“When you ask for a frigate, they give you a raft. Ask for sailors, they give you tavern waiters. And if you want breeches, they give you a vest. Benedict Arnold to David Hawley, August 1776 In”
“It would be the twentieth century before the opening of the British Headquarters Papers at the University of Michigan proved what the eighteenth century refused to believe that a young and beautiful woman was capable of helping Benedict Arnold plot the greatest conspiracy of the American Revolution and then completely fooling the astute warriors around her.”
“The fiercely independent Arnold did not need the encouragement of Loyalists: he may have thought of changing sides as early as the seniority controversy two years earlier”
“Envy and malice are indefatigable. Where they have not invention enough to frame new slanders, or the slanders newly framed are found totally inadequate to their purpose, they will call in the feeble aid of old calumnies”
“I daily discover so much baseness and ingratitude among mankind that I almost blush at being of the same species, and could quit the stage without regret, was it not for some gentle, generous souls like my dear Peggy. Benedict”