BENEDICT ARNOLD, REVOLUTIONARY HERO: An American Warrior Reconsidered.<i> By James Kirby Martin</i> .<i> New York University Press: 540 pp., $34.95</i>

Of all the obelisks, tablets, plaques and statues that commemorate the Revolutionary War, none has greater power to puzzle modern Americans than a monument on the battlefield of Saratoga, north of Albany, N.Y. On its front, a tablet bears only a bas-relief sculpture of a left boot, surmounted by a laurel wreath. An inscription explains that the memorial stands “In memory of the most brilliant soldier in the Continental Army, who was desperately wounded on this spot . . . 7th October 1777.” Nowhere does that brilliant soldier’s name appear.

This stone, erected in 1887, represents the closest Americans could come, 110 years after the fact, to recognizing Gen. Benedict Arnold’s contributions to the winning of independence. Now, after another 110 years, historian James Kirby Martin has come to terms with Arnold’s legacy in an altogether more satisfying way. His book, both a biography and an extended meditation on the ironies of the Revolution, is in many ways a remarkable example of the historian’s craft.

If most students of American history know that Arnold plotted to surrender West Point to the British in the fall of 1780, few have any idea of what motivated this celebrated act of treason. We tend to accept the revolutionaries’ explanation: Despite his fame as a fighting general, Arnold was fundamentally a corrupt man. Weakened by greed and the demands of an extravagant wife, he simply lacked the character to resist 10,000 pounds sterling and a British generalship. The first chroniclers of the Revolution cast him as the symbolic opposite of George Washington, whose courage grew not from mere physical bravery but from the self-sacrificing moral strength that they called “virtue.”

Thus a one-time apothecary with a genius for war came to occupy a pivotal place in a founding narrative that arrayed selfless, liberty-loving patriots against the richest and most powerful--yet morally debilitated--kingdom on Earth. If Arnold had not existed, those who sought moral lessons in the Revolutionary War would have had to have invented him.

Of course, the moralists did invent him, and Martin’s first task is to chip away the myths that have encrusted Arnold’s life. In telling Arnold’s story, not as a prelude to treason but rather as the evolution of a more-or-less ordinary man into a military hero whose heroism could not immunize him against disillusionment, he finds in Arnold not a symbol but a complex, troubled human being. Ultimately, he concludes that Arnold’s treason grew less from a flawed character than from the collective failure of the revolutionaries to live up to their own standards of virtue. Martin embeds this ironic argument in a narrative dense with detail and description; yet even at its densest, it is a compelling story and one that repays close reading.

Few previous writers have attributed much significance to the fact that Benedict Arnold was a lineal descendant of Rhode Island’s second governor and, indeed, the fifth man to bear his name. Martin, however, finds the source of Benedict V’s intense ambition in the family’s history. By the year of his birth, 1741, the Arnolds had come a long way down in the world without ever giving up their claims to distinction. Partially educated in the classics before his father’s downward spiral into business failure and alcoholism turned him from a prospective Yale student into an apothecary’s apprentice, the young Benedict drove himself relentlessly to restore the lost reputation of the Arnolds. By the early 1770s, his accomplishments were already formidable--he had moved to New Haven, married well and prospered--but he was finding his ascent increasingly blocked by a haughty local elite. As tensions with Great Britain grew, his detestation of the social tyrants in New Haven’s upper crust matured into hatred of the political tyranny of king and Parliament. The spring of 1775 found him at the head of New Haven’s patriot militia. When fighting broke out in Massachusetts, he marched his men north to join in the siege of Boston.

An officer of ordinary ambition would have taken his place among the thousands of troops engaged in waiting out the British, but Arnold’s ambitions were far from ordinary. Noting the shortage of cannons in the American Army, he persuaded the Massachusetts Congress to commission him as colonel of a regiment to be raised for the purpose of seizing the royal artillery stored at Ft. Ticonderoga, N.Y. Arnold arrived ahead of his regiment to find that a gang of Vermont squatters, Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys, already had plans to attack the fort. Undeterred, he flashed his commission and ordered Allen to turn over the command. Allen ignored the demand but let the feisty druggist take part in the assault anyway, perhaps for laughs. If so, it was a costly chuckle: Arnold quickly claimed the victory for himself and ultimately--once his own regiment appeared and the Green Mountain Boys wearied of garrison duty--took command of Ticonderoga.

How Arnold built a brilliant career on the cornerstone of this comical adventure forms the spine of Martin’s narrative. Returning to Boston, Arnold persuaded Washington to let him lead an expeditionary force through the Maine woods and attack the British forces at Quebec. Arnold’s march on Canada in the autumn of 1775 proved a feat of epic qualities and earned him the sobriquet “America’s Hannibal.” The attempt to take Quebec by storm in a howling blizzard on New Year’s Eve failed, as did the larger effort to turn Canada into Revolutionary America’s 14th state. But Arnold’s boldness in leading the assault, together with the bullet wound he suffered in the left leg, cemented an unshakable reputation for bravery.

Having failed to conquer Quebec, the Americans had no choice but to withdraw from Canada when the British reinforced the colony in the spring of 1776. Without Arnold’s ingenuity, initiative and charismatic leadership, the retreat would almost surely have become a rout, but Arnold oversaw the construction and manning of a gunboat fleet on Lake Champlain and then led it in a desperate attempt to stop the enemy advance. At the Battle of Valcour Bay (Oct. 11, 1776), Arnold’s vessels inflicted such damage that the British suspended their campaign, postponing their invasion of New York until the following year.

By the end of 1776, Martin argues, Arnold’s courage, coolness under fire and singular intensity of concentration had made him the Continental Army’s greatest battlefield leader. Yet a parallel set of shortcomings was also becoming unmistakable: an inability to suffer fools; hypersensitivity to slights and insults; and a remarkable talent for making enemies, both among subordinates who feared his displeasure and among senior officers who feared his rivalry. Several of these enemies enjoyed powerful connections in Congress, where Arnold had never cultivated influential patrons. Thus when Congress promoted five officers, lower in seniority and inferior in talent, to the rank of major general ahead of Arnold, he felt himself disgraced. His sense of grievance grew until he became convinced that the Revolution’s political leaders lacked the virtue to reward merit over connections.

An obsession with personal reputation and the conviction that Congress could not be trusted to behave honorably, of course, did not make Arnold unique. Washington equaled, indeed excelled, him in both. Arnold, however, lacked Washington’s self-control, patience and principled commitment to civilian (that is, congressional) control over the military. Like Ulysses S. Grant and George Patton, Arnold had every quality that suits a man in battle, but he had no talent whatever for politics.

As 1777 wore on, Arnold’s alienation grew, paralleled by his determination to prove himself morally superior to Congress and his enemies. He had his chance when Washington dispatched him to New York to help Gen. Horatio Gates stop the renewed British invasion, led by Gen. John Burgoyne. Gates, unfortunately, saw Arnold as a rival, and when Arnold’s brilliant leadership at the first battle of Saratoga (Sept. 19, 1777) outshone his own less aggressive command, Gates tried to drive Arnold out of the Army. Arnold, furious, refused to leave, and at the second battle of Saratoga (Oct. 7), he acted entirely without orders and seized command on the battlefield. His stunning intervention won the battle and earned him both another severe wound to the left leg and his commander’s undying enmity. Gates, whose support in Congress exceeded even Washington’s, saw to it that Arnold received no credit for winning the greatest victory America had yet achieved.

Martin concludes that by the end of 1777, Arnold had given his all in the service of a cause that had left him impoverished, embittered and crippled. When Congress finally authorized Washington to move Arnold ahead of those five generals promoted before him, Arnold could discern no virtue worth the name in Congress, much less among the scheming political generals Congress so often rewarded. Disillusionment, not greed, turned America’s greatest fighting general toward the British.

Post-revolutionary Americans, pondering the paradox of Arnold’s life, read its events backward, scrutinizing his every act for evidence of his treason. They concluded that the only part of him worth honoring was his shattered left leg and obliterated his name--except as a synonym for traitor--from the history of the Revolution. More than two centuries after independence, we may at last be ready to look at the whole man. If so, James Kirby Martin’s book will be our indispensable guide.