Benedict Arnold and the Battle of Valcour Island

Recently promoted Brigadier General of the Continental Army, Benedict Arnold, looked with pride at America’s first naval fleet. The flotilla of 15 ships bobbing around the American side of picturesque Lake Champlain in northern New York had been hacked by hand from the luscious pine-cedar forests surrounding the lake. While the Americans had labored to hastily assemble their little fleet before enemy soldiers arrived en masse from British-controlled Canada aboard much larger and better-armed ships, recently named “Commander of the Lakes” Arnold read the Declaration of Independence aloud to his men. It was July 1776 and the country on behalf of whose freedom Arnold had been fighting for over a year, had finally declared itself independent of the British Empire. Yet that newly declared freedom was in peril of being snuffed out in its cradle as Arnold prepared for the British onslaught on Lake Champlain. A traitor’s fate of death by torture and hanging awaited the leaders of the American Revolution, men like George Washington, John Adams and Arnold himself, if this makeshift armada failed to stop the British.