Award-winning author Jack Kelly has set his sights on a man whose very name traditionally has been synonymous with betrayal: Benedict Arnold.

Arnold was born in the American colonies to a family of British immigrants. His father inherited little but gained much as a merchant. However, he later slipped into alcohol addiction, which forced Arnold to abandon his hopes for higher education and work as a tradesman, at which he seemed destined to succeed. Much of his youthful years were filled with a sense of tension about what seemed like an inevitable revolution.

"In a closing chapter, Kelly allows readers the latitude to consider thoughtfully if Arnold was a traitor to be scorned or an unusual exemplar of the American spirit..."

At age 34, Arnold drew together a voluntary militia unit in his home region of New Haven and was much admired for his fiery determination. Once his participation in the war was made official, he was involved in key battles at Lexington, Concord and Ticonderoga, taking a leading role in the latter. But his difficult personality garnered criticism among his fellow officers, though the men he led retained admiration for him.

Arnold did not gain the recognition that he craved, but he did have a comradely relationship with President George Washington. Believing Arnold to possess “resourcefulness and imagination,” Washington gave him the role of colonel in the newly formed Continental Army. But then Arnold, who had taken a second wife (the daughter of a British Loyalist clan), was assigned the protection of West Point. There he embarked on covert, treasonous actions with a co-conspirator, John André, revealing his intention to switch sides in a hard-fought war. Once the treachery was discovered, Arnold had joined with the British military, while André was caught and swiftly hanged as a traitor. Arnold served with the British, and after the war ended, he moved to England where he remained until his death.

Kelly has presented his main characters in a new light. Washington is a sterling leader who did what had to be done, censoring Arnold as was needed, in a judicious manner. Arnold is the victim of a fraught, difficult childhood whose frustrations and losses gave him greater determination to succeed, even if it meant betraying the nascent nation he had been assigned to defend.

In a closing chapter, Kelly allows readers the latitude to consider thoughtfully if Arnold was a traitor to be scorned or an unusual exemplar of the American spirit --- gritty, entrepreneurial and staunchly independent. He concludes that Arnold will always be “an enigma, his motives lost in the impenetrable alchemy of the human heart.”