Villainous traitor? Legacy of CT’s Benedict Arnold reconsidered in new film

Benedict Arnold, the Connecticut native whose name has been synonymous with the word traitor for 240 years, is getting a fairer shake thanks to a new movie.

“Benedict Arnold: Hero Betrayed,” a two-hour feature directed by Chris Stearn, isn’t revisionist history. It doesn’t lessen or ignore Arnold’s switching of his allegiance from the not-yet-founded United States back to the British in 1780, or his attempt to surrender a U.S. fort to the British. What it offers is fresh context, to counter centuries of unquestioned vilification.

The film premiered in November at Saratoga, New York (the site of one of the battles it reenacts), and is now available to rent online through Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, Roku, Vimeo, on several cable systems and through the library video service Kanopy.

“When his story is told, a lot gets left out. The evidence is lying in plain sight. He lost faith in American leadership. When people say he’s a traitor, I say, ‘Give me a good reason why he should have stayed.”

Connecticut may be ahead of much of the rest of the country in reassessing Arnold’s role in the American Revolution.

Arnold grew up in Norwich and became a prosperous businessman in New Haven; he’s represented at the historical societies in both cities. For decades there have been regular costumed recreations on New Haven Green to honor Powder House Day, when Arnold demanded the keys to the gunpowder storage shed (which the city had voted to keep closed) so that he and his foot brigade could all load their guns, head to Massachusetts and join the revolution.

After numerous other examples of admirable rebellion and heroic leadership during the war, Arnold — who, the film points out, was passed over for numerous deserved promotions and assignments, and who came to perceive the new government as corrupt — “believed the American leadership was going to blow it,” Stearns said.

“You don’t have to give him nefarious ambitions. His motives are pretty clear. I believe he simply felt that the American experiment was not going to work,” Stearns said.

“Benedict Arnold: Hero Betrayed” is a blend of documentary and drama: The key roles are played by actors, famous battles are restaged and hundreds of townsfolk in period dress mill around in the background of the village scenes.

But there are also shots of famous documents and museum pieces, with voice-overs from history professors such as you might hear in a History Channel program.

The narrator of the film is no less imperious a voice than Martin Sheen, the actor/activist who played a U.S. president for seven seasons of “The West Wing.”

“We had dreamed about getting somebody as great as him to lend his voice,” Stearns said.

The director also sings the praises of Peter O’Meara, the actor who portrays Arnold. “He really captures what he was thinking.”

The production style of “Benedict Arnold: Hero Betrayed” — part costume drama, part educational film — was “a giant decision,” Stearns said.

“We could have done a straight documentary, with the historic houses and the portraits and the windowsills,” he said. “But few have done more to preserve American freedom than Benedict Arnold. We had to do right by him.”

That duty to Arnold’s legacy includes restaging historic battles in which he showed his heroism, battles which Stearns says “hardly show up in the the history books.”

“Benedict Arnold: Hero Betrayed,” the director says, is “the first movie to recreate the Battle of Ridgefield.”

The film is based on the book “Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered” by James Kirby Martin. He wrote the book, Martin tells The Courant, because “I remembered hearing about this really bad guy, but I knew from my military history that he did some remarkable things.

“Here’s this guy who we’re being told is the essence of all evil. Now, a historian is an investigator. The key is to get into the actual records and see what really happened.” Martin quickly discovered that biographies of Arnold, dating to the 1835 “Life and Treason of Benedict Arnold” by Jared Sparks, were creating a narrative that portrayed him as rotten to the core for his entire life.

“There were stories spread about how bad he was as a child,” Martin said, the opposite of the “I cannot tell a lie” tale that historians would apply to George Washington.

The instinctive demonization of Benedict Arnold continues today, Martin points out. When the site of Arnold’s New Haven home (now the parking lot of the city’s High School in the Community) was excavated last year, a tunnel was discovered under the foundation.

“Immediately,” Martin said with a sigh, “there was a theory that he was smuggling goods from the harbor. They jumped to the conclusion that he was this horrible criminal. But let me give you the name of another big smuggler of that time: John Hancock, the biggest name on the Declaration of Independence.” The revolutionaries would smuggle goods as a political protest because they disagreed with the British taxation policies, Martin said. “Arnold built that home in 1774 or ‘75. He hardly lived there. If he built a tunnel, he didn’t need to. But imaginations run wild.

“What has happened with Arnold is that historians have looked backward at his life. They start with treason, then want to prove that he always had a weak character. Every good historian, though, knows you begin a story at the beginning.”

The “Benedict Arnold: Hero Betrayed” film begins at the beginning, with the once-powerful Arnold family’s fall from grace in Norwich, when they lost wealth and power in the community.

As for the ending, Martin argues that by 1780, the Revolutionary cause “was moribund. It had gone inactive. When Arnold gets back to the British empire, his original allegiance, George Washington and others saw the propaganda value in this: ‘You’re not Benedict Arnold. Join us.” The film shows historical examples of Arnold being portrayed not as disillusioned but as the personification of evil. A 1780 political cartoon shows a literally two-faced Arnold riding in a horse wagon alongside the devil, who’s shaking a bag of money at one of the faces.

“Benedict Arnold: Hero Betrayed” quotes Arnold’s own published writings explaining his decision to switch allegiances: “I was only solicitous to accomplish an event of decisive importance and prevent as much as possible in the accomplishment of it the effusion of blood. Reunion with the British Empire is the best and only means to dry up the streams of misery that have deluged this country.”

Martin and the many other historians quoted in the film make clear that Arnold wasn’t alone in losing trust in the incipient American leadership. They argue that his traitorous plan to surrender the fort at West Point to the British would not have changed the course of the Revolutionary War.

The film quotes Bill Stanley, a former director of the Norwich Historical Society who died in 2010 and a longtime champion of Arnold: “In many respects, America more betrayed Benedict Arnold than Arnold betrayed America.”

The big question, Martin suggests, is, “How did this man who contributed so much to the American cause, destroy his own reputation while in his mind he was trying to do the right thing? It is a noble but tragic story.”

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.