Treacherous Beauty

by Stephen Case

  The other Becky, Becky Redman, married even more quickly in December 1779. Her husband, Elisha Lawrence, was a colonel in the New Jersey Loyalist volunteers who had been captured in 1777. The wedding announcement in the Pennsylvania Gazette called her “a young lady whose superior beauty, joined with an elegance both of person and manners, rendered her justly admired by all who have the pleasure of her acquaintance.”174

  Peggy Chew waited longer to wed, but when she did, she married well. Her husband was Colonel John Eager Howard, a hero of the Continental Army who had fought in Germantown near her family’s Cliveden estate and had won a silver medal from Congress for his heroism at the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina. They married at Cliveden in 1787, with George Washington attending.175 Howard served as governor of Maryland and as a United States senator. They had two daughters and six sons, one of whom also became Maryland’s governor.176

  Even in her later years, Peggy Chew thought fondly of John André, much to the annoyance of her husband. According to a story told by her great-granddaughter, the Howards were entertaining foreign visitors at their Baltimore estate Belvedere when the Philadelphia years came up. “Major André was a most witty and cultivated gentleman,” Peggy told her guests, and the colonel interrupted, cursing and denouncing André’s memory.177

  Meanwhile, what about Peggy Shippen? Certainly her friends were making interesting matches, but hers was matchless. The youngest of the group, she was the first to wed. Even though she was strongly sympathetic to British ways, she embraced a rebel, who was as brash and self-promoting as she was demure. Shortly after the reentry of the Continental Army into Philadelphia, Peggy met the man whose life would transform hers. And she, his.

  Benedict Arnold was a fifth-generation New Englander, born in 1741. His great-great-grandfather had emigrated from England and helped Roger Williams found Rhode Island. His great-grandfather, the first Benedict Arnold, had served as governor of the colony and made himself wealthy. The second Benedict Arnold had spent his father’s fortune, forcing the third Benedict Arnold to become an apprentice cooper, or barrel-maker.

  But the cooper had greater ambitions. He moved to Norwich, Connecticut, and joined a shipowner in trading voyages to the Caribbean and Europe. When the shipowner died at sea after a trip to Ireland, Arnold delivered the news to his widow, and later married her.

  Taking over the shipowner’s business and expanding it, Arnold built a fine home and a family in Norwich. His wife gave birth to a son, Benedict, who died in infancy. When they had a second son, he was given the same name, a not uncommon practice at the time.178

  This Benedict Arnold was a vibrant child, known for his love of skating, sledding, swimming, and fishing. Stories of his daredevil childhood abound, including one in which he grabbed hold of Norwich’s giant waterwheel and rode it under the water and back up.179

  The boy was sent to a classical academy to study under a recent graduate of Yale College. His mother wrote the school: “It is with a great deal of satisfaction that I commit my uncultured child to your care under God. Pray don’t spare the rod and spoil the child.” Arnold embraced his studies, but was also known for his pranks and adventures. His teacher wrote his mother to report that when a barn in the area had caught fire, Arnold was spotted amid the smoke on the building’s roof, walking from one end to the other before escaping the flames. The boy’s stay at the elite school lasted only two years, until his family’s finances could no longer sustain it. Arnold’s father had badly mismanaged his business and had tried to find the answers in alcohol.

  Arnold was called home to work as an apprentice to a druggist, fortunate for the chance to learn a valuable trade but forced to endure the humiliation of his father’s public descent into alcoholism. While the family held on to its fine house and a pew in the front row of the First Church of Norwich, Arnold’s father was arrested for public drunkenness and for failing to pay his debts. The apprentice was eighteen when his mother died, twenty when his father followed.

  Bankrolled by his employer, Arnold traveled to London to buy supplies to open his own shop in New Haven, Connecticut. Returning to America, he rented store space and hung out a sign with the Latin phrase Sibi Totique (For himself and for everyone). The store featured medicine, books, and cosmetics. Because Arnold was a druggist who had been to England, he encouraged people to refer to him as “Dr. Arnold from London.”

  Benedict Arnold was loved by Peggy, but was one of the most hated men in American history. National Archives (NWDNS-148-GW-617)

  Arnold was too restive to remain a mere shopkeeper, however. He began acquiring ships, and for months at a time he sailed to London, Quebec, and the Caribbean in pursuit of trade.

  He also was an active overseer to his sister Hannah, who remained in the family home in Norwich. One day he and a friend stopped by the home and spotted the nineteen-year-old Hannah inside, being courted by a Frenchman. Arnold disapproved of this suitor, as he might have of any Frenchman, since the French and Indian War had recently ended. And it is doubtful that any male pursuing Hannah would have been acceptable to Arnold. He arranged for his friend to loudly enter the house, pretending to be Arnold. When the Frenchman climbed out a window, Arnold shot at him with a pistol, but missed. The Frenchman left town, and Arnold moved Hannah to New Haven to help take care of his house. She never married.180

  Arnold, however, did take a spouse. She was Margaret Mansfield, the daughter of a trader who served as high sheriff of New Haven County. Like other Margarets, she was nicknamed Peggy. Their first child was the latest in the long line of Benedicts, and next came Richard.

  Arnold was often at sea, and often on the financial shoals. Part of the fault lay with the times: The British imposed restrictions such as the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act that disrupted trading. Arnold, like most import-export businessmen, was involved in smuggling, and the British crackdown made his business more risky. He became increasingly active in protests against British authority, and led a mob that beat up and whipped a man who had threatened to turn him in as a smuggler. Arnold began to sink into debt, and his London creditors threatened to seize his ships.181

  Benedict Arnold had a talent for making enemies. In 1770 a Jamaican trader came to town with a rumor that Arnold had been on a bender while in the Caribbean—an apparently false report, since Arnold avoided strong drink after seeing it ruin his father’s life. But the trader brought along another rumor, which Arnold’s wife seemed to believe: that Arnold had kept one or more whores during his travels, and had contracted a venereal disease. Arnold went to extraordinary lengths to dispel the rumors, filing a slander suit and recruiting his friends to attest to his good behavior in the Caribbean.

  Arnold did not push the case to trial, but he did distribute the depositions in New Haven in an attempt to clean up his image. The campaign worked with his wife at least. Their third son, Henry, was born about a year after the whoring rumors began.182

  Never one to retrench in difficult times, Arnold started construction of a grand estate along New Haven’s waterfront, featuring a house with two chimneys, marble fireplaces, stables for a dozen horses, and an orchard of one hundred fruit trees.

  But the house was only half finished when politics began pulling him away from the life he was building in New Haven.183 Arnold, active in the then-radical Sons of Liberty, accompanied Connecticut’s delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774. He attended a dinner at Edward Shippen’s house and met Shippen’s fourteen-year-old daughter Peggy there, but no details have survived. (Coincidentally, John André also was in Philadelphia at that time, but there is no indication that he and Arnold met.)184

  That first Congress reached quite a conservative compromise, affirming British sovereignty while calling for Britain to end its trade restrictions. But forces were moving in a more extreme direction. Arnold was accused of leading mobs in Connecticut that attacked Loyalists. And mob action was accomp
anied by military training: Arnold and his friends formed a militia company, with him as captain.

  About a month later and 120 miles away from New Haven, the Revolutionary War began. A British expedition to seize Patriot arms caches outside Boston led to bloody gun battles in Lexington and Concord and a humiliating retreat by the redcoats.

  When Arnold heard about the clashes, he mobilized his company to head northeast for combat. New Haven authorities chose to remain neutral and locked up the city’s supply of gunpowder. Arnold, who had been involved in one scrape or another for his whole life, was ready at age thirty-four to join an organized war. When he and his militiamen threatened to break down the door of the powder house, a local official reluctantly turned over the keys. Arnold’s militia loaded up and headed for Boston.

  Apprehending that the rebels lacked firepower, Arnold suggested that he lead a force to Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York to seize the British cannon there. The fort had military significance for another reason: It lay at a critical point on the strategic “line of the Hudson” running from Montreal to New York City, an important lifeline that would be a frequent battleground in the war—and would be in jeopardy during Arnold’s treason years later.

  Massachusetts politicians liked Arnold’s idea of seizing Ticonderoga and commissioned him as a colonel. Complicating things, a group called the Green Mountain Boys, led by Ethan Allen, was already headed to Ticonderoga with the same idea. Arnold rode ahead of his men and caught up with Allen’s force, then tried to pull rank. But Allen’s motley militia refused to serve under Arnold. The two egotistical leaders reached a compromise and mounted the attack under a joint command.

  In a surprise predawn raid, Arnold and Allen captured the fort without a single fatality on either side. Then they immediately fell into dispute. Allen’s boys chose the rum supply as their next target, while Arnold tried to order them to improve the fort for the inevitable British counterattack and prepare the cannon for shipment to Boston. The Green Mountain Boys ignored him, and Allen stripped him of his share of the command.

  Insulted and impatient, Arnold saw a chance for vindication when a schooner showed up carrying fifty recruits. He persuaded the force to sail north on Lake Champlain and raid the British-held Fort St. Jean in Canada. Approaching undetected, they seized a sloop and destroyed other ships, deftly escaping and leaving the enemy ill equipped to mount an attack on Ticonderoga. The first military mission under Arnold’s sole command was a smashing success.

  His glory was brief. Massachusetts washed its hands of any jurisdiction in the Ticonderoga area, and Connecticut appointed a new colonel to take Arnold’s place. Though Arnold first refused to step down, he ultimately relented.185

  While he was without command and pondering his future, he received the news that his wife had died of unknown causes.186 Arnold went home to New Haven, and could have stayed there to raise his three young sons and try to salvage his business, which had been devastated by the British blockade. Instead he left his sister Hannah to assume the roles of surrogate mother and business manager and went to General Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to lobby for his plan to launch an invasion of Canada.

  Eventually colonial leaders agreed to challenge the British in the North, but political negotiations put off the mission until the summer of 1775 was nearly over—a delay that would prove decisive.

  The Americans moved into Canada on two tracks. One force took the conventional route over Lake Champlain and along the Richelieu River to Fort St. Jean, the same path that Arnold had chosen when he captured the sloop during his raid after Ticonderoga. This time the invaders aimed to capture St. Jean—whose defenders now included British lieutenant John André—and then push on to Montreal. Meanwhile, a second force to the east sailed up Maine’s Kennebec River and tried to cross a forbidding, little-traveled wilderness to Quebec. If all went well, the first force would tie up the British in Montreal while the second force sprang upon an unaware and undermanned Quebec.

  Arnold accepted the more difficult assignment—command of the thousand-plus soldiers who set off over roaring rivers, thickly wooded heights, and mazelike swamps en route to Quebec. The odds, which were against them from the start, grew steadily longer as they struggled with leaky boats, torrential rain, a devastating flood, a blinding snowstorm, and severe shortages of food that compelled them to eat their own moccasins and dogs.

  Arnold somehow kept this series of disasters from dooming them all. Nearly a third of his troops turned back, but Arnold’s strong will pulled the rest of his bedraggled army over a difficult rise called the Height of Land and down an often wild river named the Chaudière, the French word for cauldron.

  When Arnold arrived outside the fortified city of Quebec, he had earned comparisons with Hannibal, famed for crossing the Alps with elephants. But Arnold was facing a more difficult task than the one he had just completed. By the time he reached Quebec, its defenders were reinforced and ready.187 Arnold’s force, on the other hand, was tired, hungry, ill clothed, and undermanned as it assembled on the pastures outside the city walls—the same Plains of Abraham where British forces had defeated the French in 1759. Recognizing that a direct attack would be futile, Arnold marched his army near Quebec’s walls in an attempt to lure the British outside and engage them on more even ground. But they didn’t emerge. When Arnold realized that his army was perilously short of ammunition—a fact that his officers had hidden from him—he pulled back and awaited support from the other rebel invasion force, which had captured Montreal and was headed his way.

  That force was led by Richard Montgomery, the general who had taken André prisoner at Fort St. Jean. A former British officer turned rebel, Montgomery was one of the few military leaders whom Arnold viewed more as a comrade than a rival. Even after Montgomery joined him, the rebel force was outnumbered by Quebec’s defenders. But Arnold had come too far to simply withdraw. Many of his soldiers’ enlistments were up on December 31, so he had to make his assault before year’s end or abandon the plan. At 5 a.m. on that last day of 1775, in the midst of a raging snowstorm, Montgomery and Arnold launched their attack on Quebec.

  Some colonial troops wore a piece of white paper on their caps to help distinguish friend from foe. On the paper was written “Liberty or death.” Bravery was in abundance, with each of the two commanders at the vanguard of one prong of the attack. For Arnold, the battle was short. As his troops attempted to breach the first barricade, a musket ball struck him in the left calf. At first he refused to withdraw, but loss of blood made him faint, and he was taken to an aid station outside the walls. Montgomery was less fortunate. As he led a charge, a cannon filled with small iron balls known as grapeshot erupted in his direction. He was struck in the head and thighs, dying instantly.

  With both leaders fallen, the attack descended into disaster. Hundreds were captured. Arnold lay at the hospital with his sword and two loaded pistols beside him, ready to fight to the death rather than be taken prisoner.188 But the British simply savored their victory and left the remnants of the Patriot army sitting outside Quebec.

  The wounded Colonel Arnold was promoted to brigadier general a week and a half after the battle. But the American version of Hannibal was far from gratified. Congress seemed slow to respond to his calls for reinforcements, but did ask for a full accounting of his expenses. Financial issues would plague Arnold throughout the war as many Continental officials questioned his demands for reimbursement for the personal funds he had used to pay for supplies. If only Arnold had been followed around by a battalion of accountants, the hard feelings and distrust might have been avoided.

  Reinforcements came to Arnold in dribs and drabs, and many of them were sick when they showed up. Another newcomer only annoyed Arnold—David Wooster, the man who had hesitated to unlock the New Haven powder house, and who now outranked Arnold. More misfortune befell Arnold when his horse shied and collapsed on his already injured leg.


  Securing a reassignment to Montreal, Arnold left Quebec unconquered. With good weather came more British troops, and they drove Arnold and the rest of the rebel army out of Canada.189 During the retreat, Arnold accused a subordinate of improperly seizing goods, and the subordinate accused him of the same. Arnold went on such a rant during the subordinate’s court-martial that officers issued an arrest warrant against him for “profane oaths.” Arnold was saved by the intervention of General Horatio Gates, who decided that Arnold’s combative nature was more useful on the battlefield than in court.190

  And indeed it was. As the British sought to move south, control of Lake Champlain became vital. Realizing that Arnold’s civilian shipping experience made him “perfectly skilled in maritime affairs,” Gates arranged for him to build and command a fleet of small wooden boats to oppose the superior British navy carrying an invasion force south to attack Ticonderoga.191

  The British fleet boasted about three dozen ships, trailed by canoes carrying hundreds of Indians. Arnold could not risk a fight in the open lake. Instead he hid his sixteen ships behind Valcour Island, which was not even on the British military’s map of the lake. Here he was hoping to spring a trap.

  On the morning of October 11, 1776, the British fleet was strung out over ten miles of lake when Arnold sent a few of his ships into plain view to lure the enemy piecemeal into the channel behind the island. The British took the bait, and a seven-hour battle ensued in which both sides lost ships but the British could not concentrate their firepower. By nightfall the American fleet had expended three-fourths of its ammunition and appeared trapped, but Arnold quietly sneaked his ships past the inattentive British and made a run for it.