The enemy force, commanded by William Tryon, the British Governor of New York and recently appointed general, was acting on intelligence from a British spy about a suspected Continental Army weapons depot.

The Battle of Ridgefieldīy early 1777, Arnold was back in the field, leading his troops in a blocking action against a British advance in Connecticut. In December 1775, he suffered the first of two serious leg injuries during a failed attack on British-occupied Quebec, Canada. His exploits, however, were not without cost. The heavy cannons taken by Arnold proved instrumental in ending the Siege of Boston the following year. In what would later turn out to be one of the great ironies of the Revolutionary War, Arnold captured Fort Ticonderoga with the assistance of a British spy. He achieved this with relative ease, providing the Continental Army with its first victory of the war and a desperately needed boost of confidence. In May 1775, Arnold’s forces eventually clashed with the British at Fort Ticonderoga – nestled along the shores of Lake Champlain in northern New York – capturing valuable artillery stores. After organizing an assemblage of volunteers, he seized munitions from the New Haven arsenal and led his group northward to fight the British. A Fighting GeneralĪ pharmacist by trade, the 34-year-old Arnold joined the rebellion in 1775. His legacy today is quite different, with Arnold branded the most notorious traitor in American history, after a failed gambit to trade the vital American outpost at West Point for cash resulted in his defection to the British side. In the early years of the Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold was one of George Washington’s most accomplished field generals.

American traitor book