have been tried and hanged as traitors, as intended by the writers of the Constitution. Treason is defined narrowly in section 3 of Article 3 to prevent political misuse, the only crime specifically noted in the document.20 When Chief Justice John Marshall freed Aaron Burr in 1807, he set a precedent that made securing a treason conviction very difficult. In the case of Timothy McVeigh, a former soldier who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people on April 19, 1995, the prosecution was unable to use the treason clause of the Constitution due to its strictness, even though McVeigh had clearly broken the bonds of loyalty and moral attachment.21 Nevertheless, by the Burr precedent set by Chief Justice Marshall, Arnold would still have been hanged as a traitor. Unlike during Burr’s conspiracy to create a new nation west of the Appalachians, there was actual armed action to prosecute, and the Constitution covers both Arnold’s initial “adhering to their Enemies” in his plans with General Henry Clinton and “levying War against them” in Virginia and Connecticut.22
Perhaps because “treason” has been so rarely used in its actual legal context, the word has become diluted by common use over the centuries. Political duplicity is almost laughable it happens so often, but that does not stop partisans from calling a politician “traitor,” or “Benedict Arnold,” for that matter. A quick search reveals thousands of merely political comparisons to Arnold in hundreds of newspapers, especially during elections and other tense moments of national disunity, everyone from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt, from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were both compared to Benedict Arnold in the same magazine, only one year apart.23
Despite Thomas Jefferson’s fervent prosecution of Aaron Burr for the crime, he said himself, “Real treason is rare.”24 Unfortunately, we have watered down “real treason” to the point where the word, if not the legal definition, is nearly useless for the purpose the writers of the Constitution intended. And the use of Arnold’s name in so many lesser cases has diluted the seriousness of his own treason. That’s why it is necessary to change the conversation about Arnold, and focusing on his “homegrown terror” attack on New London is a clear and effective way to do that. Whatever we judge now in calmer times, Arnold’s treason and his subsequent attacks had a huge effect on the national psychology of early America. Those effects are worth exploring.
This Civil War cartoon showing Benedict Arnold, the devil, and Jefferson Davis demonstrates the resonance of Arnold’s betrayal on the American imagination. Burgoo Zac, A Proper Family Reunion, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Some recent work has been more fruitful on this topic, putting the focus on the effects of Arnold’s treachery rather than on his motives. Historian Charles Royster’s study, “The Nature of Treason,” argues that Arnold represented a “threat to public virtue,” the self-sacrifice necessary for a civic society to exist, the public engagement that kept free people from being enslaved. Royster suggests that the citizens of the flowering nation hated him so fervently because he represented to them their own weaknesses by 1780: a loss of revolutionary fervor, traffic with the enemy for profit, and the corruption brought on by civic lethargy. He points out that his unambiguous treachery allowed the people to contrast their own supposed virtue, and not many could come out worse through comparison.25 Sociologists Lori Ducharme and Gary Alan Fine build on this idea to examine the subsequent “demonization” and “nonpersonhood” of Arnold subsequent to his betrayal, documenting an “enduring degradation process” that transformed him into “America’s greatest villain.” They conclude that “Arnold provided a measure of social control against egotism, while simultaneously providing a counterpoint for the trill of patriotism.”26 By focusing on Arnold’s life in Connecticut, and his attack on it, this book aims to show that just because Arnold was transformed into a symbol for evil does not mean he is an inappropriate symbol. The people he betrayed were very real: his peers and his neighbors, his family and his comrades in arms.
Furthermore, though some might point to the initial betrayal of Washington and West Point as the greatest crime, Arnold did not stop there, something that even the two excellent studies mentioned earlier fail to address. First, he attacked Virginia in a prolonged military invasion that threw the entire state into chaos. Then, more shockingly for the people of his home state, he burned New London, which suffered the highest percentage of destruction of any American city in the war. The coordinated Battle of Groton Heights had the highest percentage of casualties in what many called a massacre. These attacks changed Arnold’s position from an arguably political traitor who broke an oath and sold military secrets to someone who carried out armed attacks on his homeland. That is an important distinction and one that could lead to a stronger conclusion. A 1902 reflection in the New Haven Register put it clearly: “To have been able to put his own countrymen to the sword showed that he was sunk even deeper than a political traitor.”27
Focusing not only on Arnold’s story but on the stories of those fellow Connecticutians he associated with and fought beside also shines particular light on the importance of trust and loyalty in a civic society. Arnold’s world consisted of an interrelated network of friends and business associates serving together on the same committees or in the same battles. Jonathan Trumbull, Nathaniel Shaw, Silas Deane, Benjamin Tallmadge, William Ledyard, George Washington, Richard Varick, John Lamb, and many others befriended Arnold and bled with him before being betrayed; this is their story as much as his.
Biographers of men and women who knew Arnold tend to downplay their connections to him for obvious reasons, but it is these very connections that make his actions so indefensible. In his book on treason in American history, lawyer and historian Brian Carso states,
in a republic, trust and loyalty do not spring solely from the external covenant of our constitutional order. The internal covenant between citizen and republic relies on matters of trust and loyalty being manifest in the constitutive elements of society…. Loyalty, as with other democratic virtues, begins its development in the personal and local memberships of daily life. Loyalty is rooted first in family and community, and learns expression through the everyday associations of local institutions.28
In the following narrative, we can see how Arnold turned his back, not just on his government or some abstract notion of America, but on his local associations, his community and daily connections, built before and during the war.
In doing so, he began a procession of Americans who used political violence against their own people, including Ted Kaczinski, Nidal Hassan, and Eric Robert Rudolph, to name just a few. Terrorism is defined today in the Code of Federal Regulations as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” If violence is being used for political intimidation, if the “rules” of war are broken, if civilian populations are bombed or burned, then “terror” seems the appropriate reaction, and perhaps an appropriate word. Of course, the choice of “homegrown terror” to describe Arnold’s raid on Connecticut would be problematic from a strictly legal perspective; Arnold’s actions took place during a declared war, after all, even though the attack broke the rules of war at the time in several ways. We can also find many issues with the way that “terrorism” is used by the media, while the term “terrorist” brings up many of the same issues as “traitor.” Its definition is fluid and overused; even the FBI admits that “there is no single, universally accepted, definition of terrorism.”29
Additionally, as security expert Bruce Hoffman has noted, “If one identifies with the victim of the violence, for example, then the act is terrorism. If, however, one identifies with the perpetrator, the violent act is regarded in a more sympathetic, if not positive (or, at the worst, an ambivalent) light; and it is not terrorism.”30 So if you sympathize with the American revolutionaries, Benedict Arnold could have been both traitor and terrorist.
