To catch a traitor: Novel puts Benedict Arnold in focus

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

— E.M. Forster

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Major General Benedict Arnold once was revered as a lion among men for the bravery and heroism he displayed fighting the British for American independence.

It would be hard to overstate the esteem in which he was held by his compatriots.

It would be harder still to overstate the sense of betrayal they felt when he defected to the British side and attempted to surrender the American fort at West Point. Nearly 250 years later, his name remains a synonym for treachery and deceit in this country.

Arnold escaped the wrath of his countrymen, lived to fight against them in the service of King George III’s army, and would end his days in England 20 years later, somewhat obscure and saddled by debt, despite having been handsomely compensated by the British for his efforts.

A new work of historical fiction by Misericordia University professor Brian Carso takes readers on an emotional journey as two American soldiers are commissioned by none other than General George Washington to capture Arnold so he could be brought to justice.

Based on historical events, “Gideon’s Revolution” is told from the perspective of Gideon Wheatley, a fictional character — whom Carso described as a composite of several real individuals — who was chosen for the kidnapping mission due to his closeness with Arnold.

Wheatley, a young soldier injured fighting under Arnold at Saratoga, would later bond with the major general when assigned to comfort him during Arnold’s painful recovery from his own gruesome battle wounds at an Albany military hospital. The pair find common ground not just over their battlefield scars, but over parallel traumas in their early lives.

“I will eagerly await the day when our paths shall cross again,” Arnold tells Wheatley as they take their leave in the hospital.

And so they do — under terms neither man could have foreseen — but the kidnapping plot fails. Wheatley and his co-conspirator, John Champe, are forced into treason themselves as they are pressed into fighting with Arnold’s redcoats against their fellow Americans after having presented themselves to the British as deserters seeking to fight for the King.

Haunted by guilt and shame, Wheatley struggles for years with the desire to seek revenge on a man he once considered a hero and a friend.

Carso, a lawyer and historian, has studied treason in the early United States, previously having written a PhD dissertation and a book about the treason clause of the Constitution — the only criminal offense specifically set forth in the document.

In the process of writing those works he learned about the plot to kidnap Benedict Arnold, which ultimately inspired “Gideon’s Revolution.”

Carso spoke with the Times Leader recently about his new novel, reflecting on its origins, Arnold’s character, and the enduring lessons of his betrayal for those who cherish American democracy. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Q: Why did you write this book?

A: Number one, it was a great story. I previously wrote a legal history about treason in the United States, and in the process I discovered this little known secret spy mission to capture Benedict Arnold, and I thought, “well, this could make a really cool historical novel.”

I’m a historian. I think the stories of our early history are just as important today as they were at any point in the history of the United States.

Q: Benedict Arnold’s story seems to have particular relevance, and it has been re-told many times. Why do you think that is?

A: In 1857 Washington Irving, who was the really the first internationally famous American author — he wrote “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” — wrote a life of George Washington. The longest chapter was 60 pages about the Benedict Arnold episode.

Bear in mind this is four years before the outbreak of the Civil War. Washington Irving said quite specifically that he wrote this book about Washington, and told the story about Benedict Arnold, to remind Americans during a period of great sectional tensions about our obligations to the necessity of democratic habits and civic virtues. He used the founders, the figure of Washington, and the treason of Arnold, to make that point to Americans in 1857.

That’s a worthwhile thing to be thinking about today, too, given the political discord that we are seeing now. It’s good to be reminded of our history and what our history tells us about our obligations to be loyal — not to any individual, but to the idea of self-government and the idea of democracy.

Q: To quickly back up, how did you become interested in studying treason?

A: While I was in law school I wrote a law review note looking at the fact that the treason clause is the only criminal law in the Constitution. It’s there in part to prevent persecutions and oppression of political opposition, because treason had been abused by monarchs in England, but it’s also there to emphasize the idea of loyalty to a democratic republic.

Q: How much of “Gideon’s Revolution” is based on actual events? How much did you have to invent?

A: There are some characters that are composites of different people. Gideon is a composite. But it’s a largely true story.

Q: What makes Arnold so fascinating to us still? It’s surely more than the betrayal itself, right?

A: Anybody who studies the American Revolution, we’re all fascinated by Benedict Arnold. He was our best battlefield general. And it’s often said if he had died at Saratoga after being gravely wounded, we’d have a statue of him in every town, and we’d be taking his birthday off as a federal holiday.

But he suffered some indignities during the revolution. He wasn’t promoted when he thought he should be. He was charged with commingling some of his personal money with government money. But other people, other generals, had those kind of political difficulties and they didn’t commit treason.

So what was it about Benedict Arnold that made him go from our best battlefield general to our biggest traitor?

That’s why I created Gideon Wheatley, a character who gets to know Benedict Arnold when he’s a great hero on the battlefield, and gets to know Arnold very closely when Arnold is gravely wounded and spends four months in an Albany military hospital that really existed. What I wanted to do, in addition to examining these questions about loyalty and betrayal, was to get inside Benedict Arnold’s head. Gideon’s character allowed me to do that.

Q: What lessons do you hope readers will take away from this book?

A: Well, it’s about loyalty and betrayal. It’s about revenge. It’s about treason. It’s about the possibility of forgiveness, too. First and foremost, I want to tell an entertaining story, but I know there’s meaning in that story, and I think there’s a message about how as American citizens we’re all in the same boat.

I think it’s important that throughout American history, at critical moments we have looked inward to consider what we have in common as Americans. And if we do not take self-government seriously, we will lose our freedoms. I hope the book gets people to think about those ideas.

Q: Back to Benedict Arnold. It may not be much of a question, but he would have been hanged if he was captured, right?

A: Oh, yeah. Within days.

Q: Were there deeper issues that motivated Arnold, before his troubles during the war?

A: I went back to his hometown and I looked at church records and merchant records. Arnold was the oldest surviving son in what we would call today an upper-middle-class family. His father, Captain Benedict Arnold, was a very well-to-do merchant. Young Benedict was sent to a small boarding school essentially to train him to go to Yale and become part of the American elite.

While Arnold was away at school, two epidemics blew through town, and several of his siblings died. Benedict Arnold’s father then became a very severe alcoholic and lost the family fortune. Their fall from grace was dramatic.

I think, and others who have studied him agree with me, that when Benedict Arnold is charging across the battlefield at Saratoga, leading his soldiers on horseback, waving his sword, he is trying to restore a sense of family honor. So when the politics and so forth interfered with him getting the kind of restoration of honor that he thought he was due, he went and looked for it somewhere else, in this case from the British.

Q: After all your research, what do you think about him, personally?

A: You know, no one’s asked me that before, but that’s a really good question.

He’s a sympathetic figure, quite frankly, while he is on the American side. But then the betrayal is so severe.

The British put him in charge of a whole bunch of British troops, and send them with 30 ships down to burn Richmond. Then he comes back to New York, and, several months later they send him with another 30 ships up to New London, Connecticut, which is 11 miles south of Norwich, where he was born.

He knew people in New London, and he burned the town. It’s hard to wrap your head around that level of personal betrayal.

So for that, he’s a jerk.

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“Gideon’s Revolution,” which was released by Three Hills, an imprint of the Cornell University Press, is available through Carso’s website, https://briancarso.com/.

For more information, also see https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501771514/gideons-revolution/#bookTabs=1