In one of my visits to West Point, I found a library corner where Arnold was recognized as the key behind the American victory at Lexington.
Need to go back and see if it's still there.
Had to read this interesting novel about the American Revolution ... the author did a good job on BA’s character ....
“...In one of my visits to West Point, I found a library corner where Arnold was recognized as the key behind the American victory at Lexington. ...”
Must have been a very interesting corner indeed.
Benedict Arnold had nothing to do with Lexington.
In April 1775 - when the encounter at Lexington occurred - he was a merchant vessel master and an officer in the Connecticut militia. Word of the clashes at Lexington and Concord spread quickly, and he was seized with such fervor that he marched his outfit to eastern Massachusetts.
The colonials had just begun their siege of the British garrison in Boston. Someone realized heavy guns would be needed; someone else recalled that the British Regulars had some number of them at Ticonderoga, near the southern end of Lake Champlain. Arnold volunteered to take the place, provided someone gave him a commission and a set of orders. The Massachusetts legislature, overbusy with managing the large numbers of colonial troops from other areas who were still flocking to eastern Massachusetts, was only too happy to pass the job to him.
And so off Arnold went with a colonel’s commission in his pocket from the Colony of Massachusetts, no supplies and no men. No one knew, quite, in which organization he was serving
He linked up with Ethan Allen, leader of a rough band of pioneering colonials in the unorganized tracts east of New York, north of Massachusetts and west of New Hampshire.
They made common cause and descended on the thinly-garrisoned stone fort on the west shore of Lake Champlain, arriving before dawn on 10 May 1775. The gate was open, and the sole sentry’s musket misfired, whereon he fled the scene. Allen demanded that the British troops surrender, “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.” (Congress, of course, had no idea anyone was demanding anything in their name - events had run away, proceeding far ahead of anyone’s vision, ahead of any semblance of deliberation or control.)
Tradition has it that the sole British officer on the scene met Arnold and Allen before he had a chance to don his breeches. It’s never been proven.
It was just the beginning.