Benedict Arnold: A Traitor in Our Midst. By Barry K. Wilson. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii, 271. $39.95.)
Those who read this book will no doubt ask themselves: Why would any publisher, let alone a highly regarded university press, decide to add this study to its list of offerings? The book abounds in technical and factual errors, is heavily reliant on secondary sources, and is out of date with respect to scholarship on Benedict Arnold. The basic Arnold story is there, but the author tells it in such an untrustworthy fashion that one cannot always be sure where fact ends and fiction begins. Barry K. Wilson wants to see some virtue in Arnold, especially in regard to his military career, but he really cannot succeed because he remains dependent upon secondary accounts that feature a "tactless, impatient, extremely outspoken" person who "made numerous enemies unnecessarily" (11). His discussion of the Revolution's causes, grandly titled "the Rustle of Revolutionary Winds," verges on the embarrassing. In short order, he quotes from a commonly used U.S. survey history textbook, has the Stamp Act passing Parliament in 1764, and renders Joseph Warren as the author of the "Darren" (actually Suffolk) Resolves. Later, readers find out that Arnold was a leader of sorts (true) of New Haven, Connecticut's "thuggish Sons of Liberty," certainly a somewhat overwrought characterization of these patriot resisters.
Small glitches are evident throughout the study to the point that knowledgeable readers will likely conclude that finishing this marred rendering of Arnold's life is not worth the effort. Then again, if readers proceed directly to page 164, where Wilson launches his discussion of Arnold's brief and turbulent mercantile career (1785-1791) in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, they will find material worthy of some consideration. In chapters 12 to 14, the author first describes what life was like for American loyalists who resettled after the Revolutionary War in raw frontier communities like Saint John and Fredericton. Then he introduces Arnold into this turbulent milieu, painting the portrait of a generous person trying to reestablish his mercantile career. Unfortunately, Arnold became embroiled in endless legal proceedings with financially strapped friends and neighbors who willingly took goods on credit, but had little capacity--and in some instances no desire--to repay their debts. Along the way, Wilson effectively casts doubt on the widely accepted story that Arnold fathered an illegitimate child, John Sage by name, at the outset of his sojourn in New Brunswick.
The latter portion of Wilson's study thus attempts to make up for the lamentable text that precedes it. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether this section on New Brunswick has enough redemptive quality to overcome questions about whether this study should have been published in the first place. In this reviewer's estimation, a carefully researched and critically reviewed article-length investigation of Arnold's days in New Brunswick Province would have sufficed, as so much of this book fails to inform or advance our understanding of the life or times of Benedict Arnold.
James Kirby Martin
University of Houston