On the benefits and the limitations to remembering our most
infamous traitor the way we do.
I’m not going to argue that we shouldn’t remember Benedict
Arnold as one of our first, and one of our most enduring, national traitors,
because, well, he was. Compared to the
contested and still controversial treason accusations leveled at his
contemporary Aaron Burr, Arnold’s traitorous acts were far more overt and
undisputed—when Major
Andre was caught and Arnold’s plan to hand over the fort at West Point to
British forces discovered, Arnold immediately went over to the British side
and helped lead their war effort for the war’s remaining two years; after the
Revolution he settled in England and lived out his remaining two decades of
life in that adopted homeland.
So Arnold was a traitor to the Revolutionary army and cause,
and remembering him as such is certainly accurate to the specific histories and
events. Doing so is also beneficial on a broader level, as it forces us to recognize
the Founding Fathers and their iconic Revolutionary peers as no less human and
flawed than any other leaders or people. Arnold was one of the Revolution’s
first war heroes, playing a decisive role in the early victory
at Saratoga and other conflicts; yet just two short years later, politics
and preferences within the Continental Army, coupled with financial
difficulties (perhaps
due to lending money to the Continental Army, which would be a textbook
definition of irony), led Arnold to cast his lot with the same forces he had
helped defeat at Saratoga.
Yet there’s at least one significant downside to remembering
Arnold as a traitor, or more exactly to the collective blind spot that such
memories reveal. After all, the most simple yet most commonly ignored fact of
the Revolution is this: it represented an act of treason against the colonists’
Royal government, and each and every American involved in it was thus a
traitor. (There was a reason why Ben
Franklin worried, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, about
everyone hanging separately if they did not hang together.) Awareness of that
fact might not change our collective perspective on the Revolution and its
leaders—but might it not at least shift our understanding of the loyalists, of those who
sided (lawfully) with England during the war? As a soldier who sold out his
comrades, Arnold was of course something more than just a loyalist—but the
point here is that treason, during the Revolution, was a loaded and complex
concept however we look at it.
Next Revolutionary reality tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
What do you think? Other Revolutionary
histories or stories you’d highlight?
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