Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Announcer: Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your host, Nia Rogers, Public Affairs Librarian, and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, political science professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I am excellent because I have not betrayed anybody today. How are you? Of course, it is early in the day. We do record in the mornings generally so I still have the option later. I'm keeping it open.
J. Aughenbaugh: What an interesting way to start a podcast episode. I'm doing fine, and I haven't betrayed anybody. I'm just like, what? Then I'm like, okay. Listeners, today's episode is a continuation of our series, the Story Behind The Name. If you haven't picked up on it yet, we're going to take a look at Benedict Arnold. In part, I think both of us were fascinated in this particular individual because there is a phrase in American, if you will, language, Lexicon, if you will, I'm no Benedict Arnold. We often wonder the extent to which our fellow Americans understand, who this individual was and why this phrase arose.
N. Rodgers: I think that people pretty much know that he's a betrayer. Benedict Arnold is a way to refer to somebody as somebody who has betrayed you. I think other phrase rather, that comes to mind is et tu brute. Also, you, Brutus, you've also stabbed me. You were my friend. Theoretically what Julius Caesar said before he died. But really, it's what Shakespeare said Julius Caesar said before he died 'cause nobody knows what Julius Caesar said before he died. I grew up thinking a Benedict Arnold is the worst possible person ever. That's totally not the case, is it?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, no. After doing research about Benedict Arnold, I don't know if I am now a supporter of what Benedict Arnold did, but I have much more sympathy in part because I can imagine many of us reacting the way he did to some of the stuff that happened to him. I'm more sympathetic towards Benedict Arnold after doing the research than I ever was, for most of my life because I was just like, the dude, he betrayed his country. He betrayed the man who supported him throughout. How could he?
N. Rodgers: Well, a lot of people were on the British side. A lot of people didn't want to not be British anymore. The other thing, too, is if the British had won, he would be a hero.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: History has a weird way of being written by the winners.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. How we portray or how we remember people from wars is definitely affected. The lens in which we view them is affected by who ultimately won. For those of you who don't know, just a quick introduction, Benedict Arnold was an American-born British military officer who served during the American Revolutionary War. I know that's a mouthful.
N. Rodgers: Born in the colonies, but worked for the British?
J. Aughenbaugh: He fought with distinction for the American Continental Army and rose to the rank of major general before he defected to Great Britain in 1780. His defection was particularly noteworthy because then General George Washington had placed him in a position of trust and gave him the command of West Point in New York and for our non-American listeners, West Point, New York is where the army, military, what's the word I'm looking for?
N. Rodgers: It's where the Academy is.
J. Aughenbaugh: The academy is located, yes.
N. Rodgers: When people say West Point graduate, that's the West Point they're referring to, and that's a high military honor to graduate from West Point because it doesn't take just everybody. It's a very competitive part of group of people.
J. Aughenbaugh: When he was given the command of West Point, he was planning to surrender the Fort to the British forces, but his plans were discovered in September of 1780, and at that point, he defected to Great Britain. As the war continued, Arnold was commissioned as a brigadier general in the British Army, and he was placed in command of the American Legion, and he actually led British forces in battle against the US Continental Army for which he once commanded. Thus, his name becomes synonymous with treason and betrayal in the United States.
N. Rodgers: Also, part of why he's synonymous with treason and betrayal is because he could have sat the war. He could have gone over to the British side and been posted somewhere else. But instead, he fought people that he had trained with. Smartly, the British used him because he knew the tactics of the Americans and he got all that. But he chose the fight rather than going off to do something else in some other part of the British Empire, which at that point was hugomongus. That's a technical term, so don't throw it around.
J. Aughenbaugh: We'll explore a little bit later on this episode as to perhaps some of the reasons why he did this. Benedict Arnold was the second of six children of his father Benedict Arnold III and Hannah Waterman King. He was born in Norwich Connecticut colony in 1741. He was the fourth member of the family named after his great grandfather Benedict Arnold I, who was an early governor of the colony of Rhode Island. His grandfather and father, as well as an older brother who died in infancy, were all named after the original Benedict Arnold I. Arnold's dad was a successful business person, and they were part of the elite of Norwich Society. He was educated in a private school when he was 10, and the expectation was that he would eventually attend Yale College. But those plans were scuttled. Two of his siblings died, and this really affected his father who became an alcoholic. By the time he was 14, there was no money in the family for private education.
N. Rodgers: By that point, it's just him and his sister. Of the six children, four had died. His father turned to drinking because his children kept dying theoretically.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Things got worse in the family when his mother died in 1759. This would have been when he was 18-years-old. This is what led him to support his father and his younger sister. His dad's drinking got so bad that his father was arrested multiple times for public drunkenness, and he was effectively excommunicated by the church. He was refused communion.
N. Rodgers: Pretty bad.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Pretty bad.
N. Rodgers: If you can't take communion, you can't be absolved of your sins.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Arnold trained in the Connecticut militia when he was only 16. That military path started very young in Arnold's life. He also tried a number of businesses. For a period of time, he was a pharmacist. He was a bookseller. So much so he was so successful that he repaid his mother's family for a loan that they gave him and he repurchased the family property that his dad had sold when his dad was deeply in debt. Then he turned around and flipped it for a rather handsome profit.
N. Rodgers: Property flipper.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's not a new thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. It's been around for centuries. He then took the money he made from flipping his family homestead, if you will, and bought trading chips, and actually got involved in the then very lucrative West Indies trade, if you will, route.
N. Rodgers: Think about sugar. That's what the West Indies are about. They're about sugar and sugarcane.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. But then the British Crown needed to go ahead and raise money because of the war with the French. The British Parliament passed the Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, and a whole bunch trade with other British colonies. Began to be less lucrative for the American colonies.
N. Rodgers: These tariffs are expensive.
J. Aughenbaugh: Expensive. Yes, they are.
N. Rodgers: Anybody who tells you that tariffs will make you money is fibbing to you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, they'll make somebody money, but if you're on the opposite end of the tariff, you ain't making the money.
N. Rodgers: It won't be you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: But the Stamp Act, though, is what gets us to the rumblings of the Revolution. It gets to a bunch of people going bla bla, stupid crown, charging us. Can you explain to people what the Stamp that they're referring to in the Stamp Act is?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. The Stamp Act of 1765 wasn't about stamps that you put on envelopes.
N. Rodgers: Postage.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: It's not the modern version of stamps.
J. Aughenbaugh: The Stamp Act was every time you sold a good you had to stamp it. What the British Crown did was you had to pay a fee for the stamp showing that it was an official form of trade. On top of whatever you were paying for a good that you purchased, you had to pay the stamp. You had to pay the surcharge for the stamp.
N. Rodgers: You basically paid a tax to the British Crown.
J. Aughenbaugh: Crown. It was a surcharge for the transactions that you would be doing in the normal course of business. Which meant that all of the goods that the colonies purchased from other people, the costs went up, but the cost of American goods went up, which meant their trade partners might go to other vendors for those goods.
N. Rodgers: Or buy less.
J. Aughenbaugh: Buy less.
N. Rodgers: Smaller amounts, which either way it's going to hurt you financially.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is when we get the phrase, no taxation without representation because the Stamp Act, this surcharge, this tax, if you will, was passed by the parliament at the request of the crown with none of the colonies being consulted.
N. Rodgers: Because the colonies did not have representation in parliament.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Enter the Sons of Liberty, which is when you picture the Boston Tea Party, that's the Sons of Liberty. That's them hucking stuff into the harbor. That's the group of people who are starting to, I don't know if there's proof that Thomas Payne was a son of Liberty, but there's that group of people who are starting to pass around pamphlets and say, hey, this thing with the crown is not good. Big N, big G. We need out of this mess.
J. Aughenbaugh: To your point, it was a secret organization. They could not be public because they didn't want to be targeted by whom?
N. Rodgers: The British Crown.
J. Aughenbaugh: Crown. That's right.
N. Rodgers: Because the British Crown had soldiers in the colonies, it had the governorships in the colonies. All of those people were British citizens who were beholden to the British Crown.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. They were the loyal listeners that Nia mentioned earlier in the podcast episode, because there were people in the United States who were loyal to the Crown.
N. Rodgers: For a variety of reasons. Some of it was cultural, some of it was social, and some of it was straight up fear that Britain was going to win any conflagration with the colonies and then punish the crap out of them. Because that was a very real fear. The very real fear of this may not work, and then I will be totally screwed. Aughie is not going to join a revolution unless he's pretty sure he's going to be on the winning side because he's got a kid to think about.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Narrow self-interest led many of the American colonists to say, poking the bear.
N. Rodgers: I don't like the bear, but I don't like poking the bear even more. That's a good way to put it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Arnold joins the Sons of Liberty, and though he did not take part in public demonstrations, he did continue to do business openly in defiance of the acts. He was breaking the law. He did so because, like many of the American colonists, he faced financial ruin if he did not continue to do business.
N. Rodgers: He becomes a pirate or a smuggler basically.
J. Aughenbaugh: He becomes a smuggler. Yes.
N. Rodgers: Sorry, listeners, smuggling is when you bring a good into a place without the government's permission, without paying taxes on it, and without doing the duties that's all smuggling is. If you buy a gorgeous, beautiful statue on your vacation, and you don't declare it to the customs officials when you come back to the United States, you have smuggled?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You have smuggled. All you have to do is write it on the form. I have a really nice statue. What you going to do about it? Like, I wouldn't put that last part on the form, but I have a really nice statue, and I paid $150,000 for it. That's all you have to do, and then the customers will go, oh, well, enjoy your statue. Good luck with that. Like, now, if you were going to bring it into sale to somebody, that's a whole different thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because of the way the Stamp Act work, if you did bring in that statute, then you would have to go ahead and pay the surcharge for them, and this is where Benedict Arnold and others were just like.
N. Rodgers: Heck with that.
J. Aughenbaugh: The heck with that. The example I would like to give is what bootleggers did during Prohibition. Since they couldn't manufacture alcohol in the United States, they went ahead and brought it in from Canada, Jamaica, Haiti, the Caribbean, and by just bringing the alcohol into the United States, they were smugglers. They were breaking the law because there was a provision of the Volstead Act that said you couldn't do that. Anyways, Benedict Arnold, interestingly enough. He does get married in 1967 in.
N. Rodgers: 17, 1967 would be a sad. He would have been alive for 200 years.
J. Aughenbaugh: He gets married in 17 67, and he marries the daughter of a sheriff.
N. Rodgers: You got to like that he just flirts with danger. Right. But Miss Margaret Mansfield.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, Miss Margaret.
N. Rodgers: Which is a lovely name.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Both he and his father-in-law were members of the local Masonic Lodge. His own son, of course, named Benedict, was born the following year, and he had two more sons. Unfortunately, his daughter or his wife died in 1775 when Arnold was a soldier, and he was, and I'm going to mispronounce this. He had been captured and being held at Fort Ticonderoga.
N. Rodgers: One of the few Native American words that I can say correctly. Ticonderoga.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, let's get involved. Let's discuss his war participation. He joined the American Army in a militia outside of Boston, and he distinguished himself for various acts of intelligence and bravery. He was initially captured, as we just discussed. When he, yeah, go ahead.
N. Rodgers: When he's in 1775, the reason he's at Fort Ticonderoga is because he took it from the British.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He's on the side of the Americans at this point. He takes Fort Ticonderoga, and figures out what's cool to me, and what's interesting, is that battle, he does a lot of delaying, like the British are very orderly. When they show up, they walk in a straight line, they walk up to the thing, they do whatever. The Americans had to be a lot more defensive in their tactics. The other thing they had to do was draw things out because the Americans could rely on locals to feed them, to help whatever with that, like, supply line kinds of things, where the British could not do that. If you could outlast them, in a fight, you could probably win because it took them longer to get their stuff to wherever the fight was.
J. Aughenbaugh: This notion of guerrilla tactics: the United States had to use guerrilla tactics. By all accounts, Benedict Arnold was really good at this. He employed this at the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain, which again, gave the American forces time to defend the colony of New York. His performance in the Battle of Richfield in Connecticut led to his promotion to Major General. He provided a relief, if you will, maneuver during the siege of Fort Stanwix, which is where he actually got no, and then later, he got injured during the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. But it's during this period of time, Nia, that you begin to see why Benedict Arnold considered defecting to Great Britain. Because while he was recuperating from his injuries, he was passed over for promotion in the Second Continental Congress. The Congress decided who got promoted based on the recommendation of George Washington and other officers. This led Benedict Arnold to complain.
N. Rodgers: Wasn't there also some, like, people were taking credit because he was injured and he was not.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's what I was going to. But when he got passed over, this is when Benedict Arnold was just like, hey, wait a minute, here. I'm getting passed over for other officers who are taking credit for the stuff that I did in a number of these battles. His complaints that he was getting passed over because some of his fellow officers were taking unwarranted credit for his actions, not surprisingly, led to People in the military and in the Continental Congress to say, okay, you should have kept your mouth shut because when you complained, now we're going to investigate you for corruption.
N. Rodgers: You've drawn attention.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You've called out some people who benefited when you should have just said nothing.
J. Aughenbaugh: You said nothing.
N. Rodgers: Except that he didn't want to say nothing because he did those things, and he got hurt doing those things?
J. Aughenbaugh: Things. That's right. He gets investigated. He gets acquitted for all but two minor charges. But then his opponents in the Continental Army convinced Congress to investigate his finances, and Congress determined that he actually owed the Continental Congress money because he borrowed money to maintain his lavish lifestyle while he was in the military. In some ways, he brought a lot of this on himself, even though I can understand that by almost every historical account, there were a whole bunch of people who were taking credit for some really.
N. Rodgers: Brilliant maneuvers.
J. Aughenbaugh: Brilliant, dangerous stuff that he did that really helped, in particular, the United States in the New York campaign. There are some scholars who were like, New York would have fallen to the Brits if it wasn't for some of the actions of Benedict Arnold
N. Rodgers: Well, what I think is interesting is he realizes these people are not his friends, and so he turns to Loyalist sympathizers who will be his friends, and he marries one of them. He remarries.
J. Aughenbaugh: His first wife dies, and leaving him with three boys. While he's recuperating from his injuries and he's being investigated and he's being passed over for promotions, he begins to spend time with loyalist sympathizers in Philadelphia, marries into a loyalist family, a woman by the name of Peggy Shippen. She was close friends with a British major. The British major was John Andre.
N. Rodgers: The reason you know that name.
J. Aughenbaugh: Go ahead.
N. Rodgers: Is because he was basically their head spy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: John Andre was the James Bond of his day. Except he probably didn't drink Martini's. Shaken Osterd. But he's he's their head spy. Now events, I think, are starting to move Benedict Arnold outside his control of events. You know what I mean? Like, it's starting to pile in all these things.
J. Aughenbaugh: Most of the historians I read said that it's his second wife who facilitates Arnold's plan to switch sides. He began to secretly negotiate with Andre, and he used his wife to pass messages. The British offered him 20,000 pounds. Today's American dollars, that would be how much?
N. Rodgers: 4 million, $157,187.20. But let's round to 4.1 million.
J. Aughenbaugh: Million. That was a significant amount of money in part because Arnold went ahead and came up with a detailed plan for how the Brits could go ahead and capture West Point.
N. Rodgers: I have to tell you that if I had the grievances that he had.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I had been injured, and somebody said, I'll give you $4 million to hand over Fort Ticonderoga, I'd be like, okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Or West Point. Actually, it's not Fort Ticonderoga. It's West Point. But you know what I mean? I would struggle with my moral compass at that point because he's got three children he's got to support, and now a wife he's got to support, and he's been trashed by his side.
J. Aughenbaugh: While he's negotiating with the Brits, Washington, who doesn't know that Arnold's contemplating defecting to the opposition, gives him command of Fort West Point.
N. Rodgers: Just because Washington knows that he was involved in all these battles and did all this admirable stuff in the battle. He's like, okay, I'll put you in charge of that. Arnold's like, Hey, thanks, man. That makes this a lot easier.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, Arnold plans to surrender the fort to the British. He even comes up with an elaborate justification, like the Continental Congress, okay, didn't give us enough resources. They, in George Washington, reallocated men to other forts. The prudent thing to do would be to turn over West Point. Fort West Point serves on the Hudson River.
N. Rodgers: Which is an enormously important waterway? Enormously important.
J. Aughenbaugh: Unfortunately for Arnold, the plan gets exposed, American militia.
N. Rodgers: Andre is a chucklehead. He writes it all down.
J. Aughenbaugh: He writes it all down. He's got a cache.
N. Rodgers: Carries it around with him.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, he's got a cache of papers so that when he's detained by the militiamen, they find the entire plot, Arnold, escapes. Andre was hanged.
N. Rodgers: Don Andre was hanged being a spy. Which, by the way, is part of the deal when you get into spy world, is that you understand that if you're caught Nobody's coming to help you. It's not good for spies, but it's the way that it works. He bails and runs to the British, and they take him in.
J. Aughenbaugh: They take him in. They promote him to Brigadier General. They promise him an annual pension and a lump sum of money. He leads the British forces on raids in Richmond, New London Connecticut. By the way, the British forces in New London, Connecticut burned the place to the ground. Led the British forces in the battle of Blandford, the battle of Groton Heights. Which, by the way, was a battle that took place just a few miles downriver from the town he had grown up in. When he defects, he defects
N. Rodgers: Well, and guess what? The money that they give him for his annual pension in American dollars right now would be $75,000.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's a good annual pension.
N. Rodgers: That's a really good annual pension. I'm thinking, that's a nice chunk of change.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, listeners, if you think that we're being overly sympathetic, we're not. He betrayed his country. On the other hand, if you are just looking out for you, your wife, and your three kids, and somebody comes to you and says, Hey, if you switch sides, we're going to give you an annual pension of 75,000.
N. Rodgers: A $1 million bonus, which is what his lump sum was. It was $1 million bonus to do it. You get to get revenge on the people who stole your valet. Who put you through the embarrassment of an investigation of your finances and then demanded money from you. Like, I'm not saying it's good to go around betraying people, but I'm not sure who betrayed who first here.
J. Aughenbaugh: In the winter of 1782, he and his wife moved to London. King George received him well, but the opposition political Party in Great Britain, didn't like him all that well. And not surprisingly, the British Army officers didn't really like him or trust him.
N. Rodgers: He could have been a deep mole. Like, I'll let you recruit me to your side, and then I'll tell the Americans what you're doing. He didn't do that, but he couldn't.
J. Aughenbaugh: This classic double agent. Five years later, because conditions were not all that hospitable in London, he moves to the colony of New Brunswick, which is now Canada, and he ran a merchant business. This is actually mentioned in like four books that I read about Benedict Arnold. He was extremely unpopular in New Brunswick, so he returned to London in 1791, and he died 10 years later. People just didn't like him.
N. Rodgers: Well, he did betray. Like, you have to. What comes to mind here, and it's not the perfect parallel, but I'm going to say it anyway. John McCain was held in the Vietnam War and was physically destroyed by his captivity. Like, he couldn't lift his arms above his shoulders when he came back, like, all these things. But he didn't give up secrets, and that would have been the time to do it to keep somebody from destroying you physically. Benedict Arnold did it for money. That's probably why we have such a low opinion of him is that he didn't do it because he truly fervently believed that we should be British, in which case, you might be able to forgive. Lots of people got forgiven for fighting on the British side because they fervently believed that we should be British. It wasn't that. He did it for the money. That's why we don't like him.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's really funny.
N. Rodgers: It seems petty. You didn't get you didn't get recognition for some stuff you did. You're seriously going to turn around and fight on the other side, like, dude.
J. Aughenbaugh: What's really funny is, again, listeners, in this series Stories Behind the Name, I always find myself going down these rabbit holes of, like, reading a whole bunch of books and academic journal articles about these individuals. Man, historians bend over backwards trying to go ahead and find reasons and justifications for why Benedict Arnold did what he did; there were some who were like, he did it for the money. Others went ahead and said, well, you have to go back to his youth
N. Rodgers: His mother, his father's now alcoholic.
J. Aughenbaugh: The promise of a wealthy, comfortable existence gets pulled out from under him. He then goes ahead and tries to make something of himself in the Continental Army. Then he had his fellow officers turn on him and claim credit for the valor that he showed, etc.
N. Rodgers: Then you had me in the Continental Congress decide to drag through his finances.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or he did it because of his very young, very pretty second wife and.
N. Rodgers: Can we please not blame her? That just exhausts me. Dam bit the apple. Eve did not hold it to his face and force him to bite. Like, this whole thing of a woman made me do it is an exhausting trope that we've had since the first woman. Can we just stop with that? If he had been a man of depth of character, she wouldn't have been able to convince him. To do anything.
J. Aughenbaugh: To do anything. Heck, some historians blamed Washington. Because Washington didn't go to bat for him as.
N. Rodgers: During the whole course with Congress.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm just like, okay, so your boss didn't go to bat for you. Doesn't necessarily mean you just go ahead and say, well, I'm going to go ahead and turn traitor. How far do we go with this?
N. Rodgers: I think that probably he may have thought that they were going to lose. He may have been playing both sides against the middle because nobody wants to be on the losing side here. He'd already lost a lot, and if they lost to the British, they would have lost everything.
J. Aughenbaugh: What we oftentimes don't take into account, Nia, is the sacrifice that a lot of Americans or a lot of the colonists had to endure with no guarantee that they would win. As you pointed out in this podcast episode, if they didn't win, can you imagine what the reaction of the crown would have been
N. Rodgers: The stomping down of the colonies would have been. We would still be feeling it today. That being said, a lot of men have done a lot of stupider stuff for a time with a lady. Maybe she did have some I shouldn't say we should stop blaming women entirely because if she was truly convincing and a Mata Hari type individual, maybe she did have some influence over him. It could be also that he was just fair-weather. He likes you till he doesn't like you. Then when he doesn't like you, it's okay to hand over your fork to somebody. Like, it's a weird. I think at one point he gets a reprimand from Washington, and he acts like Washington beat him publicly with a great big stick. Like, it's like, why are you so dramatic? What's? I don't know.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, I noted this a few moments ago. The thing that struck me as I was like reading up on Benedict Arnold was pretty much anywhere he went, people didn't like him. I'm like.
N. Rodgers: Not a warm fuzzy.
J. Aughenbaugh: I was just like, maybe he had good reasons for being a pain in the butt. But nevertheless, after a while, dude, you got to take a look in the mirror
N. Rodgers: If all of your relationships fail, you are the problem. The other thing I wonder too about is, did he see Washington as some father figure in place of his father father. Then perceived betrayal of that is a second paternal betrayal. I don't know. I don't want to be too sympathetic because he got paid the big bucks and he lived out a fairly lucrative life. I'm not sure that I and he was willing to betray his country. He was born here. It would've been different to me, I think, if he had been British and then came here. But he was born in Connecticut. He was born in the United States. Well, what was not then in the United States, but he was born in the colonies. Did she stay with him till the end? Peggy Shippen?
J. Aughenbaugh: I think so, yes, she did. In his health, there was a slow decline. Part of it was brought on because of the wounds he suffered. But, he died in June of 1801 at the age of 60. Benedict Arnold, just fascinating. Like I said, listeners, when I went into this, I was just like, okay, what scum bag was he? Now, do I still think that he was a scumbag? He was a traitor. On the other hand, it was more complicated because I don't think many Americans understand that.
N. Rodgers: He did have some real grievances.
J. Aughenbaugh: He had some real grievances.
N. Rodgers: He had some that were perceived, but he had some that were actually real. People came after him. Things.
J. Aughenbaugh: He did some daring stuff in the early years of the Revolutionary War. Pretty much every historians like New York would have fell to the British without some of the stuff that he did. The fact that he then defected to Great Britain and attempted to go ahead and sell out West Point, which made his betrayal even worse. That's probably the thing because if he was just your Garn variety soldier, big deal. But the fact that he was as trusted by Washington, and he did so much Vals things during the war. You're like, Wow. Dude.
N. Rodgers: This is General Schwarzkopf moving to Iraq and deciding to.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hang out with the Iraqis.
N. Rodgers: The rest of his life in Iraq. Like, where you're like, what is happening here? I'm trying to think of a modern equivalent. That's the closest I can come. Schwarzkopf is daring and brilliant as a leader it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Reference to General Norman Schwarzkopf Storman Norman during the Persian Gulf War during the Bush 41 administration.
N. Rodgers: He never. He's not wired like Benedict Arnold. I think that people from New York have especially strong feelings about Benedict Arnold. I get that. They feel like it's a personal. I have especially strong feelings about some of the people who've come out of North Carolina, Jesse Helms; I have especially strong feelings about because I feel like, oh, come on, as a North Carolinian. I get it. There's that, too. But a complex man. Gave us a lifelong insult. Like, this insult has lasted way longer. You know what I mean? Like, it's outlasted the actual actions he did to get the name. Like, to get the moniker. When you say, what did Benedict Donald do, people go, oh, but he was bad. You're like, well, you want to know why? Don't you know why he was bad? That's a pretty strong betrayal story to last 250 years, first of all, but also or 240 years. But also that people don't even remember necessarily what you did. They just remember how bad you are. It's like Custer. We should do one of these on Custer because, again, your infamy so extraordinary.
J. Aughenbaugh: So many of us wonder if we're going to toil on anonymity and nobody's ever going to remember.
N. Rodgers: Maybe that's a good thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: I was struck by that. I was just like.
N. Rodgers: Oh, maybe it'd be okay if nobody ever knows my nephew.
J. Aughenbaugh: I don't have a legacy. Great, because the converse, the alternative, is okay, don't be a Benedict Arnold.
N. Rodgers: Like, Holy cow. That's quite the legacy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thank you, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie.
Announcer: You've been listening to civil discourse brought to you by VCU Libraries. Opinions expressed are solely the speaker's own and do not reflect the views or opinions of VCU or VCU Libraries. Special thanks to the workshop for technical assistance. Music by Isaac Hobson. Find more information at guides.library.vcu.edu/DISCOsE. As always, no documents will harm to the making of this podcast.