Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War

4. The Treasonous Spy: Benedict Arnold

39 4 The Treasonous Spy Benedict Arnold Let his name sink as low in infamy as it was once high in our esteem. On this stage all good men will unite in execrating his memory. . . . Even villains less guilty than himself will not cease to upbraid him and, though they approve the treason, they will despise the traitor. Lieutenant Colonel Eleazar Oswald, private secretary to Benedict Arnold, in a letter to Colonel John Lamb, December 11, 1780. Quoted by Wallace, Traitorous Hero. After more than two centuries, Benedict Arnold remains the most vilified spy and traitor in American history. He remains the highest-ranking American official, military or civilian, to betray his country. And his treachery went far beyond espionage. Besides passing military secrets, he was on the verge of enabling the British to capture West Point, a key American military base, at a critical juncture in the Revolutionary War. Considering the strategic importance of West Point to colonial defense, his betrayal, in modern terms, would have been equivalent to an American general handing over the Strategic Air Command to the Soviets during the Cold War. If this was not sufficient cause for Arnold’s preeminence among American spies, after his escape and defection to the British, he took up arms The Revolutionary War 40 against the colonies and attacked his former compatriots in Virginia and in his home state of Connecticut. In September 1781 his troops slaughtered the defenders of Groton and pillaged and reduced the entire town of New London to rubble after crushing its outmatched defenders. Arnold’s treachery seems all the more paradoxical if one considers his battlefield achievements for the American Revolution. Before he betrayed his fellow revolutionaries, he had won some of the most significant victories of the war and, even in defeat, he wreaked havoc that foiled the British strategy to subdue the colonies. He was an accomplished seaman, and he was also unique among military commanders in American history in leading combat in major battles both on land and at sea. Off the battlefield, however, Arnold was a brooding, hot-tempered egotist with a soul in constant turmoil with itself and with others around him. These conflicting drives simmered below the surface for years until a convergence of unfortunate events—some beyond his control, others of his own making—lit the final spark that exploded into his treason. The conflicts that would haunt Arnold throughout his life already emerged in childhood. He was born in 1741 to the middle-class family of a sea captain turned merchant in Norwich, Connecticut. Scrappy and solidly built, young Benedict was a natural leader among his boyhood mates and was always ready to fight older boys to defend them. At the same time, these early glimmers of leadership masked a darker side that surfaced in sordid incidents of childhood cruelty, in which he tortured animals and threw broken glass on the dirt streets of Norwich to cut his playmates’ feet.1 The family moved to New Haven and sent Benedict off to the prestigious Canterbury School. His father, a heavy drinker, began to spend more time in local taverns than at work and went bankrupt. Without money for tuition, Benedict returned to New Haven to become a fourteen-year-old apothecary’s apprentice. His withdrawal from the school and his father’s bankruptcy were humiliating, the first reversal of fortune in the pendulum swing of successes and failures that would mark the rest of his life. Arnold found an outlet for these frustrations in the military. At the age of eighteen years, he enlisted to fight in the Seven Years’ War but deserted to visit his ailing mother. He joined another unit a year later and served a short hitch before returning to finish his apprenticeship. After the war, his parents died, and he returned to New Haven with his sister Hannah, where he expe- The Treasonous Spy • Benedict Arnold 41 rienced perhaps the calmest period in an otherwise tempestuous life. He prospered after opening his own apothecary shop and married the local sheriff’s daughter, Margaret Mansfield, who bore him three sons. Margaret died suddenly after the pair had been married only five years, and Arnold’s sister Hannah immediately filled in as surrogate mother to raise his sons. To overcome his grief, he immersed himself in buying ships and sailing them to trade in the West Indies. He finally gained the respectability...