He prepared to take the oath required to execute the act, and on November 1, 1765, he tried to force the members of the Council of Assistants to take the oath as well. One of those assistants was Jonathan Trumbull, now the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Fitch entered the chamber to find Trumbull and the other three members from eastern Connecticut protesting the decision. When Fitch did not change his mind, the four easterners walked out of the chamber in disgust, refusing to pledge to uphold the Stamp Act.8 The esteemed French and Indian War veteran Israel Putnam also threatened Fitch, saying that if he didn’t hand over the stamp tax papers, the governor’s house would “be leveled with the dust in five minutes.”9
Though these Acts had a trickle-down effect that hurt everyone, the ones hurt most directly were traders like Arnold. In New London the richest merchant in the state, Nathaniel Shaw Jr., complained of “the Stamp Act which has put a Stop to all Business.”10 Six years older than Arnold, the thin-lipped, strong-jawed Shaw had partnered with his sea captain father in 1763, after three of his brothers had been lost at sea.11 Shaw Jr. expanded the business, trading with merchants in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as locally in Windham, selling molasses, flour, iron, paper, beaver hats, rum, coffee, and the occasional horse. He became rich enough to keep a private sloop called Queen of France to sail for pleasure and for coastal business trips, unusual in the eighteenth century. Shaw’s father had been friends with Jonathan Trumbull and John Ledyard, and now the son kept his relationship with the younger relatives: doing business with Joseph Trumbull and his close friend across the harbor, William Ledyard.12 He also became associated with two other merchants of his generation, Benedict Arnold and Silas Deane.
Silas Deane’s father, also named Silas, ran a blacksmith shop a few miles from where Arnold grew up, in the northern part of Groton, and represented his town in the Colonial Assembly in 1752. Not wishing to follow in his father’s footsteps, Silas Jr. graduated from Yale in 1758 and passed the bar, moving to live among the mills and tanneries of Weathersfield, just south of Hartford on the great road from New York to Boston. A good-looking, thin-nosed man with a receding hairline, he married a wealthy widow, but she died four years later after bearing him one child. He then married Elizabeth Saltonstall of Norwich, a beautiful woman with a delicate constitution.13 Like Arnold, Deane ran a store that sold a variety of goods, from Barcelona handkerchiefs to Caribbean molasses to local hemp seed.14 They met some time in the late 1760s or early 1770s, and Arnold began to win Deane’s “friendship and confidence.”15
In 1766 the cautious Governor Fitch was voted out, and a year later his nemesis Jonathan Trumbull noted that action taken by Britain would only increase strife, saying, “it is always to the interest of the Mother country to Keep them [colonies] dependent…. But if violence or methods tending to violence be taken to maintain their dependence, it tends to hasten a separation.”16 During the next few years, strife did increase, and men like Shaw and Deane joined in feeling and action with the progressive Trumbull, as the latter gained the governorship of the colony. Shaw preferred to take a quieter leadership position, joining the committee that approved the Boston resolutions of 1767 and acting as one of four delegates to the grand convention of the colony in December 1770. Deane, on the other hand, was more outspoken. On Christmas Day 1769, he took the floor at his Congregational meetinghouse to condemn British taxes as “unconstitutional,” and the rest of the town agreed, passing a resolution not to buy British goods. He was appointed to the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence, an innocuously named resistance organization.17
Arnold was certainly one of these radical Connecticut merchants. He joined the local Hiram Lodge of the Freemasons, a secret society dedicated to reason and other Enlightenment values, started in Connecticut by David Wooster. Born in 1711, Wooster was a veteran of the Louisbourg expedition of 1745 and had probably picked up Freemasonry from Gibraltar troops stationed there.18 The Freemasons in America included such notables as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, both of whom boarded at Wooster’s father-in-law’s house during the French and Indian War. In these years leading up to the Revolution, the Freemasons were instrumental in creating and supporting the paramilitary organization, the Sons of Liberty, in which Arnold soon became a leader. He was also eventually elected the captain of a more formal local militia organization called the Governor’s Foot Guards.19
Often Arnold’s values as a businessman and as a Son of Liberty coincided. After the British taxes and levies, many merchants turned to “smuggling,” and local governments turned a blind eye to this practice. New London alone illegally exported 210,000 horses to the Caribbean in the decade before the Revolution. But there were always king’s men ready to snitch to royal enforcers for not sending goods directly to England or for not paying taxes. On February 3, 1766, local sheriff Jonathan Mix arrested Arnold as one of the men who beat up a king’s man named Peter Boles, who had also tried to blackmail him. Arnold and a few Sons of Liberty broke into the house of a local taverner “with Great Force” to get him and “with the same Force & Violence afs. then and there assault the Body of sd. Peter Boles then and there being in sd/ House in the Peace of God a& the King of him strip of his apparel & him tie & fasten to the Whipping Post in sd. New Haven & him did beat and abuse in a cruel shocking & dangerous Manner to his grievious Damage & against the peace & to the Terror of his Majestys good Subjects.”20
Arnold was fined a few pounds for this brutal act.21 Stranger than a respected businessman taking part in a violent beating was the fact that he and the other men were not jailed; the New Haven courts were clearly not sympathetic to Mr. Boles. Still, it was obvious Arnold had a temper, whether in politics or business. During a falling out with a New York merchant, Arnold began somewhat diplomatically: “I think I can convince the Whole World I have been a loser of Fifty Per Cent. on both voyages…. I cannot say what pleasure it is for you to keep the ballance due me in your hands; but can assure you it will give me much pleasure to receive it, as it has been due three years and I want it very much.”22 But when the man replied with hostility, Arnold became insulting: “I assure you it is with the utmost indifference I observe all the unjust & False aspersions your Malice could Invent, both with regard to the Fortune’s Cargo & our affidavits, as a Consciouness of my uprightness and Fairness in regard to our Concerns will never suffer the opinion of you or any other Blockhead to give me any uneasiness.”23 Arnold was having money issues at the time, having gone nearly bankrupt a year earlier, but this was probably not the way to go about getting it back.
Benedict Arnold’s large house on Water Street in New Haven was later owned by lexicographer Noah Webster. Courtesy of the Eli Whitney Library, New Haven Museum.
Though he remained an active member of the Sons of Liberty, a year after the incident with Boles he tried to settle down into a respectable adulthood, marrying Margaret Mansfield, the daughter of one of his fellow Freemasons, New Haven County’s high sheriff. He and Margaret borrowed money and bought a large clapboard house with a carved doorway, a cupola, and carvings of birds and other flourishes above the windows. In the yard was a barn with an attached store where Arnold sold his goods, a stable for a dozen horses, a coach house, and an acre and a half of land that included a hundred fruit trees.24 In their sky-blue parlor they held dances and parties for the elite of the city and may have held Freemason meetings there as well.
Margaret bore him three sons: Richard, Henry, and, of course, another Benedict. The “loving husband” wrote often to his wife, asking about “our dear boys” and telling her not to neglect their education, that “it is of infinite concern what habits and principles they imbibe when young.”25 But politics kept intruding into their intermittently happy home. In the aftermath of the so-called Boston massacre in 1770, Arnold wrote furiously, “I was very much shocked the other day on hearing the accounts of the most wanton, cruel, and inhuman murders committed in Boston by the soldiers. Good God, are the Americans all asleep and tamely yielding up their liberties, or, are they all turned philosophers, that they don’t take immediate vengeance on such miscreants?”26
Though his first home in eastern Connecticut was now also