midnight, a fleet of twenty-four ships slid east on the calm black water of the Devil’s Belt. It was late summer in 1781, and the fleet had waited until complete darkness to weigh anchor and move up from the west, with a fair wind behind them. Now they stood near Plum Island, outside Gardiner’s Bay, at the very tip of Long Island, ten miles southwest as the crow flies from the entrance to New London harbor. The ships would have to go farther to avoid the reefs on the western side, as they sailed past the jaws of The Race in a few short hours.
On the deck of one of the warships stood a stout, muscular man with dark hair, gray eyes, and a sharp nose. He walked with a limp, his leg shot, then crushed underneath a horse—injuries that might have destroyed a weaker man. He must have tried to see the northern shore, searching for the sleeping town across the wide expanse of the Devil’s Belt, sometimes called Long Island Sound. The town was New London, Connecticut, a town he had visited many times to conduct business, to visit friends, or to retrieve his drunken father and bring him home. But he had not returned for years, or returned upriver to Norwich, to the house he had been born in and to the graves of his parents.
It was not a clear night. If it had been clear, without cloud or fog, then someone would have seen the sails, even at this distance, by starlight or moonlight, and cannon would have been fired to warn the militia. One might fire soon enough, as they rowed in for the landing, but by then it would be too late. Besides, the man on the deck knew that the Americans fired two shots to signal for enemy, and he had ordered that another cannon be fired once from the ship. That way the men in their warm beds, far in the wooded backcountry of eastern Connecticut, would not be alarmed and maybe would turn over and go to sleep.
Long Island was held by the British, and though there were Patriot spies there, the man had planned so swiftly that none of the spies could have sent word to Connecticut in time. There would be no welcoming party marched in from Hartford or Providence. Even if the scattered militia rallied, the force on these ships was overwhelming, and only a large city like Boston or Philadelphia could repulse a force under his command without a standing army. New London was not a large town; though it was only two dozen miles from the center of the American Revolution’s northern supply lines at Lebanon, he could be reasonably assured that his mission would be successful.
The gray-eyed man on the deck of the flagship of the British fleet was not the only one who had ties to the land. Although the ships held hundreds of German mercenaries and English redcoats sleeping or playing cards or cleaning their muskets in anticipation of the attack, more than half of the 1,732 men were from America. The Third Battalion of the New Jersey volunteers, the Loyalist Refugee Corps, the Loyal Americans, and the so-called American Legion were all waiting below decks. Most wanted to return home, to be part of the mighty British Empire again, to retake their land from what some called “anarchy.”
The motive of their leader on the deck was more obscure. Unlike the Loyalists below, he had as recently as a year earlier been fighting for those rebels, and fighting well. His physical courage and quick thinking had won critical battles and had in fact helped turn the tide of the entire war. Now he must have been hoping to turn it the other way. If that happened, perhaps his name would be restored, and he would once again have money, security, fame—enough for his many ambitions.
What he could not know was that those hopes were in vain, and his name would be damned through the ages for his initial treason—a plot to hand over West Point and George Washington to the British—and for this attack on his former home, an act seemingly beyond comprehension to his contemporaries. He could not know that this act of terror would be his last act of the war and that in less than two months the matter would be decided despite his efforts. The army that would decide it had marched just north of New London in June, and the fleet that would help had, the day before, already sailed into another bay to entrap the British general Charles Cornwallis.
The wind shifted at one o’clock, coming hard from the north. It would take nearly nine more hours for the first landing parties to row to the Connecticut beaches and begin their attacks, long after the sun had risen. But the delay between dawn and landing wouldn’t matter. By the end of the day on September 6, 1781, a prosperous seaside town would be ashes, and a terrible massacre would be enacted. This attack would not change the course of the war or turn the tide of American history. It would define the American soul.
The man on the deck was the dark eagle of the Revolution, Benedict Arnold, a man who could have been a founding father of America but instead became a national villain. Arnold’s brutal attack on Connecticut epitomizes this transformation: the moment where his abstract idea of betrayal completes its evolution to the slaughter and destruction of his neighbors and their homes. Focusing on this significant but unfortunately forgotten incident addresses some of the major challenges of any discussion about this complex and confusing American figure. It also directly links Arnold’s story with the stories of his friends and colleagues, something that has never been done before. The combination of these two approaches puts the focus on Arnold’s effects rather than his motives, on the victims rather than the attacker. Moreover, it reframes his “treason” as “homegrown terror,” a term that resonates with modern readers and whose definition echoes the eighteenth-century word “parricide,” used by many contemporaries to describe Arnold’s actions.
Those actions have historically presented two major challenges. First, Arnold’s treason has primarily begged the question of “cause” from historians: How could his contemporaries so misjudge him? How could someone change allegiances so completely? The second challenge is much more complex and one that has occupied much of the discourse over the past several decades: Arnold’s status in our national history. We could break this up into several questions or categories of approach. How could we present a full picture of a traitor who was previously a hero? Perhaps he was a Loyalist all along, as he claimed, and just a casualty of what was in some ways our first civil war? And is the word “traitor” appropriate? Could its legal definition be too narrow or could the expression have become too weak?
George Washington himself was among the first to speculate about the question of Arnold’s motives. In a letter written less than a month after the initial plot was exposed, he mentions Arnold’s “villainous perfidy” and states, “I am mistaken if at this time, Arnold is undergoing the torments of a mental Hell. He wants feeling! From some traits of his character which have lately come to my knowledge he seems to have been so hackneyed in villainy—& so lost to all sense of honor and shame that while his faculties will enable him to continue his sordid pursuits there will be no time for remorse.”1 Of course, if Washington was correct in October 1780, and Arnold was a sociopath who “wants feeling,” then why had the usually perceptive commander in chief not noticed this fault before the shocking treason? Congress would ask that pointed question of Washington and many others during the aftermath.
Speculation about Arnold’s motives ran rampant among his contemporaries. The same man, Joseph Plumb Martin, changes his opinion several times in his memoir of the war. On one page he marvels at the betrayal, “I should as soon have thought West Point had deserted as he,” but a page later he waffles and writes, “I had been acquainted with Arnold from my childhood and never had too good an opinion of him.” At another point he states more emphatically, “He looked guilty, and well he might, for Satan was in as full possession of him at that instant as ever he was of Judas; it only wanted a musket ball to have driven him out.”2
For over two centuries Arnold’s treason has been given explanations as diverse as greed and self-sacrifice. Surely, his Tory wife, Peggy, influenced him unduly? Perhaps it was jealousy of the other, less deserving generals promoted ahead of him? Perhaps he never believed in the revolutionary cause in the first place and fought only out of self-interest? Felt anger at the squabbling pettiness of Congress? A tragic character flaw? Mental health issues? Memories of his drunken father? Financial troubles? Midlife crisis? A whim? A blunder?
There is ample evidence for all the above. We can continue to analyze Arnold’s psychology and actions, but there will never be a
