BY MICHAEL K. WOOD

Editor’s Note on the Washington Journal

The publication of the following documents requires explanation. Students of the Revolution are well acquainted with George Washington’s voluminous correspondence, which has been preserved in the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and other repositories. These sources form the backbone of our understanding of the commander-in-chief’s thoughts during his long life.

What follows, however, is not part of that well-documented record. The text presented here was previously unknown to historians until a cache of papers surfaced during the renovation of a 19th-century farmhouse in the Hudson Valley, near Fishkill, New York. The farmhouse had belonged to a family descended from a quartermaster officer who served in the Continental Army. Hidden beneath the floorboards in a tin-lined chest were several notebooks, loose pages, and a bundle of folded sheets sealed with wax.

The provenance of these materials is still being studied. The hand matches authenticated examples of Washington’s private script—less formal than his letters to Congress, with a tighter, more hurried stroke. Paper and ink analysis has dated them securely to the late 18th century. Marginal notes, seemingly added by aides or clerks, indicate that these writings were not official dispatches, but private reflections never meant for circulation. One telling detail is the absence of the usual flourishes or closing signatures Washington employed in correspondence. Instead, entries often begin abruptly and end mid-thought, suggesting that they were composed solely for his own eye.

Why these papers were hidden away, rather than archived with the rest of Washington’s effects after his death, is uncertain. The likeliest explanation lies in their content. The writings deal with subjects beyond the ordinary scope of military command—events described in terms that skirt the boundaries of reason, speaking of unrest among the dead and powers that Washington himself admitted could not be openly discussed without endangering morale. To publish such material in the 18th or 19th century would have invited ridicule at best, panic at worst. The quartermaster officer, finding himself custodian of these papers, may have judged it safer to conceal them.

Washington was a man of the Enlightenment, skeptical of superstition yet a believer in Providence, and careful to guard his reputation. That such a man would put to paper even the suggestion of unnatural occurrences speaks to the extremity of the circumstances he believed he witnessed. What he terms “The Battle of the Hulks” appears nowhere in the official record, except for indirect references to an incident in which prison ships were lost to fire and contagion. Yet in these pages, Washington admits to seeing “corpses—long dead… yet they moved.” His horror is palpable, though he insists on the necessity of suppressing the truth, fearing mass desertion.

Readers may wonder whether these writings reflect the strain of command, a man under unbearable pressure, or whether they preserve testimony of events the official record dared not keep. They must be approached with caution, but also with respect, for they reveal a Washington rarely glimpsed: not the marble icon of national memory, but a man confronting forces he could not wholly explain.

Equally striking is Washington’s fixation on Benedict Arnold. In familiar sources, Washington’s anger at Arnold’s treachery is clear, but the journal portrays something more: a fear that Arnold trafficked in powers beyond politics, that his betrayal carried with it a corruption deeper than mere allegiance to the Crown. Washington writes of Arnold “as corrupter, not merely traitor,” language unlike any found elsewhere in his papers.

Not all historians are convinced of the authenticity of the papers, but forensic analysis confirms their age, and the writing matches extant samples of Washington’s. Whether the General authored it may never be authoritatively confirmed, but what is certain is that the papers complicate our image of the Revolution, reminding us that the struggle was not only one of armies and ideologies, but also of reason, passion, and superstition.

We offer the text as discovered: fragmentary and cryptic. They deserve to stand alongside the better-known documents of the era, if only to remind us that the past is never as tidy as the archives would have us believe.

Extract, Papers of Gen. George Washington (Harrison Drafts, misfiled folio, NYHS discovery 2023)

Autumn, 1776

In Canada, Colonel Arnold allegedly obtained an object of considerable influence. The phenomenon may have originated from papist influence, or perhaps it came through the trade of natives. 

The men whisper of it as a charm, but not in blessing. They speak of one fallen who did not lie still, whose form walked again in the snow until Arnold himself put an end to it. Whether truth or delusion born of fatigue, the fear it bred among the soldiery was plain.

Arnold was said to have buried it there, yet such matters are not easily cast aside. Men close to him believed he still carried its weight, if not on his person, then in his mind. I do not judge the tale, but I mark it, for Arnold’s ambition is restless, and restless men are dangerous.

Best not to enter this in the official record. Some things are not for Congress nor for the public ear. But I hold it in memory: that a thing once raised may not be laid down again so readily.

Prologue – The Black Talisman

A merchant’s son, quick-tempered and bold in battle. He seemed fashioned by Providence itself for war. He pressed north into the wilderness and seized Fort Ticonderoga—the gateway of the lakes. While Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys drank victory and brawled over the spoils, Arnold wandered the fort alone.

In the quiet chapel of that decayed stronghold, he found prisoners taken in earlier wars—French, Canadian, half-starved, their eyes haunted by stories they scarcely dared whisper. They spoke of things buried in the forests north of Albany. Relics left behind by priests and soldiers. Relics that did not sanctify but blasphemed.

One tale lingered: a charm that could call the dead to their feet. Arnold scoffed at such fancies, yet the words clung like burrs.

Months later, when he led the bold drive to Quebec, the rumor returned. His army stumbled through endless forests. Mud. Snow. Starvation. Men froze in their tents and starved on the march. Some died in swamps no map had ever marked. Around their fires, soldiers muttered of devils in the north woods and of relics that could bend death itself.

And in the end, for his efforts, Arnold received a devastating wound in the barricaded streets of that fortified city. His men dragged him to the dubious safety of a field hospital. Weeks passed in fevered dreams: the pale hands of the dead clawed through drifting snow. Faces of fallen friends rose from the frost. A Jesuit volunteer, tending to the stricken officer’s wounds, fed Arnold’s nightmares: “The land here remembers its dead… and some objects can wake them.”

The invasion collapsed. Broken and hungry, the army staggered back south. In the desolate woods near Trois-Rivières, Arnold found a half-buried chest, rotting in the loam. Inside lay a talisman. Black stone, bound with tarnished silver wire. Its face was etched in sigils too old to read. Cold radiated from it as though from a grave.

Arnold hesitated only for a moment. Then he slipped it into his coat. He told no man.

The retreat dragged on. Hunger and frost thinned the ranks. One evening, after a skirmish, Arnold stood over the body of a youth slain by musket fire—a soldier of sixteen. The boy’s lips were blue, his blood frozen dark on the ground. Something in Arnold broke. Perhaps it was pity. Perhaps despair. Or perhaps something darker, urged by the cold weight in his pocket.

He drew the talisman.

The word came unbidden, heavy with a tongue not his own. The boy’s chest rose. His eyes opened, black and hollow. He gasped—not in life but in hunger. Limbs jerked. Fingers clawed.

Arnold’s horror twisted into fury. He snatched his sword and hacked the thing down as it staggered toward him, heart pounding, revulsion and rage mingling until the world narrowed to each savage blow. Repeated blows, until it lay still. The snow was fouled with ichor that steamed like pitch.

He cast the talisman away into the trees. He swore never to touch it again.

And yet, as months turned to years, as slights and jealousies curdled his service, Arnold remembered where it lay. Alone at night, his leg throbbing with old pain, he thought of that boy’s blackened eyes. He thought of an army that could not die.

Thus, the relic waited, half-buried in the northern wilds. Waiting not for the French who made it, nor the priests who hid it, but for the one soldier whose ambition was fierce enough to wield it.

At Saratoga, when cannon smoke boiled across the Hudson and the fields ran slick with blood, Arnold felt the pull once more. In the dark hours after his furious charge, he limped to the edge of the woods where he had buried it years before.

The talisman was there, waiting.

You bled for them. And they call you reckless. You saved them. And they give the laurels to another. But I… I will never forget you.

Arnold pressed the stone to his breast. His wounded leg throbbed. The chill seeped into his marrow, steadying him even as it hollowed him. He dared not wield it openly. Instead, he entrusted it to a captain half-broken by the campaign, ordering him to guard it with his life.

But the relic hungered for more than secrecy. The captain grew sleepless, fevered, eyes rimmed dark. One night he tried to use it as Arnold had—pressing it to the brow of a fallen comrade, speaking words no tongue should know.

A laundress, fetching water, lingered at the edge of the circle. She saw the corpse stir. Teeth ground in a jaw that should not have moved. Hands reached for the living. Men who hesitated—knowing that face, that friend—paid with their throats.

The laundress hurled her bucket, boiling water hissing across the creature’s skin. It shrieked in a voice not its own. Soldiers piled on, smashing its skull with musket butts until it stilled.

By dawn, the captain was gone. Some whispered he deserted. Others that the earth itself swallowed him. Yet the talisman found its way back to Arnold, as though it had never left him.

And then the whisper came. Not memory. Not dream. Presence. Smooth, certain, patient.

So, we meet again, Benedict.

Arnold’s chest heaved. His hand clawed at the dirt until it struck something hard—the talisman, slick with mud. He pressed it to his heart.

“You,” he croaked.

You bled for Quebec. You bleed here, while others grow fat on your triumphs. They call you reckless. Mad. A thief. And yet without you, they would have no victory at all.

Arnold shook with rage and tears. “They rob me. They mock me. I was made for more than this.”

Then take it. Say the word. And no grave shall hold you. Command, and even the dead will obey.

Extract, Papers of Gen. George Washington (Harrison Drafts, misfiled folio, NYHS discovery 2023)

Extract, Sep. 1780

The treachery of Arnold shakes even the firmest spirit. That he sold West Point is grievous enough. That he carried with him knowledge of other matters is worse still.

I cannot set all down here. I know only that his loyalty rotted from within long before his bargain with André. Men said he bore wounds from Quebec not only in his leg but in his soul. The thing he touched there—if indeed he touched it—had worked its poison.

Now he is gone to the King’s banner. But he carries more than a sword with him. Some say the relic clings like hunger itself: never fed, never sated. It is no small matter when hunger commands a man of ambition.