What if I told you that one of the most recognizable features of Abraham Lincoln’s appearance might have started with advice from an 11-year-old girl?

In 1860, as Lincoln campaigned for the presidency, a young girl named Grace Bedell from Westfield, New York, decided to write him a letter. Her suggestion? Grow a beard! Grace thought Lincoln’s face looked too thin and believed that growing whiskers might make him look better. She even suggested that women might encourage their husbands to vote for him if he grew a beard!

Now, imagine being a presidential candidate and receiving campaign advice from a fifth-grader! But here's the surprising part: Lincoln actually responded to her letter. And before long, he began growing the famous beard that would become part of his image for generations.

Then, in February 1861, while traveling to Washington, D.C., after winning the election, Lincoln's train stopped in Westfield. He asked if Grace Bedell was there, and the two finally met in person! Imagine being eleven years old and having the future president of the United States recognize you because of a letter you wrote.

Grace couldn't vote for Lincoln, but she found another way to make her voice heard. Her story reminds us that you don't have to be a president, a general, or a famous historical figure to leave your mark on history. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple idea and the courage to share it.

On October 13, 1776, Benedict Arnold ran his remaining ships aground on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, set them on fire, and led his surviving men into the woods. By any conventional measure it was a defeat. He had lost most of his fleet over two days of fighting against a British force that outgunned him completely. What he had actually accomplished was something the history books take a while to explain properly.

The British had spent most of that summer building a fleet powerful enough to control Lake Champlain and advance south toward Fort Ticonderoga. Arnold understood that he couldn’t beat them in a straight fight, so he didn’t try to. He positioned his ships behind Valcour Island to force the British into restricted waters where their superior firepower mattered less, fought them hard enough to damage both sides, then slipped most of his fleet past them in the dark and made them chase him south for two more days before the end came. By the time it was over, the campaigning season was effectively finished. The British commander Guy Carleton looked at his situation, looked at the calendar, and decided not to advance against Ticonderoga before winter.

That decision gave the Americans a year.

In 1777, when the British tried again under Burgoyne, they ran into an American army that had spent the winter recovering and reorganizing. Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in October. France, which had been secretly supplying the Americans for months while waiting to see whether the rebellion could actually survive, signed a formal military alliance in February 1778. That alliance brought the naval power that would eventually make British defeat possible.

The chain runs directly back to Arnold running his ships aground in a bay that would eventually carry his name. He didn’t win at Valcour Island. He bought time. And the time turned out to be worth everything.

Then at Saratoga itself, he was there again.

By that point Arnold and his commanding general Horatio Gates genuinely hated each other. Arnold believed his leadership at the first battle of Saratoga on September 19 had been decisive and that Gates had deliberately left his name out of the official report. He wasn’t entirely wrong about either thing. Gates relieved him of command. Arnold stayed in camp without a formal role while the campaign continued around him.

On October 7, during the second battle, Arnold rode onto the field anyway. Nobody had authorized it. He didn’t have a command. He just showed up and started directing troops, helping overwhelm critical British positions before taking a musket ball in the same left leg that had been wounded at Quebec two years earlier. He spent the rest of the battle lying in the dirt while the fighting finished around him.

Ten days later Burgoyne surrendered.

There is a monument at Saratoga National Historical Park that commemorates the leg of an American general wounded during the battle. It doesn’t say his name.

To understand how Arnold got from October 1776 to September 1780, when he agreed to hand West Point to the British, you have to take the grievances seriously without excusing what he did with them.

He was passed over for promotion to major general in February 1777 while five officers with less distinguished records were elevated above him. For an eighteenth century officer this wasn’t a bureaucratic irritation. Rank was how the world measured your worth and your honour, and Arnold took the slight as a personal declaration that Congress didn’t respect what he had done. Washington eventually got him the rank, but the damage to how Arnold understood his relationship with the cause he was fighting for had already been done.

After Saratoga he was given command of Philadelphia, which was a political minefield. The city was full of Loyalists, returning Patriots, commercial disputes, and accusations flying in every direction. Arnold lived expensively, got involved in some commercial activities that attracted serious scrutiny, and accumulated enemies faster than he accumulated money. Some of the accusations against him were politically motivated. Some weren’t. A court-martial in 1779 found him guilty on two relatively minor charges and Washington issued a formal reprimand, carefully worded to acknowledge his earlier service while making clear the conduct had been unacceptable.

For Arnold it was one more entry in a growing ledger of humiliations. He had nearly died twice for the Revolution. He had helped save it at moments when it genuinely needed saving. And the country he had bled for was nickel-and-diming him in front of a court-martial while men who had done far less collected their promotions and their reputations.

He had also by this point married Peggy Shippen, whose family had Loyalist connections and whose social circle included Major John André, the British officer who would become Arnold’s contact in the conspiracy.

By May 1779 Arnold was already secretly communicating with the British. The treason wasn’t a sudden decision made in anger after the court-martial. It developed over more than a year while he was still serving as an American commander, still accepting Washington’s trust, still being given more responsibility. In 1780, Washington gave him command of West Point.

Arnold had already agreed to hand it over.

The plot unraveled on September 23 when André was captured returning to British lines with documents hidden in his boot. When Arnold learned the conspiracy had been discovered two days later, he fled to the British warship sitting in the Hudson and left his wife and infant son behind. He wrote to Washington asking him to take care of Peggy. Washington did.

André was hanged as a spy. Arnold was commissioned as a British general and spent the rest of the war leading raids against Americans, including a campaign through Connecticut that burned his own hometown of New London.

The question his story keeps forcing is what to do with the first part when you know how it ends. The boot monument at Saratoga is one answer: honor the leg without naming the man. It’s awkward and a little strange and also probably the most honest the historical record can get about someone whose best moments and worst moments are equally real and equally consequential.

Arnold didn’t betray the Revolution because he was secretly a coward or always a villain. He betrayed it because he was a man with extraordinary pride who became convinced that the cause he had nearly died for multiple times had decided he didn’t matter. Whether that’s true in any meaningful sense, whether Congress and Gates and the court-martial actually wronged him badly enough to justify what he did, is a question the evidence doesn’t answer cleanly.

What the evidence does answer is that without him, the Revolution’s most important year looks very different. The delay at Valcour Island, the relief of Fort Stanwix, the fighting at Freeman’s Farm, the assault on the Breymann Redoubt. Remove Arnold from 1776 and 1777 and Saratoga becomes less certain. Make Saratoga less certain and the French alliance becomes less certain. Make the French alliance less certain and you’re in genuinely different territory about how this ends.

America’s most notorious traitor was also one of the people most responsible for the fact that there was an America to betray.

You can talk directly to Benedict Arnold on Virtual Wayback and hear how he understood his own choices, both the ones that helped save the Revolution and the one that didn’t. https://virtualwayback.com/blog/benedict-arnold-and-his-impact

I hope you like this post, my sincere regards from Egypt …

—————————

In the year 1320 AD, while Scotland was fighting a war of existence against England, the nobles of Scotland stood before Pope John XXII, carrying a document known as the “Declaration of Arbroath.” The declaration was not merely a demand for independence, but a defense of a nation seeking the legitimacy of its existence in the depths of history. For these nobles realized that a people who can prove that they have an ancient past can demand that they have an independent future.

And here begins one of the strangest tales in European history, the tale of an Egyptian princess called “Scota” or “Scotia,” whose Scottish and Irish narratives say that she was the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh, and that she became the symbolic mother of an entire nation; indeed, the name of Scotland itself was derived, according to the legend, from her name.

Before Scota entered Scottish history, she was present in Irish memory for centuries. In the “Book of Invasions of Ireland,” one of the most important Irish texts of the Middle Ages, “Scota” appears as the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh and the mother of the legendary ancestor of the Gaelic peoples (and not the Gauls from Gaul).

The narrative did not stop at that, but mixed the Egyptian lineage with the biblical heritage to grant this legendary origin sanctity and solidity, linking Scota to the story of the Egyptian pharaoh who was contemporary with the Prophet Moses, and making her departure from Egypt an extension of the Exodus of the Israelites.

The historian Edward Cowan believes that the first known appearance of Scota in literature dates back to the twelfth century AD. From Ireland the tale moved to Scotland, where its historians adopted it in the fourteenth century, so that it gradually turned from a myth about origins into part of the historical narrative of the Scottish nation.

In the 1440s, the Scottish historian Walter Bower was writing in Inchcolm Abbey, on a small island in the Firth of Forth, his encyclopedia “The Scottish History,” one of the most important historical works in Scotland during the Middle Ages. Bower made Scota the starting point in the history of Scotland; for she, according to his account, was the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh, left Egypt with her husband, then their descendants moved across the Iberian Peninsula to Ireland, before crossing to the west coast of Scotland.

In the “Scotichronicon,” popular legend linked the origin of the Scots to Egypt, where it is said that Scota was the daughter of Pharaoh “Cheneres,” and that her descendants from her husband “Gaythelos” were the ones who carried the name “Scots” in honor of her.

Some narratives see that she has a relationship with Tutankhamun, describing her as his half-sister, as some sources mention that she was the daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and that she fled Egypt after a disagreement with her family.

Researchers such as David Ellis believe that she is in fact Ankhesenamun, the wife of Tutankhamun and the daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, basing this on texts attributed to the Egyptian historian Manetho. After the death of Tutankhamun, Ankhesenamun married Pharaoh Ay, who is likely to be the father of Tutankhamun, then he was forced into exile with his court due to religious conflicts, so they fled together from Egypt. The narrative indicates that they crossed the Mediterranean with a thousand of their followers, and arrived first in Spain, where their descendants lived for several generations, then later moved to Ireland and from there to Scotland.

Scota was not alone in carrying Egyptian history to Scotland; she also carried with her a mysterious stone known as the “Stone of Destiny” or the “Stone of Scone.” The legend indicates that Scota carried the stone with her from Egypt to Ireland, then it later reached Scotland to become a symbol of the legitimacy of kings. This stone was used in the coronation of Scottish kings, and remained a sacred symbol in Scottish history for long centuries, until it was transferred to England in 1296 by King Edward I, before being returned to Scotland in 1996 after a decision by the British government.

But the symbol most associated with the name of Scotland is the “St. Andrew’s Cross” (Saltire), which is a white diagonal cross in the shape of an X on a blue background.

This flag is linked to the legend of St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, who was martyred on a diagonal cross of this shape. The legend says that this cross appeared in the sky before a decisive battle in which the Scots defeated the English, so they took it as their emblem.

The history of this flag goes back to ancient times, as records indicate that the oldest known use of it as a national symbol representing Scotland dates back to 1286, when it appeared on the seal of the “Guardians of Scotland.” It is believed that the Battle of Athelstaneford in 832 AD was the one that witnessed the birth of this symbol, when King Angus Mac Fergus saw a formation of clouds in the shape of a white cross in the blue sky, so he vowed to make St. Andrew the patron saint of Scotland if he won, and he did indeed win.

But the relationship between Scota and the Scottish flag is deeper than just the legend of St. Andrew. The name “Scota” itself was linked to the Scottish people, who were known as “Scots,” and from it the name “Scotland” was derived.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States of America was on the brink of a destructive civil war. In 1861, eleven southern states declared their secession from the federal Union, and formed what was known as the “Confederate States of America,” in rejection of the attempts of the central federal government to abolish the system of slavery, which was the backbone of the agricultural economy of the South, in addition to other reasons.

The Confederacy needed symbols to unite its ranks, so several flags appeared during the war years, but the flag that became associated with it in the collective memory is the “Confederate Battle Flag,” also known as the “Southern Cross,” which is a red flag centered by a blue diagonal cross studded with white stars. It was approved by the President of the Southern Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and was designed by William Porcher Miles, one of the aides of the Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard, after the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run), in which similar flags almost caused a military disaster because of the confusion between the Union flag and the Confederate flag.

And here begins the exciting intersection between Scotland and the Confederate flag. The blue diagonal cross that centers the Confederate flag is not just a random design, but is directly inspired by the “Scottish Saltire.”

Arthur L. Rogers, the designer of the final version of the Confederate flag, stated that the flag was based on the Scottish Saltire, indicating that it symbolizes the “basic origins of the Confederate people,” with the diagonal cross of the Scottish flag and the red stripe from the flag of France. Perhaps this indicates that the sons of the southern states were fighting the northern states whose colonies were called New England, that is, New England!

It is said that this design found its way to America through Nova Scotia, one of the Canadian provinces located on the eastern coast, where the Scots emigrated to the southern American states carrying with them their veneration for Princess Scota and for St. Andrew.

The Confederate flag, with its diagonal cross and white stars, reflected the Scottish origin of many of the inhabitants of the American South, whose ancestors had emigrated from Scotland and Ireland to the United States in previous centuries.

The End..