Not That Benedict Arnold’s Widow
As Pennsylvania historian John F. Watson reported in 1844, there is indeed a record from that meetinghouse of Benedict Arnold’s widow dying in Uxbridge on 14 Feb 1836. It appears in the genealogical volume on page 356: Sarah Arnold, widow of Benedict, age eighty-three.
However, page 25 of the same book states that a boy named Benedict Arnold was born in that town in 1752 and his wife Sarah in 1754. There’s no record of their marriage, but there are listings for their children Dorcas (1775), William (1777), and Mary (1781). All those births are recorded in a way that indicates the family was Quaker. Page 356 also says that Benedict died in 1802, which left Sarah a widow.
According to the Rhode Island Genealogical Register, Benedict’s will mentioned his wife Sarah and his children William, Dorcas, and Mary. The family is also mentioned in Richard H. Benson’s The Arnold Family of Smithfield, Rhode Island.
So while it’s true that Benedict Arnold’s widow died in Uxbridge, there’s really no doubt that she wasn’t that Benedict Arnold’s widow. The same source that preserves details of her death also records her life with a local Quaker man and their three children.
In fact, there were multiple Benedict Arnolds in southern New England in the late 1700s, many named in memory of a governor of Rhode Island a couple of generations earlier. That causes problems for biographers looking for exploits of the future general’s youth before he became the Benedict Arnold and Americans completely stopped naming their children Benedict Arnold.
The death of the general’s widow was clearly reported in London in 1804. Since she was receiving a pension from the Crown, the British government had a financial incentive to keep track. In 1931 J. G. Taylor published a short book titled Some New Light on the Later Life and Last Resting Place of Benedict Arnold and of His Wife Margaret Shippen, quoting records of the Battersea Church where the couple was buried.
So you might think that the already suspicious claim that Peggy Arnold secretly returned to America and lived for over thirty years in a Massachusetts town where she knew no one would have dissolved a long time ago.
But no, this is the age of the internet! Old claims no longer have to die. Indeed, the fact that Taylor’s 1931 book is still under copyright while Watson’s 1840s books are searchable means that the claim is easier to stumble across than some of the solid evidence.
So now there are webpages, some from reputable organizations like the Penn State University libraries and that new standby Wikipedia, stating that Peggy (Shippen) Arnold died in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. Some even say she did so in 1804, which means the authors had access to the right information but added on a layer of wrong.
