Читать книгу Homegrown Terror - Eric D. Lehman - Страница 7

Preface

Just after midnight, a fleet of twenty-four ships slid east on the calm black water of the Devil’s Belt. It was late summer in 1781, and the fleet had waited until complete darkness to weigh anchor and move up from the west, with a fair wind behind them. Now they stood near Plum Island, outside Gardiner’s Bay, at the very tip of Long Island, ten miles southwest as the crow flies from the entrance to New London harbor. The ships would have to go farther to avoid the reefs on the western side, as they sailed past the jaws of The Race in a few short hours.

On the deck of one of the warships stood a stout, muscular man with dark hair, gray eyes, and a sharp nose. He walked with a limp, his leg shot, then crushed underneath a horse—injuries that might have destroyed a weaker man. He must have tried to see the northern shore, searching for the sleeping town across the wide expanse of the Devil’s Belt, sometimes called Long Island Sound. The town was New London, Connecticut, a town he had visited many times to conduct business, to visit friends, or to retrieve his drunken father and bring him home. But he had not returned for years, or returned upriver to Norwich, to the house he had been born in and to the graves of his parents.

It was not a clear night. If it had been clear, without cloud or fog, then someone would have seen the sails, even at this distance, by starlight or moonlight, and cannon would have been fired to warn the militia. One might fire soon enough, as they rowed in for the landing, but by then it would be too late. Besides, the man on the deck knew that the Americans fired two shots to signal for enemy, and he had ordered that another cannon be fired once from the ship. That way the men in their warm beds, far in the wooded backcountry of eastern Connecticut, would not be alarmed and maybe would turn over and go to sleep.

Long Island was held by the British, and though there were Patriot spies there, the man had planned so swiftly that none of the spies could have sent word to Connecticut in time. There would be no welcoming party marched in from Hartford or Providence. Even if the scattered militia rallied, the force on these ships was overwhelming, and only a large city like Boston or Philadelphia could repulse a force under his command without a standing army. New London was not a large town; though it was only two dozen miles from the center of the American Revolution’s northern supply lines at Lebanon, he could be reasonably assured that his mission would be successful.

The gray-eyed man on the deck of the flagship of the British fleet was not the only one who had ties to the land. Although the ships held hundreds of German mercenaries and English redcoats sleeping or playing cards or cleaning their muskets in anticipation of the attack, more than half of the 1,732 men were from America. The Third Battalion of the New Jersey volunteers, the Loyalist Refugee Corps, the Loyal Americans, and the so-called American Legion were all waiting below decks. Most wanted to return home, to be part of the mighty British Empire again, to retake their land from what some called “anarchy.”

The motive of their leader on the deck was more obscure. Unlike the Loyalists below, he had as recently as a year earlier been fighting for those rebels, and fighting well. His physical courage and quick thinking had won critical battles and had in fact helped turn the tide of the entire war. Now he must have been hoping to turn it the other way. If that happened, perhaps his name would be restored, and he would once again have money, security, fame—enough for his many ambitions.

What he could not know was that those hopes were in vain, and his name would be damned through the ages for his initial treason—a plot to hand over West Point and George Washington to the British—and for this attack on his former home, an act seemingly beyond comprehension to his contemporaries. He could not know that this act of terror would be his last act of the war and that in less than two months the matter would be decided despite his efforts. The army that would decide it had marched just north of New London in June, and the fleet that would help had, the day before, already sailed into another bay to entrap the British general Charles Cornwallis.

The wind shifted at one o’clock, coming hard from the north. It would take nearly nine more hours for the first landing parties to row to the Connecticut beaches and begin their attacks, long after the sun had risen. But the delay between dawn and landing wouldn’t matter. By the end of the day on September 6, 1781, a prosperous seaside town would be ashes, and a terrible massacre would be enacted. This attack would not change the course of the war or turn the tide of American history. It would define the American soul.

The man on the deck was the dark eagle of the Revolution, Benedict Arnold, a man who could have been a founding father of America but instead became a national villain. Arnold’s brutal attack on Connecticut epitomizes this transformation: the moment where his abstract idea of betrayal completes its evolution to the slaughter and destruction of his neighbors and their homes. Focusing on this significant but unfortunately forgotten incident addresses some of the major challenges of any discussion about this complex and confusing American figure. It also directly links Arnold’s story with the stories of his friends and colleagues, something that has never been done before. The combination of these two approaches puts the focus on Arnold’s effects rather than his motives, on the victims rather than the attacker. Moreover, it reframes his “treason” as “homegrown terror,” a term that resonates with modern readers and whose definition echoes the eighteenth-century word “parricide,” used by many contemporaries to describe Arnold’s actions.

Those actions have historically presented two major challenges. First, Arnold’s treason has primarily begged the question of “cause” from historians: How could his contemporaries so misjudge him? How could someone change allegiances so completely? The second challenge is much more complex and one that has occupied much of the discourse over the past several decades: Arnold’s status in our national history. We could break this up into several questions or categories of approach. How could we present a full picture of a traitor who was previously a hero? Perhaps he was a Loyalist all along, as he claimed, and just a casualty of what was in some ways our first civil war? And is the word “traitor” appropriate? Could its legal definition be too narrow or could the expression have become too weak?

George Washington himself was among the first to speculate about the question of Arnold’s motives. In a letter written less than a month after the initial plot was exposed, he mentions Arnold’s “villainous perfidy” and states, “I am mistaken if at this time, Arnold is undergoing the torments of a mental Hell. He wants feeling! From some traits of his character which have lately come to my knowledge he seems to have been so hackneyed in villainy—& so lost to all sense of honor and shame that while his faculties will enable him to continue his sordid pursuits there will be no time for remorse.”¹ Of course, if Washington was correct in October 1780, and Arnold was a sociopath who “wants feeling,” then why had the usually perceptive commander in chief not noticed this fault before the shocking treason? Congress would ask that pointed question of Washington and many others during the aftermath.

Speculation about Arnold’s motives ran rampant among his contemporaries. The same man, Joseph Plumb Martin, changes his opinion several times in his memoir of the war. On one page he marvels at the betrayal, “I should as soon have thought West Point had deserted as he,” but a page later he waffles and writes, “I had been acquainted with Arnold from my childhood and never had too good an opinion of him.” At another point he states more emphatically, “He looked guilty, and well he might, for Satan was in as full possession of him at that instant as ever he was of Judas; it only wanted a musket ball to have driven him out.”²

For over two centuries Arnold’s treason has been given explanations as diverse as greed and self-sacrifice. Surely, his Tory wife, Peggy, influenced him unduly? Perhaps it was jealousy of the other, less deserving generals promoted ahead of him? Perhaps he never believed in the revolutionary cause in the first place and fought only out of self-interest? Felt anger at the squabbling pettiness of Congress? A tragic character flaw? Mental health issues? Memories of his drunken father? Financial troubles? Midlife crisis? A whim? A blunder?

There is ample evidence for all the above. We can continue to analyze Arnold’s psychology and actions, but there will never be a definite answer to the question, even if by some archaeological miracle a document written by him surfaces, explaining carefully and precisely his reasons.³ But it is almost impossible not to speculate, and with such a fascinating figure as Arnold, no doubt the debate will continue.

Over the years a number of enthusiasts have shifted the debate to Arnold’s status as both a traitor and a hero. His 1801 obituary unequivocally acknowledged Arnold’s former patriotism, admitting, “there is no doubt, however, but he was, for some time, a real friend of the Revolution.”⁴ However, by 1901, the centennial of Arnold’s death, Connecticut Magazine pushed a more sympathetic image, including a laudatory article full of half-truths and outright falsehoods, honoring Arnold as the greatest of patriots, one who had merely made a small mistake.⁵ More articles and books followed that described him as misunderstood, if admittedly flawed.⁶

During the 1976 bicentennial, Norwich historian Marian O’Keefe told a New York Times reporter, “if the British had shot higher at Saratoga, I could have sold medals,” a claim repeated in dozens of popular culture outlets, including the Tonight Show.⁷ Though not a champion of Arnold, O’Keefe was playing one of our favorite national games, imagining an alternate history. She was also echoing the habitually dour John Adams’s endorsement for Arnold’s valiance after the Battle of Saratoga:

We could make a Beginning, by Striking a Medal, with a Platoon firing at General Arnold, on Horseback, His Horse falling dead under him, and He deliberately disentangling his feet from the Stirrups and taking his Pistolls out of his Holsters, before his Retreat. On the Reverse, He should be mounted on a Fresh Horse, receiving another Discharge of Musquetry, with a Wound in the Neck of his Horse. This Picture Alone … would be sufficient to make his Fortune for Life. I believe there have been few such Scenes in the World.⁸

And Saratoga was not a lone instance of this courage. Arnold had taken part in the capture of Ticonderoga; he was instrumental in securing the cannon that freed Boston. He had invaded Quebec after a long, often brutal march through Maine. He had stopped the British fleet on Lake Champlain. And when the British invaded his home state of Connecticut, he did not hesitate but galloped from New Haven to Ridgefield, where he fought again with undisputed fury and intelligence.

The bicentennial also saw Ellsworth Grant give what has come to be known as the modern “balanced view” of Arnold. In the Hartford Courant he stated that “no one can but admire the boldness, tenacity and brilliance” of Arnold’s military career. He quoted historian Willard Wallace: “[Arnold] was a brilliant and daring soldier who accomplished a great deal of good for the young republic, probably even saving it. He was also a proud, imperious, avaricious individual who hungered after power and glory and high social standing, a man who saw in every slight a blemish upon his honor.”⁹ With full knowledge of his military exploits, it is admittedly difficult not to admire parts of Arnold’s life. Before his treason Benedict Arnold had been one of the Continental Army’s bravest and most skillful field commanders; when the New York Times Magazine rated Saratoga as one of the most important battles of the last millennium, they gave Arnold his due.¹⁰

Arnold’s heroic march through Maine and attack on Quebec helped solidify his reputation as a capable military leader, as seen in this contemporary etching from 1776. Colonel Arnold, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

The matter of Arnold was just as confusing for his contemporaries. The Marquis de Lafayette wrote to a friend shortly after the betrayal:

In the course of a revolution such as ours it is natural that a few traitors should be found, and every conflict which resembles a civil war of the first order (although ours is, properly speaking, but a war between nations) must necessarily bring to light some great virtues and some great crimes…. But that an Arnold, a man who, although not so highly esteemed as has been supposed in Europe, had nevertheless given proof of talent, of patriotism, and, especially, of the most brilliant courage, should at once destroy his very existence and should sell his country to the tyrants whom he had fought against with glory, is an event … which confounds and distresses me, and, if I must confess it, humiliates me, to a degree that I cannot express. I would give anything in the world if Arnold had not shared our labors with us, and if this man, whom it still pains me to call a scoundrel, had not shed his blood for the American cause. My knowledge of his personal courage led me to expect that he would decide to blow his brains out (this was my first hope).¹¹

The confusion caused by Arnold’s life could hardly be shown more clearly. Lafayette’s humiliation and hope that Arnold would take the “honorable” way out stem from a real problem, caused not by the treason itself but by the preceding feeling of respect. In a contemporary diary Henry Dearborn, who had served with Arnold in Quebec and at Saratoga, expressed “joy” in seeing him at Valley Forge, then expressed alarm at his treason at West Point. And when news reached him of the attack on New London, he said, “it is said the Infamous Arnold headed the party that perform’d those brilliant exploits.”¹²

This mixture of respect for his military prowess and moral disgust has been echoed by many thoughtful historians over the years. But in recent decades the mixture has unfortunately become muddled, leading some historians to respect Arnold as a man. Of course, it is important to give Arnold a historical due and to flesh out a demonized figure into a complex human being. Indeed, the complication of simple “truths” is always a worthy project, though sometimes this leads to a troubling ethical relativism.¹³ But as we get further from an event, it becomes easier to forgive, and in the case of Benedict Arnold the balanced view has in some cases become a nearly complete amendment, to the point where many are not even clear what Arnold did, much less why he was so reviled by his peers.¹⁴

Another partial exoneration of Arnold has arisen out of the interesting reimagining of the American Revolution as our first civil war.¹⁵ Assuming this is a valid point of view and that Lafayette’s interpretation was incorrect, what is it that separates Arnold from the thousands of other Tories or Loyalists or Royalists, as they were variably called? Let’s take a look at one of Arnold’s Connecticut neighbors, Charles Jarvis of Danbury. He had been brought up as a Tory and during the war served in the British Army, fighting in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, South Carolina, and even within ten miles of his home in New York, burning property and shooting American soldiers. But he often derided the British officers and saw himself and the other Loyalist troops as liberating their country from the “rebels.” On his return home in April 1783 to his father’s house, he was harassed and finally emigrated out of the state to Canada.¹⁶

It is easy to see how and why Arnold does not fit the classic Loyalist mold. Jarvis never wavered from one side to the other, but he risked his life for a strong belief in his country’s allegiance to England. Arnold switched sides during the middle of an armed conflict, after taking an oath of allegiance at Valley Forge in 1778, and he took money to do so. Previous to this, he had no Tory sympathies and in fact had often acted passionately against them. One Loyalist, Samuel Ketchum, had been pressed into the “rebel militia” commanded by Arnold early in the war. Ketchum recalled in his claims testimony that he was not doing his duty and that Arnold “ordered that he and a few more Tories should be shut up in a House and burnt.”¹⁷

Of course, there were others who played both sides, who looked out for only themselves, who used both sides for their own purposes.¹⁸ But none of Arnold’s stature. What examples do we have of a successful and apparently enthusiastic general who fought valiantly for one side, then switched sides and fought for the other, attacking his own countrymen, even his former friends and associates? It is an example without equal, to remain as Washington Irving said a few decades later, “sadly conspicuous to the end of time, as the only American officer of note, throughout all the trials of vicissitudes of the Revolution, who proved traitor to the glorious cause of his country.”¹⁹

Another issue is the use of the word “traitor” itself. Over the past two centuries, very few Americans have been tried and hanged as traitors, as intended by the writers of the Constitution. Treason is defined narrowly in section 3 of Article 3 to prevent political misuse, the only crime specifically noted in the document.²⁰ When Chief Justice John Marshall freed Aaron Burr in 1807, he set a precedent that made securing a treason conviction very difficult. In the case of Timothy McVeigh, a former soldier who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people on April 19, 1995, the prosecution was unable to use the treason clause of the Constitution due to its strictness, even though McVeigh had clearly broken the bonds of loyalty and moral attachment.²¹ Nevertheless, by the Burr precedent set by Chief Justice Marshall, Arnold would still have been hanged as a traitor. Unlike during Burr’s conspiracy to create a new nation west of the Appalachians, there was actual armed action to prosecute, and the Constitution covers both Arnold’s initial “adhering to their Enemies” in his plans with General Henry Clinton and “levying War against them” in Virginia and Connecticut.²²

Perhaps because “treason” has been so rarely used in its actual legal context, the word has become diluted by common use over the centuries. Political duplicity is almost laughable it happens so often, but that does not stop partisans from calling a politician “traitor,” or “Benedict Arnold,” for that matter. A quick search reveals thousands of merely political comparisons to Arnold in hundreds of newspapers, especially during elections and other tense moments of national disunity, everyone from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt, from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were both compared to Benedict Arnold in the same magazine, only one year apart.²³

Despite Thomas Jefferson’s fervent prosecution of Aaron Burr for the crime, he said himself, “Real treason is rare.”²⁴ Unfortunately, we have watered down “real treason” to the point where the word, if not the legal definition, is nearly useless for the purpose the writers of the Constitution intended. And the use of Arnold’s name in so many lesser cases has diluted the seriousness of his own treason. That’s why it is necessary to change the conversation about Arnold, and focusing on his “homegrown terror” attack on New London is a clear and effective way to do that. Whatever we judge now in calmer times, Arnold’s treason and his subsequent attacks had a huge effect on the national psychology of early America. Those effects are worth exploring.

This Civil War cartoon showing Benedict Arnold, the devil, and Jefferson Davis demonstrates the resonance of Arnold’s betrayal on the American imagination. Burgoo Zac, A Proper Family Reunion, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Some recent work has been more fruitful on this topic, putting the focus on the effects of Arnold’s treachery rather than on his motives. Historian Charles Royster’s study, “The Nature of Treason,” argues that Arnold represented a “threat to public virtue,” the self-sacrifice necessary for a civic society to exist, the public engagement that kept free people from being enslaved. Royster suggests that the citizens of the flowering nation hated him so fervently because he represented to them their own weaknesses by 1780: a loss of revolutionary fervor, traffic with the enemy for profit, and the corruption brought on by civic lethargy. He points out that his unambiguous treachery allowed the people to contrast their own supposed virtue, and not many could come out worse through comparison.²⁵ Sociologists Lori Ducharme and Gary Alan Fine build on this idea to examine the subsequent “demonization” and “nonpersonhood” of Arnold subsequent to his betrayal, documenting an “enduring degradation process” that transformed him into “America’s greatest villain.” They conclude that “Arnold provided a measure of social control against egotism, while simultaneously providing a counterpoint for the trill of patriotism.”²⁶ By focusing on Arnold’s life in Connecticut, and his attack on it, this book aims to show that just because Arnold was transformed into a symbol for evil does not mean he is an inappropriate symbol. The people he betrayed were very real: his peers and his neighbors, his family and his comrades in arms.

Furthermore, though some might point to the initial betrayal of Washington and West Point as the greatest crime, Arnold did not stop there, something that even the two excellent studies mentioned earlier fail to address. First, he attacked Virginia in a prolonged military invasion that threw the entire state into chaos. Then, more shockingly for the people of his home state, he burned New London, which suffered the highest percentage of destruction of any American city in the war. The coordinated Battle of Groton Heights had the highest percentage of casualties in what many called a massacre. These attacks changed Arnold’s position from an arguably political traitor who broke an oath and sold military secrets to someone who carried out armed attacks on his homeland. That is an important distinction and one that could lead to a stronger conclusion. A 1902 reflection in the New Haven Register put it clearly: “To have been able to put his own countrymen to the sword showed that he was sunk even deeper than a political traitor.”²⁷

Focusing not only on Arnold’s story but on the stories of those fellow Connecticutians he associated with and fought beside also shines particular light on the importance of trust and loyalty in a civic society. Arnold’s world consisted of an interrelated network of friends and business associates serving together on the same committees or in the same battles. Jonathan Trumbull, Nathaniel Shaw, Silas Deane, Benjamin Tallmadge, William Ledyard, George Washington, Richard Varick, John Lamb, and many others befriended Arnold and bled with him before being betrayed; this is their story as much as his.

Biographers of men and women who knew Arnold tend to downplay their connections to him for obvious reasons, but it is these very connections that make his actions so indefensible. In his book on treason in American history, lawyer and historian Brian Carso states,

in a republic, trust and loyalty do not spring solely from the external covenant of our constitutional order. The internal covenant between citizen and republic relies on matters of trust and loyalty being manifest in the constitutive elements of society…. Loyalty, as with other democratic virtues, begins its development in the personal and local memberships of daily life. Loyalty is rooted first in family and community, and learns expression through the everyday associations of local institutions.²⁸

In the following narrative, we can see how Arnold turned his back, not just on his government or some abstract notion of America, but on his local associations, his community and daily connections, built before and during the war.

In doing so, he began a procession of Americans who used political violence against their own people, including Ted Kaczinski, Nidal Hassan, and Eric Robert Rudolph, to name just a few. Terrorism is defined today in the Code of Federal Regulations as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” If violence is being used for political intimidation, if the “rules” of war are broken, if civilian populations are bombed or burned, then “terror” seems the appropriate reaction, and perhaps an appropriate word. Of course, the choice of “homegrown terror” to describe Arnold’s raid on Connecticut would be problematic from a strictly legal perspective; Arnold’s actions took place during a declared war, after all, even though the attack broke the rules of war at the time in several ways. We can also find many issues with the way that “terrorism” is used by the media, while the term “terrorist” brings up many of the same issues as “traitor.” Its definition is fluid and overused; even the FBI admits that “there is no single, universally accepted, definition of terrorism.”²⁹

Additionally, as security expert Bruce Hoffman has noted, “If one identifies with the victim of the violence, for example, then the act is terrorism. If, however, one identifies with the perpetrator, the violent act is regarded in a more sympathetic, if not positive (or, at the worst, an ambivalent) light; and it is not terrorism.”³⁰ So if you sympathize with the American revolutionaries, Benedict Arnold could have been both traitor and terrorist. If you sympathize with the British king and his Loyalist allies, Arnold might have been a merely unsavory character with questionable methods and motives.

This book studies Benedict Arnold’s relationships with his peers and neighbors, and therefore the term seems an appropriate one, focusing on the victims’ reactions rather than the aggressors’ actions. “Terrorist” should not be considered a legal term defining Arnold’s official status or pigeonholing him into a category that will lead to a belated two-hundred-year-old conviction. Instead, it is intended to keep the focus on the people who suffered and died because of his actions. It was terror they experienced, and it was from one of their own.

“Terrorism” is also a term that brings into focus the results of Arnold’s actions for modern readers in a way that “traitor” no longer does. Today, if a citizen blows up a building or shoots someone with a political objective, we would probably cry domestic terrorism before crying treason. It is another in a historical succession of terms we have created to define the boundaries of good and evil. Early Americans might have used the term “homebred evil” rather than “homegrown terror.”³¹ Another term Thomas Jefferson and others used to describe Arnold was a “parricide,” a term that literally means “father-killer.” But they were using the more metaphorical meaning, in the same way that “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, defines the term, as a person who attacks his own countrymen.³² Treason, parricide, war crimes, homegrown terror: no general phrase can be completely accurate in describing Arnold’s actions, because what he did was so singular.

Moral evil was and is a difficult concept to codify in a democratic society, but it begins with broken trust. In a democracy we must put trust in people. We must assume others will hold our ideals and will be good. The idea of homegrown terror is so frightening for that very reason—because it is homegrown: the neighbor you thought was a war hero coming back to burn you down, the mass murderer in your high school class, the spy at your office, the sociopath down the street, building a bomb in the cellar.

Many of the conversations and actions of the founding generation after Arnold’s betrayal echo time and time again, with incidents like the bombings at the Boston Marathon and Oklahoma City and the assassinations of William McKinley and John F. Kennedy. Patriotic talk soars. Politicians call for stricter laws. Anger, despair, and confusion fuel attacks and arrests. Kidnapping plans are put into action. Spies are mobilized. Ordinary citizens debate the concept of a just murder. And finally, a free democratic society survives the worst type of threat.

The story of Benedict Arnold and the burning of New London will hopefully draw attention to a regrettably overlooked incident and its profound effects and help reassess Arnold and his place in American history. It will also, I hope, shine light on how Americans have responded and continue to respond to betrayal and terror.