Benedict Arnold remains one of the most controversial actors in the history of the American Revolution. His being an undeniable hero of the early years of the conflict made his later betrayal of the American cause all the more shocking. We talk with Jack Kelly about his new book, God Save Benedict Arnold: The True Story of America's Most Hated Man.
Benedict Arnold remains one of the most controversial actors in the history of the American Revolution. His being an undeniable hero of the early years of the conflict made his later betrayal of the American cause all the more shocking. We talk with Jack Kelly about his new book, God Save Benedict Arnold: The True Story of America's Most Hated Man.
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Hello, everyone.
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Welcome to the Revolution 250 podcast.
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I'm Bob Allison.
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I chair the Rev 250 advisory group.
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We are a consortium of about 70 organizations in Massachusetts planning ways to commemorate the beginnings of American independence.
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And our guest today is Jack Kelly.
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This is actually not your first time talking with us.
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Jack is a prolific author.
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He is a historian as well as a novelist, public scholar.
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We had him on a year or two ago to talk about his book about the Valcour Island Battle.
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He's also wrote a really remarkable book called Band of Giants, The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence.
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But today we're going to talk about your new book, which is God Save Benedict Arnold, The True Story of America's Most Hated Man.
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So, Jack, thanks for joining us.
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Well, thank you, Bob.
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It's great to be talking to you.
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So let me just ask, what drew you to tell the story of Benedict Arnold?
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Well, partly it was because I had dealt with Arnold in my previous books in Band of Giants.
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Like many people, I read the Kenneth Roberts novels and the tremendous adventure story of the march over the Maine mountains.
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And I, of course, wrote the book about the Valcour campaign, which was almost entirely Benedict Arnold's work.
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also involved Horatio Gates and Philip Schuyler, but a great achievement for Arnold.
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And I just felt that I wanted to sort of wind up the story, round it out, and
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Arnold is a great portal into the revolution, the first three years of the revolution, because he was involved in the biggest operations and the most heroic activities of the 75, 76, and 77.
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So I think, you know, particularly with the 250th anniversary coming up, the idea of Arnold as
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a familiar name to everybody, pulling people into the story of the revolution.
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And in many ways, Arnold reflected the times.
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He's always depicted as somewhat of an anomaly because he was treasonous, but it was a complicated and very conflicted time in the country.
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And he was sort of embodied that.
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Really, because you have this remarkable heroism at the beginning of the war, which is one of the things that then makes his treason such a terrific blow to Washington and others.
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If Arnold is a traitor, who can we trust?
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Yeah, exactly.
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So what do you think motivated him to become a traitor?
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Well, that question, why did he do it, always comes down to that.
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And many reasons have been given.
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He gave quite a few reasons himself.
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Different historians have had their favorite theories.
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Was it the money?
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Did he do it mostly for the money that he was going to get paid?
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Was it...
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his wife influencing him Peggy Shippen was a loyalist leaning young lady um the was it the French alliance you know he grew up hating the French and uh the French alliance he he at one point claimed that that was a cause or he didn't like Independence was it the uh the promotions he that he
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did or didn't get the conflicts he had with Congress.
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And of all these reasons, the answer I always give is, I don't know why he did it.
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It's hard to imagine that any of those,
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particular reasons would have been enough to cause this life-changing decision.
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And as I have said a few times, I sometimes wonder if he knew himself why he did it.
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He was not an introspective character.
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And he was not really a thinker.
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He was a man of action.
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And he just did things.
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And so it's, you know, I discuss a lot in the book, a lot of the factors that were involved.
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Right.
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I wonder, Jack,
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if we can talk a little bit more about his background.
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You said he's a man of action, and that actually starts at a young age.
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So can you tell us a bit about who he was before we get to the Revolution?
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Yeah.
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One of the questions that I'm often asked, Bob, is why, if he had no military training, which he'd had almost none, no military experience, why did he suddenly become a military hero?
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And he really was.
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had an uncanny feel for tactics and strategy from the very beginning.
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And I would think of it as really the product of his being a sea captain.
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His father had a trading business down to the West Indies.
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did quite well at it for a while.
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Then he became an alcoholic later and ran into business difficulties.
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But Arnold sort of picked up the family baton and carried on the same business, bought ships, and was the captain of ships.
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Some merchants in New England just stayed home and sent the ships out.
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But he went down to the West Indies because it was more profitable to do that.
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And that was a job that required a great sense of command, a lot of planning, attention to detail, an ability to really to push forth your personality over whether it's your crew or the men you're trading with or whatever.
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And I think he developed those skills and that enhanced his ability
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um the fact that he really was a natural Warrior yeah a few of those people just he just it just felt when he went in 1775 and went into action it just felt like he was uh in you know fulfilling his destiny I think right yeah yeah right and he is in command and he's used to being in command of men and on a on a small ship where you need to do things quickly and effectively and the captain has to be the captain
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And it's sort of an isolated job.
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You didn't fraternize with your crew if you were the captain.
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And they had a fairly small crew, so there wasn't a lot of other officers on the ship.
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So he would sit alone in his cabin most of the time and then, you know, command from on high.
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Right, yeah.
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But then he does have, you make a point in your book about the relationship he strikes up with Joseph Warren.
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And Warren...
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doctor and Arnold had been running an apothecary shop in New Haven.
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Yeah.
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Benedict Arnold is often referred to as an apothecary, and he did have an apprenticeship with some relatives of his mother after his father's business went down the tubes.
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He was an apprentice, which was a big step down for him.
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For the family as a whole.
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And he became this family was treated him very well, set him up in business in New Haven in an apothecary shop.
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But in those days, apothecary was really a luxury goods store.
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They sold medicine.
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They sold things we associate with a drugstore.
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But they also sold books and perfumes and, you know, fine things.
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And then from there he got into trading and he traded horses and lumber to a large extent and developed that business and was quite successful at it.
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So when he went up, a few days after the Battle of Lexington and the news reached New Haven and marched immediately with a small group
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militia company, got up to Cambridge where the Patriots were besieging the British in Boston.
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met joseph warren he was only there for two days he had a almost like a mind meld with warren they became very close friends they both saw things exactly the same that we're at war we have to push the war we can't there's not going to be reconciliation a lot of people were still talking about reconciliation and so um he um warren was the man who got him the the
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position as colonel in the Massachusetts militia and sent him out to Western Massachusetts to drum up a regiment out of people out in the West and then take over Ticonderoga, which was Arnold's idea for a way to get the cannon that they needed to confront the British.
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Right, right.
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Yeah.
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And so he does.
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And then why don't we talk about the Canada campaign again?
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Kenneth Roberts really paints a great picture of it.
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You do as well.
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I mean, that is really such an extraordinary campaign that
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we actually don't talk a whole lot about.
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Well, yeah, it's a little embarrassing, you know, that our first, the Patriots' first impulse was to invade another colony, though, you know, if you look at it from their point of view, it did make a lot of sense.
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It deprived the British of a base from which they could invade, and that was the whole idea.
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And Arnold did
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wrote up a plan to invade canada which congress was at first very reluctant and then adopted but didn't um didn't move as quickly as he thought they should uh they gave the assignment ultimately to richard montgomery who led the american campaign up the st lawrence river through from lake champlain
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And Arnold, in an idea that I guess was floating around the camp in Boston, that he should go up over the Maine mountains.
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So there was this trail.
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And it was always a little bit murky in exactly who decided to do it.
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It was probably not the best idea in the world.
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But he took 1,000 men trying to go over just a trail that went through the woods, poorly mapped.
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They had all their supplies in boats and they spent most of their time pushing the boats upstream in the Kennebec River, wading in ice water.
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They ran out of food, partly because a lot of the food got ruined by the water and partly because it just took a lot longer than they thought it was going to.
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And Arnold reached a point, they were about halfway to Canada,
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And he reached a point where he had to decide and, and it was a, you know, a thousand men's lives were depending on his decision.
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Um, it seemed like it was, it was too late to go back, but they don't, they didn't know what was ahead of them.
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And so he decided, you know, he convinced them and he had this great sense of like stepping up to the crisis.
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And he, he convinced all his officers that, uh, I'll go forward alone with a small group of men.
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get the food and send it back to you while you continue on with the expedition, which he was able to do, and just barely in the nick of time.
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Really remarkable.
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And came pretty close to taking the city of Quebec, which was their goal, but got there a few days too late and had to wait for Montgomery.
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Whether Montgomery did a good job in that campaign, he was such a martyr.
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He was one of the earliest and the highest ranking men to be killed in the war.
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He was revered then.
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He continues to be revered to the extent that he's remembered at all.
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But I don't think he did a very good job.
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I think he was too slow.
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He could have moved a lot faster.
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And once he got up there and saw the situation, it really was foolish to try to attack Quebec, but he did and lost his life.
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Yeah, we're talking with Jack Kelly, author most recently of God Save Benedict Arnold, The True Story of America's Most Hated Man.
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really talking about this guy we all know as the traitor but actually before he's a traitor he's actually one of the leading military men of the revolution and we've just been talking about the beginning of the canada campaign i know you wrote you've written a book about balcour island so maybe we don't need to talk more about that although it's a great another story um
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Then it seems like Arnold is always pushing and always pushing against those who are.
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Your book begins with that wonderful anecdote about David Worcester and the New Haven committee saying, no, we don't want we want to wait and see.
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And Arnold demanding the keys to the powder house so they can get their supplies and be off to Lexington and Concord.
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Well, I think that one thing that always struck me about Arnold is he had a strategic view of things.
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And there's a lot of great, and you'd say, you know, some of the great sort of general patent types who are practically brilliant and in battle are, you know,
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but don't have the bigger picture all the time.
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But somehow Arnold had that strategic view of things, what had to be done and then how to do them was the tactical.
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And that came up again and again in his career.
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Yeah, he really does combine these two things.
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And plus, of course, his charismatic ability to lead men.
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Absolutely, yeah.
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He had a great confidence and was apparently very persuasive.
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He didn't leave behind a lot of writings or men that recorded his speeches, but somehow he was able to really persuade people that...
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His idea was right, and it usually was right.
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It's amazing.
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The war does bring forward a number of people like this.
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It reveals these talents like Nathaniel Green, Henry Knox, even Washington would have had much different lives if not for this big event that they're all involved in.
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Yeah, I think that's true, particularly of Henry Knox and Greene.
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I mean, both pretty successful in their careers that they'd chosen, as was Washington, and were drawn into the war and found themselves in the war.
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And I think that is true of Arnold even more so, that when he got into the fighting, he found that he had a gift that was...
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I'm sure it must have surprised him almost, too, for whatever experience he had.
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He just had this gift for war that changed his life entirely.
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Now, would you say he is the real hero of Saratoga?
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I think it's the dispute about...
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the various aspects of Saratoga.
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Had Arnold been relieved of his command?
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Was he having a dispute with Gates?
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Looking at that as thoroughly as I could and through all the records, I think that that whole
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episode was overblown I think it was it was pushed by his aides who were friendly with Philip Schuyler who was very resentful of being pushed out of command in the north and uh of Gates's main aid which was Wilkinson James Wilkinson who was a notorious kind of um gossip and uh troublemaker
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And they, in the end, it didn't really mean anything.
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And Gates was not about to send him back or to deprive him of command.
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And that Arnold really was in command.
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There was a letter, of course, that came out a few years ago that was, they called the bachelor letter that was written two days after the battle that just indicated that both,
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gates and arnold were cooperating and and were on the battlefield at times it wouldn't have it wouldn't have been appropriate particularly for gates to be out in the battlefield uh as the commanding general he had to be somewhere where he could always be found the same thing for arnold in a lot of ways as a major general he should have been behind the lines which he was most of the time and i think that his his uh management of the battle
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really paid off.
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But I also give a lot of credit to Gates.
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And some people seem to think, well, who was it?
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Was it Gates or Arnold?
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Well, I think that it was teamwork.
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Gates had the strategic vision of
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wearing down burgoyne and did and and that was what put burgoyne in a position where he had to do something that in the second battle was was really kind of foolish but um he was desperate and so uh having been put in that position then arnold uh rallied the troops and uh and led the charge yeah
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When he went off to Lexington Concord in 1775, he left behind his wife who was in bad health, young children.
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So what happens to his family while he's away?
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Well, while he was up around Ticonderoga and that campaign in 75, his wife died unexpectedly.
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She was never in very good health, but it wasn't.
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And left three sons behind.
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His sister then took over the care of his sons.
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the two his wife and sister had both been involved in the business they they he would go off when he was going off that was of course the disadvantage of being a sea captain you were out of touch with your business so they would take it over and work quite well versed in his business but it was hard it was a hard time because of the british blockades uh trading and you had a really big maneuver and his sister um told him you know as your business is going down but um
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he he immediately you know pushed on um he was he was very grieved by his wife's death but he pushed and went uh assignment whatever it was whatever it was and then what about his sons what happens to them
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Well, they stayed there in New Haven with his sister, and he got to see them a few times during the war or before the Saratoga campaign, but very rarely because he was, after he took off for Maine to go over the Maine mountains into Canada, he was in Canada then for a long time.
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It was after Montgomery was killed, he was in command in Canada.
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a weight and had been wounded and he had to recover and then went right down into the valcour campaign all the summer of the next summer so he didn't get home all that much during that period of the war um we're talking with jack kelly author most recently of god save benedict arnold the true story of america's most hated man so then
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After this, he gets the command in Philadelphia, after the British evacuate Philadelphia, you know, they occupied it for a year or so.
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So what led to him being given command in Philadelphia?
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Well, a lot of people say, you know, it was one of George Washington's rare personnel mistakes that he should never have put Arnold in charge there.
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It was a politically very
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delicate situation because so many of the Philadelphians had cozied up to the British while they were there and then who was really a loyalist and who was a leaning a loyalist.
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And Arnold, that was the one thing that he didn't have was tact and a political sense of how to maneuver diplomatically.
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And so he...
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threw in largely with the wealthier people in the city he liked to live the high life and courted peggy shippen who was the daughter of a family that was leaning loyalists they weren't they weren't
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flat-out loyalists but they leaned that way and she apparently did too had had been very friendly with British officers and he married her and he was hard up for money he cut a few corners to try to make some money that was all
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It was a little fuzzy during the revolution.
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I mean, Nathaniel Green, who was a quartermaster general, made a lot of money in dealing with the army as well.
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And he was never accused of... I'm sorry, Jack.
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I'm worried about not saying bad things about Nathaniel Green on this part.
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I know Arnold was a Rhode Islander and his family was from Rhode Island, but is this like...
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Rhode Island trash talking each other, the other generals.
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I'm sorry, I cut you off.
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I'm actually a big admirer of Nathaniel Green, too.
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So, you know, I think particularly down south, he did a great job.
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I'm just saying that, you know, things were different than as far as...
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But, you know, that that led to Arnold being reprimanded.
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They got up a court martial.
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Washington gave him the most gentle reprimand in history.
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But he still didn't like it.
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And he thought that he was not being appreciated.
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And.
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He started thinking.
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And soon after he married Peggy Shippen, he made contact with the British and started the plot to go over.
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So was it his maneuvering that got him in command of West Point?
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Or did Washington say, let's move him out of Philadelphia and send him somewhere else?
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No, actually, Washington wanted him to come back into...
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into a command, field command, and said he would make him his second in command.
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And by that time, Arnold had this idea of getting command over West Point and giving that over to the British.
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And so he said he was still too, his leg had been shattered at Saratoga, and he was still recovering, so he declined that command.
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invitation to go back into active service and said that he wanted to command the lower Hudson Valley and West Point.
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And so that's what Washington gave him.
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And that's where the plot reached its conclusion.
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So why West Point?
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Why was West Point such a strategic position that the British would have paid Arnold to get their hands on?
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Well, they had had the idea
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from the beginning of the war of that corridor, which we don't think much of now, but it was a water corridor that ran from New York City up the Hudson River, up Lake George, Lake Champlain, the Richelieu River up to Montreal.
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There was like a super highway of that time.
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And it was very crucial for communications and the ability of the British to cut off communications from New England to the middle states.
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and of course what there was no military academy there then it was simply a fort but it was the the strategic fort protecting the river from being uh from being taken by the british whether if they had taken it they would have won the war uh has been debated i i think it's possible but it's not probably not likely but it certainly it would have been a blow that
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In a bad year for the Patriots, which 1780 certainly was, it might have prompted them to begin negotiations of a negotiated settlement rather than push through to victory.
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There was some thinking at the time, too, that Arnold being such a popular figure would bring others with him.
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And that doesn't really happen.
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So what happens to Arnold once he does go over to the British side?
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Yeah, that was a fortunate development that he didn't inspire others to join him.
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And even when he went over, became a brigadier general in New York on the British side and tried to raise a regiment of loyalists, which he did, but there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for that either, even though they would be serving under the great Benedict Arnold.
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Yeah.
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He then fought down in Virginia for a while, did fairly well, and then was given the assignment of raiding New London, Connecticut, which was pretty much his hometown.
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He'd been born just a few miles north of there.
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And so he went up there, and in the process, not only did they burn part of the town, but there was a massacre in Fort Griswold on the other side of the town.
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river that um arnold wasn't really really responsible for but it didn't didn't help his reputation anyway yeah and then uh he went over to england on the same ship that cordon wallace did after yorktown wow wow so then then he lives the rest of his life in england uh yeah he and um his second wife who was the both his wives were named peggy so peggy shippen um
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lived in London that didn't get a real warm reception there.
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In particular, Arnold wanted to get back into the military.
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I mean, he realized that the military was his life.
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And he could never, after the fighting ended in America, he could never get another assignment, even tried to get into the East India Company that had its own military force.
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And even they didn't want them.
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He and Peggy went to Canada for about six years.
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He tried to get into business up there in a community of loyalists.
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Then went back and essentially got back into the business he'd left, which was to...
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trade down to the West Indies, and he'd made numerous trips down to the West Indies trading.
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Wow.
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What happens to his sons by his first marriage?
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They eventually, they joined up with him when he moved to Canada.
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His sister and the three sons came up there.
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A couple of them stayed in Canada and ran the businesses that he had started up there.
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All of them got commissions in the British Army.
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All of his sons, he had, I think,
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three or four more sons with his second wife in England.
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They all got commissions as part of the sort of the reward from the British and served.
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His eldest son, who was also named Benedict, was killed in the Napoleonic Wars in Jamaica.
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All the sons served and apparently did fairly well.
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And in generations down the Arnold line, many of them went right down to World War I, I think was the last, and were generals or high commands in the British Army.
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Interesting.
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We're talking with Jack Kelly, public scholar, historian, novelist about his new book, God Save Benedict Arnold.
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The True Story of America's Most Hated Man.
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Now, Jack, you've been immersed in the story of the Revolution for some time, and you've written three books on the Valcour and the Band of Giants.
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I'm wondering, in doing this one, what are some of the things that surprised you to find out about the story of Benedict Arnold?
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It's a very well-known story, but you're always uncovering new things.
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That's a good question.
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I'm trying to think of what were the surprises.
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And I'm drawing a blank.
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I'm sure there were surprises.
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A lot of it had to do with the reasons for his thing.
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And I think the most telling thing, and I suppose it was a surprise in a way, was
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that I really got convinced that Benedict Arnold was a man of action in a very pure sense.
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A lot of the biographies have tried to have an intellectual understanding of him as if he was an intellectual, as if he had thought out these things.
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And I think that that's not true.
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I think that he was a person who
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is hard for scholars to understand, maybe, because it's just... We're not men of action, right?
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Well, that's, yeah, that's what it comes down to, and it's projecting onto him doesn't work.
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I mean, you have to try to look into him, and it's a difficult nut to crack, and I think it's ultimately, he's a very opaque character.
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He's not a character we can
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dissect and say this was the result of his personality or the result of his background.
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I always cite the, not only was his father, he saw his father go downhill and become an alcoholic, but his mother was a Puritan and she had sent him many letters about, you always have to be aware that you're going to die.
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He didn't become religious as she was, but
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He, I think, absorbed that message.
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And one of the reasons he was effective in the military was that he had that idea.
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He was a fatalist and, you know, I don't care if I die, I'm just, I'm going to do what's necessary.
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So that was part of his, part of that same complex of a man of action that he was willing to risk everything at any moment.
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That's interesting.
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So I just recalled what Ulysses S. Grant wrote to William Tecumseh Sherman when Grant was writing his memoir.
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He says, I realize that I am a verb and not a noun.
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Oh, that's good.
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A man of action.
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And Arnold, did he write a lot of letters?
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No, he was not.
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There are a few letters he wrote to his wife have survived, but he was not...
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He had he was the type of guy he after his first wife died and he started courting a young woman in Boston.
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It was quite a bit younger than he was.
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He sent her a whole trunk of gowns.
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That was his ham handed way of courting and sent her these letters of the usual flowery language of the time.
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He then exactly
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after she rejected him he exactly copied those letters and sent them to uh Peggy Shippen to exact same language wow um and um and there he was successful so try again you know that's interesting did were they original letters to him or had he copied them from like a manual of
33:36.776 --> 33:59.663
accordingly uh that's a good question now i think the uh they all the the originals uh were somewhat original at least so recycle them yes why not we're talking with jack kelly author of god save benedict donald the true story of america's most hated man which is available to a great book it's uh
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really retells this story that we might think is familiar, but Jack's really looked at it in a new way.
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Anything else we should talk about, Jack?
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I mean, it's a great story, and I don't want to discourage people from buying the book, and we don't want to give it all away, but is there anything you want to say?
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Somebody asked me, there have been a number of biographies of Arnold.
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Why another book?
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And
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I think there's a couple of things that I would point to.
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One is that my book is not really a biography.
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It's making the case for Arnold.
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And so it's pretty succinct.
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It clears up, I think, some of the distortions that even the later biographies that crept into the later biographies, particularly about Saratoga, but also Ticonderoga, which the takeover of Ticonderoga
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by Benedict Arnold was very, very crucial to the whole war effort for the first several years.
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And yet it's not, it's never given the stature of like Bunker Hill
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I know.
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We didn't even talk about it, I'm sorry to say.
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Yeah.
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So I've tried to go into those things and show where, you know, how Arnold's role, how important it was.
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And also the main thing I would point to is just I try to tell a story and to turn this man of action into an action story.
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So that's...
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I think is a little bit different than the more academic biographies.
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Right.
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Good.
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Good.
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Well, thank you for writing it.
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Thank you for doing that.
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It's a good book.
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So we've been talking with Jack Kelly, public scholar, historian, novelist, new book, God Save Benedict Arnold, the true story of America's most hated man, a great action story.
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So, um,
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So thank you so much for joining us, Jack.
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Oh, thank you, Bob.
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It's been a pleasure.
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We look forward to talking to you again.
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And I want to thank Jonathan Lane, our producer, and our many friends.
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You know, Jack, last time you were on, we were imagining then we'd have just a few folks listening who were in and around Boston.
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We actually have a great...
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loyal groups of listeners around the world and every week i thank them if you're one of these folks in one of these places send jonathan lane an email jay lane revolution250.org and so this week i want to thank our listeners in ticonderoga new york and in norwalk new london new haven and waterbury in connecticut charlestown indiana
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Madison, Ohio, and Madison Heights, Michigan, and in Naples, Italy, and all points beyond and between.
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Thanks for joining us.
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And now we will be piped out on the road to Boston.