God Save Benedict Arnold, page 13
Congress had promoted five men to major general. Arnold was not one of them. The delegates in Philadelphia so insisted on their prerogatives that they had not consulted with Washington about the promotions—they had not even informed him. So far, the commander in chief only heard of the appointments from muddled accounts in newspapers. He wrote to Arnold that he was “at a loss whether you have had a preceding appointment, as the newspapers announce, or whether you have been omitted through some mistake.”
In establishing the Continental Army, Congress had reserved for itself the authority to issue officers’ commissions. From the beginning, the appointment of men to important posts, especially that of major general, had generated controversies. Too often, politics rather than military merit determined who was chosen. Men with previous military experience, with high rank in state militias, or with superior accomplishments felt slighted.
When an officer saw men of lower rank promoted over his head, he generally responded to the perceived stain on his honor by resigning. Nathanael Greene, raised early to major general, now told John Adams, “I fear your late Promotions will give great disgust to many.” He cautioned Adams to strictly follow seniority. Henry Knox was of the opinion that a failure to promote Benedict Arnold “most infallibly pushes him out of the service.”
Alarmed, Washington immediately wrote to his Virginia friend, the congressional delegate Richard Henry Lee, asking whether the failure to promote Arnold was “owing to accident or design.”
“Surely,” Washington pointed out, “a more active, a more spirited, and sensible officer, fills no department in your army.” But the omission of Arnold’s name from the list of major generals “has given me uneasiness.” Washington assumed that Arnold would not remain in the army “under such a slight.”
The slight was no accident. On February 19, Congress had promoted to major general four Continental officers of lower seniority than Arnold. Since length of service was an integral part of rank in the army, the delegates were giving “younger” subordinates the right to command their former superior. Another man, Benjamin Lincoln, received the rank without any previous service in the Continental Army—he had only been a general of state militia. None of the promoted men had anything like Arnold’s record of accomplishment. They included Thomas Mifflin, a lackluster quartermaster general, and Adam Stephen, who would soon be cashiered for being drunk during a battle.
Arnold wrote back to Washington the day after receiving his letter. Of Congress, he said, “their promoting Junior Officers to the Rank of Major Generals, I view as a very Civil way of requesting my resignation, as unqualified for the Office I hold.” The insult stung him to the quick. “When I entered the Service of my Country, my Character was unimpeach’d, I have sacrificed my Interest, ease, & happiness in her Cause.” To do anything but resign would permanently stain his honor.
Like every man who aspired to be a gentleman, Arnold was touchy about any denigration of his character. But he was as reluctant to depart from the army, to step away from the ongoing war, as Washington was to lose him. Turning around the meaning of the word “resign,” he promised not to act hastily. “Every personal injury shall be buried in my zeal for the safety and happiness of my country, in whose cause I have repeatedly fought and bled and am ready at all times to resign my life.”
In a letter to Horatio Gates, Arnold was more forthright. Congress was using him for their “sport or pastime.” If they continued down this road, “no gentleman who had any regard for his reputation will risk it with a body of men who seem to be governed by whim and caprice.” He was determined to resign from the army, he told Gates. He would not think of again drawing his sword in the cause “until my reputation, which is dearer than life, is cleared up.”
In early April, he heard back from Washington, who offered a feeble explanation of the intentions of congressional delegates. They had adopted a new system for promotions, he wrote, in which seniority and merit would be weighed against a third factor: the number of troops mustered by the candidate’s home state. Since Connecticut already had two major generals in Joseph Spencer and Israel Putnam, there was no room on the list for Benedict Arnold. “I confess this is a strange mode of reasoning,” Washington wrote, but “it may serve to show you, that the promotion which was due to your seniority, was not overlooked for want of merit in you.”
However, he continued, the fact that Arnold had been deliberately passed over “does not now admit of a doubt, and is of so delicate a nature, that I will not even undertake to advise, your own feelings must be your guide.” Arnold had asked Washington for a court of inquiry to clear his name. The commander in chief told him that “as no particular charge is alleged against you,” there was no basis for such an inquiry.
Arnold’s sole recourse was to resign his commission. Resignation by an officer who felt he had been slighted was considered honorable and was not uncommon.
* * *
IN THE MIDDLE of April, with the situation in Rhode Island stagnant, Arnold returned on leave to his family in New Haven. He planned to make a journey to Philadelphia to argue his case with Congress.
While he was spending time with his sister and sons, news reached him from young Betsy DeBlois. It turned out she was in love with another, younger man—he was, as Arnold had been, an apothecary apprentice. She rejected Arnold’s attentions. As Lucy Knox put it in a letter to her husband, “Miss De Blois has positively refused to listen to the genl, which with his other mortification will come very hard upon him.”
He now found himself turned down simultaneously by a capricious teenage girl and a fickle Congress. Although Arnold was a natural optimist, the accumulated mortification induced by Congress’s failure to recognize his achievement pushed him toward full-blown depression.
For a man so little given to gloomy rumination and so heartened by military action, the news that arrived on April 26, 1777, must have been strangely welcome. It indicated that the war had taken a new and alarming turn. The British had landed a substantial force of armed loyalists and regulars at Norwalk, a village thirty miles west of New Haven. The enemy had struck at his home state.
Arnold’s mind lit up with excitement. Duty called. In spite of his vow not to serve, he girded on his sword and galloped toward the scene of the action.
10
Devilish Fighting Fellow
We are alarmed by 24 ships off Compo Point … 200 or 300 are actually landed at Compo Hill. Pray Sir, afford us your Presence & Assistance without Delay. The folded piece of paper had been placed in David Wooster’s hands at New Haven on the evening of Friday, April 25, 1777. After sealing his urgent request, General Gold Silliman, militia commander in western Connecticut, had scratched on the back: Another messenger comes from Compo & says that 1000 men are landed & that the boats are constantly coming & going.
The message dismayed Wooster, who feared the landing might be a prelude to a British invasion of his entire state. The sixty-six-year-old officer, who two years earlier had briefly denied Benedict Arnold the keys to the New Haven powder house, was now commander of all of Connecticut’s militia forces. Knowing that his illustrious neighbor was in the city on leave, he sent a message to Arnold’s Water Street home.
He and Arnold set out at dawn on Saturday to hurry down the coastal road to the site of the invasion. They took with them a contingent of the city’s militiamen that they had been able to muster on short notice.
While they proceeded along the muddy lane through a light rain, they had a chance to talk. Although at odds more than once during the war, they had been compatriots during the earlier time of agitation, and they could bond over their shared disgust with Congress.
There was plenty of blame to go around for the debacle in Canada, but a group of commissioners sent north in the spring of 1776 had declared to Congress: “General Wooster is in our opinion unfit, totally unfit, to Command your Army & conduct the war.” Ineffective in supporting the siege at Quebec, Wooster had also imposed anti-Catholic laws, closed churches, and levied onerous taxes—actions sure to alienate the inhabitants.
The old soldier would not concede his mistakes. When denied promotion, he felt that honor required him to give over his Continental commission. His consolation was the command of his home-state militia. Arnold told Wooster that he too was fed up with fickle politicians. Like his companion, he planned to resign if he did not receive satisfaction in Philadelphia.
When they reached the coastal village of Fairfield late Saturday morning, the generals learned that the enemy’s target was the Continental Army supply depot in Danbury, twenty-five miles inland. General Silliman, with a few hundred militiamen, was on the trail of nearly two thousand redcoats. Wooster and Arnold headed north. They shouted to every man they saw to take up a musket or fowling piece and join the fight. The war had come home to Connecticut.
* * *
AS THE WAR entered its third year of fighting in 1777, British general William Howe, ensconced in his New York City headquarters, contemplated a number of options. He could reinforce General Clinton’s regiments in Newport and hit New England. He could try to break through patriot defenses in the Hudson River Highlands north of Peekskill, New York. Or he could march his troops toward the American capital at Philadelphia. Any of these strategic moves might force George Washington into the decisive battle. Howe was sure his troops would prevail.
His prospects were brightened by the operation then being prepared in Canada. The aggressive General John Burgoyne, who had taken over command of the invasion army from Guy Carleton, was determined to crash through American defenses to reach Albany.
To meet these threats, General Washington had stationed his army at Morristown, twenty-seven miles west of New York City in central New Jersey. From there, he could send troops north to the Highlands or fall back to protect Philadelphia. He also stationed a force at Peekskill to protect the main Hudson crossing. He had called on citizen-soldiers to help defend that crucial post.
One of the militia regiments that marched to Peekskill was from Danbury. In January, General Wooster had complained to Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull that sending militia out of the state would “leave all the western part of Connecticut to the ravage and rapine of worse than a savage enemy.” Now his prediction had come true.
The terrain grew increasingly rugged as the men proceeded north toward Danbury. The cold rain carried the lingering chill of winter, the roads were little more than sloppy winding trails. Yet as the two generals advanced, more and more volunteers, singly and in small groups, joined them.
One of the questions of 1777 was: Had the patriots’ fervor for revolution played out? Recruiting for the Continental Army was yielding fewer soldiers than needed, and the 1775 enthusiasm known as the rage militaire was only a memory. Patriots were still eager for independence, but they had farms to tend, businesses to run. John Adams scorned the “stupid, cowardly, Toryfied country people” who refused to serve.
Western Connecticut was home to both Tories and Whigs. British authorities had faith in the idea that Americans, for the most part, rejected insurrection. Loyalists, they thought, with enough encouragement, would emerge as a majority. The king’s supporters were rumored to be particularly plentiful in Connecticut.
* * *
LATE ON SATURDAY, April 26, under a sodden sky, Arnold and Wooster, with their troop of volunteers, finally caught up with General Silliman in Redding, ten miles south of Danbury. Commanding five hundred men, his force was outnumbered four to one. With rain pouring down and darkness descending, the advance could proceed no farther.
Silliman briefed Wooster and Arnold on the situation. The British had swooped in on Compo Beach, a sandy stretch at the mouth of the Saugatuck River on Long Island Sound in the town of Norwalk. Landing from two dozen ships, they spent hours shuttling men and equipment ashore under the protection of the ships’ guns.
William Tryon, an army veteran now serving as royal governor of New York, commanded fifteen hundred redcoats drawn from Howe’s most experienced regiments. Three hundred loyalists of the Prince of Wales’ American Regiment, decked out in green coats, marched at the head of the detachment. Ten mounted dragoons accompanied them, their plumed helmets adorned with skull-and-crossbones emblems. The six brass field guns Tryon brought along were meant to terrify any rebels they encountered.
At eleven the night before, the British invaders had headed north from Norwalk. After camping along the route, they continued on Saturday morning to Bethel, just outside Danbury. They deployed into a line of battle. Most of the town’s 2,500 residents had already departed, loading their belongings into all the available wagons. Only fifty Continental recruits under the command of Jedediah Huntington and about a hundred Connecticut militiamen remained. Outnumbered, Huntington chose to retreat into the hills north of town.
Arnold knew Huntington well. He had been a neighbor when both were growing up in the western Connecticut town of Norwich—they may have played together as boys. Jedediah’s father, Jabez, was one of the most successful merchants in Connecticut and someone whom the Arnolds would have emulated. But while Arnold’s father’s business was declining in the 1750s, Jedediah’s family remained prosperous—he graduated from Harvard and joined his father’s trading establishment. When the Revolution broke out, both men embraced the patriot cause.
In the spring of 1777, Huntington was leading a hundred Continental recruits westward. At the urgent request of Washington, he had sent half his force rushing ahead toward Peekskill the day before the threat to the Connecticut supply depot emerged.
At first, the British encountered no resistance when they marched through Danbury’s deserted streets on Saturday afternoon. Then shots rang out from a house belonging to Captain Ezra Starr. Three men were inside, one an African American who was being held in slavery. He had been hired out to work for Captain Starr and “being a very zealous friend to the American cause,” had taken a shot at the invaders. It cost him his life. All three men were shot dead. Enemy soldiers burned their bodies along with the house.
* * *
THE ABSENCE OF wagons in the town meant that the British could not confiscate the supplies in Danbury but had to destroy them. By their own calculations, they set fire to four thousand barrels of salted beef and pork. Joseph Plumb Martin, a Continental recruit from Connecticut, arrived in the town a few days later and reported that “the streets, in many places, were literally flooded by the fat” that ran out of the barrels as they burned. More than a thousand much-needed tents were destroyed, as were five thousand pairs of shoes. Smoke clogged the town as the troops put the torch to shops and storage buildings. The homes of well-known patriots were also targeted.
On Sunday morning, after a day and night of destruction, scouts brought Tryon a warning that the countrypeople were rising. He decided to take a different route on his return. His troops marched westward to avoid Bethel and Redding. Tryon planned to circle south through Ridgefield, a village a mile from the New York border.
Men had joined the patriot force from all over the region. Colonel Henry Ludington, a militia leader in Patterson, New York, had sent his sixteen-year-old daughter, Sybil, to alert the countryside the night before. She had ridden forty miles in the rain to urge her father’s troops to congregate at the family farm. Although the story of her heroics did not appear in print until much later, Sybil has gone down in history as the female Paul Revere.
At Redding, the American generals decided to divide their battalion. Wooster would take two hundred men and fall in behind the retreating British to harass their rear guard. The remaining five hundred fighters, under Silliman and Arnold, would cut straight westward to try to head off the British at Ridgefield.
The enemy soldiers had marched Friday night and Saturday morning before spending all of Saturday night heaving barrels and boxes of provisions onto fires. Now, tired and apprehensive, they began their retreat. Knowing that the rebels were preparing armed resistance and that miles of hard marching separated them from the security of the ships, they cast wary eyes on the furrowed landscape.
The two forces marched toward their violent rendezvous. The British slogged southward in a long, drawn-out procession. Livestock confiscated from Danbury farmers slowed their pace. The mud-clotted road to Ridgefield made moving the cannon especially arduous. At one point, they stopped to burn a gristmill and to destroy a hundred barrels of flour.
The patriots, less encumbered, hurried forward behind Arnold and Silliman. Over their heads, Sunday morning sunshine glimmered through trees just beginning to set spring leaves. Many of the men knew little of war except for hometown drills. Now they were about to face the real thing.
* * *
DAVID WOOSTER LOOKED out for his Connecticut boys. That morning, he tried to quickly impose some order on his troops, who came from different militia regiments and included farmers who had turned out without any training at all. His main advantage was a detailed knowledge of this uneven, wooded terrain.
His small battalion caught up with the rear elements of the British regiments about three miles north of Ridgefield. The tired companies at the end of the straggling enemy line had paused to eat a quick breakfast. This gave Wooster the chance to swoop down on them from the woods. Favored by surprise, the Americans swarmed onto the road, killed a few enemy soldiers, grabbed a dozen prisoners, and scurried back into the forest.
When General Tryon at the front of the line heard of this hit-and-run raid, he halted the brigade and ordered three of the command’s six cannon to be hauled back to protect the rear. After the delay, the march continued.
Wooster shadowed the British caravan for another mile before again ordering an attack. The enemy immediately unlimbered their guns and let loose an explosive spray of canister shot. Unused to facing artillery fire, the patriots flinched. Wooster pranced his horse forward, shouting, “Come on, my boys, never mind such random shots! Follow me!”
