Benedict Arnold as Hero

Since that infamous day September 25, 1780, when Benedict Arnold fled down the Hudson to avoid capture for his negotiations with Major John Andre, a popular cry erupted throughout America: “Treason! Treason! Treason! Black as Hell.” General Nathanael Greene, once Arnold’s admiring friend, denounced “the villainy and meanness of that man” as “a reproach to human nature” (p. 8). On September 30 patriotic citizens paraded a float through the streets of Philadelphia depicting the devil offering a purse of gold to a two-faced effigy of Benedict Arnold. At the same time Satan stood ready with pitchfork in hand to drive Arnold to hell as his reward for the crimes he had committed against his innocent and trusting countrymen. On October 4, 1780, by order of the Continental Congress the Board of War removed Arnold’s name from the army’s sacred roll. Newspapers throughout the new nation portrayed him as the very personification of deception, hypocrisy, avarice, and treason.

In the years following the Revolution those individuals who would admit to having known Arnold, practiced selective hindsight in their recollections of his youth. Just as the fabrications of Parson Weems established the steadfast integrity of young George Washington, so, too, did the stories of these individuals contribute to the image of Benedict Arnold as a thoroughly mean-spirited, depraved youngster. According to such recollections, the young Arnold took baby birds out of their nests and maimed them in sight of older ones simply for the pleasure of hearing their cries of distress. Worse, he spread broken glass in paths trod by children in bare feet. Forced to admit to his physical prowess, those familiar with Arnold as a child linked his natural abilities to a reckless egotism; he was a self-centered individual who unfailingly used his natural talents in perverted ways. By any standard of judgement, then, Benedict Arnold as a youth was simply an immature version of the malevolent adult who betrayed his country for personal gain.

Not long after Arnold’s treason became known, officers who had served with him began to question his war record. A colonel stationed near West Point contended that Arnold’s “bravery at Saratoga has in the eyes of his country and army, covered a multitude of his villainous actions.” He firmly believed that Arnold’s occasional acts of bravery had clouded the eyes of patriots to his inherently flawed character. He could see quite clearly that Arnold had “practiced for a long time the most dirty, infamous measures to acquire gain” (p. 7). And so it went; a great many Revolutionaries saw only self-aggrandizement where prior to September 25, 1780 they had lauded heroism.

Firmly convinced that such a whiggish view of Arnold’s career has seriously distorted our understanding of the man’s life and contributions to the Revolutionary cause, James Kirby Martin intends to set the story straight. Thus, in his words Benedict Arnold: Revolutionary Hero “is the actual story of Benedict Arnold, stripped of its heavily encrusted myths” (p. 10).

It is essential at the outset to understand clearly what Martin’s book is and what it is not. It is not a full biography. For reasons best known only to himself, Martin deals only with the first two-thirds of Arnold’s life. Out of 432 pages of text, he devotes barely two pages to the man’s career (a span of some twenty years) after he flees from West Point. He spends only 55 of the preceding 430 pages on Arnold’s life before the onset of the Revolution. Consequently, Benedict Arnold: Revolutionary Hero is just that: a study of the heroic years of Benedict Arnold’s service during the Revolution. For his part, Martin assumes that “by the end of the Saratoga campaign of 1777, which for Arnold was the defining moment of his existence, the reasons that he would turn against the American cause were becoming obvious.” Consequently, by his own...