[On June 14th,
1775, the Continental Army was formed at the Second
Continental Congress in Philadelphia. So for the 250th
of that momentous military moment, I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of iconic
Revolutionary War figures, leading up to a special weekend post on that
historic anniversary!]
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.
Last
Revolutionary figure tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Rev War figures you’d highlight?
