by Stephen Case
Two days later, the British caught up with Arnold. His command ship, named Congress after a group with which he often feuded, was encircled by seven enemy vessels. Nonetheless Arnold found a way to reach a shallow bay, set the ship afire, and escape by land.
Arnold had lost two-thirds of his fleet. But the British had lost even more valuable assets: time and momentum. Embarrassed, bloodied, and stunned into caution, the British abandoned the idea of seizing Ticonderoga that year and turned back to spend the winter at the Canadian end of the lake.192
Arnold spent the winter traveling, and he was often greeted as a war hero. Neither Quebec nor Valcour Island had been victories, but in each case he had shown the kind of audacity that was desperately needed—and was so far lacking—in the Continental Army.
During his travels, Arnold brought troops to the beleaguered Washington along the Delaware River, and shared intelligence and stories with the top general, whom he hadn’t seen since leaving for Quebec. Then Arnold went to New Haven, where he visited his sister Hannah and his three sons, and paid a thousand pounds of his own money to bankroll a regiment started by some friends. After that, it was on to Rhode Island, where he was ordered to be prepared to confront British forces that had seized Newport. On a side trip, Arnold went to Boston, where he asked shopkeeper Paul Revere to find a sword knot, sash, epaulets and silk hose for his navy-blue uniform.193
Arnold was at a high point in his military career, but two significant events would pull him down.
While in Boston—the cradle of colonial radicalism—he met a young beauty from a Loyalist family named Elizabeth DeBlois. Despite her mother’s disapproval, the widowed, thirty-six-year-old Arnold tried to woo the fifteen-year-old DeBlois by smuggling her a love letter and a trunk of gowns. It’s not clear whether she ever answered the letter, but she did reject the gowns, and soon after accepted a different marriage proposal from an apprentice druggist.194
Meanwhile, a career disappointment may have permanently soured Arnold’s view toward American independence. When Congress announced the promotion of five men to major general, it passed over Arnold even though he had been a brigadier longer than any of them and had proved himself to be one of America’s most brave and resourceful military men.
Arnold immediately wrote to Washington, threatening to resign. Washington asked him to wait while he investigated. “I know some villain has been busy with my fame and easily slandered me,” Arnold wrote to Gates, in a sentence remarkable only because he used the singular “villain” rather than the plural.195 Arnold’s brash style had made scores of political foes, for reasons both petty and well founded.
Instead of dwelling on Arnold’s polarizing behavior, however, Washington diplomatically blamed the slight on a new congressional policy designed to spread out high-ranking officers among the states. Connecticut already had its share of major generals, Washington explained.196
Though Arnold was threatening to quit the war, even he must have known that warmaking was his gift, his calling, his perfect use. While he was brooding over the promotion snub, he was alerted that the British were raiding Danbury, Connecticut, and he immediately gathered militiamen to attack the invaders. During the fighting, Arnold’s horse was wounded, and the general fell to the ground, with one foot stuck in the stirrup. An enemy soldier rushed at him, bayonet flashing, and demanded his surrender. Instead Arnold drew his firearm and shot the man dead.197
Arnold’s apparent willingness to shelve his bitterness and risk his life for his country impressed Congress—or at least enough of its members so that Arnold was belatedly named a major general. That wasn’t enough for him, however. He went to Philadelphia and demanded that his seniority be made retroactive to when the other five had been promoted. And when Congress ignored him, he submitted his resignation.198
But the call of battle intervened. The British under General John Burgoyne, continuing their effort to control the line of the Hudson, invaded from Canada, seizing Ticonderoga for starters. Arnold asked Congress to put his resignation aside, and he again plunged into a desperate military action at Washington’s behest. He joined American defenders near Saratoga, New York, seeking to block the advancing British force. But Arnold found himself embroiled in a feud with Gates, his commanding officer and onetime friend, that nearly sacrificed victory to pettiness.
The Battle of Saratoga was actually two battles eighteen days apart. On September 19, 1777, the aggressive Arnold’s division clashed with the British, and Gates refused Arnold’s demand for reinforcements that could have defeated Burgoyne then and there. Late in the day, Gates relented, but the troops arrived too late to make a difference. Gates then reported to Congress that Burgoyne had been ably opposed by “a detachment from the army,” not mentioning that it was Arnold’s division.199
As the armies faced each other, Arnold smoldered, and he finally exploded when Gates decreed that one of Arnold’s best corps would take orders only from Gates’s staff. The bypassed Arnold angrily confronted Gates, who pulled a joker out of his sleeve. Citing the resignation still pending before Congress, Gates declared that Arnold—who had managed one of Gates’s divisions for weeks—might not be legitimately in command.
When General Benjamin Lincoln arrived on the scene, Arnold’s humiliation was complete: Gates removed Arnold from command in favor of Lincoln, who had been one of the five generals promoted ahead of Arnold half a year earlier. Though Gates wrote a letter giving Arnold permission to leave the battlefront, the disgruntled general stayed in camp, with little to do. It was not in his nature to leave a battlefield with combat still to come.
The second fight came October 7, with Burgoyne’s army clashing with the troops formerly led by Arnold. After hearing musket fire at the front, Arnold could stand it no longer. He climbed atop his black stallion and rode toward the sound of the gunfire, waving his sword over his head. Gates sent one of his majors riding after Arnold, to order him back. But Arnold was too swift, too driven. He rallied troops to attack one British strongpoint, then another. Gates’s major still had not reached him. With bullets flying all around, Arnold led his soldiers toward a small fort on a rise manned by two hundred Hessians. Arnold’s horse was shot, and then Arnold was, too.
Arnold’s wound did not stop the Americans from overtaking the Hessians’ position, a key advance in the Continental Army’s most important victory to that point. Soldiers who came to Arnold’s aid found him wounded in the left leg, the one he had injured twice at Quebec. Asked by a comrade where he had been shot, Arnold said, “In the same leg. I wish it had been my heart.”200 When Gates’s major finally reached the scene, he absurdly ordered Arnold to withdraw from the front lines.201
Arnold endured a painful thirty-mile wagon ride to a military hospital in Albany, where doctors assessed his shattered femur and decided that amputation was necessary. Arnold refused, risking gangrene and death. But again Arnold defied the odds. He was fitted with a wooden fracture box to hold the leg stable, and endured about three months of hospitalization, an excruciating period for a man as active as Arnold.
As his condition improved and regressed and improved again, Arnold was as combative as ever, railing at his doctors. “His peevishness could degrade the most capricious of the fair sex,” wrote Dr. James Browne.202
All the news was not bad. Burgoyne surrendered soon after Arnold’s heroics, and Congress eventually agreed to its own form of surrender, giving Arnold the seniority he had demanded.
After leaving the hospital, Arnold continued his recuperation in Middletown, Connecticut, where he visited his children in school and underwent more surgery to remove bone splinters.203
In the spring of 1778, when Peggy Shippen was in Philadelphia preparing for the Meschianza, another young woman in Boston fended off a second round of advances from Arnold.
Betsy DeBlois, now sixteen, who had rejected Arnold the year before and intended marrying an apprentice druggist, was availabl
e again. Her mother had stood up in church before the ceremony and forbidden the union. The ever ambitious Arnold saw an opportunity, thinking somehow that a crippled war hero might be more attractive to Betsy than an uninjured general had been the year before. His love letter reveals Arnold at the height of emotionalism: “Twenty times have I taken up my pen to write to you, and as often has my trembling hand refused to obey the dictates of my heart, a heart which has often been calm and serene amidst the clashing of arms.”204
Betsy—or perhaps her mother—responded by asking Arnold to leave her alone. Such requests were “impossibilities I cannot obey,” he wrote, adding that she might as well “wish me to exist without breathing as cease to love you.”205 But eventually he did give up. Betsy, who lived into her eighties, never married.206
After a hero’s welcome in New Haven, Arnold traveled by coach to Valley Forge to join Washington’s army. The commander, noticing that Arnold could not stand on his wounded leg, decided he was not yet fit for the battlefield.207 Accordingly, Arnold was assigned to be military governor of Philadelphia, that majestic American city vacated by the British, that city of divided loyalties and unending intrigues, that city where a lovely young woman named Peggy Shippen awaited.
CHAPTER 6
Love and Money
To many men, Peggy Shippen was the most desirable young woman in Philadelphia, but to Benedict Arnold, she was second choice. As stark evidence of this, Arnold wooed Peggy with a letter that contained many of the same words he had written to Betsy DeBlois only months earlier.
There is no indication that Peggy ever learned that his expressions of love were secondhand. And in any case, Arnold piled on a new layer of heavily perfumed language that is remarkable for its self-deprecating tone:
Dear madam, your charms have lighted a flame in my bosom which can never be extinguished; your heavenly image is too deeply impressed ever to be effaced. My passion is not founded on personal charms only: that sweetness of disposition and goodness of heart, that sentiment and sensibility which so strongly mark the character of the lovely Miss P. Shippen renders her amiable beyond expression, and will ever retain the heart she has once captivated. . . . Shall I expect no return to the most sincere, ardent, and disinterested passion? Do you feel no pity in your gentle bosom for the man who would die to make you happy? May I presume to hope it is not impossible I may make a favorable impression on your heart? Friendship and esteem, you acknowledge. . . . Consider before you doom me to misery, which I have not deserved but by loving you too extravagantly. Consult your own happiness, and if incompatible, forget there is so unhappy a wretch; for may I perish if I would give you one moment’s inquietude to purchase the greatest possible felicity to myself. Whatever my fate may be, my most ardent wish is for your happiness, and my latest breath will be to implore the blessing of heaven on the idol and only wish of my soul.208
Arnold and Peggy had met once in 1774 when she was fourteen. There is no reliable account of their second meeting as the summer of 1778 began, when Arnold returned to Philadelphia as military governor. But within two weeks of his arrival, the thirty-seven-year-old general was spending time with the barely eighteen-year-old Peggy.209
Though Arnold hobbled and was only five-foot-seven—two inches shorter than John André—he managed to cut an impressive figure, with broad shoulders, a muscular physique, and a fearless manner.210 He was as aggressive and determined in his assault on Fourth Street as he had been in Quebec and Saratoga. “I must tell you that Cupid has given our little general a more mortal wound than all the host of Britons could. . . . Miss Peggy Shippen is the fair one,” gossiped Mary Morris in a letter to her mother.211
Arnold’s entry into Philadelphia’s social scene was well timed to capture Peggy.
Her father, still on the political sidelines and therefore without significant income, was so worried about his finances that he considered leaving Philadelphia for Lancaster. “The common articles of life, such as are absolutely necessary for a family, are not much higher here than at Lancaster;” he wrote his father, “but the style of living my fashionable daughters have introduced into my family and their dress will, I fear, before long oblige me to change the scene.”212
Continental paper money was in freefall, dropping from one-third of its face value to one-tenth in an eight-month period and causing severe privation for common Philadelphians who had recently survived a difficult occupation by an invading army.213 Yet Edward Shippen, who found fault with his daughters’ spendthrift ways, complained about any reduction in extravagances for himself or his father. “I have sent you . . . half a dozen pounds of chocolate,” he wrote his father in Lancaster, “but I am afraid it will be very difficult to procure Madeira wine at any price. . . . There is no such thing as syrup, the sugar bakers having all dropped the business a long while. It is possible after some time there may be an importation of French molasses; if so, I will try to get you some.”214
In a time of economic uncertainty, Arnold may have appeared to be a good match for Peggy because of his seemingly bottomless treasury. But in fact, he was badly overextended, having spent his own money to supply the expedition to Canada, for which he was never properly reimbursed. Like other rebel military leaders, he found himself working for free. Congress was three years behind in paying Arnold’s salary. But to a man like Arnold, lack of money was no reason to stop spending.
Arnold moved into the Penn Mansion at Sixth and Market Streets, which had been headquarters for his British predecessor as Philadelphia’s military ruler, General Howe. The fleeing enemy had stripped the great house of its furnishings, so Arnold restored its grandeur at high cost with the help of a Loyalist-leaning merchant named Joseph Stansbury, who would soon assist Arnold in far more secret arrangements.
The general staffed the mansion lavishly, since he was expected to entertain politicians, merchants, and others with business before him. He rode around town in a carriage, which some critics took as a regal pretension, though in fact Arnold’s leg was simply not well enough to allow him to ride a horse.
Arnold’s high style of living attracted much attention, coming amid the crisis in Continental paper money. To stay afloat, Arnold arranged secretive and questionable business deals that posed serious conflicts with his official duties. It was routine for an officer to maintain his private livelihood while serving his country. But the manner in which Arnold was compelled to juggle his business affairs and his combat duties proved both absurd and impossible. It was the equivalent of expecting General Dwight Eisenhower to find a few minutes to sell insurance when he wasn’t busy planning the invasion of Normandy.
Joseph Reed, the Pennsylvania politician whose vendetta against Benedict Arnold pushed the general and Peggy toward treachery. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Profiteering like Arnold’s was widespread during the Revolutionary War, and not necessarily against the rules. When sailors at sea captured an enemy ship, they were allowed to split the goods they seized. On land, soldiers were generally permitted to profit from their warmaking as long as their business affairs did not get in the way of their public duty.
As the colonial leaders retook Philadelphia, they correctly anticipated a wild scramble to smuggle goods out of the city, and they wanted to make sure that Loyalist-owned property did not escape.
While still at Valley Forge, Arnold wrote a pass for a merchant so he could leave with goods on his ship, the Charming Nancy, even as Congress was preparing to impose an embargo on such shipments. Arnold later bought a part interest in the ship’s cargo, which included linens, glassware, nails, and tea. Still later, when the ship was stuck in the port of Egg Harbor, New Jersey, and at risk of British seizure, Arnold ordered the use of twelve government wagons to go overland and rescue the cargo. Successful in bringing the goods back to Philadelphia, he and his partners turned a considerable profit. Arnold said later that he intended to repay the government for the use of th
e wagons.
Before taking control of Philadelphia, Arnold hatched another moneymaking plot. His new aide David Franks, a Canadian cousin of Becky Franks’s father, would hurry into the city and buy up as many goods as possible for Arnold on the sly before civil authority was reestablished.215 But that plan was foiled by the intervention of a powerful Pennsylvania congressman named Joseph Reed, who would soon become Arnold’s greatest enemy. Reed strongly urged Arnold to order the closure of the city’s shops for a week while authorities assessed what was needed to provision the army. Arnold publicly acquiesced, and privately called off Franks’s shopping spree. But the scheming general found a secret way to profit from the week’s embargo. Arnold and his partners ignored the trading ban and paid bargain prices for Loyalist-owned luxury goods that would soon be subject to seizure. Because these were luxury items rather than essentials, Arnold could tell himself he was not hurting the war effort, but there was no doubt he was using his authority to gain an unfair competitive advantage.216
Arnold’s acquiescence to Reed’s call for the shop closures did little to satisfy the ambitious and increasingly vengeful politician. While Arnold collected enemies the way some men collected snuffboxes, he would have done well to avoid clashing with Reed. No nemesis in Arnold’s life would be more damaging.
Joseph Reed was the son of a merchant and iron forge owner from Trenton, New Jersey, and received the finest education available in the area, at the Academy of Philadelphia (a forerunner of the University of Pennsylvania) and the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Then he crossed the ocean to study law at London’s Middle Temple, the same place where Peggy Shippen’s father had been called to the bar.
