me much pleasure to receive it, as it has been due three years and I want it very much.”22 But when the man replied with hostility, Arnold became insulting: “I assure you it is with the utmost indifference I observe all the unjust & False aspersions your Malice could Invent, both with regard to the Fortune’s Cargo & our affidavits, as a Consciouness of my uprightness and Fairness in regard to our Concerns will never suffer the opinion of you or any other Blockhead to give me any uneasiness.”23 Arnold was having money issues at the time, having gone nearly bankrupt a year earlier, but this was probably not the way to go about getting it back.
Benedict Arnold’s large house on Water Street in New Haven was later owned by lexicographer Noah Webster. Courtesy of the Eli Whitney Library, New Haven Museum.
Though he remained an active member of the Sons of Liberty, a year after the incident with Boles he tried to settle down into a respectable adulthood, marrying Margaret Mansfield, the daughter of one of his fellow Freemasons, New Haven County’s high sheriff. He and Margaret borrowed money and bought a large clapboard house with a carved doorway, a cupola, and carvings of birds and other flourishes above the windows. In the yard was a barn with an attached store where Arnold sold his goods, a stable for a dozen horses, a coach house, and an acre and a half of land that included a hundred fruit trees.24 In their sky-blue parlor they held dances and parties for the elite of the city and may have held Freemason meetings there as well.
Margaret bore him three sons: Richard, Henry, and, of course, another Benedict. The “loving husband” wrote often to his wife, asking about “our dear boys” and telling her not to neglect their education, that “it is of infinite concern what habits and principles they imbibe when young.”25 But politics kept intruding into their intermittently happy home. In the aftermath of the so-called Boston massacre in 1770, Arnold wrote furiously, “I was very much shocked the other day on hearing the accounts of the most wanton, cruel, and inhuman murders committed in Boston by the soldiers. Good God, are the Americans all asleep and tamely yielding up their liberties, or, are they all turned philosophers, that they don’t take immediate vengeance on such miscreants?”26
Though his first home in eastern Connecticut was now also a center of seditious activity, Arnold could hardly have picked a better city to find radical politics, full of Enlightenment hallmarks like newspapers, coffeehouses, and an educated population. The largest city in the state, New Haven had boasted its first newspaper, the Connecticut Gazette, though it folded a few years after Arnold moved there. By then a number of other newspapers had sprung up, and folded, throughout the state, with the Green family starting most of them. Thomas Green started the Connecticut Courant in Hartford in 1764 and the Connecticut Journal three years later in New Haven.27 But it was the presence of the state’s only college that made New Haven such a hotbed of Enlightenment ideas.
The president of Yale College, Napthali Daggett, had been one of the first to attack the Stamp Act openly, in pages of the Connecticut Gazette. Daggett had, like Arnold, received “grammar instruction” from Dr. Cogswell of Canterbury, and now he trained many of the students who would go on to become ardent patriots during the Revolution.28 The school was the largest of the nine colleges in the colonies in the 1770s, with approximately two hundred students.29 It was located on the west side of the New Haven green, and in those days consisted of two buildings, Connecticut Hall and Yale College. Connecticut Hall was brick, modeled after Massachusetts Hall at Harvard, with large sleeping chambers that contained small study cells within them. Yale College was a long wooden building with six chimneys along the roof line, originally colored light blue.30 Boys in felted hats and camblet gowns packed like ship cargo into uncomfortable rooms, studying logic, mathematics, languages, physics, oratory, and rhetoric. On good days they crowded into a thin dining hall and ate salted shad, corn bread, beans, peas, and onions, washed down with apple cider. In leaner times they were fed pumpkin and Indian pudding and drank boiled water. Of course, the wealthier students could be seen around town in their buckskin breeches, smoking tobacco and drinking coffee or, if they could afford it, a frothy mug of flip.
Two of the most popular and gifted students in those years were Benjamin Tallmadge and Nathan Hale. Born amid the soft green hills of Coventry in 1755 to a farming family, one of twelve children, Nathan Hale grew into a handsome boy with fair skin, blue eyes, and flaxen hair. By the time Hale reached Yale he was an athlete with a broad chest, solid muscles, and legendary jumping and leaping skills. He could kick a football “over the tops of the trees.” He became a member of the literary Linonian Society and during his second year met a fifteen-year-old named Benjamin Tallmadge.31 Tallmadge’s father had been born in New Haven in 1725 and graduated from Yale in 1747, becoming a minister at Brookhaven on Long Island. That is where Benjamin was born, on February 25, 1754, and he grew into a good-looking, doe-eyed young man with a precocious intelligence. He was so talented, in fact, that President Daggett admitted him to Yale when he was only twelve years old. But his father wisely held him back three years until the autumn of 1769, when he crossed the Sound to New Haven.32
Their friendship became a touchstone in both their lives, with a witty repartee that hid genuine feeling. Tallmadge wrote during their junior year,
In my delightsome retirement form the fruitless Bustle of the Noisy, with an usual Delight &, perhaps, with more than common attention, I peruse your Epistle. Replete as it was with Sentiments worth to be contemplated, let me assure you with the strongest confidence of an affectionate Friend, that with nothing was my Pleasure so greatly heightened, as with your curious remarks upon my preceding Performance.
With his purposefully flowery, college-student prose, Tallmadge pontificates with a wink to his friend, taking issue with the smallest and most amusing points: “You intimated in your last, that my using the Comparative Degree was somewhat needless, alleging that the sincerity of my friendship would not be rendered more conspicuous by the use of the Comparative.” He goes on like this for three pages, on the subject of what degree of language to put their friendship into and on a vague disagreement in a previous letter that is never made concrete, in the drollest rhetoric possible. In other words, he uses the highest and most formal language to say absolutely nothing: a classic college-student prank. At the end he jokes, “I have so far exceeded any design in treating upon the preceding Topicks, that I must omit many things, which I determined to have discoursed upon at this Time, to be considered in some future Paper.”33
At graduation in 1773, Tallmadge spoke at the invitation of President Daggett, and he and Hale participated in a cutting-edge debate on the education of women.34 The two young men left college and looked for employment. Hale first went to teach in East Haddam along the Connecticut River, but moved almost immediately to New London that winter, where he became the preceptor at Union School college preparatory academy and was befriended by one of its benefactors, Nathaniel Shaw. Tallmadge took a job as superintendent of a school in Weathersfield, where he was befriended by Yale alum Silas Deane. These young men had been educated in radical politics and now joined the network of merchants and politicians advocating resistance to British tyranny.
Tallmadge and Hale were not the only Yale graduates to take part in progressive politics. In the 1770s eight of the twelve assistants to the governor were Yale alumni, and, of course, Trumbull himself was a Harvard man. One half of the field officers of the Connecticut militia were Yale graduates, and a majority of the Council of Safety were also. Many of the graduates served as ministers throughout the colonies, and most of these promoted antimonarchist “Whig” policies from the pulpit and to their parishioners.35 These networks were all merging and growing, with Freemasons, Sons of Liberty, and college graduates becoming interdependent and interchangeable. The Connecticut Committee of Correspondence had emerged as a shadow government and was populated by citizens from all these other networks. And they stretched outside of Connecticut, joining others, creating the vast root system that allowed the
