A month before the British surrender at Yorktown ended major fighting during the American Revolution, the traitor Benedict Arnold led a force of Redcoats on a last raid in his home state of Connecticut, burning most of the small coastal city of New London to the ground.
It has been 242 years, but the town has not forgotten.
A crowd of several hundred revelers, some in period costume, on Saturday evening marched through the city’s streets chanting: “Burn the traitor,” before watching as officials set Arnold’s effigy ablaze for the Burning of Benedict Arnold Festival, recreating a tradition that was once practiced in many US cities.
Photo: AP
“I like to jokingly refer to it as the original Burning Man festival,” said organizer Derron Wood, referencing the annual gathering in the Nevada desert.
For decades after the US Revolutionary War, cities including New York, Boston and Philadelphia held yearly traitor-burning events.
They were an alternative to Britain’s raucous and fiery Guy Fawkes Night celebrations commemorating the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, when Fawkes was executed for conspiring with others to blow up King James I of England and both British Houses of Parliament.
Residents “still wanted to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, but they weren’t English, so they created a very unique American version,” Wood said.
The celebrations died out during the Civil War, but Wood, the artistic director of New London’s Flock Theatre, revived it a decade ago as a piece of street theater and a way to celebrate the city’s history using re-enactors in period costumes.
Anyone can join the march down city streets behind the papier-mache Arnold to New London’s Waterfront Park, where the mayor on Saturday cried: “Remember New London,” and put a torch to the effigy.
The crowd chanted “U-S-A” as the life-sized Arnold burned.
Ellen Warfield, of Mystic, brought her nine-year-old son, Lucian Bace, because she said their ancestors fought in the revolution and she hoped to get her son excited about the history that surrounds him.
“It’s wild to show the kids something like this,” she said. “You get to see it in real life, rather than see it play out on TV. They spend too much time on their screens today.”
Lucian had a singular focus.
“I just can’t wait to see them burn that man,” he said. “Burn that turncoat.”
Arnold, a native of nearby Norwich, was initially a major general on the US side of the war, playing important roles in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and the Battle of Saratoga in New York.
In 1779, he secretly began feeding information to the British. A year later, he offered to surrender the US garrison at West Point in exchange for a bribe, but the plot was uncovered when an accomplice was captured. Arnold fled and became a brigadier general for the British.
On Sept. 6, 1781, he led a force that attacked and burned New London and captured a lightly defended fort across the Thames River in Groton.
After the US victory at Yorktown a month later, Arnold left for London. He died in 1801 at age 60, forever remembered in the US as the young nation’s biggest traitor.
On Saturday, a satisfied nine-year-old watched the festivities.
The coolest part was “probably the head falling off,” Bace said. “I really liked it.”
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