws in force and no protection afforded for property, there could be no allegiance and therefore no treason. But after the British invasion of October 1777, the council cracked down, appointing commissioners to confiscate and sell Loyalist property and dispensing with the right to a fair trial for accused Loyalists. The next tightening of anti-Loyalist laws came in March 1778, while the British still held Philadelphia. Confiscation laws were stiffened and commissioners named thirteen prominent Loyalist exiles who had already fled the state, giving them thirty days to appear and surrender to the charge of treason or be attainted, all their property forfeited to the state and their inheritance rights sacrificed. If they refused to submit to a treason trial and ever were captured, they were to be hanged. The power to attaint of high treason was given not to a court of law but to the council. In each county, attainting agents were appointed by the council: they often profited from the sale of confiscated property to friends or revolutionary leaders. Their reports of loyalty or treason were based on hearsay from informers without even the legal nicety of a sworn statement. Between 1778 and 1781, some 487 Pennsylvanians and their families were attainted, 80 percent of them named during the British occupation. Twenty came to trial, one died within British lines, two died in American jails. Three were convicted and sentenced to death, one went insane. Two were hanged for treason. Of the 386 who did not surrender, only six fell into American hands. Five were pardoned. One, the first American ever legally executed without a trial, was hanged. In an attempt to keep their properties from confiscation, many couples were divided, the husbands fleeing with the British, the wives remaining in their homes in Pennsylvania. In June 1780, the council ordered them all expelled. When Loyalists were banished, their properties often passed into the hands of revolutionary leaders, who usually bought them at low prices at auction with depreciated currency. Joseph Reed moved into the house of former speaker of the assembly Joseph Galloway. Reed forced the eviction of Grace Galloway, an in-law of the Shippens, from the house despite the protection of General Arnold, who posted guards in her parlor. When the Pennsylvania council sent around militia Captain Peale and his soldiers to carry her out in her chair, Arnold made a point of sending around his housekeeper to help her pack and his coach-and-four to move her out with dignity, a gesture which infuriated Reed and his council colleagues. The Galloways' five-thousand-acre Bucks County manor, Trevose, went to young General Wilkinson, now in Philadelphia as secretary of the Board of War. In all, the confiscations netted the state £100,000 over an eighteen-year period.

It was the execution of two Quakers denounced by the council as Loyalists that drove Benedict Arnold into open opposition to the radical Whig purges in Philadelphia and led to the largest antirevolutionary protest during the war. John Roberts was a sixty-year-old miller from Lower Merion who was suspected of Tory leanings and had felt compelled to leave behind his family and flee into Philadelphia when the British took over. There he supported himself by selling provisions to the British and raised a cavalry troop, threatening to lead it on a raid to free the Quakers in captivity in Virginia. He also served as a guide on British foraging raids into the countryside. When the British left, General Howe privately warned Roberts to go with the British to avoid reprisals, but Roberts, who also had helped many American prisoners in British hands, followed Howe's public advice to make peace with the Americans. When the supreme executive council on May 8, 1778, issued a proclamation requiring a long list of accused Loyalists to surrender themselves under pain of being attainted of high treason, Roberts left Philadelphia and surrendered himself, subscribing an affirmation of allegiance to the United States and posting bail to stand trial. He was tried on a charge of "waging cruel war against this Commonwealth." Ten of twelve jurors voted for his acquittal and only agreed to a verdict of guilty if they could petition for a pardon. Their petition asserted that Roberts had acted "under the influence of fear when he took the imprudent step of leaving his family and joining the enemy." Although Chief Justice McKean ruled that Roberts had had thirty-five jury challenges, and had only exercised thirty-three of them, the two he failed to use did him in. Despite Roberts's frequent "acts of humanity, charity and benevolence" that had saved many American lives, despite the spectacle of his wife and ten children appealing on their knees before Congress for mercy and the signatures of more than one thousand civic, military, and religious leaders on a petition for clemency, Roberts and a Loyalist gatekeeper, Abram Carlisle, were ordered hanged, their reprieve denied by Reed, who called them "a crafty and designing set of men" and who demanded in the newspapers "a speedy execution for both animals."

The night before the execution, Benedict Arnold had demonstrated his sympathy for the city's Loyalists in Philadelphia by staging a public reception at City Tavern, personally inviting leading Quakers and Loyalists. Two days later, Reed began a long campaign against Arnold by writing to General Nathanael Greene, Washington's number-two general: "The Tories are unhumbled. ...Will you not think it extraordinary that General Arnold made a public entertainment ... of which not only common Tory ladies but the wives and daughters of persons proscribed by the State and now with the enemy at New York formed a very considerable number. ...You have undoubtedly heard into what line General Arnold has thrown himself. If things proceed in the same train much longer, I would advise every Continental officer to leave his uniform at the last stage and procure a scarlet coat as the only mode of ensuring respect."

Not all American generals agreed with Reed's assessment of Arnold's public neutrality. Philadelphia's own General Cadwalader, the man who had shot the caballing Conway in the mouth, wrote of Arnold, "Every man who has a liberal way of thinking highly approves his conduct. He has been civil to every gentleman who has taken the oath, intimate with none." Mrs. Robert Morris noted that "even our military gentlemen here are too liberal to make any distinctions between Whig and Tory ladies. If they make any, it's in favor of the latter. It originates at headquarters." …


PAGE 438-441

What Arnold apparently did not realize was that there was a revolution taking place within the Revolution, what we would call fundamentalist today, led by Scottish Presbyterians in Pennsylvania, in New York, and in the backcountry all the way south through the Carolinas, rejecting the Anglicized way of life of wealthy merchants and gentry in the coastal towns and tidewater settlements. In Philadelphia, it seems to have been triggered by the juxtaposition of the British occupation with its attendant opulence and waste within miles of the starving American army. The reform movement accelerated under Reed, Matlack, Tom Paine, and the council, publicized in a newspaper war. In an age where educated men and women bowed to the classics, Matlack signed himself "Tiberius Gracchus" after the Roman reformer who argued for land redistribution and republican virtues such as simplicity of dress and style. As the criticism of high-living Tories and Quakers mounted, it became a religious crusade, and Benedict Arnold became the symbol of an opulent and decadent old order as his carriage rattled grandly through a sea of people less well off, more plainly dressed. In this atmosphere of religious fundamentalism, Arnold's enemies were trying to paint him as the devil. Reed and Matlack found they had powerful allies: in Paris, Benjamin Franklin was furious when his daughter ordered fancy feathers for her hair and he admonished her to keep to her loom. From New Jersey, Governor Livingston warned his daughter to avoid the extravagance introduced by the British, spread by the Tories.

Benedict Arnold was a proud man who tried at first to shrug off what he perceived as the insolence of the lowly secretary of the Pennsylvania council: "No man has a higher sense of the rights of a citizen and freeman than myself," he wrote to Matlack privately, but when war made a citizen a soldier, "the former is entirely lost in the latter, and the respect due to a citizen is by no means to be paid to the soldier any further than his rank entitles him to it. Arnold pointed to his own painful experience as a subordinate to General Benjamin Lincoln "who was not known as a soldier until after I had been some time a brigadier." Matlack wrote back to threaten that Pennsylvania militia would no longer enlist if they could be so demeaned. To this, Arnold shot back that they certainly would enlist: "Self-preservation is the first principle of the human race; theirs will induce them to turn out and defend their property."

Next to the tyranny of a strong Congress, the Pennsylvania radicals feared most that generals such as Arnold really aimed at perpetuating themselves in power as an American military aristocracy replacing the old British elite. The Whigs resented any threat of subservience to a military order. Matlack fired back another missive at Arnold: his subordination under Lincoln had been brought about by "the essential interests of your country" as well as "a regard to your own fame" and he, too, would have refused to carry out orders motivated by "pride and insolence." An officer could send a man to his death but not for his barber. Matlack demanded that Arnold apologize; unless he did, Matlack would withdraw his son from the militia and publicize his reasons. Arnold, who hated politicians and was no match in a war of words with lawyers, refused to recant and fired off another salvo. If Matlack was trying to intimidate him, Matlack had "mistaken your object. …I am not to be intimidated by a newspaper." But Arnold said he hoped this would be the last word on the subject, since "disputes as to the rights of soldiers and citizens may be fatal to both." If Matlack and his son still required satisfaction, they should take the matter up with this aide, Major Franks. Arnold was preaching a hard new doctrine to ruggedly individualistic militiamen who resisted the mindless monotony of military discipline, the absolute insistence on discipline that prepared men for battle. Washington had faced this same problem with democracy in New England and had broken resistance with the whip, the court-martial. Arnold tried in vain by example and now with words: to him, it was a doctrine "evident from the necessity of military discipline the basis of which is implicit obedience, and however the feelings of a citizen may be hurt, he has this consolation, that it is a sacrifice he pays to the safety of his country" Arnold had hoped that his letters would pacify the radicals, showing them the mix of patriotism and professionalism required to make their republic safe. Instead, it outraged Matlack, who excoriated Arnold for defending Franks's highhanded conduct. Arnold tried again, thinking Matlack did not quite understand him: "It is needless to discuss a subject which will perhaps be determined more by the feelings than the reason of men." He was not swayed by Matlack's threats of publicity: "To vindicate the rights of citizens I became a soldier and bear the marks upon me. I hope your candor will acquit me of the inconsistency of invading what I have fought and bled to defend." He again refused to intervene in the dispute between Matlack and Franks by ordering Franks to apologize, and he himself certainly would not apologize.

No sooner did Joseph Reed become chief executive of Pennsylvania than the attack on Arnold became general. Reed had come to power after running simultaneously for three offices -- delegate to Congress, Pennsylvania assembly, and Pennsylvania council -- and by switching parties. Brought to power by moderate men, he deserted them to lead the radical attack on his old comrades, including Robert Morris and Silas Deane, and the army officer most closely aligned with them, Benedict Arnold. Reed's change of sides eliminated the moderate element in Pennsylvania, creating a left-wing party, the Radical Whigs, and a right-wing party, the Republicans, whose leaders all were attacked in print and by mobs in the city's streets in the next year. Reed broadened his campaign against Arnold by writing to Washington's headquarters in December that Arnold had become personally and profitably involved in the Active admiralty case.

After Reed resigned from Congress to take over in Pennsylvania, it was more difficult for him to attack his federalist foes in Congress. Instead, he concentrated his fire on the visible symbol of a strong central government, Military Governor Benedict Arnold. Reed and his radicals criticized Arnold for his friendships, for his extravagant style of living, even for attempting to stay out of the infighting between moderates and hard-liners. General Cadwalader wrote General Greene at Washington's headquarters that Arnold was becoming "unpopular among the men in power in Congress, and among those of this state in general." He considered the campaign against Arnold ill-founded and the charges circulating against him in the city "too absurd to deserve a serious answer."

When Reed learned of Arnold's private use of Pennsylvania's publicly hired wagons to haul the cargo of Charming Nancy from New Jersey into Philadelphia, and of his attempt to help Hannah Levy get a pass to go to New York City illegally and despite the Pennsylvania council's objections, he began his main assault. The council summoned Arnold and his adjutant, Major Clarkson, to testify before them, but Arnold replied in less than tactful terms that he and his staff were accountable only to Congress and their commander in chief. Reed immediately fired off a protest to Congress that Arnold had insulted Pennsylvania, treating its government with indignity," demanding that Arnold be removed from command in Pennsylvania "until the charges against him are examined." Although no charges had yet been enumerated, Congress appointed a special committee to investigate. Such a committee, Reed realized, was at cross-purposes with the Pennsylvania's council's attempt to assert its own authority. If Pennsylvania had to present evidence to a federal congress, it would be a tacit admission of a higher federal power. But if Reed backed down and did not offer any evidence, Arnold would be acquitted. While Arnold was delighted at Reed's quandary, the council decided to keep its initiative by offering Congress evidence only on the affair of the rented wagons. Reed, in charge of raising Pennsylvania's troops and levying Pennsylvania's share of tax revenues, now added a new threat: if Congress refused to oust Arnold, allowing him "to affront us without feeling any marks of your displeasure," Pennsylvania would think long and hard about cooperating with Congress in the future. …


PAGE 454-455

…By the spring of 1779, when Arnold put out his first feeler to see if the British would make use of his services, a chorus of Tories had joined in denouncing Arnold's enemies for their ungrateful treatment of Arnold.

The fiercely independent Arnold did not need the encouragement of Loyalists: he may have thought of changing sides as early as the seniority controversy two years earlier when he wrote to his then friend Horatio Gates in August 1777 that "no public or private injury or insult shall prevail on me to forsake the cause of my injured and oppressed country until I see peace and liberty restored or nobly die in the attempt." Yet the years of political infighting, even as the British held out the olive branch of reconciliation, had turned Arnold against many of the original revolutionaries. As the economy deteriorated and the revolutionaries became more radical, Arnold moved ever closer to sympathizing with conservative Americans who were swelling the ranks of Loyalists. Added to his natural affinity for men of industry and thrift who feared they would lose everything if radical revolutionaries were permitted to continue on their ruinous course, Arnold was flattered more and more by Loyalists and disaffected revolutionaries around him. In addition, he was itching for a chance to get even with the likes of Joseph Reed. By early 1779, there were reportedly fifty thousand Loyalists under arms or offering their services to the British --more than double the force Washington had at his disposal. Arnold would have his revenge by leading American Tories in a decisive civil war that would return America to peace with England. By 1778, British peace commissioners were offering to rectify all the American grievances of 1776, ignoring only the demand for independence.

More and more, conservative men that Arnold had come to respect were urging return of the colonies to their status quo ante bellum, before the age of tumults had begun in 1763, as the British now said they were willing to do. Persecuted and disenchanted by his old compatriots in revolutionary politics, Arnold opened up a secret correspondence with British military leaders inside New York City. That Arnold made such a fateful step that involved his wife in such grave risks and clandestine activities without consulting her is impossible to believe, especially given the intimate nature of their relationship. Indeed, there are indications that she urged him to give up the cause of the ungrateful Americans and serve with friends who respected him. As Arnold clearly understood by May 5, the time he wrote his letter to Washington, he could be executed if he was caught and convicted, hardly his wish now that he was blissfully married.

While corresponding with the enemy was a dangerous act of treason and could have meant hanging for everyone involved, communication with the British was a routine and almost trivial fact of wartime life in Philadelphia, as Peggy Arnold well knew. Indeed, since the British had retreated to New York City, Peggy Arnold's friends had stayed in touch with their old redcoat beaux behind enemy lines one hundred miles away. One route open for the Arnold treason correspondence was through Peggy's closest friends. …