Benedict Arnold: America’s Most Infamous Soldier

Before his name became synonymous with treason, Benedict Arnold may have been the most heroic and badass general of the American Revolution. In this episode author Ben Thompson and Professor of History Dr. Pat Larash discuss General Arnold's incredible military career, and the decisions that ultimately led him to become the most infamous soldier in American history.

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Episode Transcript:

October 7th, 1777. The forests of upstate New York are afire with musket flashes, gunsmoke, and the screams of fighting men. Through fierce determination, Daniel Morgan's Rangers have heroically held the line against the British, and have begun to push them back in disarray. The entire war – and the American Revolution – depends on this moment. The opportunity to strike is now. Yet the overall commander of American forces either doesn't see it, or he's too timid to try and exploit it. In that moment, with so much hanging in the balance, one American hero took it into his own hands to lead his troops to victory. Jumping on his horse, he unsheathed his saber, reared up on his steed, and then charged screaming into battle, a single man streaking towards the enemy with his blade at the ready. Inspired, his men rallied behind him. Their ferocious bayonet attack that day smashed through the British lines, marking a turning point in the Revolution. But, despite all of this American officer's heroics, and in the dozens of battles that came before and after, you cannot find a single statue to this man in all of the United States. In fact, his name today is synonymous with one word: Traitor.

Ben: Hello and welcome back to Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson, and I am here with my co-host, Dr. Pat LaRoche. Pat, have you been watching anything good on TV recently?

Pat [00:01:51] Yeah, I finished. Only murders in the building and haven't really picked up anything since that.

Ben [00:01:56] Yeah, it's always so weird with so much stuff on VOD. So, like, it's always, you know, you don't have these, like, cultural events as often anymore where there's just, like, a thing that everybody has to watch and they watch. Oh, did you see Walking Dead? It was on or whatever.

Pat [00:02:08] Yeah.

Ben [00:02:09] We don't have that quite as much anymore. Are you watching House of the Dragon at all? I've been watching that now.

Pat [00:02:15] Not really. I haven't picked it up yet.

Ben [00:02:17] It's not. It's not Season one of Game of Thrones. It's fine. I don't. I don't have any problems with it. But I also watched three episodes on Monday in a row, and I really can't tell you too much about any of it. And I was like a pretty big time Game of Thrones person I liked. I was super into it. I had this big list of Game of Thrones people that was going to write about on my website. Yeah, but Game of Thrones in particular is kind of a weird cultural thing because everybody loved it and was crazy about it, and then it didn't get like a lot of hate. It didn't get a lot of like people weren't just like, angry about it forever. It just disappeared overnight. It seemed like nobody wanted to talk about it anymore.

Pat [00:02:56] Yeah, everyone moved on to the next thing.

Ben [00:02:58] Did you watch Game of Thrones at all?

Pat [00:03:00] I watched a few. I watched some of the seasons and I kind of fell off and didn't pick it up again. Yeah.

Ben [00:03:06] Yeah. So, I mean, so what happened with that show? Is that like, it was it was amazing and it was so good. There was nothing like it. It was really, really good. I had read all the books and stuff, but, you know, people were so into this every week. How did you watch the show? Did you watch it? You know what's going on? All this crazy stuff is happening. And then basically, like the book got like basically the last season, like, you know, the show got beyond the books and then it was on the writers of the show to keep it going and and then the last two seasons but in particular in particular, the last season were so bad and it ended so horribly and so miserably that everybody was just like, Oh, well, if get this right, you know, Yeah. And never hit it so poorly that you don't want to go back and rewatch season one with like for nostalgia purposes, it's just. No, that was awful. I was a huge eight year waste of my time.

Pat [00:04:00] Oh, yeah. So it's not like it's a Godfather three kind of situation where it's like, you know, Excellent, excellent. And then Mare or it's just like it was so mad that it kind of ruined the whole thing.

Ben [00:04:12] You know? It was not so mad that it totally ruined the whole thing. It was, We have these characters and we've established them and they're they're clearly are kicking towards these varying different end points. And then like, actually, I was a bad guy the whole time. And I actually this is like, you thought I liked you, but I don't like you actually. And it's like, Wait, wait.

Pat [00:04:31] So yeah, we.

Ben [00:04:33] All of this stuff is coming out of left field. It was just just brutal. It was it was a miserable experience watching the last season of of Game of Thrones and and that suck because I really loved the show and I like the books and, you know.

Pat [00:04:50] Yeah, it was it really was part of the culture. Yeah. For so long.

Ben [00:04:54] Yeah. And it's just gone.

Pat [00:04:56] Yeah.

Ben [00:04:57] So I bring this up right in. Game of Thrones in particular was huge, huge, huge thing. People would go to bars and watch it and like react to it, whatever, and then overnight it disappears and nobody's talking about it anymore. Nobody's going back to rewatch the old stuff. Even when House of the Dragon came out, they they put like Game of Thrones in very small font at the top because they kind of want to associate themselves with the entire thing. And we actually have a story like that in American history.

Pat [00:05:26] And you have Dragons Den.

Ben [00:05:28] It does not have dragons. No.

Pat [00:05:30] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:05:32] It really happened. They ride on horses, they fight with swords. It's a true story. Whereas.

Pat [00:05:37] Okay, okay, I'll Kill.

Ben [00:05:38] Thrones is a story kind of based on the historical events. So what? What do you think when I say the name Benedict Arnold?

Pat [00:05:47] Yeah, He's that traitor guy from the American Revolution, you know?

Ben [00:05:52] Yeah, Yeah. You're not wrong. He is that traitor guy from the American Revolution. But I'm going to talk about him this week on The Badass of the Week podcast because he was also kind of bad ass.

Pat [00:06:05] So you pick Benedict Arnold, The traitor was a bad ass. That's what you. You're. That's what you're going for, Ben.

Ben [00:06:10] That is the that is the the thesis statement that I am presenting right now. And I would just ask you to hold all judgment until the end.

Pat [00:06:20] Okay. I will hear you out. Present your evidence, present your reasoning.

Ben [00:06:23] Okay, here we go. I'm going to talk to you about Benedict Arnold. Okay, let's get back into it. So Benedict Arnold, he's a guy whose name is synonymous with treason and being a traitor and being hatefully remembered by anybody who has any rudimentary knowledge of American history. But right before he became the biggest traitor in American history and the first big one, I guess he was actually pretty bad ass. So let's get into talking about Benedict Arnold. So for Benedict Arnold, the war begins for him. He is a pretty wealthy Connecticut shopkeeper. He's living in the colonies under British rule, early 1770s. He's doing well with his business. Things are going pretty good. But as the revolution is starting to brew, he definitely airs on the side of the Patriots. He is not a loyalist. He does not like the Crown. He doesn't like paying his taxes like many wealthy shopkeepers don't. And he decides he is all in on this revolution, like, let's start our own country. Let's not tax the rich. All of that good stuff. And when he hears about the American Army putting up a good fight at the battle of Bunker Hill, he gets so excited that he runs to the local armory, demands the keys from the guys there, gets a bunch of guns out of the armory and just like recruits a militia, which is just a if you study American Revolution history, that is just a thing that people knew how to do in these days. You just put out a call for a militia and a militia arrives.

Pat [00:08:03] Yeah. Yeah. That's a motif that just keeps coming up over and over again.

Ben [00:08:07] Yes. You're going to see a lot of people who randomly were able to summon armies out of nowhere. And Benedict Arnold is one of them. He gets this militia. He heads out for upstate New York, which is kind of the line like the border between Canada and and New York State. And he links up with another guy who raises his own militia, a guy named Ethan Allen, who is now remembered as a great hero for his victory at Fort Ticonderoga. And a lot of people forget that Benedict Arnold was also there. So these two guys get together. They storm Fort Ticonderoga on May 10th, 1775, and it's just a bunch of screaming Americans with rifles running up the hill, which is incredibly terrifying to the British and the Canadians and many other people in the world. And the British commander runs outside in his underwear and immediately surrenders the keys to the fort. Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen are great heroes of the American Revolution. Very early on in the proceedings for their capture of a dude in his underwear at a fort on the border between New York and Canada. Another thing that Arnold is very well known for, and one of the craziest things that he did during his career is he led the first American invasion of Canada. We've tried to invade Canada twice. We have failed both times. Benedict Arnold was in command of the first attempt. He led a thousand soldiers on a 350 mile canoe ride and hike through the uncharted wildernesses of Canada in the middle of winter. And when I mean uncharted, I mean, like the only notes we had on this, on the route that they were taking was literally not on any maps because nobody had gone. It was all swamp and river and all this stuff. Nobody had gone through any of it before. And the only guide they had along this way was some dude who, like more than ten years ago, had traveled this route and made a little journal about it and drew little maps and stuff. Very sketchy. But Arnold was like, Yeah, whatever. We can do this. I'll march a thousand guys this way in the middle of winter in canoes that we just made like, two weeks ago. That sounds feasible.

Pat [00:10:08] Totally. Totally.

Ben [00:10:10] Hoff So they march in the wilderness. It doesn't go well. Like people are starting to desert. People are starting to get hungry. It's cold. People are freezing. The food's starting to run out there. Stories of people eating the leather off of their shoelaces. There's to get any kind of calories to sustain themselves on this hike to go all the way up the Kennebec River. Waterfalls, rapids. Sometimes the rowing, sometimes they're portage ing across, carrying the boats and stuff. But they do eventually make it. It takes nearly two months for them to get through this passageway. And the idea was that when they get out the other side, they're going to attack Canada from the direction that they were at least expecting it. Right. The main roads were all fortified. They wanted to go the back way and they did. And they were incredibly successful a lot due to the leadership of Benedict Arnold. He spent a bunch of his own money to outfit and supply the soldiers and they did it. They entered Canada American Army thousand guys outside the wall of the Canadian capital, Quebec City, which has 40 foot tall walls and several hundred people defending the town. It's the only city in North America that still has its original fortifications and walls, and they're very impressive and they're very big. And yet Benedict Arnold, he's got no cannons. He he has enough powder left from his journey that every guy can get five shots.

Pat [00:11:27] Only five.

Ben [00:11:28] Right? They get five shots. No cannons. Have the 1006. Her guys are left the rest of either deserted or died along the way. What do you think? The first thing he did was when he gets outside the capital of Quebec? If you had to guess.

Pat [00:11:41] I would. I would say a bad word.

Ben [00:11:45] I'd be like, Sorry, guys, thanks for following me out here. But like this, I really wasn't prepared for this. Now he demands the unconditional surrender of the castle, effective immediately. Oh, yeah. They respond by shooting a cannon at his messenger. The guy lived, but it wasn't that fun. So Benedict Arnold to 600 guys lay siege to Quebec City. Of course, as you. As you do. Even though he has no food, he's going to lay siege to Quebec City.

Pat [00:12:12] So no food, no cannon, and almost no powder.

Ben [00:12:16] Right. Okay. Yeah. He laid siege to the 40 foot walls of Quebec City. They have six bastions. They have 200 cannons. They have nearly a thousand defenders, including, like every man, woman and child in Quebec City. Like, the Canadians really don't want to be part of America. And they never have. And they probably never will. Every man, woman and child in the city was building fortifications inside the city like roadblocks and things like that, digging trenches to try to fortify the the city against Benedict Arnold. But he's going to push forward. He gets reinforced. He gets a little bit more supplies. And on New Year's Eve, 1775, in the dead of winter, in the dead of night in a whiteout blizzard, he personally leads the attack against Quebec City. You can say a lot of stuff about Benedict Arnold and we're going to say a lot of bad stuff about Benedict Arnold. But he was very brave. One of his men once wrote that he was the kind of guy who would say follow me rather than go get him. And he personally leads the attack. He is dragging a sled that he is mounted with a little cannon on it.

Pat [00:13:19] Wait a minute. Wait. So they actually do have a cannon? They have one little cannon.

Ben [00:13:23] They found one. Yeah, they they managed over the over the the two months, I believe, that they were besieging Quebec City. They managed to get their hands on it. Not a big one. A little cane if it's on a sled. Right. But they did it every they break into the lower city. Not the walls yet, but they're fighting through the lower parts of the city. Citizens are throwing things at them from the windows. The town guard is fighting them, but they are pushing their way through and they're winning and they're doing pretty well. And then Benedict Arnold gets shot. No way. He's falling. He's down. He's screaming and yelling. He's trying to crawl his way to keep fighting. Three of his own guys drag him kicking and screaming off the battlefield. The attack kind of stalls and then it gets crushed. I think something like 500 Americans get captured. The attack is completely destroyed. Arnold is lucky to escape with just like a little group of his own guys. And they get away. But complete defeat, right After all of that work, all of that travel all the way up there, they besiege him for a couple of months. They have this huge attack, very daring, but it's a big failure and they're running away.

Pat [00:14:31] Yeah. Tactical withdrawal.

Ben [00:14:32] Tactical withdrawal? Yeah. That's the military.

Pat [00:14:33] Term. That's the military term. Need to remember that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So this is I'm guessing this is not the end of the story.

Ben [00:14:41] It is not the end of the story because Benedict Arnold now has a new problem, which is that the Canadian Army has defeated the American army in the north and now they are going to march south and attack into New York and just pursue the defeated army and try to root them. And then basically like, okay, well, we defeated you and now we're going to go in because you all you guys are dead and we're going to go march in there and and take New York. So Arnold's retreating, retreating and he learns that the British are set to attack and they're not going to go the way he went. They're not going to go the main road. They're going to go by water. You know, you've got all those lakes up in upstate New York and Canada. They're going to go across a big lake called Lake Champlain. They have 29 warships that they've built on this lake, and they're going to transport 13,000 men across Lake Champlain into upstate New York to launch an attack. Arnold has like four guys with him. He's in big trouble, but he puts out a call. Like I said, everybody's raising militias. So he raises a militia of just everybody he can get his hands on on the way back. Right. Upstate New York, people like, hey, we got some trouble here. We got we got a problem. He has what's left of his soldiers, chopped down trees, their milk, horseshoes, gun barrels and canned whatever bits of cannons left. They have to make nails out of it.

Pat [00:15:59] So they're actually melting down their firearms.

Ben [00:16:03] Melting down their guns? Yeah. Melting down the firearms.

Pat [00:16:05] Like they're choosing to sacrifice their guns for this, right?

Ben [00:16:09] To build ships. Yeah. They're going to cut down trees and melt down their gear to make nails to build ships, which, I mean, the main thing they're going to do with them is set them on fire and sell them into the British fleet to to try to cause some havoc there. But he and his men managed to build 16 warships in Lake Champlain in an incredibly short. Period of time. So he gets defeated on New Year's Eve, 1775, on October ten, 1776, ten months later. He's built 16 warships and he trained a regiment of New Hampshire infantrymen who had never been on a boat before, how to sail a ship. And those guys are going to go out and sail against 29 warships of the British Navy and 13,000 men and try to stop this attack into New York.

Pat [00:16:58] That's pretty impressive.

Ben [00:16:59] Yeah. Yeah, it's impressive. The odds are not great. No. And like I said, their plan was to light some of those ships on fire and just sail them into the British Navy to try to hope to catch some of their ships on fire. But they end up fighting this battle of Lake Champlain at 7 hours on the lake, which I just love. The idea of two navies fighting each other in a big lake. Whoever wins, there's no exit plan here, right? All you can do is just sail back and forth around this lake. There's no. There's no ocean access. It's been kind of. Kind of funny.

Pat [00:17:26] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:17:28] Everything catches on fire. The boats all get smashed, Everything gets blown up. Benatar loses every single ship in his fleet. And like I said, he was planning on setting most of them on fire, which is what he does. He uses the sails to carry his wounded men home in these bloody sails. But he was able to delay the British attack. He did enough damage to them. He didn't win the battle. He lost every ship in his fleet. But he did enough damage to them that they couldn't press the invasion and they were kind of stuck there. Arnold retreats back to Fort Ticonderoga, which is the fort he captured in the very beginning days of the war. Starts building more ships, starts getting reinforcements, starts building of his army, and it's going to be another six or seven months before the British are able to try to attack again by themselves some time. And that's pretty awesome to have been defeated. And then you cover your own tactical withdrawal. But building these ships and having them fight against this invasion force.

Pat [00:18:27] Yeah, that was pretty that was that was a pretty bad ass tactic.

Ben [00:18:30] Okay. The British do eventually come. And this is where you get the Battle of Saratoga, which is the one that everybody knows. It's the turning point of the war. That's the only thing I ever remembered learning about this growing up was that Battle of Saratoga was the turning point of the American Revolution. The Battle of Saratoga was won by Benedict Arnold. And we're going to get into that. So the British come down and the British take their sweet time getting down there. The British army is led by a guy named Johnny Burgoyne and he's they call him gentleman Johnny Burgoyne. Johnny Burgoyne is like, you know, that question of like, which historical figure would you have dinner with if you could have dinner with any historical figure? What would your answer to that be, Pat? Oh.

Pat [00:19:16] Goodness. I don't know, honestly. Maybe. Maybe, the Roman poet answered. I don't know. It's like I think actually, I'd want to have like a whole dinner party of people. But anyway, is. Is this the cue for me to ask you, Ben? So, Ben, who would you like to have dinner with?

Ben [00:19:34] Well, I think a lot of people go with the historical figure they think is the most interesting gentleman. Johnny Burgoyne might have been the most fun person to have dinner with. If you were going to have a dinner party to have dinner with somebody from history, it'd be like it'd be a close one between like Peter the Great and gentleman Johnny get going. Because they were both party monsters. So the British are going down. Johnny Burgoyne was just some guy. He was just some British officer. He meets the commander of the British Army at a party in Canada. And it's like, Hey, you want to you want to take care of these Americans? I'll take care of some Americans for you, Dude, I got this under control. And the guy was like, Yeah, sure, why not? You can have an army of guys to attack the colonies. So we're going is going down. He's got this big baggage train with him. He's got one giant horse drawn carriage that's filled entirely with silverware for his parties. He's a party machine, and that's all he really wants to do. And that's all he does. On the ride south from Canada into New York to fight the Americans. And the bummer with this is that it also really slows him down because you've got to get all these carts through the mud and the rain and the muck and all of this stuff. They're not an easy and easy way to get down there. And by the time they get down there, the Americans reinforce their base at Saratoga. So there's two guys in charge of the base at Saratoga, one's Benedict Arnold, and one is Horatio Gates. Gates is the guy who gets all the credit for winning this, even though Horatio Gates would have lost it without Benedict Arnold Gates, the strategy was like, hey, we're in this fort. We've got these cannons, we got these trenches, just hang out here and defend. And Arnold was like, No, they've got more guys than us. They got 6000 troops, they've got hundreds of cannons. And they're bringing up more and more every single day. Every day we wait here, more of Johnny Goins silverware is going to arrive and with it's going to be cannons and horses and guys. And so we have to attack. We have to find the right moment in attack. And him and Gates really have an argument about this. There's one they do like a little skirmish at one point, a place called Fraser's Farm, a place that's now known as Fraser's farm. The Americans win. Arnold is like, This is it? We've got to go. We've got a break and we've got him on the run, Gates says. No, there's this huge argument. And Benedict Arnold, it's a very like it's one of these like, you can't fire me. I quit situations. He might have been we might have been fired. He might have quit. We don't really know. There was a big argument. There was a lot of swearing, there was a lot of anger. And it ended up with Arnold having stayed at Saratoga because he really wanted to see this thing through. But he was completely removed of all command and was no longer in charge of any soldiers. So a few weeks later, the British launched an even bigger attack and the Americans hold again, same place Fraser's farm. It's called that because the British commander's name was Fraser. He gets killed on the battlefield at the second engagement here, the British kind of on the run. And the British main force isn't really prepared for this. There's this huge hole in their lines. Arnold is sitting on the hill at Saratoga watching this tells Gates like this is the time. Gates is like, No, no, we're just gonna hang out here. Arnold's like, You can hang out here. I'm going. He goes on his horse by himself and rides directly to that gaff by himself. He jumps over like a fence on his horse. He's like, waving his sword around. He's screaming at the American troops that are there are so inspired by this that they follow him. Even though he's not their commanding officer. He commands nobody. Their orders are to hold and they charge with him and they run through and they break through this flank. Arnold gets shot in the leg. He keeps fighting. His horse gets shot and falls on the same leg that has now been shot twice, crushes his leg. He's killed under the horse. He's still, like waving his sword around, trying to get people to rally. And they do. They defeat Scottish Highlanders. They defeat some of the more like intense units of the British Army, drive them from the field. And the next day, Johnny Burgoyne surrenders his entire army to the Americans, 6000 soldiers.

Pat [00:23:24] Wow.

Ben [00:23:25] So he's the greatest hero of the biggest battle of the American Revolution.

Pat [00:23:28] Yeah. Mr. Benedict. Follow me, Arnold.

Ben [00:23:31] Yeah, follow me. Exactly. That's how he did it.

Pat [00:23:33] And that's. And that's how we're seeing him in this moment.

Ben [00:23:37] Yes.

Pat [00:23:38] This is, you know, this is Benedict Arnold at his best.

Ben [00:23:41] This is Van Gaal. Asbestos all downhill from here. So, yes, this is this is this is the bummer part of the story. So. He gets put in charge of Philadelphia, he's re regrouping, right. His legs all messed up. He technically disobeyed orders. Him and Gates still hate each other. Gates is a little bit more influential. Arnold was a little bit more of, like a renegade. While he's recovering, they put him in Philadelphia. He marries into a loyalist family. Which take from that what you will like. There's a lot of historical stuff around like those which made him do it, which I don't really think is a very productive way of looking at historical figures, because he still had to make the decision. Right. I don't understand. It's like, Oh, he had an evil wife and that's why she henpecked him into doing evil stuff. Which yeah, I hate it as a historical way of looking at things.

Pat [00:24:30] Exactly. Yeah. I mean, she's not the only influence on him. And, you know, we have just so many examples of married couples disagreeing on things. I'm with you on this, Ben.

Ben [00:24:40] Exactly. It's like he's marrying into the family now after having been fighting the British from day one of this war. It's not like he didn't give that at least a little bit of thought before he bought the ring. Right. He gets passed over for promotion. The Continental Congress accuses of him stealing funds because they don't like him. He wasn't stealing funds by most accounts. He wasn't stealing funds. He came into money when he married his family. So he started buying nicer things. They accused him of stealing money from the Continental Congress. I think that was just kind of a way of.

Pat [00:25:11] Opportunity.

Ben [00:25:11] Giving him a hard time.

Pat [00:25:12] Yeah, his.

Ben [00:25:13] Leg hurt every single day because we're looking at like 18th century medicine to repair a dude who got shot twice in the same leg and then had a horse fall on it. Oh.

Pat [00:25:22] Yeah. Even with 21st century medicine, that's rough.

Ben [00:25:25] Yes. So he's still. He's still brigadier general, which is not that high. Right. It's like the lowest level of a general. He's a brigadier general, and he's one of the greatest war heroes of the war so far. Gates gets promoted over him and is given command of the entire army in the South. Completely blows it and and gets massively defeated. And Arnold is super mad and he's like, why? I should be having a better, better post than just this Philadelphia thing. And so they put him in charge of a little base called West Point, which is currently where the United States Military Academy is, where the Army trains its officers. But at the time it was just a fort on a river in upstate New York. And he was just like, what is this? What the hell is this? Right?

Pat [00:26:09] Yeah, he was promoted out of the way.

Ben [00:26:11] Right. You were just kind of stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. He's mad. Like I would be a little. I'd be a little annoyed with this, too. So what he does is not awesome. He meets with some British spies and is like, You know what? I'll just hand over West Point to you guys. If you just make me an officer in the British Army and treat me better than these Americans. He wants money, he wants an officer's commission, and he is going to turn over West Point.

Pat [00:26:33] Oh, Benedict Benedict.

Ben [00:26:35] It's not a good idea. It's a really bad this is a really like this is the this is the American Revolution version of like having too much wine and like emailing your ex girlfriend. Right. Like, this is not good. It's not a well thought out decision.

Pat [00:26:50] No, you know, it is not well thought out. I mean, I take it on like a larger scale than, you know, drunk texting your ex or whatever, but you know. Yeah. Not, not Benedict Arnold's finest moment and.

Ben [00:27:04] And he's not even good at it because it gets caught.

Pat [00:27:07] Here. Oh, he sucks at treason.

Ben [00:27:11] He sucks it treason. It's not his thing. He's more about, you know, he went about Theresa in the same way he went about the Battle of Saratoga, just like waving his sword around and yelling because he gets busted. Washington spies the culprit ring. They find him. And luckily, luckily for him, I guess he figures it out before he gets caught. He escapes. They go to get him and they he gets away. He does become an officer in the British army. They give him a generalship. He goes back and he sets fire to some stores outside of Richmond, Virginia. He goes back to his hometown of New London, Connecticut, and burns it to the ground, which, you know what? This is not cool. In 1775 when you're like the greatest war hero in American history.

Pat [00:27:53] Not cool. Benedict Not cool.

Ben [00:27:56] And and that's it. He he survives the war. He goes back to England. He starts of a business there. He's retires with an officer's commission and he dies in peace. Nobody gets him. If you were going to do a Hollywood movie of his life, you'd end up having like Lafayette duel him at the end and defeat him or something. Or George Washington would throw him off the tower or whatever. But like, it doesn't happen. He goes home and and he retires and he's rich and he lives in a mansion. And, you know, he's a little bit sad about the way that things went. But but.

Pat [00:28:27] But he's sad and rich.

Ben [00:28:30] Sad and rich. It's better to be sad and rich than sad and poor. Yeah.

Pat [00:28:33] Yeah. He's sad and rich and not in jail, right?

Ben [00:28:38] Yes, right. Yeah. He committed treason and got away with it and lived happily ever after. And that's how the story ends. Wow. There are currently three monuments to Benedict Arnold in the United States. Which is kind of interesting considering that he's the biggest traitor in American history.

Pat [00:28:54] Well, you got to remember things somehow. Yeah.

Ben [00:28:56] I mean, he was a great hero and he wouldn't have been such a big trader. Like, there were plenty of people who were flipping sides in the American Revolution on the lower levels. But you don't remember their names because they weren't big time celebrities in their own lifetime, right?

Pat [00:29:09] Yeah. So these monuments, how do you commemorate a guy who is as complicated as Benedict Arnold, big war hero, also a traitor? Yes.

Ben [00:29:17] Mostly just to leave his name off the monument, which is what they did to Arnold with these with these ones to the monuments at Saratoga. One is just the statue of a boot on the foot that got shot. And it's. It's placed right at the spot where he led the charge and got shot in the leg. And it simply says, in memory of the most brilliant officer of the Continental Army who was desperately wounded on this spot waiting for his countrymen, the decisive battle of the American Revolution and for himself the rank of Major general. Pretty good. That's pretty good one. That's as far as the monuments go. That's pretty solid one. There's another statue on the battlefield at Saratoga that shows the American commanders, Horatio Gates, Philip Schuler and Daniel Morgan. And there's a fourth pedestal there that's empty. Just kind of say like there was another guy here, but we're not going to talk about him.

Pat [00:30:07] Yeah. Mm hmm. Conspicuous by his absence.

Ben [00:30:10] Yes, exactly. I like the but one. There's a story that when Benedict Arnold was leading those raids into Virginia, he captured some American soldiers, and he was interrogating them personally. And this is. This is back before Instagram and live streaming all that stuff. So these people knew who Benedict Arnold, these American soldiers knew who Benedict Arnold was, but they didn't really know what he looked like. Right. Because it wasn't like you weren't sending, like, photographs around. You were there was no AP wire of, like, what his face looked like. So he captures these guys and he asks them if there were any orders regarding what to do with General Benedict Arnold if they were to capture him. And the soldier that he talked to, I mean, this is a story, right? But the the soldier said, yes, we are to bury the wounded leg with the highest military honors and hang the rest of him. Oh, pretty solid. That's pretty good. I would say that is like some way I would say that it's pretty bad as to be remembered in this way. I mean, it's not good, right? It's not good to betray your country for some money. I think if he had just kind of been chill, he'd be remembered as like, one of the greatest founding fathers in American war heroes ever. If he had just gone to West Point and, like, written an angry letter.

Pat [00:31:19] Yeah. Yup. Use your words, people.

Ben [00:31:22] Well, yeah, exactly.

Pat [00:31:23] Use your words and then don't sell out. If she had made different choices, he'd be remembered quite differently. He'd be. He wouldn't. He wouldn't be outshone by Horatio Gates.

Ben [00:31:33] Yeah. I mean, it's a and it's interesting, right? Because because of this treason, everybody does know his name, even though I don't think they quite like. I think over the last couple of hundred years, it's been kind of lost as to why his name is was so, so hated at the time. Right. It was because he was such a badass warrior of American history that that when he betrayed when he betrayed his post, it was shocking to everybody.

Pat [00:32:02] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:32:04] I didn't know about the third monument, but the third one is that the United States Military Academy at West Point, which is like the they have a statue to this guy at the place where he was most famously going to, like, betray the country. Yeah. But on the grounds at West Point, they have a bunch of plaques that depict every American general of the revolution. And it just puts like birth year, rank death a little sentence or two about them. The name. And there's one amid all of these with all the biological details of everybody who achieved the rank of general in American Revolution. There's one that is just blank and it says Major General born 1740 with no additional details. So that was the story of Benedict Arnold, American hero who became American villain overnight. Pat, to convince you at all, is it still you, Benedict Arnold?

Pat [00:32:55] Okay. Okay. Yes, I'll confess. I still have you Benedict Arnold. But this is ill Ben. Benedict Arnold. Say it ain't so. You know, you have convinced me that he was a badass. And he, you know, he did a total heel turn, but he was a badass.

Ben [00:33:10] He was. And yeah, he he totally. He he'll turn is the best way to put it. Just overnight, greatest war hero in American history. If he decides that he doesn't want to, you know, betray everything that he fought for, then he's he's probably on money right now. Yeah, but he did. And he had his season eight of Game of Thrones, and now nobody wants to talk about him anymore. And there's no statues of him. And and that's that's the story of Benedict Arnold. It's it's it's much more of a tragedy than a lot of people really give it credit for, because they just think, oh, he's that guy that betrayed the country and.

Pat [00:33:49] Yeah, that's a little.

Ben [00:33:51] More deeper and interesting.

Pat [00:33:52] And it's not even well, it's not even that there are no statues. It's that there are things that whose point is to tell you this is not a statue of Benedict Arnold.

Ben [00:33:58] Yes. Yes. They they went through great effort to to obfuscate and to and to say this is a statue of a great hero, but who shall not be named and we will never talk about and we don't have any is it persona non grata or is not memorialized in the US, I guess.

Pat [00:34:17] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Good old. I'm not here tomorrow. Good old Roman tradition. Yes. So if you have convinced me he's a badass and like any human being, he's a complex character and you can be a bad ass.

Ben [00:34:30] Yeah. So I'm not comfortable referring to him as. As friend of the show Benedict Arnold just yet.

Pat [00:34:35] But no.

Ben [00:34:36] But he, you know, he's he's more bad ass than people like to give him credit for. And yeah. So hopefully we won't get too many horrifying hate mail emails about this or angry Twitter comments. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed on that.

Pat [00:34:53] That is a hobby of some people.

Ben [00:34:57] Okay. Well, we will see you on the next one. Have you made it this far? We're really glad that you did. And thanks for listening. Have a great one.

Pat [00:35:06] Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen and tell your friends and your enemies if you want, as we'll be back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.