Joseph Arnold (1710–1776) was a pre-revolutionary resident of North Kingstown and Exeter in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
[3] His maternal grandfather was Rhode Island Attorney General Joseph Sheffield, for whom Arnold was undoubtedly named.
[3] Arnold's mother likely died at an early age, since she had only three children, and never cosigned any land records with her husband.
[6] His second child with his second wife, Stephen Arnold, moved from Rhode Island to Stephentown, New York, and became the great grandfather of Stephen Arnold Douglas, who became famous as the leader of the Northern Democrats before the Civil War, sparring with Abraham Lincoln in a series of famed debates prior to a U.S. Senate contest in 1858, and later losing to Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election.
[1] The three early generations of Joseph Arnold's ancestry are documented in John O. Austin's Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island.