ship, along with another Ledyard brother named Youngs. Both brothers died within weeks of each other while at sea, and years later their supercargo was suspected of foul play.33 John Ledyard’s youngest surviving brother, William, was three years older than Arnold, but he did not head off to the war with his father. Instead, young William kept his father’s business running, sending the Trumbulls molasses and other goods.34
Like John Ledyard, many Connecticut men also served in the locally dubbed French and Indian War, or sent their sons, like Trumbull’s eldest, Joseph, four years older than Arnold.35 At the beginning of the war, Arnold was too young, and perhaps his mother did not want her last surviving son to go. He was also busy. Lathrop sent much of his medical supplies to the Northern Army, and the war-disrupted trade made everything complicated and dangerous. Nevertheless, despite his indentured servitude to the Lathrops, once he turned eighteen Arnold seems to have immediately joined the New York Provincial Regiments to fight. It is unclear why he didn’t join Connecticut’s “voting” militia, which had always been “democratic,” in the sense that officers needed to persuade their soldiers, and personal prestige and popularity mattered much more than military hierarchy. As early as 1709, an observer noted “an equality which is not so consistent with martial discipline.”36 This would have appealed to Arnold, who was not part of the aristocracy of the colonies by any means or even among the merchant elite that dominated his own state.
Arnold’s service did not last long; he deserted in the spring of 1759.37 His mother had taken ill, and it could be that he returned to see to her while her father spent the season at sea. She finally died that summer and was lowered into a grave by the town green by her grieving son and daughter. After that, young Benedict seems to have returned to the army the following spring but never saw any action. It is difficult not to read something into this double abandonment of duty, first of his apprenticeship and second of the army. But despite being punishable by hanging, desertion was not unusual and was almost common practice among the colonial militias.
Even with these regular desertions, Connecticut gave more than its share of provisions and troops for the French and Indian War, especially for the assaults on Canada that led to the capture of Quebec.38 The war also created a network of veterans and merchants, and their leader was unquestionably Jonathan Trumbull, by the end of the conflict Connecticut’s most respected public figure.39 And Trumbull, along with almost everyone else who fought or contributed to the war, was disenchanted with the mother country. Military recruiters behaved dishonestly, British regulars demeaned colonial troops, and arbitrary imperial authority was followed by unpaid debts. It was not only soldiers that felt the brunt of this; families throughout the colonies had to quarter troops in their homes, and some towns such as Stamford and Norwalk were completely taken over.40 Little did the troublesome British army know they were planting the seeds of rebellion.
Some Connecticut merchants also lost their fortunes during the war years. Arnold’s father went completely bankrupt, perhaps because shipping became such a chancy prospect or perhaps because he became one himself. On May 12, 1760, a warrant was issued for his arrest, for the crime of losing “the use of his understanding and reason,” a thinly veiled euphemism for public drunkenness and nuisance.41 Shortly after this arrest, one of the Arnolds put an ad in the New London Summary for the sale of “a likely Negro boy to be sold cheap for ready cash or short credit.”42 Either this was a personal servant that the family was getting rid of because they could no longer afford one, or they had sunk to slave trading to try to pay the bills.
Whatever the case, Benedict Sr. died a year later, leaving Arnold and his sister, Hannah, orphans. Dr. Lathrop generously put up £300 to keep his apprentice out of debtor’s prison and took back a mortgage so that in 1762 young Arnold could sell his parents’ house for £700.43 Lathrop also gave his apprentice an even larger loan of £500 to set up his own business. By now, Arnold was clearly no longer just an indentured servant but considered the childless Lathrops’ heir. They even offered him a share in the business in Norwich, but he refused this kindness.
Perhaps there were too many graves in the cemetery by the green, or perhaps his father’s dissolution had made the family name mud in the town of his birth. Perhaps Arnold simply wanted to establish a pharmacy in a new city, and since his fellow apprentice, Solomon Smith, was starting one in Hartford, he would start one in New Haven. He left Norwich and rode across the state with his teenage sister to start a new life.
Two decades later, a year after the burning of New London, Dr. Daniel Lathrop died. We can only imagine how he felt when from his old home in Norwich he saw the “whole southern horizon wrapped in the strange, flickering redness of a distant flame” and found out that it was his former apprentice who was responsible.44 But his wife, Jerusha, lived to a ripe old age, long enough to radically change her opinion of the boy she had once offered her inheritance to. She told her tenant Lydia Sigourney a terrible and probably fabricated story detailing his cruelty to animals, with “dismembered birds” that she found lying around the yard.
Betrayal works on people in strange ways. It is no exaggeration to see Jerusha as a surrogate mother to the son of her husband’s cousin. She had lost her own sons, and then trusted and maybe even loved a boy whose mother died young and whose drunken father was an embarrassment and a curse. And in the decades following his attack on Connecticut, this woman had not created an abstraction or symbol of Arnold; he was still a real boy whom she had nurtured for seven years. But she had changed her memory so completely as to believe the most horrible things about the once-beloved teenager she now called “cruel Benedict Arnold.”45 No doubt she was hiding a lot of pain.
Flashpoint
BENEDICT ARNOLD’S store on Leather Lane stood opposite the whipping post and town scales, where occasionally a slaver would auction his wares. But Arnold did not sell slaves in New Haven; he sold fantastic-sounding medicines, like Tincture of Valerian, Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, and Francis’ Female Elixir. He sold fever powder, rose water, cold cream, wall hangings, needles, watches, stationery, mace, tea, and sugar. And it was not only the needs of the body that Arnold catered to. He sold modern novels like Tristram Shandy, Joseph Andrews, Peregrine Pickle, Tom Jones, and Pamela. Shelves sagged with the poetry of Homer, Milton, Dryden, Plutarch, Johnson, Pope, and Swift, and the essays of Aristotle and Locke.1 His taste in stocking his bookshelves shows that he may have even read some of them.
His sign read “Sibi Totique,” usually translated as “for himself and for all,” either an attempt to unite the opposing poles of individual and community or an attempt to advertise to the Latin-speaking Yale students down the street.2 Once established in New Haven, Arnold quickly expanded his pharmaceutical trade to the more profitable import-export business, becoming part owner of three different ships, the Charming Sally, Fortune, and Three Brothers. They followed the trade routes between Dublin and London and the smaller Caribbean islands that formed the backbone of Atlantic trade. He often joined these expeditions and became known in town as Captain Arnold. He imported molasses and rum from the “sugar islands” and manufactured products from England, while exporting shingles, staves, corn, flour, and barrels of pork.3 He sometimes traded horses, bringing them from Quebec to sell in the Caribbean.4 He made enough money in just a few years to permanently bring his sister, Hannah, to New Haven and buy back his parents’ Norwich home, though he eventually sold it again for a healthy profit.
But aspiring merchants like Arnold were about to get a rude awakening. Despite the vital help the colonists had provided in defeating the French in North America, the British government promptly levied the Sugar Act in 1763, affecting colonies like Connecticut that were dependent on the Caribbean trade.5 Americans were furious; they had a sense of entitlement to freedoms they earned,
