The first sign of Indian warfare came on the afternoon of July 27, when soldiers at Fort Stanwix heard four gunshots. Soldiers and civilians had been told to fire their muskets only in self-defense or as a signal for help. At the sound of the shots several soldiers ran from the fort to the edge of a patch of woods about five hundred yards from the fort. They were too late.
In a meadow speckled with berry bushes, two girls lay scalped and tomahawked, one dead and the other dying. A third girl, shot in the shoulder, had escaped. She emerged from the woods and told what had happened. The three girls had been picking raspberries when four Indians suddenly appeared and fired. Four armed Rebel soldiershad walked past the spot shortly before the attack and apparently had been ignored by the Indians. They had come, said a bitter report on the killings, “not to fight, but to lie in wait to murder; and it is equally the same to them, if they can get a scalp, whether it is from a soldier or an innocent babe.”54
On the day that the girls were murdered, Jane McCrea, the twenty-year-old daughter of a Presbyterian minister and his wife, was staying in the home of Mrs. Sarah McNeal, near the village of Fort Edward, about one hundred and twenty-five miles east of Fort Stanwix. Fort Edward had been abandoned by defenders, who were retreating before Burgoyne’s advance.55 It lay at the southern end of the Great Carrying Place, where rapids and falls churned the Hudson River, making farther passage impossible. From there canoes and boats had to be portaged to the headwaters of Lake Champlain.56
The McCrea family had been sundered by the Revolution. Presbyterians generally were on the Rebel side, and Jane’s brother John was a Rebel. But Jane was a Loyalist and the fiancée of Lt. David Jones, a local Tory who had joined the Queen’s Loyal Rangers. Jane had been staying with her brother but had moved to the home of Mrs. McNeal, also a Tory, in anticipation of David’s arrival with Burgoyne’s army.
What happened to Jane McCrea produced myth and rage. The story that swept down the valley and then through the colonies told of a beautiful young maiden attacked by two Indians serving with Burgoyne. The Indians had stormed into Mrs. McNeal’s house and carried off the two women. Mrs. McNeal was taken to Burgoyne’s camp. Shortly she saw an Indian holding a bloody scalp that she quickly identified as Jane McCrea’s. Soldiers rode off and found McCrea’s mutilated body.57
Burgoyne did not punish the scalper because he did not want to disturb the tense relationship between the whites and Indians in his army. His decision further outraged the people in his path. Patriots seized on the propaganda value of Indian tomahawk killings. Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates, who would soon be fighting Burgoyne, wrote to him, condemning him for the “miserable fate of Miss McCrea” and adding: “Upwards of one hundred men, women and childrenhave perished at the hands of these ruffians.”58 The letter, published in New England newspapers, produced an increase in Continental Army volunteers.59
As Burgoyne continued on toward the Hudson, the second, smaller invasion army under St. Leger had progressed up the St. Lawrence from Montreal, then southward on Lake Ontario to Oswego, New York. Besides a detachment of about eight hundred Regulars and Loyalists, there were some eight hundred Indians in the force. There was also a separate unit: Brant’s Volunteers, about one hundred Mohawk and some white Loyalists who painted and dressed themselves as Indians. Unrecognized as members of an official unit, and thus unpaid, they expected to live on plunder.60
Fort Stanwix, St. Leger’s objective, was not the easy conquest he had expected.61 Its walls of turf and timber had been strengthened. Reinforcements, arriving just before the invaders, raised the number of defenders to some 750, but less than half the size of the approaching force. In June the Continental Congress had adopted the Stars and Stripes as the national flag. Tradition says that the first American flag to fly against an enemy—pieces of a red flannel shirt, a white shirt, and the blue petticoat of a soldier’s wife—was hoisted above Fort Stanwix as the invaders approached.62
On August 3 St. Leger’s force surrounded the fort and demanded surrender. Col. Peter Gansevoort, commander of the fort, replied that he would “defend this fort and garrison to the last extremity.”63 Both sides settled in for a siege. St. Leger issued a proclamation that called on Loyalists to come forth in support of his soldiers—and for Patriots to be beware of his “messengers of justice and of wrath,” who would be bringing them “devastation, famine, and every concomitant horror.”
When reports of the invasion first reached Brig. Gen. Nicholas Herkimer, commander of the Patriots’ Tryon County militia, he asked for a meeting with Joseph Brant, a former neighbor. Herkimer wanted to talk about the chance of maintaining peace between Indians and Patriots. Brant’s headquarters was then Unadilla, at the confluenceof the Susquehanna and Unadilla rivers, about eighty miles west of Schenectady. They met at nearby Sidney, site of a new white settlement. Each man came with an armed escort but agreed to be personally unarmed when they talked face-to-face. Brant held firmly to his allegiance to the king, and Herkimer departed, knowing that Brant was his enemy. Herkimer returned to Fort Dayton, about thirty miles downriver from Fort Stanwix, and prepared for a long-term war in the Mohawk River Valley.64
Herkimer was the grandson of a German immigrant, one of many who settled in the valley. His English neighbors called him a Dutchman and mocked his thick accent. His written orders needed deciphering as much as his verbal ones. One is said to have begun: Ser yu will orter your bodellyen do merchs Immiedietlih. (Sir: You will order your battalion to march immediately.) Herkimer, warning that an invading army of “Christians and savages” was on its way, ordered every able-bodied man from sixteen to sixty years of age to mobilize with musket and ammunition. Men older than sixty were to gather women and children together and prepare to defend them. Any man who refused to take up arms would be imprisoned.65
Herkimer’s militia quickly grew, and on August 4 he headed for Fort Stanwix with about eight hundred men and boys. Three men, apparently secret Tories, slipped away and hurried to the invaders’ camp to warn of Herkimer’s advance.
Among those who marched with St. Leger was Herkimer’s brother. St. Leger ordered Brant and Butler, with a force of about four hundred Indians and Tories, to intercept the militiamen. At the Oneida village of Oriska, about six miles east of the fort, Brant set up an ambush in a deep marshy ravine.
The militiamen brought with them about four hundred ox-drawn carts containing supplies for the fort, stretching their column out for nearly a mile. At the head of the soldiers were about sixty friendly Oneida, acting as scouts, and Herkimer on his white horse. As the scouts and advance guard reached the ravine, the road narrowed to a corduroy causeway surrounded by a dense forest thick with underbrush. Even the Oneida, skilled woodsmen, could not see the hidden foes.
As soon as Herkimer and his first group of men were deep into the ravine, the ambushers—Brant’s Indians and an Indian force assembled by Lt. Col. John Butler—struck, killing many militiamen with musket fire and cutting down others with tomahawks. Herkimer, his left leg shattered and his horse killed, ordered men to place him against a tall beech tree with his wounded leg resting on his saddle. He took out his pipe, lit it, and kept shouting orders. Many Oneida had melted away into the forest. But some Oneida—men and women—did fight. One warrior, shot in the wrist, continued to fight using his tomahawk.66
Some militiamen panicked and ran off, pursued by the Tory Indians, who killed many. But most men stayed and rallied around Herkimer. At first each time a man fired from behind a tree, an Indian would run to the tree and tomahawk him before he could reload. Herkimer ordered two men to pair behind trees so that while one man reloaded the second could kill the approaching brave.
A sudden rain, soaking muskets’ primers, stopped the battle for a short time. During the pause Herkimer had his men form a circle. Ripped by concentrated fire, the Indians began to pull back, beginning what would be a ragged retreat to their camp near Fort Stanwix. Then from St. Leger’s camp came reinforcements—a detachment of the King�
�s Royal Regiment. The Tories had turned their green uniforms inside out. For a moment the militiamen believed they were getting help from the fort. Then one of the militiamen recognized former neighbors, cried out a warning, and slew three of them with his espontoon, an officer’s half pike. Other men of the valley fought to the death—American against American, kin against kin—until the daylong battle suddenly ended, probably because Butler and Brant expected that a rescue force was on its way from the fort.67
Herkimer would die in a few days, joining about 160 militiamen who fell in the ravine. The invaders lost about 150 Tories and Indians, including several chiefs. Further losses came when Rebel raiders fromthe fort attacked the besiegers’ camp before the surviving ambushers returned.68
St. Leger, confronted by angry Indians who had fought but gotten no plunder, tried once more to end the siege with a threat that if Colonel Gansevoort did not surrender his fort, the Indians could not be stopped from “executing their threats to march down the country and destroy the settlement with its inhabitants. In this case, not only men but women and children will experience the sad effects of their vengeance.”69
Gansevoort again rejected the call to surrender. Meanwhile an officer left the fort in the night, got past St. Leger’s sentries, and set out for Fort Dayton, where Benedict Arnold was preparing to lead about nine hundred militiamen and Continentals to Fort Stanwix to end the siege. Arnold, well known as a Tory hunter in Connecticut, had discovered a group of Loyalists who were planning an uprising. Among the men he captured were Ensign Walter Butler, Col. John Butler’s twenty-five-year-old son, and Hon Yost Schuyler, a deranged young man whose madness was seen as mystical by many Indians. He was related to both Herkimer and Major General Schuyler. Butler and Hon Yost were tried by court-martial as spies, convicted, and sentenced to death.
Some of Arnold’s officers appealed Butler’s sentence because they knew him as a schoolmate when he studied for the law in Albany. So he was sent off to imprisonment—and subsequent escape, a frequent boon for Loyalist prisoners kept amid Tories. After clemency pleas for Hon Yost from his mother and brother, Arnold said he would spare his life if he would use his mystical powers to convince St. Leger’s Indians that a huge army was on its way to the fort. Hon Yost agreed, and to add to his story of a narrow escape from Arnold’s soldiers, he shot holes in his clothes with a borrowed musket. Arnold sent Hon Yost off and held his brother as a hostage.
Hon Yost reached the Mohawk camp outside the fort and, when asked how many men were on their way, pointed to the leaves of the trees and said each leaf was a soldier. Hon Yost repeated his rambling story to St. Leger. Frightened Mohawks began grabbing up Britishsupplies, food, and liquor for a hasty retreat. Loyalists and St. Leger’s Regulars joined the Indians, fleeing before the phantom army until they reached Oswego and the safety of Canada. They left behind tents, food, ammunition—and St. Leger’s own escritoire, the portable writing table that contained his private papers, which historians long afterward used for descriptions of the siege and the flight of his army.70
To the north, Burgoyne continued to attract local Tories as he passed into the newly created republic of Vermont. Some Tories joined informally, marching with Burgoyne but not fully committing to a long-term enlistment. Those who openly joined Burgoyne risked their own private battles, especially in areas where Rebels had fled before the army, producing a temporary Tory enclave. Nathan Tuttle, a minor official in the village of Rutland, was a Rebel who stayed. Known to hate and taunt Tories, he disappeared around the time that Burgoyne’s army passed through Rutland. In 1786 a former Tory revealed that Tuttle had been bayoneted during an argument, his body weighted with stones and thrown into a creek.71 We will never know how many other private grievances were settled in a similar manner during the war.
In Vermont, Burgoyne met unexpected Rebel resistance. Short of supplies and in need of horses for his footsore German cavalrymen, he ordered a force of about eight hundred men to forage in the village of Bennington. Burgoyne had learned that Bennington was a Patriot supply depot stocked with corn and cattle. And, still relying on Skene’s advice, Burgoyne expected that the area was full of Loyalists who would rush to join his army. But the man in command of the foraging force, Lt. Col. Friedrich Baum, would not be able to speak to any Loyalists because he spoke only German.72 (Skene translated for Baum; Burgoyne spoke to him in French.)
Awaiting Baum were about fifteen hundred militiamen from New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Their commander was Col. John Stark, a tough old soldier who had been captured by Indians as a young man and bore the scars of heroic service with Rogers’ Rangersduring the French and Indian War. He had fought in the Battles of Bunker Hill, Trenton, and Princeton.73 As more militiamen arrived, Stark drew up a complicated plan. After a day of impasse and rain, Stark led the attack.
Some of his men—farmers lacking uniforms—had stuck pieces of white paper in their hats to identify themselves as Rebels. But they looked like Loyalists to Baum, who welcomed them as they drifted into his ranks. When the attack began, the infiltrators started picking off their unwitting foes. Skene saw more men who did not look like soldiers and shouted, “Are you for King George?” An answering fusillade killed his horse. He ran back to a German redoubt.74
As at Oriska, neighbor fought neighbor. Lieutenant Colonel Peters, commander of the Queen’s Loyal Rangers, spotted Patriot captain Jeremiah Post, a childhood playmate and a cousin of Peters’s wife. Just as Post fired and missed, Post rushed toward Peters, shouting, “Peters, you damn Tory, now I have got you!” He shoved his bayonet into Peters’s side. Peters fired his gun, “Though his bayonet was in my body,” Peters later wrote, “I felt regret at being obliged to destroy him.”75
Peters joined the retreat, lucky to survive a battle that left more than two hundred of his Loyal Rangers dead, wounded, or captured.76 Indians scattered and vanished. The Germans valiantly held their redoubt until Baum fell, mortally wounded by a musket ball. Some Germans fought their way into the woods and escaped; some surrendered. Reinforcements for both sides arrived, but as the long day ended, the surviving invaders fled the field. About thirty of Stark’s men were killed and forty wounded. The victory inspired militiamen for miles around to head north to join the fight against Burgoyne.77 “Wherever the king’s forces point,” Burgoyne later wrote, “militia to the amount of 3 or 4 thousand assemble in 24 hours … and the alarm over, they return to their farms.”78
Burgoyne now faced a growing enemy army while between nine hundred and a thousand of his own men had been killed, wounded, captured, or were missing, many of them dying of wounds, unseen in dense forests.79 Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler, who lost the confidence of Congress after his retreat from Fort Ticonderoga, was now replaced by Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates. Added to his army, besides the swelling ranks of militia volunteers, were Arnold’s men, freed by the ending of the Fort Stanwix siege, and Col. Daniel Morgan’s three hundred riflemen, whose reputation as marksmen preceded them.80
Morgan, captured during the battle for Quebec, had been released in a prisoner exchange in January 1777 and given command of an independent special rifle corps. Morgan picked the men of the unit, who came from western Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. They wore the rifleman’s standard uniform—loose-fitting hunting shirts and leggings.81
Gates blocked Burgoyne’s path to Albany by entrenching on a Hudson River bluff known as Bemis Heights. On the morning of September 19 Burgoyne’s advance guard—mostly Indians and Tories disguised as Indians—probed forward through a dense forest. Morgan’s men and some of Arnold’s were ordered to clear Indians spotted in the woods. An officer remembered Arnold’s turning to Morgan and saying, “Colonel Morgan, you and I have seen too many Redskins to be deceived by that garb of paint and feathers; they are asses in lions’ skins, Canadians and Tories; let your riflemen cure them of their borrowed plumes.”82
As riflemen perched in trees picked off officers and artillerymen, Arnold brought his men forward, generating a fe
rocious battle that neither Burgoyne nor Gates had expected. Arnold sent word to Gates that with reinforcements he could defeat Burgoyne. But Gates ordered Arnold back to the American redoubt. Gates had lost about three hundred men, compared with Burgoyne’s six hundred, many of them officers. Burgoyne had won the day, but Gates’s army still lay across the path of the invaders. And the Loyalists in the area had not risen to aid Burgoyne.
While Burgoyne contemplated his future moves, the third facet of his plan—a thrust up the Hudson—was carried out by Sir Henry Clinton. Leaving the defense of New York City to Regulars augmented by Loyalist regiments, Clinton took a force up the river and captured two Continental forts.83 To punish local Rebels, hundreds of British soldiers swarmed into Kingston, the interim capital of New York State, and burned much of the town, which the British commander called “a Nursery for almost every Villain in the Country.” Another landing party put the torch to Clermont and Belvedere, the manorial homes of the Hudson Valley’s best-known Patriots, the Livingstons.84
By October 7 Burgoyne’s troops were on half rations. Desperate, he led what he called a reconnaissance in force to turn a Gates flank and burst through to Albany. Two miles away, at Gates’s headquarters in the well-fortified American camp, Arnold learned of Burgoyne’s maneuver and asked Gates to let him lead a counterattack. Gates, born in England and a haughty veteran of the British Army, despised Arnold, a fifth-generation New Englander and an ex-clerk in an apothecary shop. Gates refused to send Arnold into battle. Furious, Arnold mounted his horse and galloped to the sound of the guns, racing away from an officer Gates had sent to stop him.
Arnold sighted a British strongpoint and headed toward it, shouting, “Come on, brave boys, come on!” He led a charge across the line of fire, through cannon shells, musket balls, and grapeshot. His riddled horse fell, throwing Arnold. A wounded German shot him—in the same leg that had been hit at Quebec. “Don’t hurt him!” Arnold ordered as his frenzied men sprang forward to bayonet the German.
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