Patriots (37 page)

Forty-one days after the first shot at Lexington, the
London
Chronicle
printed a detailed story of the day’s events. It was entirely favorable to the Americans and included a note from Arthur Lee, the London agent for Massachusetts. Lee said he had received sworn statements from witnesses who confirmed that the British had fired first. The affidavits were on file with the Lord Mayor should any reader care to consult them. General Gage’s side of the affair arrived ten days later. Although it differed in emphasis, it confirmed that the unthinkable had happened, that Americans had fired back at His Majesty’s troops. At first, Lord Dartmouth had not commented. Then Gage’s version arrived, and Dartmouth tried to play down the battle’s significance. But, having misjudged American resistance in the past, he seemed unlikely to be staying on in his post, especially since George III was clearly digging in for a showdown. America, the king told Dartmouth, was either a colony or an enemy.

Benedict Arnold

ANNE S. K. BROWN MILITARY COLLECTION

C
APTAIN
Benedict Arnold’s lineage in America was long and illustrious. His great-grandfather had succeeded Roger Williams as the president of Rhode Island Colony. By the time Benedict’s father moved to Connecticut in the 1730s, however, the family’s fortunes were slipping, and he became a barrelmaker. When Benedict was a child, his father was already drinking heavily.

The boy was not large—he never grew taller than five-foot seven—but strong and fearless. He was dark, with striking blue eyes and a quick, cold smile.
Benedict’s teachers remembered him as mischievous but bright and inventive, and his mother had no trouble in apprenticing him to her Lathrop relatives, two brothers from Yale College who had become druggists in Norwich.

Benedict found life at the pharmacy tame. When he could escape to the local mill, he rode the waterwheel like a bronco, soaring high in the air, holding tight as it dunked him under the
water. That kind of daring made him famous around Norwich. It is not true that he stole young birds from the nest and maimed them or that he strewed glass shards near the school. His neighbors traded those stories only much later.

When Benedict was fourteen, the sheriff caught him stealing tar barrels from a shipyard for an election-day bonfire, and the husky boy stripped off his jacket and challenged the sheriff to settle the matter with his fists. A year later, Benedict ran off to join the British Army in the French and Indian War. He got as far as Hartford before his mother appealed to her minister, who had the boy sent home. The next year he succeeded and reached the battle over Fort Ticonderoga. But when he grew bored with military discipline, he deserted with a pocketful of parched corn and slipped back to Connecticut and his job at the drugstore. The British advertised in the
New York Gazette
, offering forty shillings for information leading to his arrest. When a British officer came through Norwich looking for deserters, Benedict’s friends hid him in a cellar.

His apprenticeship ended at twenty-one, and the Lathrop brothers helped him open a shop in New Haven where he sold drugs, books and sundries imported from London. For his sign Benedict chose a Latin motto:
Sibi totique
—For himself and for all. Benedict’s mother died and then his father, whose drinking had eventually made him a public embarrassment. Benedict spent his inheritance on a trip to London to buy stationery, drugs and rare books—the Bible in Hebrew, copies of
Tom Jones.
A year or two after he returned, he had acquired his own warehouse and partnerships in merchant vessels. Sailing up and down the coast, he traded in livestock and timber. John Hancock may have inherited his fortune, and Benedict Arnold made his own, but both fortunes were built on smuggling.

With his growing prosperity, Arnold became acceptable to the old families of New Haven. He bought a fine white house set off with luxuriant shrubbery on Water Street, where his only sister, tall, blond, gentle Hannah, acted as his hostess. Arnold had kept a jealous eye on Hannah from the time their parents died, and when she fell in love, he set out to end the romance. The man was French, Catholic and a dancing master, and Arnold ordered him to stay away from his sister. One day he looked through a window and caught the couple together in the sitting
room. He sent a friend to rap loudly on the door. When the dancing master leaped out through the window, Arnold chased him, firing pistol shots at his heels. Hannah subsided into spinsterhood.

His success seemed to offer Arnold more scope for indulging his bad temper. When he was on a trading voyage to the Bay of Honduras, a British captain, Croskie, sent a note inviting him for the evening. Arnold was tired and didn’t acknowledge the invitation. He intended to apologize the next morning, but Croskie found him first. “You are a damned Yankee,” he told Arnold, “destitute of good manners.”

Arnold removed a glove, bowed and returned to his own ship. Duels were forbidden in New England, but this was the West Indies. The next morning he arrived in a small boat at an island in the bay with his second and a surgeon. Captain Croskie appeared, followed by a band of natives. Arnold sent them away at gunpoint. Croskie fired first and missed. Arnold then grazed him. “I give you warning,” he said as Croskie’s wound was being dressed, “if you miss this time, I will kill you.”

The British captain apologized.

Arnold almost lost one of his ships to confiscation when he was twenty-five. A sailor,
Peter Boole, tried to blackmail him over contraband from the Indies. Arnold refused to pay, and Boole informed the customs agents. Soon afterward, Arnold caught him and beat him badly. When Boole threatened to sue, Arnold collected a gang of men who considered informing a heinous crime. They inflicted forty lashes on Boole and ran him out of town. Boole continued to press for justice until two judges awarded him a mere fifty shillings in damages. The judges were burned in effigy, and a torchlight parade was staged in Benedict Arnold’s honor. Only six months after the Stamp Act riots, Arnold had found a way to turn the antigovernment sentiment to his own uses.

With his powerful build and his Caribbean tan, Arnold was popular with New Haven’s young women. At twenty-five, he fell passionately in love with Margaret Mansfield, the daughter of New Haven’s sheriff. They had their first son within a year of their marriage, and two more not long afterward. His shipping business sometimes faltered, London merchants hounded him for bills, and his wife grew estranged and would not answer his letters while he was away at sea. One winter he returned to find that Peggy
Arnold had heard that her husband had contracted a venereal disease in the islands and would not let him touch her.

One consolation was his membership in the Governor’s Foot Guards, a unit made up of the most prominent young men in New Haven. When Arnold was named its captain, he was as proud as John Hancock had been of leading Boston’s cadets, and he celebrated in the same way. He ordered his tailor to run up a scarlet coat, which he wore with white breeches and white stockings.

By the time of the Boston Port Act, Arnold was drilling his men regularly on the New Haven green. He had recruited about sixty of them, including many students from Yale. When news of the slaughter at Lexington reached New Haven, about noon the next day, Arnold bullied the selectmen into opening the powder magazine, but an officer asked him to delay his march to Massachusetts until orders could be issued. Captain Arnold wasn’t prepared to wait.
“None but Almighty God,” he said, “shall prevent my marching.”

All the same, sending the local guardsmen away from home required a written agreement, and before they left Arnold and his men signed a pledge to conduct themselves decently and inoffensively. They also agreed to avoid every vice, including gambling, swearing and drunkenness. Officers were not permitted to strike their men, but an unruly private could be expelled for being unworthy of serving in such a glorious cause.

Captain Arnold reached Cambridge and took as his headquarters the mansion of a Tory who had fled to Boston. His smart apparel and the uniforms of his men stood out among the dusty farm clothes of the other troops, and when the Americans wanted to return the body of a British officer who had been taken prisoner at Lexington and died of his wounds, Captain Arnold’s men were chosen as the honor guard. But he was not content with ceremonial duties. The captain went before Dr. Joseph Warren and the Committee of Safety with a plan. He said that he knew Fort Ticonderoga, although he didn’t reveal his desertion there. He proposed to lead a band of Americans to seize the fort from the British. The idea was daring but not original. Months before, Samuel Adams had anticipated what the British strategy might be when war came. He concluded that General Gage would try to cut off New England from the south and the west by sending troops down through Lake Champlain, Lake George and the Hudson River to
the town of New York. As Gage was dispatching scouts to Concord, Adams had sent John Brown, a Pittsfield lawyer, to Canada to gauge Canadian attitudes toward an American revolt. Brown was also told to gather information about the condition of the forts since the French and Indian War. Three weeks before the battle of Lexington, he had returned to say that if the king’s troops provoked a battle, Fort Ticonderoga should be seized at once. In fact, Brown had assigned the task to a group of New Hampshire farmers who were already waging a running battle against New Yorkers in a property dispute. Those men from New Hampshire, led by a giant named Ethan Allen, called themselves the Green Mountain Boys.

Joseph Warren and his committee knew nothing about Ethan Allen and were enthusiastic about Benedict Arnold’s suggestion. Dr. Warren’s army was less than two weeks old and needed Ticonderoga’s cannon, mortars and howitzers. On May 3, the committee named Benedict Arnold a colonel in the new American Army and authorized him to go to western Massachusetts and recruit four hundred men for his expedition. Three days later, Colonel Arnold heard in Stockbridge that a band of men had set off to take Ticonderoga. Arnold had only a few officers with him and no troops, but he resolved to overtake the ragtag upstarts from New Hampshire and make them yield to his official commission. He left his officers behind to drum up an army and hurried after the trail of the Green Mountain Boys.

—

What Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold had in common was audacity. When Ethan was two years old, his father had moved the family to a rough frontier farm in the New Hampshire Grants lands. By the age of ten the boy was fending off wolves and rattlesnakes, but his only schoolbooks were the family Bible and Plutarch’s
Lives.
When he was about sixteen, he was sent to the town of Salisbury, where his family hoped that tutoring from a local clergyman could make him acceptable to Yale. Then Ethan’s father died, and he was called home. From that time on he knew that he was smart—smart enough, he thought, to see through orthodox Christianity—but he apologized often for his shaky command of grammar and spelling.

Before he turned twenty, he went off to fight the Marquis de Montcalm during the French and Indian War. In the course
of that long struggle, a talented French military engineer named de Lotbinière built a star-shaped fortress of stone, earth and timber near the southern end of Lake Champlain. Across the lake the new fortress faced a bluff, and a little to the south Lake George emptied into a channel that flowed through a gorge into Champlain. As a result, whoever held the fort controlled the one southward passage out of Champlain, leading toward the Hudson River by way of Lake George, and on to Albany. The Frenchman had called his fort
Carillon because of the loud splash of nearby rapids. For the same reason, the Indians called the spot Cheonderoga, which meant
“noisy.” Jeffrey Amherst took the base for the British in 1759, and his men called it Ticonderoga. The Americans called it Fort Ti.

When the French and Indian War finally ended, an irksome border war arose. New Yorkers claimed to hold deeds to the land Ethan Allen and his neighbors had been farming for years. Allen was chosen to represent them in court, but when he lost, the people of Bennington and its outlying areas dispensed with further legal pleas. Whenever a New York sheriff appeared in the disputed area, he was roughed up and sent home. Ethan Allen formed his own permanent posse in the early 1770s, with a man named Seth Warner as his captain. By New Year’s Day 1772, the Green Mountain Boys were holding formal drills and passing in review like a professional army.

New York’s governor called the Boys riotous trespassers and offered a twenty-pound reward for Allen’s arrest. As the disturbances grew, the bounty went up to a hundred and fifty pounds. Allen resented the charge of trespassing, but the accusations of riotous behavior helped to keep his more timid opponents at bay. He proved it by betting his Boys that he could ride into Albany, drink a bowl of punch at the busiest tavern in town and return unharmed.

Allen reached the town, entered a crowded tavern and called for the punch. As he was sipping it, people flocked to the tavern to watch the noted outlaw. The county sheriff went with them. Allen finished the bowl, walked deliberately to the door and climbed back on his horse. The sheriff decided that the reward still wasn’t large enough to risk an arrest. Ethan Allen rode off with a cry,
“Huzzah for the Green Mountains!”