the straightest white pines for ship masts. He would have passed small cornfields, with interlaced rows of beans and squash. At last he reached the Congregationalist meetinghouse of Dr. James Cogswell, originally of Lebanon, who graduated from Yale the year after Arnold was born.16 Benedict’s schooling with Cogswell was clearly meant to prepare him for the revered teacher’s alma mater.
While Benedict studied music and grammar upriver, a yellow fever epidemic paralyzed Norwich, where his mother said, “deths are multiplied all round us…. Your uncle Zion Arnold is dead…. John Lathrop and his son barnibus are boath dead.”17 His mother wrote him again on August 30, 1753, saying that his sisters Hannah and Marey were very sick, and “your father is verry poor; aunt is sick, and I myself had a touch of ye distemper…. Your groaning sisters give love to you … but I must not have you come home for fear that should be resumption.”18 His sister Hannah survived, but Marey died, leaving Mrs. Arnold devastated. Nevertheless, she did not forget to send her son a pound of chocolate, and the following spring sent him fifty shillings; she seems to have constantly worried about his health and welfare.19 He must have seemed her hope for the future.
But after only two years of school, Arnold had to return to Norwich. It could be that he was a poor student, or more likely that his parents had overextended their finances. His father’s business had been deteriorating, due mostly to an increasing problem with drinking. His mother alluded to these financial and health issues in another mournful letter: “I write to let you know ye situation of our family. Your father is in a poor state of health but designs, if able, to set out for New York on August 23, and if I can, I shall journey with him, and if Providence shall permit, we shall be back by ye middle September when I shall send for you home…. We have a very uncertain stay in this world.”20 The teenage Arnold seems to have spent time with his father at sea during the summer months, traveling to the Caribbean. Witnessing the sordid life of hardened sailors was one thing, but quite another if one of those sailors is your father. The boy might have also had to rescue his father from drunken sprees in New London, and stories proliferated in later years about this unhappy duty. This was followed by an arrest warrant for Benedict Sr. in November 1754, for debt.21
Presumably other relatives came to his rescue, because the elder Arnold was not imprisoned and remained a sea captain for the next few years. But the family was clearly in dire straits, and young Benedict’s future as a college student was now impossible. Instead, his mother apprenticed him to her cousins, the Lathrops. Brothers Joshua and Daniel were the first pharmacists in the county and probably the first in Connecticut to keep “a general assortment of medicines.” The Lathrops also sold fruit, wine, and miscellaneous merchandise, from painters’ colors to Turkish figs. Arnold joined another boy named Solomon Smith as an apprentice and began to learn the trade.22
By now, Arnold had grown into a good-looking young man, strong and thin-lipped, with heavy black eyebrows and hair.23 He could easily walk up the dirt track past the front of the Leffingwell Inn to the Lathrop store. But he may have actually lived in the large home of Daniel and his wife, Jerusha, since his bankrupt parents probably rented out rooms in their now too-large house. The Lathrops’ three sons had died and no doubt they didn’t mind the company. Besides, an apprenticeship was not just a day job; it was legally indentured servitude that led to expertise in a certain field. In this case, Arnold was not really learning to be a pharmacist; he was learning to be a trader in provisions. He went on innumerable short trips, like two miles away to grind corn at the mill, where “while waiting, he amazed the miller with sundry fantastic tricks,” such as holding onto “a spoke of the great mill wheel in its revolutions.”24 The Lathrops sent him on much longer trips too, to England and the Caribbean, trusting him as supercargo for exports and imports. In the tangled web of eighteenth-century international trade, having a man or even a teenager on the spot was vital.
While apprenticed to Dr. Daniel Lathrop as a pharmacist at this Norwich shop, Arnold replaced the children the Lathrops had lost years before. Courtesy of Marian O’Keefe.
In the 1740s and 1750s, currency in Connecticut depreciated, and the position of farmers, shopkeepers, and merchants was kept in a strange balance, with credit a flitting hummingbird that everyone tried to follow. One of the primary concerns was the honesty of customers, and the position of middleman was potentially prosperous even before the regularization and codification of finance laws. But business could also be potentially disastrous, and the entire credit system could break down when someone in the long chain of commerce did not pay. Many merchants were also farmers and shopkeepers, to hedge their bets, and a man named Jonathan Trumbull was one of them: driving cattle herds, salting and packing meat, running a flour mill, and selling imports and local farm goods out of his Lebanon retail store.25
A few miles northwest of Norwich, Lebanon had been built around a thick alder swamp, which slowly drained over the decades, becoming the largest town green in New England.26 Trumbull had been born on October 10, 1710, into this frontier town, and grew into a robust five-foot-nine man with a hawk-like nose and large, drooping eyes. When he was in his twenties, the town began to grow rapidly, even though it was slightly off the confluence of paths from Hartford, New London, and Providence.27 Trumbull had gone to school at Harvard, graduated at the age of seventeen, and returned home. But after three years of reading with the local parson, he returned to Harvard to get his master’s degree, expecting to become a preacher himself. Meanwhile, his father had either built or bought a ship, called it the Lebanon, and Jonathan’s brother set sail from New London for the Caribbean. Neither he nor the ship was ever seen again. And so Jonathan gave up the career in the clergy and became the “son” in Trumbull and Son.28
Trumbull’s simple house in Lebanon was smaller than Arnold’s in Norwich, with a central chimney, molded window cornices, and classical doorways. Much of it was built with wide pieces of pine, or “king’s boards,” supposed to be sent back to England—the Trumbulls had clearly ignored that command. It was a fine house to sit around the fire on straight-backed, rush-seat chairs, waiting for bread from a beehive oven while sipping a mug of good coffee straight from the Caribbean. But Trumbull himself had little time for such pleasures. He became Lebanon’s deputy in the Connecticut House of Representatives, and then Speaker of the House at the tender age of thirty. He served as assistant to the council in the upper house from 1741 to 1751 and again from 1754 to 1763. He also served as a justice of the peace in Windham County, judge of the probate courts, and judge of the Connecticut Superior Court during those years. These were not vanity positions, but ones for which he continually performed difficult work.
Trumbull did it with the civil work ethic that characterized the people of New England at that time and that he epitomized. Other elected officials began to understand that they could count on the judicious Trumbull for anything.29 Furthermore, by the 1750s Trumbull had become one of Connecticut’s largest dealers in provisions, despite a consistent habit of giving too much credit to his customers and remaining in debt himself. This combination of skills served the colony well when war with the French loomed again.
A decade earlier, during the War of Austrian Succession, Connecticut troops had fought bravely during the siege of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, losing 150 soldiers. But when the British simply gave the fortress back to the French during peace negotiations, many were severely disenchanted with the mother country; even the pro-British governor called it an “unhappy experience.”30 Nevertheless, troops from New Haven, Hartford, and New London marched once again to assist the British against French forces in Canada. The Trumbulls, the Huntingtons, the Lathrops, the Williamses, and several other merchant families teamed up to supply the provisions of the state’s troops.31 One of those suppliers was a friend of Trumbull’s named John Ledyard, who had a smaller mercantile business in Groton, a small town on the east side of the Thames River harbor, opposite New London. He imported goods to sell to the colonial armies, and then served in those
