The Great Traitor (May/June 1994 | Volume: 45, Issue: 3)

The Great Traitor

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Authors: Geoffrey C. Ward

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

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May/June 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 3

A good many Americans have been accused of betraying their country over the past two centuries. Yet only Benedict Arnold’s name has entered the language as a synonym for treason.

One reason may simply be that Arnold was guilty as charged. About the rest of the most celebrated accused, we’re not so sure. Aaron Burr may or may not have tried to hack out a country for himself west of the Mississippi. Ezra Pound’s defense for broadcasting on behalf of the Axis during World War II was that he’d been mad. Alger Hiss may have provided secrets to the Soviets, but he was never convicted of having done so. Controversy still surrounds the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Jonathan Pollard’s excuse is that the country for which he was caught spying is an American ally.

 

But there doesn’t seem to be a whisper of a doubt about Arnold’s culpability. It is one of the many strengths of Clare Brandt’s vivid and concise new biography The Man in the Mirror: A Life of Benedict Arnold that, while offering no excuses for what Arnold did, she manages to provide a coherent explanation for why he did it.

Until the age of 14, Benedict Arnold had every reason to believe that he would move smoothly to a position of power and privilege. His father, a successful trader descended from the founders of Rhode Island, was wealthy enough to send his son away to school in preparation for attending Yale. But the elder Arnold was also an alcoholic; he had to be locked up for public drunkenness and lost his fortune, and, eventually, his senses. His son was pulled from school and apprenticed to a druggist for seven years, his family humiliated, their assured future suddenly vanished.

Benedict Arnold was bright, energetic, ambitious, and, by the time he left his apothecary’s shop to lead the minutemen of New Haven off to war in the spring of 1775, he seemed well on his way to recouping the family fortune. But Brandt believes that he had never recovered from the “earthquake” of his father’s disgrace; for all his outward success, “the space where self-assurance and self-respect should have developed was empty … he was … hollow … driven by a craving for reassurance and confirmation that could never be satisfied, even by his own well-earned triumphs. Whatever he had was never enough; the more he gained, the more he needed.”

Part of the reason that Arnold makes such a satisfying villain is that he was first such an authentic hero. He may have been the ablest American battlefield commander in the Revolution; he was almost certainly the boldest. “He’d ride right in,” recalled an old veteran. “It was ‘Come on, boys!’ ‘Twasn’t ‘Go boys!’” With Ethan Allen, he seized Fort Ticonderoga even before the war was really under way. He led an arduous 350-mile wilderness march that almost took Quebec, then commanded a homemade