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Arnold

General Benedict Arnold of Connecticut.

Benedict Arnold (1741 - ??) was one of the military leaders of the North American Rebellion.

Born in Connecticut on January 14, 1741, Arnold was a merchant operating ships when the Rebellion broke out in 1775. With Ethan Allen, he took Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 and organized naval operations on Lake Champlain that delayed the British invasion from the north in 1776. In September 1775 he led an army of 1,100 men from Massachusetts to join General Richard Montgomery's invasion of Quebec. He suffered a serious injury to the leg during the Battle of Quebec of 31 December 1775.

During the 1777 Hudson campaign of General John Burgoyne, Arnold was able to relieve the siege of Fort Stanwix by Colonel Barry St. Leger, preventing St. Leger from joining forces with Burgoyne. Arnold then joined with General Horatio Gates at Saratoga. Arnold and Gates were defeated by Burgoyne in the October 1777 Battle of Saratoga.

Following the end of the Rebellion, Arnold was one of the prime organizers of those former rebels who left British rule as part of the Wilderness Walk. Arnold's book Toward a New Jerusalem was published in Jefferson City, Jefferson in 1800.

Sobel's sources for the life of Benedict Arnold are Lord Henry Hawkes' Benedict Arnold and the Canadian Campaign (London, 1880) and Bamford Parkes' Benedict Arnold: The Rebel Genius (New York, 1965).

In For All Nails Arnold led the first Wilderness Walk expedition, largely from the Northern Confederation. This expedition vanished without a trace and Arnold presumably perished with it, making his 1800 publication in Jefferson a posthumous one.

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