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.”