01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 16, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

Barnabas Deane, Nathanael Greene's partner in a secret business, sent bad news from the North: the traitor Benedict Arnold had led a sea-borne invasion on the towns of New London and Groton, Conn., where he had burned a privateering ship in which Greene was heavily invested. The loss to Barnabas Deane & Co. was 800 pounds.

"Every wharf & Store in N London was Burnt & One half the Houses in Town," Deane reported, without exaggeration.

If it hadn't been for this attack on New London-Groton, history could almost have forgiven Benedict Arnold as a man who acted badly while in the throes of a midlife crisis. At the time he turned traitor he was a middle-aged man smitten with a beautiful women half his age who liked life's finer things. He'd twice been injured in heroic service to the United States, yet Congress initially snubbed him when handing out promotions. Arnold could justify his treachery as taking what he'd earned from an unappreciative country and using it to support his new wife.

But Arnold's actions at New London-Groton, together with his treachery, brand him as evil. He was born not far from those towns on the banks of the Thames River, in Norwich. On Sept. 5, 1781, he led a fleet of warships from New York north through Long Island Sound, in hopes of diverting the French and American troops marching from Newport to Yorktown.

At sunrise the next morning, the people of New London and Groton ran from their houses into the countryside as they saw eight warships near Fisher's Island standing straight up the Thames.

Local farmers and merchants ran into the forts on hills above the river -- Fort Trumbull on the New London side, Fort Griswold in Groton -- to man the cannon. Col. William Ledyard, for whom Ledyard, Conn., is named, was in overall command of the militia; he headed for the larger fort, Griswold, reportedly remarking as he went: "If I must lose today my honor or my life, you who know me can tell which it will be."

Arnold's force of 800 men, backed by thundering ships' cannon, easily took New London -- and torched it. Arnold later claimed it was an accident, but fires systematically set by his soldiers consumed 143 buildings and left 97 families destitute.

On the Groton side, about 160 militiamen staved off the British attack for about 40 minutes. When, after much bloodshed, the British forced their way into the fort, Ledyard surrendered his sword to a Loyalist lieutenant colonel named Van Buskirk, who promptly jabbed the sword through Ledyard's bowels. Ledyard dropped and British soldiers fell on him with bayonets. The soldiers then massacred the rest of Fort Griswold's defenders, leaving 65 dead inside the fort and another 85 bloodied, some dying. They piled the wounded into a heavy artillery cart that either broke away or was pushed down the hill, crashing its load of wounded into a tree.

As Arnold sailed into the sunset, rigor mortis set into the bloodied corpses of 85 men in Fort Griswold while below, across the Thames, flames flared through black smoke consuming the Town of New London.

Gerald M. Carbone