fortune in trade.
One of those men was Benedict Arnold Sr., who served as a captain for richer men, such as Hezekiah Huntington on the ship Prudent Hannah.4 Arnold Sr. had come to Norwich from Rhode Island and met a widow named Hannah King, formerly Waterman. He may in fact have been one of her late husband’s shipmates, but that did not stop him from marrying her.5 They had named their first son Benedict after his father, but the child died at the age of eight months, along with a half sister named for her mother, both on the same day. In the custom of the times, the grieving parents named their next two children the same. The first Benedict Arnold Jr. was buried on the green, by the First Church of Norwich, where the deeply religious Hannah found comfort and faith.
The previous year, the “Great Awakening” had swept across New England, revitalizing the Christian church, which had waned in influence somewhat in the early decades of the century. During high summer of 1741 Jonathan Edwards preached his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon in Enfield, Connecticut, explicating Deuteronomy 32:35: Their foot shall slide in due time. With both reason and wrath he proclaimed that people “are liable to fall” and that “he that stands or walks on slippery ground needs nothing but his own weight to throw him down…. He cannot stand alone, when he is let go he immediately falls and is lost.” The congregation was thrown into disarray, with “shrieks and cry” from the parishioners fearing they would go to hell.6
But despite the revival of Christian evangelism, this was no longer the society of the early Puritans. Other ideas were filtering into the public consciousness. A month after Arnold’s birth, rivals Andrew Bradford and Benjamin Franklin published the first monthly magazines in the colonies. Franklin had already opened the first subscription library and started the first newspaper, though it would be at least another decade before the press fully reached Connecticut and thirty years before the state would open some of the first free public libraries in the country. In the meantime educated men argued in town halls and coffee shops, where this bitter drink was replacing hard apple cider or ale as the preferred refreshment at breakfast and lunch. Already in 1741 they discussed John Locke’s theories of equality and the social contract between the ruler and ruled.
A young Connecticut man named Ezra Stiles demonstrated how these two apparently opposing worldviews could work in perfect harmony. In 1746 Stiles graduated from New Haven’s Yale College at the age of nineteen and became a minister, while retaining a passion for intellectual liberty and reason. When he gave his master’s degree oration in 1749, he said, “Tis Liberty, my friends, in the Cause of Liberty we assert—a Freedom from the Bias of a vulgar Education, and the Violence of prejudicate Opinions—a Liberty suited to the Pursuit and Enquiries after Truth—Natural and Moral. This is the Advantage of Education, and this the Emolument of the Liberal Discipline.”7 The deeply religious Stiles saw no contradiction in also being a champion of Enlightenment values: tolerance, education, reason, and freedom.
These ideas had not always necessarily been tied to representative democracy, but, mixed with the colony’s unique voting system, they were radical. In a 1662 charter the king of England gave the full citizens, or “freemen,” of Connecticut elected representatives twice a year and once a year nominated and selected the governor, deputy governor, and twelve assistants. This was a much different system from colonies where the royally appointed governors had veto power and could appoint judges, lawyers, and military officers with impunity. Not wanting to give up these rights, Connecticut thwarted an attempt by a less progressive monarch to confiscate the document in 1687. Despite a number of grumbling “King’s men” who found all this republicanism heretical, the stability it brought was very difficult to argue against. Although the relatively small Connecticut had no large port, no readily exportable product, and few imported slaves or indentured servants, the social order remained fairly secure.8 And the population boomed, from 38,000 in 1730 to 130,000 in 1756. Some of these were children, but more were immigrants from England and the southern states, including many Baptists, Quakers, and other dissenters.9
This population growth produced one of the first land crises in the colonies. By 1750 almost the entire state had been parceled out, and settlers looked to move west. This led to the simmering Yankee– Pennamite War in what is today northeastern Pennsylvania and eventually to the settlement of the Western Reserve in northeastern Ohio, as well as various other migrations and settlements, both legal and illegal. Like all populations that prosper and exceed their boundaries, eighteenth-century Connecticut exported its greatest resource—people. These migrations also signaled that the new nation was already far more fluid and cohesive than the parent country dreamed.10 The inhabitants had begun to think of themselves as Americans and not just as residents of a colony or a town.
This mix of fluidity and cohesion marked Benedict Arnold’s childhood. On the one hand, he was in the center of a close-knit community, with a fairly unified cultural and social life, especially for the children. They were all familiar with the sounds of long sermons in a cold church pew, sheep bleating from the hills, and the squeals of a hog butchered in the kitchen garden. They shared entertainment, like watching cats hunting mice in the corn and dogs chasing rabbits out of the grazing fields. They hunted deer and fished for trout. They pretended they were pioneers of a hundred years before, settling by “the rushing and picturesque cascade of the Yantic” under “rude ledges of towering rock.”11 They all had the same fears too—larger children probably warned them of “savage” Indians, like the remaining Pequots, who lived nearby at the source of the Mystic River.
Though little gray-eyed Benedict was not tied to the land as much as many farming families, he would have spent his share of the days heaping stones into walls and picking apples from the orchards, while older men heaped mowed thorns with pitchforks. But at the same time, his father’s position as ship captain must have seemed romantic and free, with the entire world to roam and conquer. And though his father was gone for months at a time, every day Benedict could watch cart horses pulling trucks full of salted fish and molasses past his window, struggling in the muddy ruts of the road, heading northwest to Windham or Hartford.
One of two surviving Arnold children, Benedict grew up in this house in Norwich, which stood by the road between the center of town and the harbor docks. Courtesy of Marian O’Keefe.
His mother continued to bear more children, and he would have been expected to help bring up these brothers and sisters. He had other family in Norwich too—his mother’s relatives, like the Lathrops, had been there for years, and now some of his father’s relatives moved in. Oliver Arnold joined his brother in Norwich by 1755 at least, with his two sons Oliver and Freegift, who looked up to their older cousin.12 Benedict’s uncle Zion may have moved into town from Rhode Island as well; he certainly visited at least. As his father’s business grew in the 1740s, they moved into a large two-chimney house on the road south of the green, a signal that they had become part of the town’s elite. The Arnolds’ pew at the Norwich Congregational Church was nearby the Lathrops, the Turners, and the Huntingtons.13 In this way, young Benedict probably met Philip Turner and Jedediah Huntington, boys less than two years older. Jedediah was the son of Jabez Huntington, the richest merchant in town and one of the leaders of the colony. Unlike the Huntingtons, though, Benedict’s father wanted little part in societal governance and remained at sea every summer. He was chosen for the grand jury in 1746 but refused to serve on it.14 Philip Turner was the son of a father of the same name, who had moved to Norwich from Massachusetts. His parents died when he was young, and instead he was brought up by the kindly Dr. Elisha Tracy, who lived nearby.15 Benedict learned his Bible verses and played on Sunday afternoons with companions like these, children of the rising middle class of the eighteenth century.
When Benedict was nine, his younger brother died, leaving him the only son. Two years later, in the fall of 1752, he trudged up the north road to Canterbury, following the Shetucket River. Along the way he
