friend to Schuyler, and perhaps did
not take enough pains to conceal his poor opinion of Gates. Other
officers in the northern army let it plainly be seen that they placed
more confidence in Arnold than in Gates, and the result was a bitter
quarrel between the two generals, echoes of which were probably
afterwards heard in Congress.
If Arnold's wound on the field of Saratoga had been a mortal wound, he
would have been ranked, among the military heroes of the Revolution,
next to Washington and Greene. Perhaps, however, in a far worse sense
than is commonly conveyed by the term, it proved to be his death-wound,
for it led to his being placed in command of Philadelphia. He was
assigned to that position because his wounded leg made him unfit for
active service. Congress had restored him to his relative rank, but now
he soon got into trouble with the state government of Pennsylvania. It
is not easy to determine how much ground there may have been for the
charges brought against him early in 1779 by the state government. One
of them concerned his personal honesty, the others were so trivial in
character as to make the whole affair look somewhat like a case of
persecution. They were twice investigated, once by a committee of
Congress and once by a court-martial. On the serious charge, which
affected his pecuniary integrity, he was acquitted; on two of the
trivial charges, of imprudence in the use of some public wagons, and of
carelessness in granting a pass for a ship, he was convicted and
sentenced to be reprimanded. The language in which Washington couched
the reprimand showed his feeling that Arnold was too harshly dealt with.
If the matter had stopped here, posterity would probably have shared
Washington's feeling. But the government of Pennsylvania must have had
stronger grounds for distrust of Arnold than it was able to put into the
form of definite charges. Soon after his arrival in Philadelphia he fell
in love with a beautiful Tory lady, to whom he was presently married. He
was thus thrown much into the society of Tories and was no doubt
influenced by their views. He had for some time considered himself
ill-treated, and at first thought of leaving the service and settling
upon a grant of land in western New York. Then, as the charges against
him were pressed and his anger increased, he seems to have dallied with
the notion of going over to the British. At length in the early summer
of 1780, after the reprimand, his
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