Читать книгу Homegrown Terror - Eric D. Lehman - Страница 11

Flashpoint

BENEDICT ARNOLD’S store on Leather Lane stood opposite the whipping post and town scales, where occasionally a slaver would auction his wares. But Arnold did not sell slaves in New Haven; he sold fantastic-sounding medicines, like Tincture of Valerian, Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, and Francis’ Female Elixir. He sold fever powder, rose water, cold cream, wall hangings, needles, watches, stationery, mace, tea, and sugar. And it was not only the needs of the body that Arnold catered to. He sold modern novels like Tristram Shandy, Joseph Andrews, Peregrine Pickle, Tom Jones, and Pamela. Shelves sagged with the poetry of Homer, Milton, Dryden, Plutarch, Johnson, Pope, and Swift, and the essays of Aristotle and Locke.¹ His taste in stocking his bookshelves shows that he may have even read some of them.

His sign read “Sibi Totique,” usually translated as “for himself and for all,” either an attempt to unite the opposing poles of individual and community or an attempt to advertise to the Latin-speaking Yale students down the street.² Once established in New Haven, Arnold quickly expanded his pharmaceutical trade to the more profitable import-export business, becoming part owner of three different ships, the Charming Sally, Fortune, and Three Brothers. They followed the trade routes between Dublin and London and the smaller Caribbean islands that formed the backbone of Atlantic trade. He often joined these expeditions and became known in town as Captain Arnold. He imported molasses and rum from the “sugar islands” and manufactured products from England, while exporting shingles, staves, corn, flour, and barrels of pork.³ He sometimes traded horses, bringing them from Quebec to sell in the Caribbean.⁴ He made enough money in just a few years to permanently bring his sister, Hannah, to New Haven and buy back his parents’ Norwich home, though he eventually sold it again for a healthy profit.

But aspiring merchants like Arnold were about to get a rude awakening. Despite the vital help the colonists had provided in defeating the French in North America, the British government promptly levied the Sugar Act in 1763, affecting colonies like Connecticut that were dependent on the Caribbean trade.⁵ Americans were furious; they had a sense of entitlement to freedoms they earned, while the conservative wing of the British government, including the king, saw ungrateful dependence on the might of the British navy. Why not tax them more? Why not force them to buy duty to British goods and materials? The Sugar Act was followed by the Stamp Act in 1765, throwing the colonies into further disarray, with many in Connecticut protesting that the act violated the colony’s charter.

As merchant, bookseller, and pharmacist, Arnold became one of the richest men in New Haven, joining interconnected societies such as the Freemasons and Sons of Liberty. Courtesy of the Eli Whitney Library, New Haven Museum.

New London, Norwich, Lebanon, and Windham rose up as a body, and by October 1765 the Sons of Liberty was formed. Merchants and shopkeepers were among the first members, secretly or openly. New Londoners burned the “stamp man” in effigy, and an anonymous protestor gave a long speech to attendees, protesting “the crown of all corruption, the ST—P M-N … an emblem of the molten calf.” He appealed directly to the tradition of self-government, crying, “O Connecticut, Connecticut, where is your charter, boasted of for ages past” and “O freemen of the colony of Connecticut! Stand fast in the liberties granted you by your royal charter.” But the citizens were clear that though their charter was “royal,” they would sing for King George only “if we have liberty.” They declared that those taxed have the rights of representation: “For being called Englishmen without having the privileges of Englishmen, is like unto a man in a gibbet, with dainties set before him, which would refresh him and satisfy his craving appetite If he could come at them, but being debarr’d of that privilege, they only serve for an aggravation to his hunger.”⁶

Hanging in effigy was always a common practice, usually locally and haphazardly performed. But when Jared Ingersoll of New Haven agreed to distribute the stamps during the Stamp Act controversy, dummies with his name painted on it were hanged throughout the state, especially in eastern Connecticut. A group of five hundred men from New London and Windham confronted him on September 25, 1765, and forced him to resign his post.⁷

Governor Thomas Fitch had opposed the Stamp Act, but he would not go so far as to denounce the British parliament. He prepared to take the oath required to execute the act, and on November 1, 1765, he tried to force the members of the Council of Assistants to take the oath as well. One of those assistants was Jonathan Trumbull, now the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Fitch entered the chamber to find Trumbull and the other three members from eastern Connecticut protesting the decision. When Fitch did not change his mind, the four easterners walked out of the chamber in disgust, refusing to pledge to uphold the Stamp Act.⁸ The esteemed French and Indian War veteran Israel Putnam also threatened Fitch, saying that if he didn’t hand over the stamp tax papers, the governor’s house would “be leveled with the dust in five minutes.”⁹

Though these Acts had a trickle-down effect that hurt everyone, the ones hurt most directly were traders like Arnold. In New London the richest merchant in the state, Nathaniel Shaw Jr., complained of “the Stamp Act which has put a Stop to all Business.”¹⁰ Six years older than Arnold, the thin-lipped, strong-jawed Shaw had partnered with his sea captain father in 1763, after three of his brothers had been lost at sea.¹¹ Shaw Jr. expanded the business, trading with merchants in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as locally in Windham, selling molasses, flour, iron, paper, beaver hats, rum, coffee, and the occasional horse. He became rich enough to keep a private sloop called Queen of France to sail for pleasure and for coastal business trips, unusual in the eighteenth century. Shaw’s father had been friends with Jonathan Trumbull and John Ledyard, and now the son kept his relationship with the younger relatives: doing business with Joseph Trumbull and his close friend across the harbor, William Ledyard.¹² He also became associated with two other merchants of his generation, Benedict Arnold and Silas Deane.

Silas Deane’s father, also named Silas, ran a blacksmith shop a few miles from where Arnold grew up, in the northern part of Groton, and represented his town in the Colonial Assembly in 1752. Not wishing to follow in his father’s footsteps, Silas Jr. graduated from Yale in 1758 and passed the bar, moving to live among the mills and tanneries of Weathersfield, just south of Hartford on the great road from New York to Boston. A good-looking, thin-nosed man with a receding hairline, he married a wealthy widow, but she died four years later after bearing him one child. He then married Elizabeth Saltonstall of Norwich, a beautiful woman with a delicate constitution.¹³ Like Arnold, Deane ran a store that sold a variety of goods, from Barcelona handkerchiefs to Caribbean molasses to local hemp seed.¹⁴ They met some time in the late 1760s or early 1770s, and Arnold began to win Deane’s “friendship and confidence.”¹⁵

In 1766 the cautious Governor Fitch was voted out, and a year later his nemesis Jonathan Trumbull noted that action taken by Britain would only increase strife, saying, “it is always to the interest of the Mother country to Keep them [colonies] dependent…. But if violence or methods tending to violence be taken to maintain their dependence, it tends to hasten a separation.”¹⁶ During the next few years, strife did increase, and men like Shaw and Deane joined in feeling and action with the progressive Trumbull, as the latter gained the governorship of the colony. Shaw preferred to take a quieter leadership position, joining the committee that approved the Boston resolutions of 1767 and acting as one of four delegates to the grand convention of the colony in December 1770. Deane, on the other hand, was more outspoken. On Christmas Day 1769, he took the floor at his Congregational meetinghouse to condemn British taxes as “unconstitutional,” and the rest of the town agreed, passing a resolution not to buy British goods. He was appointed to the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence, an innocuously named resistance organization.¹⁷

Arnold was certainly one of these radical Connecticut merchants. He joined the local Hiram Lodge of the Freemasons, a secret society dedicated to reason and other Enlightenment values, started in Connecticut by David Wooster. Born in 1711, Wooster was a veteran of the Louisbourg expedition of 1745 and had probably picked up Freemasonry from Gibraltar troops stationed there.¹⁸ The Freemasons in America included such notables as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, both of whom boarded at Wooster’s father-in-law’s house during the French and Indian War. In these years leading up to the Revolution, the Freemasons were instrumental in creating and supporting the paramilitary organization, the Sons of Liberty, in which Arnold soon became a leader. He was also eventually elected the captain of a more formal local militia organization called the Governor’s Foot Guards.¹⁹

Often Arnold’s values as a businessman and as a Son of Liberty coincided. After the British taxes and levies, many merchants turned to “smuggling,” and local governments turned a blind eye to this practice. New London alone illegally exported 210,000 horses to the Caribbean in the decade before the Revolution. But there were always king’s men ready to snitch to royal enforcers for not sending goods directly to England or for not paying taxes. On February 3, 1766, local sheriff Jonathan Mix arrested Arnold as one of the men who beat up a king’s man named Peter Boles, who had also tried to blackmail him. Arnold and a few Sons of Liberty broke into the house of a local taverner “with Great Force” to get him and “with the same Force & Violence afs. then and there assault the Body of sd. Peter Boles then and there being in sd/ House in the Peace of God a& the King of him strip of his apparel & him tie & fasten to the Whipping Post in sd. New Haven & him did beat and abuse in a cruel shocking & dangerous Manner to his grievious Damage & against the peace & to the Terror of his Majestys good Subjects.”²⁰

Arnold was fined a few pounds for this brutal act.²¹ Stranger than a respected businessman taking part in a violent beating was the fact that he and the other men were not jailed; the New Haven courts were clearly not sympathetic to Mr. Boles. Still, it was obvious Arnold had a temper, whether in politics or business. During a falling out with a New York merchant, Arnold began somewhat diplomatically: “I think I can convince the Whole World I have been a loser of Fifty Per Cent. on both voyages…. I cannot say what pleasure it is for you to keep the ballance due me in your hands; but can assure you it will give me much pleasure to receive it, as it has been due three years and I want it very much.”²² But when the man replied with hostility, Arnold became insulting: “I assure you it is with the utmost indifference I observe all the unjust & False aspersions your Malice could Invent, both with regard to the Fortune’s Cargo & our affidavits, as a Consciouness of my uprightness and Fairness in regard to our Concerns will never suffer the opinion of you or any other Blockhead to give me any uneasiness.”²³ Arnold was having money issues at the time, having gone nearly bankrupt a year earlier, but this was probably not the way to go about getting it back.

Benedict Arnold’s large house on Water Street in New Haven was later owned by lexicographer Noah Webster. Courtesy of the Eli Whitney Library, New Haven Museum.

Though he remained an active member of the Sons of Liberty, a year after the incident with Boles he tried to settle down into a respectable adulthood, marrying Margaret Mansfield, the daughter of one of his fellow Freemasons, New Haven County’s high sheriff. He and Margaret borrowed money and bought a large clapboard house with a carved doorway, a cupola, and carvings of birds and other flourishes above the windows. In the yard was a barn with an attached store where Arnold sold his goods, a stable for a dozen horses, a coach house, and an acre and a half of land that included a hundred fruit trees.²⁴ In their sky-blue parlor they held dances and parties for the elite of the city and may have held Freemason meetings there as well.

Margaret bore him three sons: Richard, Henry, and, of course, another Benedict. The “loving husband” wrote often to his wife, asking about “our dear boys” and telling her not to neglect their education, that “it is of infinite concern what habits and principles they imbibe when young.”²⁵ But politics kept intruding into their intermittently happy home. In the aftermath of the so-called Boston massacre in 1770, Arnold wrote furiously, “I was very much shocked the other day on hearing the accounts of the most wanton, cruel, and inhuman murders committed in Boston by the soldiers. Good God, are the Americans all asleep and tamely yielding up their liberties, or, are they all turned philosophers, that they don’t take immediate vengeance on such miscreants?”²⁶

Though his first home in eastern Connecticut was now also a center of seditious activity, Arnold could hardly have picked a better city to find radical politics, full of Enlightenment hallmarks like newspapers, coffeehouses, and an educated population. The largest city in the state, New Haven had boasted its first newspaper, the Connecticut Gazette, though it folded a few years after Arnold moved there. By then a number of other newspapers had sprung up, and folded, throughout the state, with the Green family starting most of them. Thomas Green started the Connecticut Courant in Hartford in 1764 and the Connecticut Journal three years later in New Haven.²⁷ But it was the presence of the state’s only college that made New Haven such a hotbed of Enlightenment ideas.

The president of Yale College, Napthali Daggett, had been one of the first to attack the Stamp Act openly, in pages of the Connecticut Gazette. Daggett had, like Arnold, received “grammar instruction” from Dr. Cogswell of Canterbury, and now he trained many of the students who would go on to become ardent patriots during the Revolution.²⁸ The school was the largest of the nine colleges in the colonies in the 1770s, with approximately two hundred students.²⁹ It was located on the west side of the New Haven green, and in those days consisted of two buildings, Connecticut Hall and Yale College. Connecticut Hall was brick, modeled after Massachusetts Hall at Harvard, with large sleeping chambers that contained small study cells within them. Yale College was a long wooden building with six chimneys along the roof line, originally colored light blue.³⁰ Boys in felted hats and camblet gowns packed like ship cargo into uncomfortable rooms, studying logic, mathematics, languages, physics, oratory, and rhetoric. On good days they crowded into a thin dining hall and ate salted shad, corn bread, beans, peas, and onions, washed down with apple cider. In leaner times they were fed pumpkin and Indian pudding and drank boiled water. Of course, the wealthier students could be seen around town in their buckskin breeches, smoking tobacco and drinking coffee or, if they could afford it, a frothy mug of flip.

Two of the most popular and gifted students in those years were Benjamin Tallmadge and Nathan Hale. Born amid the soft green hills of Coventry in 1755 to a farming family, one of twelve children, Nathan Hale grew into a handsome boy with fair skin, blue eyes, and flaxen hair. By the time Hale reached Yale he was an athlete with a broad chest, solid muscles, and legendary jumping and leaping skills. He could kick a football “over the tops of the trees.” He became a member of the literary Linonian Society and during his second year met a fifteen-year-old named Benjamin Tallmadge.³¹ Tallmadge’s father had been born in New Haven in 1725 and graduated from Yale in 1747, becoming a minister at Brookhaven on Long Island. That is where Benjamin was born, on February 25, 1754, and he grew into a good-looking, doe-eyed young man with a precocious intelligence. He was so talented, in fact, that President Daggett admitted him to Yale when he was only twelve years old. But his father wisely held him back three years until the autumn of 1769, when he crossed the Sound to New Haven.³²

Their friendship became a touchstone in both their lives, with a witty repartee that hid genuine feeling. Tallmadge wrote during their junior year,

In my delightsome retirement form the fruitless Bustle of the Noisy, with an usual Delight &, perhaps, with more than common attention, I peruse your Epistle. Replete as it was with Sentiments worth to be contemplated, let me assure you with the strongest confidence of an affectionate Friend, that with nothing was my Pleasure so greatly heightened, as with your curious remarks upon my preceding Performance.

With his purposefully flowery, college-student prose, Tallmadge pontificates with a wink to his friend, taking issue with the smallest and most amusing points: “You intimated in your last, that my using the Comparative Degree was somewhat needless, alleging that the sincerity of my friendship would not be rendered more conspicuous by the use of the Comparative.” He goes on like this for three pages, on the subject of what degree of language to put their friendship into and on a vague disagreement in a previous letter that is never made concrete, in the drollest rhetoric possible. In other words, he uses the highest and most formal language to say absolutely nothing: a classic college-student prank. At the end he jokes, “I have so far exceeded any design in treating upon the preceding Topicks, that I must omit many things, which I determined to have discoursed upon at this Time, to be considered in some future Paper.”³³

At graduation in 1773, Tallmadge spoke at the invitation of President Daggett, and he and Hale participated in a cutting-edge debate on the education of women.³⁴ The two young men left college and looked for employment. Hale first went to teach in East Haddam along the Connecticut River, but moved almost immediately to New London that winter, where he became the preceptor at Union School college preparatory academy and was befriended by one of its benefactors, Nathaniel Shaw. Tallmadge took a job as superintendent of a school in Weathersfield, where he was befriended by Yale alum Silas Deane. These young men had been educated in radical politics and now joined the network of merchants and politicians advocating resistance to British tyranny.

Tallmadge and Hale were not the only Yale graduates to take part in progressive politics. In the 1770s eight of the twelve assistants to the governor were Yale alumni, and, of course, Trumbull himself was a Harvard man. One half of the field officers of the Connecticut militia were Yale graduates, and a majority of the Council of Safety were also. Many of the graduates served as ministers throughout the colonies, and most of these promoted antimonarchist “Whig” policies from the pulpit and to their parishioners.³⁵ These networks were all merging and growing, with Freemasons, Sons of Liberty, and college graduates becoming interdependent and interchangeable. The Connecticut Committee of Correspondence had emerged as a shadow government and was populated by citizens from all these other networks. And they stretched outside of Connecticut, joining others, creating the vast root system that allowed the grass of a new nation to grow.

But people didn’t have to have a college education or be part of these growing networks to understand that the British policy toward America amounted to tyranny. After all, the population of the American colonies was at least half that of England and twenty times that of Canada. That meant almost one-third of the so-called British dominions were ruled by a Parliament in which they had no representation.³⁶ These facts began to seep into the consciousness of the now vaguely united colonists, from the farmers and the craftspeople to the housewives and the innkeepers. This popular support meant governmental sponsorship; as early as 1769 Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania had adopted the strategy of not importing British goods. Those who refused were often pressured by their more progressive colleagues and neighbors.³⁷

The Tea Act in 1773 led to more protests and widespread dumping of tea by Americans, from the housewives who refused to serve it to their guests to the merchants who refused to import it. Nathaniel Shaw wrote in October, “In regard to the tea that is expected from England, I pray heartily that the colonies may not suffer any to be landed.”³⁸ Many burned or discarded tea and other British-made objects in public demonstrations, and Labrador tea or coffee became the drinks of choice. Things seemed to be coming to a head, and Benedict Arnold could not help musing to his wife that winter, “how uncertain life is, how certain Death: may their loud & affecting calls awaken us to prepare for our Own Exit, whenever it shall happen.”³⁹ He had created a new family from the ruins of the old, rebuilt his fortune twice, and now they were threatened by the simmering conflict, which may have been inevitable and just, but not welcome.

The Boston Port Act of 1774 was the fuse that lit the fire. The king and his supporters in Parliament had decided that their only options were capitulation to the American demands or war. Without reason to stand on, tyranny becomes the last refuge. And the Americans gave the king plenty of excuses to enforce that tyranny. When Boston was blockaded and put under military law by the British parliament on June 27, mobs harassed Tory politicians and demagogues throughout New England, while kidnapping, riots, and threats swept the land.⁴⁰ Special town meetings were held across Connecticut, most of which ended in a denunciation of England and a pledge of support for Boston. Shaw met with the New London town committee and vowed to adhere to the acts of the Continental Congress.⁴¹

Elected as a representative from Weathersfield two years earlier, Silas Deane sent a letter in June for publication in the Connecticut Courant that detailed the injustices of the British, asking, “Is there, my Countrymen, any other Alternative now left you but to submit, or prepare for resistance even to Blood? I declare I know of none. Our petitions dispised, our Liberties sported away, our private as well as public Interest invaded, and our lives at the Mercy of a General and his army!”⁴² He was swiftly elected by his peers to serve in the upcoming Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The Massachusetts delegation, with Samuel and John Adams, reached Hartford in August 1774, on their way to Philadelphia. Deane and his stepson Samuel Webb rode up to meet them, and the following day they visited his house, where his wife Elizabeth served punch and coffee. A few days later, after settling his business affairs, Deane followed the delegation to Philadelphia, the second-largest city in the English-speaking world, to debate a course of action.⁴³

Some in Connecticut could not wait for the results of the new Congress. Delegates from Windham and New London counties met in Norwich, condemning the “unconstitutional acts” and presence of General Thomas Gage’s standing army in Boston, which was “too great to be given to any Person in a free Country … an Army not under the Control of the civil Magistrate! What Country? What State?” They lamented the possible “disagreeable necessity of defending our sacred and invaluable Rights … for, we could not entertain a thought that any American would or possibly could be dragoon’d into Slavery.” Among the men at the Norwich meeting were Samuel Huntington, Nathaniel Shaw, William Ledyard, Jonathan Trumbull, and Israel Putnam. They all signed their names to this radical protest, two years before delegates from the entire country would sign a similar document, putting reputations and lives on the line for liberty.⁴⁴

Not everyone was ready for rebellion. The reverend Samuel Peters of Hebron wrote a proclamation urging his flock not to take up arms, “it being high treason.” The result, he wrote, was that “riots and mobs … have attended me and my house…. The clergy of Connecticut must fall a sacrifice, with the several churches, very soon to the rage of the puritan nobility.” He pleaded for the Lord to “deliver us from anarchy.”⁴⁵ The proclamation was not well received by the majority of the townspeople. A number of men arrived at Peters’s house and found it full of his armed followers. They held a meeting outside, in which they argued about his use of tea, and during the argument Peters claimed there were no weapons in the house. The reverend started to “harangue” the crowd, when suddenly a gun went off inside. The men rushed inside to find loaded guns and pistols, swords, and two dozen large wooden clubs. After confiscating these, they let Peters go back inside to write a confession of what happened. He was not cooperative and the crowd grew “exasperated.” Finally, the people seized him, took him to the green at the center of town, and forced him to sign a confession.⁴⁶

According to Peters, admittedly not the most reliable witness, when he fled Windham County’s mob rule to New Haven, he was met with more of the same from the local Sons of Liberty, including Benedict Arnold. At ten o’clock “Arnold and his mob came to the gate,” and after Peters said he would not come out, supposedly “holding a musket” in his hand, Arnold told the mob to “bring an axe, and split down the gate.” Peters replied, “Arnold, so sure as you split the gate, I will blow your brains out, and all that enter this yard to-night!” When Arnold retreated, the mob called him a coward, but he said, “I am no coward; but I know Dr. Peters’ disposition and temper, and he will fulfill every promise he makes; and I have no wish for death at present.” According to Peters, David Wooster showed up with another mob a half hour later, and these and other threats encouraged him to leave Connecticut altogether, heading for Boston.⁴⁷

That autumn of 1774 people around the state quietly began to arm for a war many suspected would come, even though the first shots had not yet been fired. New military companies were commissioned, artillery was inventoried, weapons were repaired, and militia was trained. Connecticut called for a meeting of all the colonies to join forces and protest the Coercive Acts and even at this early date called for a more permanent union. The same year the monarchist Tories met in Middletown and tried to remove the radical Governor Trumbull from office. They were a dwindling minority, though, and failed. The council under Trumbull asked Nathaniel Shaw to send ships to the Caribbean to covertly buy powder and shot from the French. Arnold himself tried to gather muskets equipped with bayonets.⁴⁸

In early 1775 a group of Tories in Stamford found out about a large shipment of gunpowder secretly entering Connecticut. They told a sympathetic customs officer, who seized the powder and kept it at his house. But the next day a large group of Revolutionaries, having heard of this incident, “proceeded in an orderly manner to the house where the powder was lodged, which they entered without opposition, and having found it, rode off with the casks.” The Tories and their informers “hid themselves until all was over.”⁴⁹

Trumbull and the assembly also joined the new Continental Association. Every town but Ridgefield and Newtown publicly accepted their actions. These holdouts were promptly shunned by the rest of the towns in Fairfield County, who suspended all commerce dealings and connections from the inhabitants of these two villages.⁵⁰ In March 1775 Trumbull stood in front of the assembly and called the Tories “depraved, malignant, avaricious, and haughty,” rallying for “Manly action against those who by Force and Violence seek your ruin and destruction.”⁵¹ By April Shaw had obtained powder and was trying to stock up on lead from Philadelphia.⁵² He wrote on April 1 that “matters seem to draw near where the longest sword must decide the controversy.”⁵³

He was right. The first shots were fired at Lexington on April 19, and swift riders carried the word west across Connecticut. Hour by hour each town heard the news and sprang into action. In Brooklyn veteran Israel Putnam supposedly set down his plow and galloped to Boston.⁵⁴ When the news reached New Haven, class exercises were suspended, and Ezra Stiles’s son, who had followed in his father’s footsteps at Yale, left for Newport and arrived on April 26, surprising his father.⁵⁵ Norwich’s Ebenezer Huntington, a senior at Yale, left class and marched directly to Boston to meet his brother Jedediah, who had graduated from Harvard a decade earlier. They and the other volunteers began to surround the city.

Twenty-one-year-old Jonathan Mix Jr., whose father had arrested Benedict Arnold nine years earlier, was a member of the New Haven Cadets and had recently joined the Governor’s Foot Guard under Captain Arnold. On April 21 a herald sent by Arnold banged on his door and called him out to the green, where he and forty others gathered and heard the news. They voted unanimously to march to Boston. The following morning when they gathered to leave, Arnold asked the Board of Selectmen for the keys to the powder house, since his small troop lacked gunpowder. Fellow mason David Wooster put up a cautious resistance, saying that they should wait for proper authorization, probably from Governor Trumbull. Arnold told him that they could give him the keys or he and his men would break in. Wooster gave him the keys. Arnold left his three sons and his sickly wife and marched to war, leading Mix and the small band of dedicated militia toward Boston.⁵⁶ Resistance had become revolution.

Meanwhile, the only colonial governor who supported that revolution, Jonathan Trumbull, called together his Council of Safety and began to form six regiments under new articles of war.⁵⁷ Few in the colonies were as ready as Trumbull and his allies for this moment. Men carrying letters and messages galloped around the state—between Trumbull in Lebanon, Samuel Huntington in Norwich, Nathaniel Shaw in New London, Thomas Mumford, Daniel Lathrop, Eliphalet Dyer, Benjamin Tallmadge, and William Ledyard—and circulated further on to those who had joined the army or were serving in the Continental Congress, such as William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, Roger Sherman, Jeremiah Wadsworth, Gold Selleck Silliman, Silas Deane, and Benedict Arnold. Shaw asked the Huntingtons for powder for the Oliver Cromwell. The Huntingtons sent flour and salt pork to the Trumbulls.⁵⁸ Forts were occupied, Tory assets were seized, and military plans were put into action. They had long since planted the seeds, and the grass had finally broken through the soil.