by Bob Drury
Then, on October 14, breathless riders from upstate New York arrived at the commander in chief’s headquarters with details of the first of several running series of clashes between Gen. Gates’s northern army and Gen. Burgoyne’s Redcoats that would come to be known as the Battle of Saratoga.
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Four months earlier, on June 20, “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne had departed Quebec with the appropriate pomp at the head of a force of just over 8,000 men. His army included nearly 4,000 hardened British regulars and 3,000 blue-coated German Brunswickers belting out their Lutheran hymns. Within a week the outnumbered patriots defending Fort Ticonderoga at the narrows near the south end of Lake Champlain would hear that chorus echoing from the heights overlooking their redoubt. They had no choice but to abandon “Old Ti” in the dead of night.
After occupying the fort, Burgoyne surmised that the rest of his campaign to capture Albany, at the time a wilderness town with fewer than 4,000 residents, would fall naturally into place. By this time he had learned of Gen. Howe’s plans to move on Philadelphia, and he counted on Gen. Clinton’s troops in New York City to at least theoretically keep the Americans guessing as to when and where they might expect an assault on their southern flank. In Burgoyne’s typical bombast, he proclaimed, “The messengers of Justice and Wrath await the [rebels] in the field, and Devastation, Famine, and every concomitant Horror . . . will bar the Way to their Return.” It remains unrecorded whether the warning ever reached Gen. Gates, the commander of the Continental Army’s northern corps.
Gates, with his matronly spectacles perched upon his large, hooked nose and ever clad in a slovenly blue frock, resembled nothing so much as a blowsy midwife from a Gainsborough painting sprung to life. Yet his countenance disguised the 49-year-old’s lust for power and position. Gates, who was the illegitimate son of a Kentish chambermaid impregnated by the duke for whom she worked, possessed a nimble and martial mind. After obtaining a military commission at the age of 17, he had risen to the rank of major during the French and Indian War before purchasing a plantation in the Shenandoah Valley and settling in America. A relentless ingratiator and wily political operative, one year earlier he had opted out of Washington’s Christmas-night crossing of the Delaware by feigning illness and had galloped off to Philadelphia to attempt to persuade Congress to install him as commander of the Continental Army’s Northern Military Department.III That the department was at the moment being ably run by Washington’s friend Gen. Philip Schuyler was beside the point. Schuyler, a wealthy New Yorker intensely disliked by the New England contingent to the Continental Congress, nevertheless had a circle of influential friends whom Washington counted on for political influence and backing. As two historians of the American Revolution have observed, “Although there were clear limits to [Gates’s] not inconsiderable military talents, there were none to his ambition.”
As the general pleaded his case before Congress, at least one delegate was repulsed by Gates’s “vanity, folly, and rudeness.” “His manner was ungracious and totally void of all dignity, his delivery incoherent,” wrote the New York representative William Duer to his friend Gen. Schuyler. Yet, in the end, his undermining of Schuyler succeeded. Now, nine months later, the “unhappy figure” whom the representative Duer had described as stabbing his fellow American officer in the back was charged with preventing Burgoyne’s force from gaining control of the Hudson River and severing New England from the rest of the United States.
The initial engagement between the two northern armies, centered on an abandoned farmhouse set deep in the Adirondack woods, took place on September 19 when a wing of Gates’s 6,000-man force under the command of Gen. Benedict Arnold ambushed a column of Burgoyne’s Redcoats. By advancing on the British, Arnold had exasperated the more defensively inclined Gates, who had bivouacked his main body behind the barricades he had ordered thrown up some 25 miles north of Albany. But Arnold’s instinctive tempestuousness prevailed, and the enemy suffered more than 600 casualties, including the deaths of a bevy of British and German officers. Much of the damage was done by a provisional regiment of picked riflemen led by Washington’s old Virginia acquaintance Col. Daniel Morgan.
If Morgan were nature, he would have been sleet. He was well over six feet tall and broad of shoulder, with a frontiersman’s ruddy face, and in his 49 years he had acquired a reputation as a gambler and tavern brawler of backwoods renown. He had honed his fighting skills breaking trail with his cousin Daniel Boone, and was known to communicate with his troops by turkey gobbles. Two years earlier he and his unit had been surrounded and captured during the disastrous attack on Quebec. True to his obstreperous nature, Morgan refused to present his sword to a British commander and instead handed it to a French-Canadian priest. He spent 14 months in British custody before returning in a prisoner exchange, albeit only after refusing a general’s commission to fight for the Crown. Morgan’s guerrilla tactics were infamous among the British, who considered his penchant for targeting officers a shocking breach of honor and etiquette. Yet they were effective, as evidenced by the next clash in which he and his riflemen were involved.
In the two weeks since Gen. Arnold’s triumph in what was already being called the Battle of Freeman’s Farm, the Continentals and Crown troops had dug in and engaged in daily skirmishes that produced no clear outcome. In a last-ditch effort to fulfill his promise to capture Albany, Burgoyne attempted to outflank Gates’s defensive works. His target was the high ground on the Continentals’ left wing: a thickly wooded plateau known as Bemis Heights, by this time of the season a portrait of scarlet and gold. Once again Morgan, and later Arnold, stymied his maneuvering—although it is a wonder that Arnold was present at all.
Gates had relieved Arnold of command and replaced him with Morgan after the fight at Freeman’s Farm, ostensibly for disobeying orders. In reality the general was wary of Arnold, who made no secret of his continued friendship with Gen. Schuyler, the man whom Gates had replaced. Their relationship further deteriorated when Gates failed to mention Arnold in his official dispatch to Washington detailing the engagement near the farmhouse. Arnold had few equals in seeking public approbation, and he was not a man to brush the many chips off his shoulders. When he found out about the slight he burst into Gates’s tent and erupted with a string of profane oaths. Gates yelled back, and Arnold stomped away. Arnold had been in Washington’s favor since his daring maneuvers had broken the siege of Fort Schuyler in the Mohawk Valley two months earlier, and now only the interference of several friendly officers restrained him from forsaking the northern campaign and riding off for Pennsylvania to complain directly to the commander in chief.
Like a modern-day Achilles, Arnold was sulking in a corner of Gates’s headquarters tent on the afternoon of October 7 when the officers’ afternoon mess of charred oxen heart was interrupted by the sound of gunfire some two miles away. Arnold begged Gates, twice, to be allowed to investigate. After his second appeal, Gates granted him leave on one condition—that he not personally participate in the action. When Arnold arrived at the scene on a borrowed Spanish mustang, a British force of some 1,500 troops had already been caught in a murderous cross fire. Earlier that morning during their stealth march to Bemis Heights the Redcoats had stumbled across an abandoned wheat field. Their commanding officer, the Scottish General Simon Fraser, had paused and granted his men permission to forage. As they scythed the wheat stalks they were spotted by an American picket who reported the enemy’s presence to Morgan. Morgan immediately led his brigade on a circuitous route through the thick wood that surrounded the wheat field and fell in behind the enemy column on its left flank. The New Hampshire General Enoch Poor, commanding a mixed regiment of New Hampshiremen and New Yorkers, had bought Morgan time by engaging the British right flank and center.
As Gen. Fraser formed up his soldiers to fend off Poor’s ambush, Morgan’s cohort burst from the forest and poured rifle fire into the stunned British flank. The Redcoats were falling back in disorder as
Arnold galloped onto the battlefield and spotted Gen. Fraser atop his huge Highland gray struggling to develop a second defensive line. An instant later, at Morgan’s command, one of his Virginia sharpshooters blew Fraser from his saddle. All was now chaos. Arnold took advantage.
Drawing two brigades about him, he led a charge into the center of the disintegrating British front, splitting the enemy’s defenses and opening a wide corridor through which Gen. Poor’s troops poured. Next Arnold raced across the length of the enemy’s purview to lead an attack on its right flank. “He behaved, as I then thought, more like a madman than a cool and discreet officer,” noted a Connecticut trooper who fell in behind him. At this point one of Gates’s aides caught up to Arnold with orders that he return to headquarters. He ignored the man and, spotting a unit of Brunswickers defending a hastily constructed redoubt not 500 yards from the Freeman farmstead, swept up Morgan and his riflemen, pointed his sword, and galloped into the teeth of enemy fire. A study in frenzy, he made it as far as the little fort’s sally port before his luck ran out. As Morgan and the others were overrunning the fortification, Arnold was being carried off the field with a ball in his right leg. It was the same leg he had broken two years earlier during the luckless attempt to make Canada the fourteenth state. The wound would pain him for the rest of his life.
By nightfall nearly half of Burgoyne’s would-be flanking corps were dead, wounded, or missing, including Gen. Fraser. American casualties totaled about 150. Only darkness and fatigue prevented the Continentals from finishing off the expeditionary force, and the Americans managed to seize some 330 tents, eight brass cannons, assorted lesser field pieces, and multiple “kettles boiling with corn.” Over the next several days Burgoyne slowly withdrew his starving army north through the rain and cold, their wounded left behind, their dead unburied. Gates’s regiments harassed their every step. The constant echo of cannon blasts and flintlock reports through the mountains of upstate New York must have seemed to “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne the death rattle of his once grand designs to spread “Devastation, Famine, and every concomitant Horror.”
By mid-October what was left of the British army had taken refuge in the hills outside the hamlet of Saratoga. Their safety was but temporary. The British were surrounded as, farther north, a force of New Hampshire militia had blocked the road to Fishkill, Burgoyne’s last potential escape route, while a separate regiment of Massachusetts militiamen were raiding Fort Ticonderoga’s surrounding outworks. With his force in tatters, Burgoyne’s last, best hope was a rescue by Gen. Clinton. To that end he sent a string of messengers south pleading for help. All were captured by the Americans, including one who was caught swallowing a hollow silver ball that contained the written communiqué. It was recovered when a Continental surgeon administered to the man a strong emetic.
When Burgoyne finally learned that Clinton had led his troops back to New York City after capturing the American forts on the Hudson, he realized that his last, best hope for survival had evaporated. On the morning of October 15 he dispatched his adjutant general to Gates’s headquarters with the terms of his surrender. Gates’s aides and officers were astounded when the American commander, contrary to the usual practice of generals at the head of victorious armies, accepted them without demanding counter-terms. Historians have since speculated that Gates, unaware that Gen. Clinton had marched his troops back south, was still leery of his last-minute arrival and wanted Burgoyne’s troops disarmed as quickly as possible.
Three days later, 5,000 Crown troops and German mercenaries tromped into a cleared meadow and, unit by unit, laid down their arms. The procession included over 300 officers, seven generals among them. Particularly galling was the company of American fifers leading a loud serenade of “Yankee Doodle.” The words to the centuries-old tune had originally been composed by British soldiers to mock the Continental troops as homosexual rubes. But by this point in the war the song had been adopted by the colonists as a paean to their industriousness and grit. Looking on, Daniel Morgan, Enoch Poor, and the others who had been responsible for the British capitulation were merely satisfied at having furthered the cause of the revolution. Benedict Arnold, on the other hand, still simmered. Gates had again failed to mention him in his after-action dispatches. The hard feelings of Saratoga were the roots of his descent into treason.
Following the humiliating surrender ceremony, Gen. Burgoyne was escorted on horseback to the head of Gen. Gates’s camp. There he wordlessly presented his sword to the American commander. Whether Burgoyne was aware that his counterpart had never left his barricaded headquarters nor issued a combat command during the fortnight of fighting remains unrecorded. Burgoyne was, as usual, impeccable in uniform, his service coat dyed a rich royal scarlet with expensive cochineal and the lush velvet of his falling collar brushed to a midnight blue. His black leather riding boots were buffed to a mirror shine, and his gold epaulets and polished silver buttons glinted in the mid-autumn sun.
Gates wore his plain blue frock.
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I. It did not help matters that Gen. Stephen was visibly drunk for the duration of the fight. He was later court-martialed, found guilty of “Drunkenness, or drinking so much, as to act frequently in a manner, unworthy [of] the character of an officer,” relieved of command, and cashiered from the service. (Washington’s “General Orders, 25 October 1777,” in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, Vol. 11, ed. Chase and Lengel, pp. 604–6.)
II. When Washington was informed that the dog’s collar indicated that it belonged to Gen. Howe, he had the animal bathed, combed, and returned to Howe with a note penned by Hamilton that read, “General Washington’s compliments to Gen. Howe. He does himself the pleasure to return him a dog, which accidentally fell into his hands.”
III. The Continental Army’s Northern Military Department covered northern New York and the New England states; the Southern Military Department consisted of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia; the Middle Military Department’s purview included Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and parts of southern New York.
EIGHT
THE IDEALIST
As Washington certainly recognized, the astounding news from the north constituted a doubled-edged sword. General Burgoyne’s surrender, combined with the fall of the American forts on the Hudson Highlands, only increased the pressure on the commander in chief to force another assault on Philadelphia. For Washington’s congressional critics, Gen. Gates’s triumph was precisely the measuring stick to hold up against the defeats at Brandywine, at Paoli, and at Germantown—no matter how orderly and professional the retreats. Nor was it lost on the delegates that the enemy’s capture of the two Highland forts was the likely result of Washington’s thinning of Israel Putnam’s ranks. If the commander in chief had to detach men from Putnam’s command, why was he not using them against Howe? From as far away as Saint Croix, Hamilton’s old mentor Hugh Knox wrote to his former charge of the “Immortal Gates; another bright Star in the Constellation of American Heroes.” Knox added that he and his fellow republicans “tremble in Suspence . . . Expecting to hear that Gen. Washington has done Something like the same by Gen. Howe!” Even a faction of Washington’s own officer corps agitated for an attack.
The brigadier general Jedediah Huntington, for instance, was a renowned tactician who had led one of Putnam’s detached Connecticut brigades south from Peekskill. Once integrated into Washington’s main force he adjudged only two options appropriate in the wake of Saratoga—a forceful winter siege of Philadelphia, the British-held capital city, or an immediate assault on it “to fight them in their stronghold.” Huntington and others made clear that they preferred the latter. Less than a month after the defeat at Germantown, Gen. Greene, who was strongly loyal to Washington, eagerly wished “to get to fisticuffing of it with Mr. Howe” as soon as possible. For his part, Washington nourished no such delusions.
Despite publicly urging his own soldiers to match the feats of the heroes of Saratog
a—“What shame then and dishonour will attend us, if we suffer ourselves in every instance to be outdone?” he asked in one General Order—Washington knew that springing another surprise on the now vigilant Howe was impossible. Moreover, his campaigns in the Ohio wilderness a decade earlier had left him with a better understanding than most of how long it took an army to retrench and refit after an engagement such as at Germantown. It was sage leadership to grant his foot soldiers time to recover both their strength and their morale. He and his strategists also had to prepare for the possibility, however slim, that the British might follow up with a counterassault of their own. As it happened, Washington could not know that Gen. Howe, having withdrawn his troops into Philadelphia proper after the Germantown fight, wanted to avoid another large engagement.
Unlike George III and his combative advisers, Gen. Howe was a sphinx without a riddle, more interested in suppressing the rebellion by driving the Americans into submission rather than despair. Howe’s older brother Richard was even more conscientious, the admiral having before the war exhibited decidedly pro-American leanings, particularly in his view that the colonists were being unfairly taxed by Parliament. Their eldest brother, George Howe, had died fighting alongside Americans in the French and Indian War, and they admired the grit of the Americans. Both brothers also feared that an utter military victory, while feasible, would in the long run continue to bleed England by necessitating a semipermanent occupation force in North America. They had reluctantly answered the call to lead British forces against the rebels on the condition that they also be authorized to negotiate a peace settlement—with the terms, naturally, dictated by Whitehall.