Arnold received the price of his desertion,[998] was made a general in the British service, and turned his sword, both in Connecticut and Virginia, against his countrymen. Afterwards he went to England, was treated with an enforced respect in some places, and scorned in others.[999] He lived for a while in New Brunswick, but he never escaped the torments which the presence of honorable men inflicted upon him. His descendants live to-day in England and in Canada, and some of them have attained high rank in the British army; and no one of them, as far as known, has disgraced the good name of the old Rhode Island family, whence Benedict Arnold descended.[1000]
The report of the court respecting André, with its appendix (already referred to), and the trial of Smith were the first public sifting of the evidence about the conspiracy. Smith was acquitted by the military tribunal,[1001] and was then turned over to the civil authorities for a further trial; but, succeeding in escaping in women's clothes, he reached New York, and England, where several years later he published a narrative, which it is not easy to reconcile with all his evidence in his trial,—the supposition[1002] being that he was addressing injured Americans in the one case and disappointed Britons in the other.[1003] Marbois, the secretary of the French legation at Philadelphia at the time, wrote a Complot d'Arnold et Clinton, which was not published till 1816 at Paris. Sparks says, that what came under Marbois' personal observation is valuable; but otherwise the book, as most students think, should be used with caution.[1004]
The earliest comprehensive treatment of the subject—and it has hardly been surpassed since—was in Sparks's Life and Treason of Arnold (Boston), and he gives the principal documentary evidence in his Washington, vol. vii. App.[1005]
The next special examination of the conspiracy was made in Winthrop Sargent's[1006] Life and Career of Major John André (Boston, 1861),—an excellent book.[1007]
In 1864 the story necessarily made a part of Edward C. Boynton's History of West Point, who pointed out the military advantage of the Highlands of the Hudson.[1008] Not long after this, Henry B. Dawson, then editing the Yonkers Gazette, printed in its columns sixty-eight contemporary documents or narratives, and these, subsequently printed from the same type in book-form, constitute no. 1 of Dawson's Gazette Series, under the title of Papers concerning the capture and detention of Major John André (1866). It is the most complete gathering of authentic material which has been made.
The volume (x.) of Bancroft which contains his account of the conspiracy appeared in 1875, and was constructed "by following only contemporary documents, which are abundant and of the surest character, and which, taken collectively, solve every question.... The reminiscences of men who wrote in later days are so mixed up with errors of memory and fable that they offer no sure foothold."[1009]
The Life of Arnold, by Isaac N. Arnold, of Chicago, and the Two Spies of Benson J. Lossing, are the last considerable examinations of the subject.[1010]
