There is a strange intermingling of all the tragic figures of the play: Benedict Arnold marries the girl for whom Major André wrote a parlor play. Major André, during his period of captivity as an American prisoner of war and before his exchange, was often at the home of David Franks. And David Solesbury Franks, at his post as agent of the Franks syndicate at Montreal, is placed by a strange turn of the wheel of destiny in the military family of Benedict Arnold for a considerable period preceding and including the great treason.
So, for the moment let us leave the Jewish family of Franks—all of them still stationed as we first described them: Moses in England, Jacob at New York, David at Philadelphia, David S. at Montreal—and let us scrutinize the young American officer, Benedict Arnold.
These facts would most of them be lost, had they not been preserved in the Jewish archives, by the American Jewish Historical Society. You will read any history of Benedict Arnold without perceiving the Jews around him. The authors of the accepted histories were blind.
The principal defect in Benedict Arnold’s character was his love of money. All of the trouble which led up to the situation in which he found himself with reference to the American Government and Army, was due to the suspicion which hung like a cloud over many of his business transactions. There have been attempts to paint Arnold as a dashing martyr, as one who was discouraged by the unmerited slights of the Continental Congress, as a victim of the jealousy of lesser men, as one from whom confidence was unjustly withheld. Nothing could be further from the fact. He was a man to whom men were instinctively drawn to be generous, but so general was the knowledge of his looseness in money matters that, while admiring him, his brother officers acted upon the protective instinct and held aloof from him. He was tainted by a low form of dishonesty before he was tainted with treason, and the chief explanation of his treason was in the hard bargain he drove as to the amount of money he was to receive for his guilty act.