Benedict Arnold gets a bad rap. That tends to happen when you’re the first traitor in the history of your country. But the image of Benedict Arnold we’ve learned about in history class is a far cry from the man himself. It has been heavily edited, simplified, sanitized, and simplified to the point of being almost cartoonish. It’s essentially “Benedict Arnold hated freedom and betrayed America to the very bad British!” The man’s name has essentially become a byword for a turncoat. Even people who know hardly anything about Benedict Arnold know that being referred to one is a bad thing. As usual, the real story is a bit more complicated.
Benedict Arnold was a very highly regarded American general ruing the Revolutionary War. He was held in especially high regard by George Washington. The dude picked up two leg wounds in service to his country, and led his troops to multiple very important victories. He achieved the rank of major general, which is nothing to scoff at. But when you realized that he achieved the rank of major general in like four years of total service, with no prior military experience, (certainly not at officer level), while fighting a glorified insurrection against a first rate superpower, his achievements become all the more impressive. Before the war started, he was a wealthy merchant. During the war, he lost everything. And he still fought, and he still lead, and he still WON. Benedict Arnold was a legitimate fucking badass with balls the size of Plymouth Rock. It’s no wonder George Washington thought the world of the guy, even if he was, according to numerous reports, kind of a dick.
The fact remains that Benedict Arnold was a traitor. In the middle of a war, he changed sides, and went to fight for the enemy. That is about as clear cut a case of treason as you can get. It’s basically the textbook definition of the term! But why? He was highly regarded, at least by George Washington, and if George fucking Washington, in the middle of the Revolutionary War, thinks you’re a cool dude, it doesn’t really matter what the fuck anybody else thinks. Everyone else thinks you’re a dick? Fuck ’em! George Washington thinks you’re alright. So you’ve got George Washington as your BFF and an unbelievable track record you’ve racked up during a brief, but ridiculously illustrious military career. Why give that all up and turn traitor? He had to have known that history would not be kind to him, and dudes at that level very much care about their reputation, both during their lifetime, and especially after. Yet he still turned traitor. Why? Well, it’s complicated.
There isn’t exactly a strict consensus on the reason for the treason. There were multiple factors. For one, as accomplished and capable a general as Benedict Arnold was, he felt very strongly that he was under appreciated. A guy loses his livelihood and everything he spent his whole life building to fight for the cause, it’s hardly a surprise if he expects the cause to give back. The cause did not. Arnold felt very strongly that he was being passed over for promotions in favor of younger and less accomplished officers. He felt that other people were unjustly taking (and receiving) credit for his accomplishments. He felt that the Continental Congress didn’t like him and were treating him unfairly. The army was in disarray. Morale was low. The Continental Congress, the beating heart of the revolution, was a quagmire. If you think today’s Congress is ineffective and a general all around clusterfuck, it is practically a well oiled machine compared to what it was back then. And you can’t really blame them. They were learning on the job. Making it up as they went along. There was no precedent for what they were trying to do.
It’s easy to look back with 20/20 hindsight, knowing how everything turned out. and wonder “What the fuck was this guy thinking?” But at that point in time, at that point in the war, success was far from a foregone conclusion. The Continental army was still basically a bunch of rag tag militias and they were up against a foe who was orders of magnitude better organized, better supplied, better equipped, and better trained than them. If nothing else, British soldiers were getting regularly paid, which was more than could be said for the Continentals. To say that their odds were long would be the understatement of the century.
Say you’re a guy who’s been on board since pretty much day one. You’ve given a lot. Suffered two serious wounds to a leg that already had fucking gout! Sacrificed everything you had for the cause. Fought in numerous major battles. Won quite a few of them against staggering fucking odds! Sure, you’ve achieved a pretty high rank in the army, but you feel like you’ve plateaued. You feel like you’re not being given your due. Hell, even the big guy, your once BFFF GW himself, seems like he’s kinda giving you the side eye. The army isn’t exactly looking like a world beater, and Congress are a bunch of bickering bastards who can’t seem to agree which way the fucking wind blows. You really wanna stay on this sinking ship? And that’s before your new bride, who just so happens to be a gorgeous young Tory loyalist starts whispering sweet treasonous nothings in your ear. Oh, and by the way, you’re already a traitor to the crown and if this war doesn’t go the way you planned, you are FUUUUCKED! A random foot soldier might be able to fly under the radar, but a goddamn major general? They’re stringing your ass up just to set an example! Hell, it’s a wonder he didn’t switch sides sooner.
Like I said earlier, Arnold was already a traitor just by the very nature of fighting against the British. Just like George Washington, the Continental Congress, and every single person who participated in or supported the war. If we’re gonna shit on Benedict Arnold for betraying America, are we gonna shit on America for betraying Britain? American history textbooks tend to gloss over this fact, but the Revolutionary War didn’t exactly come about by unanimous consensus. Lots of people were against the war and very much liked the way the crown was running shit. Or, at the very least, they were used to it. This was the way things worked, they were used to it, and they didn’t really see a huge problem with it. So when shit hit the fan, A LOT of people in the colonies were less than thrilled about it. Those people viewed Arnold, Washington, and everyone else connected with the revolution with the same, (or perhaps even greater), derision than people today view Benedict Arnold.
If we are going to deride Arnold for the sole reason that he was a traitor, shouldn’t we then deride George Washington and the Founding Fathers for being the same thing? Or are traitors only bad people if they betray OUR side, whatever our side happens to be? Now, lest you think that I am being intentionally obtuse, allow me to clarify something. I believe that treason directed at a monarchy, (especially one with a long and storied history of doing awful shit like the British monarchy), is not only okay, but a moral imperative. Monarchies are unjust, immoral, and all around fucking awful. They serve the interests of a few at the expense of humanity as a whole. So if someone decides to start a revolution to throw off the yoke of empire, they’re going to get nothing but love from me.
Those are the people Benedict Arnold betrayed. So you could make an argument that the problem wasn’t Arnold’s betrayal in and of itself, but rather against whom that betrayal came. It came against the side which held the moral high ground. After all, not all treason is created equal. An American general in World War 2 defecting to Nazi Germany would be judged much more harshly by future generations than a high ranking Nazi defecting to the Allies. But how solid, exactly, was the Continentals’ moral high ground? Sure, they were fighting to overthrow the yoke of empire, but was there more to it? As it turns out, there was. One big difference between the British and the Americans was slavery. Both sides in the Revolutionary War had slaves. But the difference was that the British were setting their slaves free, while the Americans were, if anything, trying to get more. Now, it should be noted that the British weren’t just freeing their slaves out of the sheer goodness of their hearts. The condition for freedom was fighting in the war. If a slave agreed to fight for the British, they would be granted their freedom. It was a simple way for the British to bolster their ranks on the cheap, and preserve goodwill at home, since they would now have to send fewer men to fight in the Colonies. Still, as cynical and self serving as the British reasons for freeing their slaves may have been, they still resulted in slaves being freed. Freeing a man from slavery, even for cynical and self serving reasons, is still a better thing than doing the opposite.
So, while Arnold most definitely and beyond a shadow of a doubt betrayed the Americans, he did not exactly betray the side with the moral high ground after all. Arnold betrayed Britain, a monarchy, when he joined the American Revolution. But his rebellion against the crown had little to do with moral opposition to the concept of monarchy, and more to do with how the actions of Parliament negatively affected his business and bottom line. When he betrayed the Americans, it had nothing to do with the immorality and cruelty of slavery and more to do with the £20,000 the British offered him to hand over the strategically important fort at West Point in New York (of which he was commander at the time.) These actions, combined with Arnold’s numerous attempts to profit from the war, show him to be, if anything, consistent. The man’s main concern appears to have always been his bottom line. Everything else came second.
If you’ve made it this far in this article, you may think that this is a defense of Benedict Arnold. I assure you, dear reader, that it is anything but. After he defected to the British, Arnold was given the rank of brigadier general and allowed to raise a force of American loyalists. This force was called the American Legion. With his troops, Arnold fought in several battles, including the capture of Fort Griswold in Connecticut, upon which Arnold and his American Legion attacked and killed American soldiers who had already surrendered. I believe that loyalty to humanity supersedes loyalty to an arbitrary chunk of territory or a piece of cloth with some colors on it. Countries, governments, flags, anthems, they are all just symbols. They are little more than fictitious entities. You cannot kill a country. You cannot murder an anthem (at least not literally.) But you CAN murder humans, and that’s exactly what Benedict Arnold did, even though he didn’t have to. Benedict Arnold may have been a traitor, but he was also a war criminal and a murderer, and that is much worse.
Fuck that guy.
