A Fictional Interview with Jonathan Trumbull and Benedict Arnold at Fort Trumbull
TRAVEL IN TIME WITH DAN | Fort Trumbull State Park, New London, Connecticut — Out of Time
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is a fictional historical interview, and this one takes the show’s name more literally than usual. Jonathan Trumbull (1710–1785) was the only one of the thirteen colonial governors to fully back the Revolution, and Fort Trumbull is named for him. Benedict Arnold (1741–1801), born just ten miles away in Norwich, Connecticut, defected to the British in 1780 and personally led the 1781 raid that burned New London and triggered the Groton Heights Massacre. These two men never sat down together after that raid… Arnold died in exile in London in 1801, and there is no record of any reconciliation or confrontation between them. To bring them into the same room at all, this piece leans fully into fiction: Dan pulls both men out of their own moments in time and seats them together at the fort that now bears one of their names. One real historical thread runs underneath the conversation… before the war, Arnold was in fact excluded from the tight political circle of Connecticut elites that Trumbull governed alongside from Hartford, a documented grievance historians still point to when explaining Arnold’s later turn. Everything either man says here beyond that established fact is imagined.
SETTING: The upper level of Fort Trumbull, present day, at dusk. Dan stands between two men who have never occupied the same room in their lives… Governor Trumbull in his colonial coat, and General Arnold in a British officer’s uniform, the Thames River glinting below them both.
Dan: Gentlemen, I’ll admit this is not a conversation either of you ever expected to have. Governor Trumbull, you were the only governor of the thirteen colonies who fully backed Washington. What made that an easy call for you when it clearly wasn’t for the others?
Trumbull: It was never easy, only clear. I had corresponded with Washington long before most of my fellow governors would commit themselves to anything, and I had come to trust the man’s character. But I will not pretend loyalty is simply a private virtue a man carries alone. It is also built through who you choose to bring close to you and who you leave standing outside the circle. I have had cause to reconsider that second part more than once since.
Dan: General Arnold, you grew up just up the river from here. Before any of this… before West Point, before this raid… you tried to be part of Connecticut’s political class, didn’t you?
Arnold: I tried harder than most men would admit to trying. I was a merchant with ambition and I wanted a seat at the table in Hartford same as any man of standing. But Trumbull’s circle was not built for men like me… I was outside the right families, the right meetinghouses, the right long-standing name. I was patriotic before most of them were, mind you. It simply never seemed to matter to the men making the decisions.
Dan: Governor, did you know that’s how he experienced it… as being deliberately shut out?
Trumbull: I did not think of it that way at the time, which I suspect is itself an answer worth sitting with. A governing circle rarely experiences itself as exclusionary. It experiences itself as simply choosing familiar, trusted men for difficult work. I did not sit awake at night calculating how to keep Benedict Arnold outside of it. I simply never thought to invite him in, and I can see now that the not-thinking was its own kind of decision.
Dan: General, is that what you’re pointing to as a reason for what came after — for the betrayal, for this raid?
Arnold: I will not hand you a reason that erases what I did, because there is no such reason, and I have had many years in exile to know that. But you asked what fed it, and I will not lie to you about that either. A man who is told again and again that his service counts for less than his last name will eventually go looking for somewhere his service is the only currency that matters. The British offered me rank, money, and standing on the basis of what I could do for them, not who my father was. That is a poison that works slowly, and I let it work on me for years before I ever acted on it.
Dan: Governor, hearing that now… does it change how you think about leadership, looking back?
Trumbull: It sharpens something I already half knew. A leader who only ever rewards the people already inside his circle is quietly manufacturing his own future enemies, one overlooked man at a time. I do not say this to excuse what he did with that grievance… nothing excuses turning on one’s own country. But I would be a poor student of my own history if I refused to ask whether a wider table in Hartford might have kept a talented, ambitious man fighting beside us instead of against us.
Dan: General, last question. Standing here, at a fort that carries his name and not yours… what do you make of that?
Arnold: I make of it exactly what history has decided I deserve. He kept faith. I did not. No grievance, however real, balances that scale back in my favor, and I would not ask it to. I simply wish, for reasons that serve no one now, that someone in Hartford had thought to ask me to the table before the British did.
Dan: Thank you both… this is not a conversation I expected to get to have, either.
Jonathan Trumbull governed Connecticut throughout the entire Revolutionary War, and Fort Trumbull, along with the state’s enduring nickname “the Provision State,” still carries his name and legacy in New London today. Benedict Arnold, despite early brilliance and real sacrifice for the Patriot cause, remains American history’s most enduring symbol of betrayal, and historians studying his life have long pointed to his exclusion from Connecticut’s governing elite as one thread among several that fed his eventual turn. The leadership lesson from Fort Trumbull today is not about the raid or the ramparts… it is about who gets invited into the room before the crisis ever arrives. Leaders rarely set out to alienate talented, ambitious people. They simply keep choosing the familiar faces, again and again, until one day they discover who was left standing outside the circle, and what that person became because of it.
Uncovering History. Inspiring Leadership.
📺 Watch the episode: YouTube | 🎙️ Listen to the podcast: Spotify | 📖 Read the blog: granddaddyssecrets.com | 📚 Dan’s book: Travel in Time in the Northeast
