Homegrown Terror. Eric D. Lehman
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practice among the colonial militias.
Even with these regular desertions, Connecticut gave more than its share of provisions and troops for the French and Indian War, especially for the assaults on Canada that led to the capture of Quebec.38 The war also created a network of veterans and merchants, and their leader was unquestionably Jonathan Trumbull, by the end of the conflict Connecticut’s most respected public figure.39 And Trumbull, along with almost everyone else who fought or contributed to the war, was disenchanted with the mother country. Military recruiters behaved dishonestly, British regulars demeaned colonial troops, and arbitrary imperial authority was followed by unpaid debts. It was not only soldiers that felt the brunt of this; families throughout the colonies had to quarter troops in their homes, and some towns such as Stamford and Norwalk were completely taken over.40 Little did the troublesome British army know they were planting the seeds of rebellion.
Some Connecticut merchants also lost their fortunes during the war years. Arnold’s father went completely bankrupt, perhaps because shipping became such a chancy prospect or perhaps because he became one himself. On May 12, 1760, a warrant was issued for his arrest, for the crime of losing “the use of his understanding and reason,” a thinly veiled euphemism for public drunkenness and nuisance.41 Shortly after this arrest, one of the Arnolds put an ad in the New London Summary for the sale of “a likely Negro boy to be sold cheap for ready cash or short credit.”42 Either this was a personal servant that the family was getting rid of because they could no longer afford one, or they had sunk to slave trading to try to pay the bills.
Whatever the case, Benedict Sr. died a year later, leaving Arnold and his sister, Hannah, orphans. Dr. Lathrop generously put up £300 to keep his apprentice out of debtor’s prison and took back a mortgage so that in 1762 young Arnold could sell his parents’ house for £700.43 Lathrop also gave his apprentice an even larger loan of £500 to set up his own business. By now, Arnold was clearly no longer just an indentured servant but considered the childless Lathrops’ heir. They even offered him a share in the business in Norwich, but he refused this kindness.
Perhaps there were too many graves in the cemetery by the green, or perhaps his father’s dissolution had made the family name mud in the town of his birth. Perhaps Arnold simply wanted to establish a pharmacy in a new city, and since his fellow apprentice, Solomon Smith, was starting one in Hartford, he would start one in New Haven. He left Norwich and rode across the state with his teenage sister to start a new life.
Two decades later, a year after the burning of New London, Dr. Daniel Lathrop died. We can only imagine how he felt when from his old home in Norwich he saw the “whole southern horizon wrapped in the strange, flickering redness of a distant flame” and found out that it was his former apprentice who was responsible.44 But his wife, Jerusha, lived to a ripe old age, long enough to radically change her opinion of the boy she had once offered her inheritance to. She told her tenant Lydia Sigourney a terrible and probably fabricated story detailing his cruelty to animals, with “dismembered birds” that she found lying around the yard.
Betrayal works on people in strange ways. It is no exaggeration to see Jerusha as a surrogate mother to the son of her husband’s cousin. She had lost her own sons, and then trusted and maybe even loved a boy whose mother died young and whose drunken father was an embarrassment and a curse. And in the decades following his attack on Connecticut, this woman had not created an abstraction or symbol of Arnold; he was still a real boy whom she had nurtured for seven years. But she had changed her memory so completely as to believe the most horrible things about the once-beloved teenager she now called “cruel Benedict Arnold.”45 No doubt she was hiding a lot of pain.
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