The Lesson of Benedict Arnold

I just finished reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution.  It is one of a series that Philbrick has written about the settlement of America by Europeans and the early years of the American Revolution.  The book goes into detail about military operations in Pennsylvania, New York, and the surrounding areas during the Revolution, what was happening in key communities, and the inter-personal relationships that shaped America’s fight for independence.  Philbrick’s insights into the personalities, skills, ambitions, and human strengths and weaknesses of our early military leaders and their impact on the Revolution are intriguing, but they took on new meaning reading about them as the Trump impeachment movement took shape over the past few weeks.

            Arnold has become the paragon of the ultimate traitor over the years.  However, he first achieved notoriety as a military leader under George Washington and as the hero of several major battles against the British.  But he was also a prideful man whose mistakes and personal animosities cost him leadership roles and the recognition that he felt was due him.  Congress passed over him for promotion and, at one point, he was court martialed for his actions.  At the same time, he entered into several shady business dealings in an attempt to recover the financial position that he held prior to the Revolution and to support his new wife, who came from a Loyalist family.  

            Ultimately, he turned traitor.  By the time Washington appointed him as commander of West Point—a strategically important site for the defense of New York and the mid-Atlantic states—Arnold had decided to sell information to the British.  When he was found out, he fled, eventually joining the British army to fight against his former compatriots.  After the war, he remained in Britain, except for a brief, unpopular, stay in Canada, and died in 1801.

            As Philbrick paints Arnold’s portrait, the traitor was driven not by ideals or feelings of patriotism to England, but by personal animosities, hurt ego, and, most immediately, the desire to make money.  Philbrick describes Washington’s reaction to learning of Arnold’s betrayal this way:

Being a republic, the country they were struggling to create was ruled not by a king or an emperor but by the mutual consent of the governed.  Arnold had betrayed not just Washington but every American citizen he had pledged to protect.  Since republics rely on the inherent virtue of the people, they are exceedingly fragile.  All it takes is one well-placed person to destroy everything.  Washington, his face betraying the sadness, anger, and shock of this most recent revelation turned to Lafayette and asked, “Whom can we trust now?”

            I finished Valiant Ambition on the day Congress decided to open impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump for encouraging a foreign government to interfere in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.  The evidence was plain that Trump had asked the President of Ukraine for a “favor”—to investigate the son of his main rival in the upcoming election.  In the process, we learned that Trump had also told the Russians that he had no problem with their interference in the 2016 election.  

            As our country steels itself for the upcoming impeachment investigation, let us not forget the lesson of Benedict Arnold.

A Nation of Immigrants: A Lesson from Nathaniel Philbrick

I am reading Valiant Ambition, the third book in Nathaniel Philbrick’s history of the American Revolution, subtitled, “George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution.”  It gave me a reminder of why the lessons of history are so important in guiding our actions and attitudes in the present. 

In Valiant Ambition, Philbrick writes about the battle of Brandywine, in southeastern Pennsylvania.  “After the Battle of Brandywine,” he writes, “a British officer listed the nationality of the rebel prisoners,” adding:

If this list is any indication, most of the soldiers in Washington’s army had been born not in America but in England, Ireland, and Germany, with only 82 of the 315 prisoners (approximately 25 percent) listed as native born.  This meant that while the vast majority of the country’s citizens stayed at home, the War for Independence was being waged, in large part, by newly arrived immigrants.  Those native-born Americans who by mid-1777 were serving in the army tended to be either African-Americans, Native Americans, or what one historian has called “free white men on the move” . . . (p. 187).

He adds further that these soldiers “did not have the education and social standing of the zealous patriots who had served during the early years of the Revolution, but they would become the battle-hardened backbone of the Continental army” (ibid.).

            Today, almost 250 years later, it is good to be reminded that we have always been a nation of immigrants—immigrants who feel deeply the value of our liberty and are willing to fight to achieve and to sustain it.  

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Philbrick, Nathaniel.  Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution. New York: Penguin Books, 2016.