NEW LONDON, Conn. — A month earlier than the British give up at Yorktown ended main combating in the course of the American Revolution, the traitor Benedict Arnold led a pressure of Redcoats on a final raid in his residence state of Connecticut, burning many of the small coastal metropolis of New London to the bottom.
It has been 242 years, however New London nonetheless hasn’t forgotten.
Hundreds of individuals, some in interval costume, are anticipated to march by way of town’s streets Saturday to set Arnold’s effigy ablaze for the Burning of Benedict Arnold Festival, recreating a practice that was as soon as practiced in lots of American cities.
“I like to jokingly refer to it as the original Burning Man festival,” mentioned organizer Derron Wood, referencing the annual gathering within the Nevada desert.
For a long time after the Revolutionary War, cities together with New York, Boston and Philadelphia held yearly traitor-burning occasions. They had been a substitute for Britain’s raucous and fiery Guy Fawkes Night celebrations commemorating the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, when Fawkes was executed for conspiring with others to explode King James I of England and each Houses of Parliament.
Residents “still wanted to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, but they weren’t English, so they created a very unique American version,” Wood mentioned.
The celebrations died out in the course of the Civil War, however Wood, the creative director of New London’s Flock Theatre, revived it a decade in the past as a chunk of road theater and a strategy to have fun town’s historical past utilizing reenactors in interval costumes.
Anyone can be part of the march down metropolis streets behind the paper mache Arnold to New London’s Waterfront Park, the place the mayor cries, “Remember New London,” and places a torch to the effigy.
Arnold, a local of close by Norwich, was initially a significant normal on the American aspect of the battle, taking part in vital roles within the seize of Fort Ticonderoga and the Battle of Saratoga in New York.
In 1779, although, he secretly started feeding info to the British. A 12 months later, he provided to give up the American garrison at West Point in change for a bribe, however the plot was uncovered when an confederate was captured. Arnold fled and have become a brigadier normal for the British.
On Sept. 6, 1781, he led a pressure that attacked and burned New London and captured a frivolously defended fort throughout the Thames River in Groton.
After the American victory at Yorktown a month later, Arnold left for London. He died in 1801 at age 60, perpetually remembered within the United States because the younger nation’s greatest traitor.
New London’s Burning Benedict Arnold Festival, which has grow to be a part of the state’s Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival, was rising in reputation earlier than it was halted in 2020 due to the pandemic. The theater group introduced the competition again final 12 months.
“This project and specifically the reaction, the sort of hunger for its return, has been huge and the interest in it has been huge,” mentioned Victor Chiburis, the Flock Theatre’s affiliate creative director and the competition’s co-organizer.
The solely time issues obtained just a little political, Chiburis mentioned, is the 12 months a bunch of Arnold supporters confirmed up in powdered wigs to defend his honor. But that was all tongue-in-cheek and something that will get individuals within the Revolutionary War historical past of town, the state and Arnold is optimistic, he mentioned.
In one of many early years after the competition first returned, Mayor Michael Passero forgot to inform the police, who had been lower than happy with the yelling, burning and muskets firing, he mentioned.
But these points, he mentioned, had been quickly resolved and now he can solely be completely happy that the celebration of one of many worst days within the historical past of New London brings a mob of individuals to town yearly.
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