Benedict Arnold: From Hero of Saratoga to Traitor at West Point

On the morning of September 25, 1780, a thirty-nine-year-old American major general riding away from his command post at the Robinson House on the east bank of the Hudson River near West Point received a message that British Major John André had been captured the previous day at Tarrytown with incriminating papers in his boot. The major general — Benedict Arnold, the hero of Ticonderoga, the wounded commander of the American left wing at Saratoga, the one general George Washington had trusted to defend the strategic Hudson Highlands — finished his breakfast, kissed his wife Peggy, told his aides he was going to West Point on inspection, and rode instead to a barge on the river. The barge took him downstream to the British warship HMS Vulture. By the evening of September 25 he was an officer of the British Crown. His attempted betrayal of West Point to the British failed only because André’s couriers, near Tarrytown, had robbed André of his watch before learning his identity and finding the surrender plans hidden in his stocking.

The name “Benedict Arnold” has functioned as a synonym for treason in American English for nearly 250 years. The man behind the name was, for the first five years of the war, one of the most consistently effective field commanders in the Continental Army. This is what he actually did, why he did it, and what happened to him afterward.

The Hero, 1775–1777

Arnold’s wartime record before his treason is the part of the story most often forgotten. He was a New Haven apothecary and merchant before the war, with substantial mercantile experience in the Caribbean and the West Indies. At the news of Lexington and Concord he led the New Haven militia to Cambridge, persuaded the Massachusetts Committee of Safety to commission him a colonel, and was on the road to capture Fort Ticonderoga within six weeks. The May 10, 1775, seizure of Ticonderoga from its small British garrison — carried out jointly by Arnold and Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys, in a contested co-command — was the first American offensive victory of the war and produced the heavy artillery that, dragged across Massachusetts by Henry Knox the following winter, would force the British evacuation of Boston in March 1776.

Arnold’s next operation was the autumn 1775 march on Quebec. Approximately 1,100 men under his command crossed 600 miles of Maine wilderness from Cambridge through the Kennebec River watershed, the Chain of Ponds, and the Chaudière River into Canada, in worsening weather, with inadequate provisions. About 350 died, deserted, or turned back. The remainder, joined by Major General Richard Montgomery’s force, attempted to take Quebec City in a blizzard on December 31, 1775. Montgomery was killed; Arnold was shot in the leg leading the assault; the attack failed. Arnold maintained a half-hearted siege of Quebec through the winter and spring of 1776 before retreating south. He was promoted to brigadier general for his Quebec campaign.

In October 1776, on Lake Champlain, Arnold built and commanded an improvised American fleet that delayed British Major General Sir Guy Carleton’s planned invasion southward into New York for a full campaigning year. The Battle of Valcour Island on October 11, 1776, ended in tactical defeat — Arnold’s ships were destroyed — but Carleton, with winter approaching, returned to Canada. The delay almost certainly cost the British their best chance to split the colonies along the Hudson–Champlain corridor in 1776.

The following autumn, Arnold’s tactical leadership at the two Battles of Saratoga — Freeman’s Farm on September 19, 1777, and Bemis Heights on October 7, 1777 — was decisive in the American victory that brought France into the war as a US ally in February 1778. Saratoga is the engagement most credited to him in retrospect, although his contemporary commander at the field, Major General Horatio Gates, had relieved Arnold of command before the second battle in a personal dispute. Arnold rode into the battle without orders, rallied wavering American units, and was shot in the same leg that had been wounded at Quebec. His horse fell on the leg and crushed it.

The Slide, 1778–1779

What follows is the part of the story that explains, without justifying, his eventual treason. Arnold’s Saratoga injuries left him partially crippled and unfit for field command. In June 1778, Washington appointed him military governor of Philadelphia after the British evacuation. The position required diplomacy with a Pennsylvania civilian government — heavily Loyalist-sympathetic before the war and now anxious to appear patriotic — that he did not have. He lived ostentatiously in the Penn Mansion, accepted business deals from Loyalist merchants, and married the eighteen-year-old Margaret “Peggy” Shippen, the daughter of a prominent Loyalist family, on April 8, 1779. Peggy Shippen had been a close friend of Major John André during the British occupation of Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania state authorities filed eight charges of corruption against him in February 1779 — using public wagons for private trade, abuse of military authority, financial misconduct. A court-martial in early 1780 acquitted him on six charges and convicted him on two minor ones. Washington’s required reprimand was mild: a public letter regretting Arnold’s lapses but praising his service. Arnold considered himself disgraced. His pay was years in arrears; Congress had refused to settle his accounts from Quebec; his physical injuries were severe; he was deep in debt; and he believed, with some reason, that he had been treated badly by a political system that owed him better. He began his correspondence with the British in May 1779, one month after his marriage.

The West Point Plot

The conspiracy ran for sixteen months. Arnold sent encoded letters and military intelligence to British headquarters in New York through Peggy Shippen’s family connections and through commercial intermediaries; André, as Clinton’s adjutant general, was his principal correspondent. The financial negotiations were detailed. Arnold’s initial demands ranged between £10,000 and £20,000 for the surrender of West Point and its garrison of approximately 3,000 men.

In August 1780 Washington appointed Arnold commander of West Point at Arnold’s own urgent request. The post controlled a great loop of the Hudson where a heavy iron chain, made at Sterling Iron Works, was strung across the river each spring to block British naval ascent. Loss of West Point would have allowed Clinton to split the colonies in two along the Hudson, isolating New England from the southern and middle states, and likely would have collapsed the American war effort.

On the night of September 21–22, 1780, André travelled from the HMS Vulture upriver in a small boat to meet Arnold in person on the west bank at Long Clove Mountain near Haverstraw. The two men talked through the night and into the next day. Arnold gave André detailed plans of West Point’s fortifications, the disposition of its garrison, and the date he proposed to surrender. André, dressed in civilian clothes (a fatal procedural choice that would later cost him his life as a spy rather than a prisoner of war), set out to return to New York by land after his ship was driven downriver by American shore batteries.

About thirteen miles south of West Point, near Tarrytown, on the morning of September 23, three New York militiamen — John Paulding, David Williams, and Isaac Van Wart — stopped a stranger on the road. André identified himself as a British officer, assuming the men were Loyalists. They were not. They searched him, found the West Point plans in his stocking, and turned him over to Lieutenant Colonel John Jameson at North Castle. Jameson, confused, initially sent the prisoner back to Arnold; one of his subordinates, Major Benjamin Tallmadge — Washington’s intelligence chief — recognised the danger and had André recalled. A message went directly to Washington. A separate message went to Arnold.

Arnold received the message at the Robinson House on the morning of September 25, finished his breakfast, told his wife, kissed her, and rode for the river. He was on the Vulture by midday. Washington arrived at the Robinson House four hours later.

The Aftermath

André was tried by a board of fourteen American generals — Nathanael Greene presided — at Tappan, New York, between September 29 and October 1, 1780. The board found him guilty of being a spy: the technical determining fact was that he had crossed the lines in civilian clothes. André requested to be shot rather than hanged, as befitted his rank. Washington refused: the procedure for spies was hanging. André was hanged at Tappan on October 2, 1780, aged 30. He went to the gallows with composure that observers found remarkable.

Arnold served the rest of the war as a British brigadier general. In January 1781 he led an expedition into Virginia that burned Richmond and captured public stores. In September 1781 he conducted a punitive raid on his home state, attacking and burning much of New London, Connecticut, and overseeing the massacre of the American garrison at Fort Griswold across the harbour. He sailed for England in December 1781.

The British government paid him approximately £6,315 plus an annual pension as a brigadier general, far short of what he had hoped for. London society treated him coldly. He spent the 1780s and 1790s in trade ventures in Saint John, New Brunswick (where his warehouse was destroyed in a politically motivated arson), in the West Indies, and back in London. He died at his Gloucester Place home on June 14, 1801, of dropsy, aged 60. Peggy Arnold died three years later. Their son James Robertson Arnold served as a British army officer in India.

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Two corrections worth making. The first is the implication that Arnold was always a traitor — that his early service was somehow concealment, or that his betrayal expressed pre-existing British loyalties. There is no documentary evidence of either. Until the spring of 1779 he was, on his own correspondence, a Patriot officer who believed himself badly treated by the Continental Congress and by Pennsylvania state authorities. His turn to the British appears to have followed his marriage, his medical incapacity, his debts, and his perception of having been publicly disgraced.

The second is the partial obscuring of Peggy Shippen Arnold’s role. Modern scholarship — particularly Mark Jacob and Stephen H. Case’s Treacherous Beauty (2012), drawing on Major André’s papers and on British intelligence records — has established that Peggy was an active, witting participant in the conspiracy, not the surprised innocent wife of nineteenth-century legend. She had known André in Philadelphia during the British occupation, served as intermediary in some of the early correspondence, and successfully feigned hysteria in Washington’s presence at the Robinson House on September 25, 1780, to keep him from immediately pursuing her husband.

Why It Still Matters

The Saratoga Battlefield in upstate New York preserves the most famous Arnold-related historic site: the Boot Monument, an anonymous bronze sculpture of a left boot and Continental Army epaulet on a granite base, marks the spot where Arnold’s leg was shattered on October 7, 1777. The inscription names the wound and the rank and notes that he was “the most brilliant soldier of the Continental Army.” His name does not appear. It is the only American battlefield monument honouring a body part rather than a person.

The story is genuinely instructive — not as a parable of essential treachery but as a study of how grievances, debts, injuries, marital influence, and bureaucratic mistreatment can combine in a previously loyal officer to produce one of the most consequential acts of betrayal in American history. The failure of the plot was a matter of three militiamen on a road near Tarrytown.

For related Revolution-era history, see our pieces on women in the American founding and Black Americans in the Revolutionary War.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Benedict Arnold?

Benedict Arnold V (1741–1801) was a Continental Army major general during the American Revolution. He led the May 1775 capture of Fort Ticonderoga, the 1775 march on Quebec, the October 1776 naval defence at Valcour Island, and provided decisive battlefield leadership at the Battles of Saratoga in September and October 1777. In 1779–80 he secretly contracted with the British high command to surrender the strategic Hudson River fortress at West Point. The plot was uncovered on September 23, 1780, when American militiamen captured the British messenger Major John André with the surrender plans in his boot.

Why did Benedict Arnold turn against the United States?

Arnold’s documented grievances by 1779 included two severe leg wounds (Quebec 1775, Saratoga 1777), substantial unpaid debts and back wages, public corruption charges (most of which he was acquitted of, but for which he was nonetheless reprimanded by Washington), and his April 1779 marriage to Peggy Shippen, daughter of a prominent Loyalist Philadelphia family. He began secret correspondence with the British within weeks of the marriage. The financial demand for surrendering West Point was £20,000; he ultimately received about £6,315 plus a British brigadier’s pension.

What was the West Point plot?

In August 1780, at Arnold’s request, Washington appointed Arnold commander of the strategic American Hudson River fortifications at West Point. Arnold conspired with British Major General Sir Henry Clinton to surrender the post and its 3,000-man garrison. The plot was carried by Major John André, Clinton’s adjutant general, who met Arnold in person near Haverstraw on the night of September 21–22, 1780. André was captured the next morning at Tarrytown with the surrender plans hidden in his stocking. Arnold escaped to British lines aboard the HMS Vulture on September 25.

What happened to Major John André?

Major John André was tried by an American military board at Tappan, New York, between September 29 and October 1, 1780. He was found guilty of being a spy — the technical determining fact was that he had crossed American lines in civilian clothes — and hanged at Tappan on October 2, 1780, aged 30. He had requested to be shot, as befitted his rank, but Washington refused.

What happened to Benedict Arnold after his treason?

Arnold served as a British brigadier general for the remainder of the war. He led the January 1781 expedition that burned Richmond, Virginia, and the September 1781 raid that burned much of New London, Connecticut, and oversaw the massacre at Fort Griswold. He sailed for England in December 1781, lived in London and Saint John, New Brunswick, in declining circumstances, and died in London on June 14, 1801, aged 60.

What is the Boot Monument at Saratoga?

The Boot Monument at Saratoga National Historical Park in upstate New York is a bronze sculpture of a left boot and Continental Army epaulet on a granite base, erected in 1887. It marks the spot where Arnold’s leg was shattered on October 7, 1777, during the Battle of Bemis Heights. The inscription describes him as “the most brilliant soldier of the Continental Army” but does not name him. It is the only American battlefield monument honouring a body part rather than a person.

Sources

1. George Washington’s Mount Vernon — Benedict Arnold
2. US National Park Service — Saratoga National Historical Park
3. US National Archives — Founders Online (Washington’s papers on Arnold)
4. Willard Sterne Randall, Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor (William Morrow, 1990)
5. James Kirby Martin, Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered (NYU Press, 1997)
6. Nathaniel Philbrick, Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (Viking, 2016)
7. Mark Jacob and Stephen H. Case, Treacherous Beauty: Peggy Shippen, the Woman behind Benedict Arnold’s Plot to Betray America (Lyons Press, 2012)
8. Stephen Brumwell, Turncoat: Benedict Arnold and the Crisis of American Liberty (Yale University Press, 2018)