Benedict Arnold Came Home: The Fort Griswold Massacre, 1781

‪@emberandash1776‬ On September 6, 1781 — six weeks before Yorktown — Benedict Arnold, Connecticut's own turned traitor, returned under the British flag. New London burned, and across the river at Fort Griswold about 85 of roughly 150 local defenders were killed — many of them, American survivors said, after surrender. This is the true story of the Battle of Groton Heights — the Fort Griswold Massacre. In 1781, with Cornwallis trapped at Yorktown, the British sought a diversion on the Connecticut coast, and sent the region's most infamous native son to strike it: Benedict Arnold, the Revolutionary hero turned archetypal traitor, born a few miles up the same river. His men burned New London, one of America's busiest privateering ports, and stormed the little fort on Groton Heights defended by roughly 150 neighbors and kin — farmers, tradesmen, sea-captains, two Black defenders named Jordan Freeman and Lambert Latham, fathers and sons, and boys who carried the powder. After a forty-minute fight and a fatal misreading of a fallen flag, the fort fell — and by the survivors' account, the killing continued after Colonel William Ledyard ordered his men to lay down their arms. Some 85 defenders died. Told from primary sources — Arnold's own report to Clinton, the Connecticut Gazette, Rivington's Loyalist Royal Gazette, and the survivor narratives of Rufus Avery and Stephen Hempstead — this film asks the question the granite monument still answers in stone: was it a legitimate military raid, or a traitor's revenge? Note on sources: the famous exchange ‘Who commands this garrison?’ ‘I did, sir, but you do now’ is recollected testimony (William Gordon, 1788; Hempstead, 1826), not found in the 1781 press, and is flagged as such in the film.