The reader may refer now to the reference made above to Franks’ record of himself in which he mentions having joined Count d’Estaing, the French admiral, at Sandy Hook. This was just a month after Arnold took command at Philadelphia, just a month after the events on which the above charge was based. Evidently Franks got out of town for a little while. He would notice the coolness of his fellow officers among whom reports of Colonel Fitzgerald’s discovery must have circulated. There would be no prejudice against him because he was a Jew, it would be solely due to the suspicions concerning him. Indeed, readers of the ordinary history will never learn that Arnold had Jews around him. There were David Franks, moneyed man and merchant in the city, and David Solesbury Franks on Arnold’s staff—both outstanding figures, yet wholly passed over by the historians, with one or two exceptions, and even these have never caught the Jewish clue. In that day there was no prejudice against Jews as Jews, even as there is none now.
Franks, then, easily gains letters which permit him to join the French fleet of d’Estaing, within a month after the Philadelphia business. And strange to relate, at precisely the same time, Benedict Arnold conceived the notion that he too should go into the navy, and a month after his appointment to Philadelphia he writes to General Washington suggesting nothing less than that he be given command of the American Navy!—at precisely the time Major Franks takes to the water.
“... being obliged entirely to neglect my private affairs since I have been in the service,” Arnold writes to General Washington, “has induced me to wish to retire from public business, unless an offer, which my friends have, mentioned, should be made to me of the command of the navy.... I must beg leave to request your sentiments respecting a command in the navy.”