Benedict Arnold.
Strange that history remembers only Arnold the Traitor and not Arnold the hero of Ticonderoga, Quebec, and Saratoga. Too bad he didn’t die in that brilliant charge upon Burgoyne’s intrenchments, where after overcoming all obstacles and apparently just on the point of victory he was wounded in the same leg that had been painfully injured in the assault on Quebec—and carried fainting and profusely bleeding from the field. To be twice wounded for a cause and then to betray it—perverse human heart, who shall know its depths of perversity!
And yet the events since that time, which Arnold could not foresee or foreknow, rather than the concomitant circumstances of that time, which Arnold saw and knew, have proclaimed him Traitor. And had the results been otherwise, had not his own mad efforts helped turn the tide at Saratoga, Arnold might now be known as a shrewdly diplomatic young officer who, influenced by a beautiful Tory wife and seeing the cause of the Colonists desperate, had timely transferred his allegiance to the British army and bravely helped along the conquering cause of the mother country.
And Major Andre sleeps in honored rest in old Westminster Abbey; while the man twice wounded in battle, the hero of Ticonderoga, Quebec, and Saratoga sleeps in an unhonored grave having as epitaph indelibly traced upon surrounding air and earth and water and sky—Arnold the Traitor.