Flashback, October 1776: Arnold’s Valor at Valcour Island

Before he betrayed his country, Benedict Arnold, America’s most notorious traitor, saved it twice in hours of maximum peril. The second time occurred at Saratoga, where his impetuous charge turned the tide of battle and brought the French into the American Revolution against the British. The earlier time when Arnold kept the patriot cause alive did not bring a victory, but it foiled the redcoats’ plans to split the Northern colonies in two.

From first to last, the Battle of Valcour Island bore all the distinctive characteristics of Arnold: intelligence, energy, daring and valor. Arnold’s engagement with the British on this island on Lake Champlain, from October 11 to 13, 1776, pitted his hopelessly outmanned and outgunned force against Sir Guy Carleton, Governor-General of Canada. Against all odds, Arnold managed to check the advance of the larger fleet, delaying the redcoats’ attempt to divide the Middle Colonies from New England for another year--long enough to buy the colonials precious time.

The odd thing about this battle, considering the other operations where Arnold made (and, at West Point, unmade) his reputation, is that it was naval. Yet Arnold was one of the few, if not only, American commanders who could have led a fleet as credibly as a land force, since he had been a shipmaster in Connecticut before the revolution.

With no long roads existing in the upstate, frontier area of New York, Carleton was ready to follow up on his successful defense of Canada that winter and spring by traversing Lake Champlain on boats built and operated by the Royal Navy. Guessing his plans, with no time to waste, Arnold embarked on a breathless campaign in the summer of 1776 to put to work every woodsman, carpenter, armorer, and crewman he could find.

The makeshift flotilla, thus put together on a wing and a prayer, consisted of 15 galleys, schooners and gunboats--hardly anything to speak of against Carleton’s five boats armed with 18 12-pound cannon, along with 20 gunboats and 28 barges containing troops and Indian allies.

Arnold hardly had a chance (his one advantage, during September: heavily wooded Valcour Island allowed him to keep the British under surveillance without them detecting him in turn), and he knew it. But this campaign wasn’t about his forces standing a chance, but about giving the other Americans downstate the opportunity to have one. That led him to disregard a member of his council of war who advised that the Americans shouuld slip away before the British fleet spotted them.

Carleton’s fleet finally encountered Arnold’s on October 11. The Americans fought desperately and well for seven hours, even severely damaging several British ships, until the leading redcoat vessel, Inflexible, found Continental boats in range and blew gaping, damaging holes in them.

Arnold’s council of war that night was grim, as losses and options were assessed. But the general now presented and put into action one of his best--certainly most daring--ideas of the war. With muffled oars, the battered American ships that night slipped in single file past the British line, with lanterns hung in the stern the only guides through the darkness and fog.

By the next morning, Carleton found that the man the Indians would call “Dark Eagle” had escaped. Most of Arnold’s ships made it to Fort Ticonderoga. But a light wind left some idling in the lake, and Carleton at last intercepted these lagging vessels on the 13^th.

Rather than let the ships or his men fall into enemy hands, Arnold acted as he had at the conclusion of his heroic but failed campaign against Montreal earlier that year: he was among the last group of soldiers to guard the getaway of his remaining men. Once assured of that, he ran his remaining ships aground on the shore of Lake Champlain, burned them, and made his way toward Crown Point.

Arnold had lost his motley fleet but prevented most of his men from falling into enemy hands. More important, as Nathanael Greene would demonstrate anew in the final year of the war, he had proven that even a loss could have beneficial effects, if it meant the frustration of enemy war movements and aims. In this case, the capable but cautious-to-a-fault Carleton decided he had lost too many days already and that, rather than leave his troops vulnerable to a wilderness winter in a country they didn’t know, it was better to head back to Montreal.


The next year, Arnold would use equally stunning craftiness in the Saratoga campaign. (My favorite gambit of his: sending a half-wit to convince Indians surrounding a patriot-held fort that he was coming with a relief force “as numerous as the leaves on the trees,” inducing the Indians to retreat and leave the pleasantly surprised garrison alone.) Until he fell, painfully wounded, at his great Saratoga charge, Arnold had shown repeatedly that he was, as Willard Sterne Randall claimed in his excellent biography, Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor, “the best field commander in the war on either side.”

A prior post of mine discussed the war profiteering and infatuation with his beautiful young wife, a Tory sympathizer, that led Arnold fatally astray—and, of course, into his infamous turn to the British he had once fought so resolutely.

In fact, it might be argued, the anger and despair of his Continental colleagues about his betrayal ran so deeply because Arnold shone the brightest of the entire group. If he could go over to the enemy, who among them could be trusted?