Homegrown terror: Benedict Arnold and the burning of New London
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London. Eric D. Lehman. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014. 261 pages. $30.00 (hardcover).Most Americans are familiar with the name Benedict Arnold and instantly associate it with the word treason. We may know that he turned traitor during the Revolutionary War in a plot involving West Point but, for most of us, that is the end of the story. Homegrown Terror corrects this knowledge gap by recounting Arnold's wartime exploits both before and after his notorious volte-face. The book convincingly levels the additional charge of domestic terrorism against Arnold and leaves little doubt that his name will remain forever infamous. This is not a revisionist history. If anything, it represents a well-deserved piling of additional charges that have been lost, and now revived, to general knowledge and to history.The story of Benedict Arnold is akin to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Before the war he was an affluent merchant in Norwich, Connecticut, with family and commercial ties to New London. An early Son of Liberty, during the war he participated in many battles, distinguishing himself as a legitimate hero in the effort to gain independence from Britain. He and Ethan Allen captured Fort Ticonderoga without firing a shot. He led the disastrous attack upon Quebec, which was doomed to failure anyway due to poor planning and logistics and unrealistic expectations. Ironically, he was also instrumental in beating back an early British attack on Connecticut. Arnold was the real hero of the pivotal Battle of Saratoga, though his commanding officer, Horatio Gates, gained most of the laurels.Throughout his career, early warning signs ofa difficult and prickly personality emerged. He was arrested for assaulting a Loyalist before the war began. He repeatedly threatened to resign when he did not receive promotions fast enough to keep pace with his ambition. On the personal side, he became deeply indebted and married a beautiful Tory from an affluent family. As military governor of Pennsylvania, he was known as a hothead and was charged with misconduct and peculation (embezzlement). He resigned this post, was court-martialed and acquitted, and was reprimanded by Washington. This led to his fateful correspondence with the British and the eventual betrayal of his friends, family, and country.Arnold was offered a British generalship and twenty thousand pounds to turn West Point over to his former enemies. If the conspiracy had not been discovered, it is not unreasonable to believe that the entire course of the Revolutionary War may have been upended. Control of the Hudson was considered vital to the war on both sides, analogous to control of the Mississippi River during the Civil War. Of course, the conspiracy was discovered and disaster averted, but Arnold would exact his revenge in two distinctive campaigns. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".