The Traitor Comes Home

Benedict Arnold knew these waters. He had sailed them as a merchant, conducting business between New London and the Caribbean. He knew where the harbor was deep and where it was shallow, which buildings held the most valuable goods, and how the town's modest defenses were arranged. When he returned to Connecticut on September 6, 1781, he brought that knowledge in service of the enemy.

Arnold had been a British officer for less than a year, but the raid on New London was his most consequential action in his new uniform. He led approximately 1,700 troops against the town while a companion force attacked Fort Griswold across the Thames River in Groton. The military objective was clear: destroy the privateering base that had been harassing British shipping.

The town burned. Warehouses stacked with captured British goods — the fruits of years of successful privateering — went up in flames. Homes, shops, wharves, nearly 150 buildings in all. Some of the fires spread beyond what Arnold may have intended, but the destruction was immense regardless.

What made the raid uniquely painful was not the scale of the damage but the identity of the attacker. Arnold had grown up in nearby Norwich. These were his neighbors, his former trading partners, people who had watched him march off to Cambridge in 1775 as a patriot militia captain. The same man who had bled for the cause at Quebec and Saratoga now directed British regulars in burning Connecticut towns.

The raid achieved its military objective but failed strategically. It was meant to divert Continental troops from Washington's march toward Yorktown. Washington was not diverted. Less than a month after Arnold burned New London, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. The war was effectively over, and Arnold had contributed nothing to the British cause that mattered. His treason, in the end, was as futile as it was infamous.