Saratoga National Historical Park
Benedict Arnold: The Hero Whose Name the Monument Refuses to Say
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Benedict Arnold is probably the most famous traitor in American history.
At Saratoga, he was also one of the most aggressive and important American battlefield leaders.
Both facts belong in the same sentence.
Arnold had been locked in a bitter command dispute with Horatio Gates.
On October seventh he rode into the fighting and helped drive the action forward.
Near Breymann's Redoubt, he was badly wounded in the left leg when a musket ball broke the leg and his horse fell.
NPS places that wound at the site commemorated by the Boot Monument.
The monument does not use Arnold's name.
It commemorates rank, wound and achievement while withholding the identity of the man who later tried to betray West Point to the British.
That is American memory arguing with itself in stone.
The Saratoga Monument does something similar with an empty niche.
Americans wanted to honor what Arnold did in 1777 without building a conventional statue to the man he became in 1780.
The contradiction does not need solving.
People can deserve credit for one action without receiving a lifetime certificate of virtue.
History becomes more human when we allow a person to change — even catastrophically.
Arnold's later betrayal also changed how Americans remembered earlier events.
Had he died from his Saratoga wound, his national reputation would probably look completely different.
Instead, West Point retroactively contaminated the story of 1777.
That is how memory often works.
Later knowledge reaches backward and changes the emotional meaning of earlier actions.
The Boot Monument is fascinating because it tries to resist that process just enough to preserve the military fact while still condemning the later man.