In 1779, before the name "Benedict Arnold" meant anything other than a competent, ambitious Continental Army general, Arnold was serving as military commander of Philadelphia. He also had a side business — or tried to. He used state-owned military wagons to move personal merchandise he was trading, which is precisely the kind of thing an officer isn’t supposed to do with property that belongs to the army, not to him.
Pennsylvania authorities filed a formal complaint. The Continental Congress referred it to a court-martial. Arnold ended up facing thirteen separate specifications of misconduct — the wagons were the headline, but there was more piled on underneath it.
The Trial Nobody Finished on Schedule
The proceedings opened in Philadelphia in June 1779 and then got interrupted — by an actual British attack, which is a genuinely difficult thing to schedule a court-martial around. The case didn’t resume until December 23, 1779, this time in Morristown, New Jersey, in the dead of a Revolutionary War winter.
He was cleared of most of it. What he got instead was a formal reprimand — written so mildly it read almost like praise.
The Reprimand That Broke Him
George Washington issued the reprimand himself. By any reasonable measure, Arnold got off easy: cleared of the bulk of thirteen charges, hit with nothing worse than a stern letter. Arnold did not experience it that way. He read the mild rebuke as a betrayal — proof that Washington and the rest of the Continental Army leadership didn’t appreciate him, didn’t respect his service, and were never going to give him what he’d earned.
He was still stewing on it five months later when he opened correspondence with the British about handing over West Point.
Why This One Belongs at the Top of the List
This is, as far as documented American military history goes, the origin story of treason as a workplace grievance. Not ideology. Not money, at least not at first. A general got a light reprimand for running a side hustle with government wagons, decided the United States Army had disrespected him, and let that resentment metastasize into the most famous betrayal in the country’s history. The Army has spent two hundred and fifty years occasionally over-punishing people for far less than what Arnold actually did. In his one specific case, the system was almost too lenient — and the lesson from it wasn’t "be more lenient." It was "some grudges don’t care how fair the outcome was."