Rick Atkinson - The British Are Coming

Even now, gaunt after his Maine anabasis, Arnold at thirty-four was muscular and graceful, with black hair, a swarthy complexion, and that long, beaky nose. He was adept at fencing, boxing, sailing, shooting, riding, and ice-skating. “There wasn’t any waste timber in him,” a subordinate observed. Restive and audacious, he was “as brave a man as ever lived,” in one comrade’s estimation, and as fine a battle captain as America would produce that century, a man born to lead other men in the dark of night. Yet he would forever be an enigma, beset with both a gnawing sense of grievance and the nattering enmity of lesser fellows. His destiny, as the historian James Kirby Martin later wrote, encompassed both “the luminescent hero and the serpentine villain.” His Christian name meant “blessed,” but that came to be a central irony in his life, for his was an unquiet soul.

His father was a drunk merchant who had started life as a cooper’s apprentice, rising high only to tumble low, from the owner of a fine house and a prominent pew in the First Church of Norwich to arrest for public inebriation and debt. Young Benedict was forced to leave school, abandoning the family plan for him to attend Yale. Instead he was apprenticed in 1756 to two brothers who ran a successful pharmacy and trading firm; the boy would later describe himself as a coward until forced to head his household at fifteen. “Be dutiful to superiors, obliging to equals, and affable to inferiors, if any such there be,” his mother had told him before her death three years later, adding, “Don’t neglect your precious soul, which once lost can never be regained.”

His masters were generous and trusting. They sent him on trading voyages to the West Indies and London and, when he turned twenty-one, provided him with a handsome grubstake of £500. He set up his own emporium in the growing seaport of New Haven, selling Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, Francis’s Female Elixir, and tincture of valerian, an aphrodisiac, as well as earrings, rosewater, surgical instruments, and books ranging from Paradise Lost to Practical Farrier . His black-and-gold storefront sign proclaimed, SIBI TOTIQUE—for himself and for everyone—and he did not correct customers who called him “Dr. Arnold from London.”

His ambitions grew with his business. He bought a forty-ton sloop, the Fortune , running her from Montreal to the Bay of Honduras, trading livestock, furs, Spanish gold, cheese, slaves, cotton, and salt. By 1766, at twenty-five, “Captain Arnold” owned three ships and was an adept smuggler of contraband rum and Central American mahogany. More than once he ran afoul of associates, who accused him of jackleg business practices; in that same year he was briefly arrested after failing to pay £1,700 to his London creditors. Even so, as one of New Haven’s most prosperous merchants, he married, had three sons, joined the Freemasons to widen his social and business circles, and built a house overlooking the harbor, with a gambrel roof, marble fireplaces, wainscoting, and an orchard with a hundred fruit trees. But British commercial repression pinched him; he grew political, then radical, and in March 1775 was elected captain of a militia company, the Foot Guards, by comrades who saw him as a stalwart, worldly leader.

With the seizure of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, Arnold burst into American history, never to leave. After securing both forts in May 1775, wearing a scarlet militia uniform coat with buff facings and big epaulettes, he led three dozen men on a brief raid across Lake Champlain into Canada to capture thirteen prisoners and a sloop—the George , which he renamed Enterprise —in what the biographer Willard Sterne Randall would call the first American naval assault as well as the first American attack of a foreign country. In a long letter to the Continental Congress, Arnold was also among the first to urge an invasion of Canada via St. Johns, Chambly, and Montreal, offering to lead the expedition himself “with the smiles of heaven.” Congress approved the plan but not the planner, selecting Schuyler and Montgomery instead. A few weeks later, Arnold rode into Cambridge to settle his financial accounts with the provincial congress, which had subsidized the Ticonderoga escapade. He took the opportunity to convince Washington that he was the right man to lead a second invasion force directly to Quebec along a rugged trace used in the past century by Indian raiders, Jesuit missionaries, and French trappers. His proposed route followed the Kennebec and Chaudière Rivers from the coast of the Eastern Country—still part of Massachusetts, but later to become Maine—to the St. Lawrence valley.

The boy in the shop apron had made good. Yet throughout his remarkable ascent he was bedeviled by episodes that suggested a trajectory forever wobbling between shadow and bright light. An accusation in 1770 that he was a drunken whoremonger who had contracted a venereal disease in the West Indies led to a lawsuit, depositions from business colleagues “in regard to my being in perfect health,” and a duel. In another incident, Arnold allegedly dragged a sailor from a tavern and administered forty lashes for gossiping about his smuggling activities. Success at Ticonderoga was followed by an ugly quarrel over who was in command—“I took the liberty of breaking his head,” Arnold wrote after thrashing another militia colonel—and a brief mutiny during which Arnold was locked in the Enterprise cabin. “Col. Arnold has been greatly abused and misrepresented by designing persons,” one soldier wrote, but others saw him as headstrong and arrogant. After departing Crown Point in a huff, he learned that his wife had abruptly died, leaving him with three boys under the age of eight. He put them in the care of his faithful sister and headed for Cambridge, telling a friend that “an idle life under my present circumstances would be but a lingering death.”

Washington chose to take a chance on him. The commander in chief had contemplated a similar expedition through Canada’s back door, and this pugnacious, enterprising, persuasive merchant—this fighter —seemed worth a gamble. In early September, he gave Arnold a Continental Army colonel’s commission and permission to recruit eleven hundred “active woodsmen” from the regiments in Cambridge for a mission that was “secret though known to everybody,” as one officer noted. “Not a moment’s time is to be lost,” Washington wrote. “The season will be considerably advanced.” He believed “that Quebec will fall into our hands a very easy prey.”

Few military expeditions would be more heroic or more heartbreaking. “The drums beat and away they go,” a rifleman in Cambridge wrote a friend, “to scale the walls of Quebec and spend the winter in joy and festivity among the sweet nuns.” The “active woodsmen” were mostly farmers, with a few adventurous oddballs like a wiry nineteen-year-old named Aaron Burr, grandson of the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards and son of the former president of the college in Princeton, New Jersey, where young Burr was admitted at age thirteen. Washington also provided three companies of riflemen from Virginia and Pennsylvania, partly to get them out of Cambridge; their acknowledged leader was a deep-chested teamster, sawyer, and “formidable border pugilist” named Daniel Morgan. Captain Morgan, known as “the Old Wagoner,” carried a turkey call made out of a conch shell. He also wore scars from a savage British flogging administered after he beat up an insolent regular in 1755 and from an Indian musket ball that perforated his cheek a year later.

After marching forty miles north to Newburyport, Arnold’s brigade paraded with flags unfurled near the Merrimack River, listened to a sermon drawn from Exodus in the First Presbyterian Church—“If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence”—then clambered onto eleven coasters stinking of fish. “Weighed anchor,” the soldier Ebenezer Wild told his journal, “with a pleasant gale, our colors flying, drums beating, fifes playing, and the hills all round covered with pretty girls weeping for their departing swains.” The men soon grew seasick—“indifferent whether I lived or died,” as one wrote—despite the two hundred pounds of ginger Arnold distributed as an antidote. But by September 22 they had traveled over one hundred miles up the Maine coast, past Honeywell Head and Merrymeeting Bay to Reuben Colburn’s shipyard on the banks of the Kennebec.