The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  The next day, again, Wild feared for his life. Under orders to burn buildings that contained grain or other supplies that could help the British, his superior officer ordered an attack on a second mill that was surrounded by several buildings. British soldiers guarded it. To Wild’s relief, they surrendered without firing a shot. The buildings, full of grain, were torched and Wild and his comrades marched back to Gates’s camp with ten prisoners, three of them officers, twelve horses, and eighteen cattle.

  On October 6, Gates was certain Burgoyne would attack. The First Massachusetts, five hundred men including Wild, was sent out as an advance guard. Nothing happened.

  The Second Battle of Saratoga

  The much-feared attack finally came on October 7, two weeks after the first battle. Burgoyne decided that he might be able to flank the American left wing and move south. The British struck, but despite all of their preparation the First Massachusetts did not engage in the furious fighting.

  Benedict Arnold did. The general, still seething from being relieved of his command earlier, had decided to remain in camp. He was with Gates and others at 3 p.m. on the afternoon of October 7 when they heard the sudden sound of cannon. A messenger burst into the tent to announce that the British were attacking.

  Arnold leaped up from his chair. “Shall I go out and see what is the matter?” he asked Gates, who told him to go. Benedict Arnold leaped on to a nearby horse and galloped toward the fighting. A man who saw him ride through the woods said that he looked like a “madman.” Gates had a change of heart just a few moments after Arnold left his tent. Arnold had been relieved of command and should not be given any now. Gates shouted at an officer to mount a horse, chase down Arnold, and bring him back before he reached the fighting. The aide did so, but never caught up to the galloping Arnold, hell-bent to defeat the British.

  Arnold reached the battle between the American left flank and Burgoyne’s army a few moments later and started to rally the troops, shouting as loudly as he could over the din of the battle. He told Morgan to ask a sharpshooter to fire at General Fraser, leading his men in the battle while astride a large, gray horse. The man braced himself, aimed carefully, and killed Fraser. Fraser’s fall from his horse sent his men into confusion.

  The animated Arnold then led a charge on horseback toward a wellfortified redoubt that had just been constructed behind the left flank of the British lines, exhorting his men to follow him as fast as they could. As he approached, he could hear the pounding of his horse’s hooves. He shouted for it to gallop faster. Men ran behind him, firing at the enemy. Arnold encountered a thunderstorm of musket fire from the Hessians in and around the redoubt. They sensed they were about to be overrun and rallied for one last defense. General Arnold continued to yell commands and look over his shoulder at the men following him. Suddenly, he was shot in the leg, the same leg that had been hit in the attack on Quebec. His horse had also been shot and fell on top of Arnold’s wounded limb, breaking it. The firing around him intensified.

  Gates may have hated him but the men and many officers in the fight loved Benedict Arnold. “A bloody fellow he was,” wrote private Samuel Downing of New Hampshire. “He didn’t care for nothing. He’d ride right in. It was ‘come on, boys,’ not ‘go, boys.’ . . . There wasn’t any wasted timber in him.” An officer, Captain E. Wakefield, agreed. He wrote, “Nothing could exceed the bravery of Arnold on this day; he seemed the very genius of war . . . he seemed inspired with the fury of a demon.”20

  His men, inspired perhaps by Arnold’s wounding, took the redoubt a few minutes later, killing or routing the Hessians inside it. As darkness fell, the entire American line advanced quickly, forcing the English and German soldiers to flee. The Americans suffered remarkably few losses.

  Burgoyne had failed again, once more defeated by men led by the energetic Benedict Arnold. He did not see any other way to advance as evening began and ordered a general retreat, hoping that Clinton had somehow received his messages. The entire army pulled back. It would march north and then halt. This procedure was followed for a few days. As they retreated, the British also burned down the home of General Schuyler. Burgoyne possessed no intelligence concerning American outposts around his new position. He waited and did nothing. “The greatest misery and utmost disorder prevailed in the army,” wrote the Baroness von Riedesel of those days after October 7. She added that her husband wanted a hasty and immediate retreat northward to save the army, but that Burgoyne seemed immobilized. The British “lost everything by his loitering,” she added.21

  As it turned out, Sir Henry Clinton did send the troops that Burgoyne had begged him to transport north. He ordered three thousand soldiers to sail up the Hudson to meet Burgoyne at Saratoga, but the voyage went slowly. They received no messages from Burgoyne and dawdled. The ships stopped to bombard and burn Kingston, New York, an easy target. Then the captain in charge of the fleet decided that he did not want to sail any farther north without explicit orders and headed back to New York, leaving Burgoyne without reinforcements.

  The one hundred plus wounded American soldiers were transported south to an army hospital in Albany. Their gruesome wounds stunned veteran doctors there. One surgeon wrote of “mutilated bodies, mangled limbs, incurable wounds.” One man, he noted, was shot through the face with a musket ball that knocked out some of his teeth and tore off half of his tongue. Another had his face and half his throat blown open by a cannonball. A third was shot in the head with a musket ball and lay on the bed, bleeding profusely. He told the doctor the ball had apparently fallen out of his head and asked him to fix the wound. The doctor examined him and found that the ball was still in his skull, prevented from killing him by a thick bone in which it had lodged. The doctor sat back, told the man what had happened, and joked that it was a good thing that American foot soldiers had skulls too thick for shots to penetrate.22

  Gates had been busy during the time between the first battle on September 19 and the second on October 7. Using information gleaned from reports from scouting parties such as Wild’s, he had moved militia, one unit with eleven hundred men, into positions north of Burgoyne to prevent him from escaping. With the main American army to the south, militia to the north, thick forests to the west, and the Hudson on the east—and supplies dwindling—the British had nowhere to go.

  That must have been apparent to Burgoyne on the day after the second battle, October 8, when his camp came under assault from various cannon batteries that surrounded it. The house that General von Riedesel occupied alone was hit with eleven cannonballs.

  One of the regiments continually harassing the Redcoats was Wild’s. On the morning after the battle, the First Massachusetts was ordered to scout the enemy as well as they could. They marched toward their camp only to find that the Redcoats had moved further north, leaving some cannon and infantry behind to protect them. The First Massachusetts met them head on. Wild wrote, “The enemy had retreated to some works they had in their rear, where they fired from and did us some damage. As we were marching through their [former] lines they fired a number of cannon at us.”

  The First Massachusetts’s commander, Colonel Joseph Vose, ordered the men to disperse as the cannon in front of them erupted, and managed to escape death when his horse was shot out from under him as a cannonball exploded underneath him. The men fled through the woods, regrouped, and moved to Lake Saratoga to form part of a western barrier to prevent a British escape.

  Again, on October 10, the First Massachusetts chased the British as they tried to move northward. “We marched within a half mile of the enemy and camped in the woods,” wrote Wild. “There was a considerable firing on both sides.” On the following day, the First Massachusetts and other regiments tightened the noose around Burgoyne. Now Wild’s regiment had advanced to Schuyler’s Creek where they engaged in yet another firefight, this time capturing an officer and thirty-six men. On October 12, Wild wrote that there was “considerable smart cannonading the biggest part of the day on both sides, and we
fortified against the enemy considerable on the hills all around us.” Then again, on the thirteenth, there were more fights. “There was considerable firing on both sides all day. We continue still here in the woods,” Wild wrote.

  Burgoyne had nowhere to turn and the next day agreed to surrender, accepted a cease-fire, and spent several days negotiating terms. On October 17, Gates ordered all of his men to line the route that the British would take to walk into the American camp to lay down their arms. The morning was dark and foggy, but by noon the sun had risen and bathed the Saratoga area with warmth for a historic event; the total surrender of an entire British army.

  “We marched round the meeting house and came to a halt,” wrote Wild. By sheer fortune, their spot on the route gave them a front-row seat to the drama. It also offered them an unobstructed view of the size of the British army, with its six thousand men, cannon, camp followers, bands, and wagons. The parade into camp that Wild and his comrades assumed would take an hour or so dragged on all afternoon as company after company of rather grim looking Redcoats walked past their American conquerors.

  Wild added, “General Burgoyne and his chief officers rode by us there, and then we marched further down the road and grounded our arms and rested there. At half after three o’clock, General Burgoyne’s army began to pass us, and they continued passing ’til sunset.”

  Private Dan Granger, one of the militia volunteers who had hurried toward the battle, also had a good view of the historic moment. He and his company did not reach Saratoga in time for the final struggle, and on the day of the surrender they were on the other side of the Hudson, near the pontoon bridge that crossed it. They saw the American courier race away from the English camp with the surrender and watched over the river as the American celebration began. Disregarding orders to remain on the west bank of the river, the men in the company ran across the bridge.

  “Soon we saw them coming,” Granger wrote. “General Gates’s troops were arranged on both sides of the road, drums and fifes playing ‘Yankee Doodle,’ cannon roaring in all quarters and the whole world seemed to be in motion. Officers lost command over the soldiers. I got as near to General Gates’s marquee tent as I could for the crowd and saw General Burgoyne and his suite ride up, and dismount and go into General Gates’s marquee and soon the van of the prisoners made their appearances. The Hessian troops came first with their baggage on horses that were mere skeletons, not able apparently to bear the weight of their own carcasses. These troops had some women, who wore short petticoats, bare-footed and bare-legged, with huge packs on their backs, some carrying a child and leading another or two. They were silent, civil, and looked quite subdued. The English troops followed and were cross and impudent enough.”

  Granger felt an enormous sense of satisfaction in the scene. He wrote, “Having seen a large and well-equipped British army of about eight thousand surrender as prisoners of war and leaving on the field the finest and largest park of artillery that ever was seen in America, with all their carts, timbrels, and vehicles for the conveyance of their ammunition, was a great and pleasing novelty indeed.”

  The British troops could not believe what had happened to them. Perhaps nothing explained their demoralized feelings better than British Lieutenant William Digby’s droll recollection of his army’s bands, which played one of the Empire’s most famous military songs, “The Grenadiers’ March,” as the troops surrendered. “We marched out with drums beating . . . but the drums seemed to have lost their inspiring sound.”23

  News of the surrender caused jubilant celebrations throughout America. In Boston, Harvard College and dozens of homes were illuminated and thousands gathered around a huge bonfire to cheer the army. Soldiers throughout the army, from Washington’s division in Philadelphia to the militia at Bennington to Gates’s remaining men at Albany, rejoiced, too, in the astounding turn of events symbolized by the capture of Burgoyne’s army in what British historian Sir Edward Creasy, writing nearly one hundred years later, called one of the fifteen most decisive battles in the history of the world.24

  It was put best by Dr. James Thacher, who treated the wounded from Saratoga at the army’s two-story hospital in Albany. “We witness the incalculable reverse of fortune, and the extraordinary vicissitudes of military events, as ordained by Divine Providence . . . the [news] of these events to the British government must affect them like the shock of a thunderbolt, and demonstrate to them the invincibility of a people united in the noble cause of liberty and the rights of man.”25

  The victory at Saratoga had international and historic implications. It made a hero out of Gates, a moderately skilled commander who would soon be talked about as a replacement for George Washington. It stirred up false hopes in most Americans that the war would soon end. Most importantly, though, the victory convinced the French government that the Americans might be able, in time, to defeat the British. The French decided right after Saratoga to conclude treaties with the Americans, recognizing American independence, which led them to come into the war on the American side.

  For Private Ebenezer Wild and the men of the First Massachusetts, though, the day after the Saratoga surrender was just another day in the army. There was a false rumor that Sir Henry Clinton was going to attack Albany and Wild’s regiment was sent on a grueling one-day, forty-mile march toward that city. As usual, the officers read maps the wrong way and the company became lost, wandering through the woods for an entire day. When they made it to Albany they were told the clothes they expected were not there and the men were given hand-me-down shirts from the Pennsylvania troops. The wagons with their supplies arrived hours late. On the following day it rained heavily and Wild could not sleep because small rivers of water ran through his tent, soaking his clothes.

  And on the day after that the men received orders to move out. General Washington had commanded them to spend the winter with his army on a large plateau twenty-three miles from Philadelphia near a small ironworks called Valley Forge.

  VALLEY FORGE

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE HARSH ROAD TO A WINTER CAMP

  The War

  In the summer of 1777, General William Howe decided to capture Philadelphia—the new American capital city, home of the Continental Congress, and a major port. He was certain that the occupation of that city would be a major military victory that might just cripple the rebels’ willingness to continue the war. Howe took a force of fifteen thousand men down the Atlantic seaboard on two hundred sixty ships, sailed into the Chesapeake Bay, landed near what is now Elkton, Maryland, and marched north toward Philadelphia. There he engaged Washington’s main army at Brandywine and Germantown, near the city.

  After those battles, George Washington’s force of nearly fourteen thousand soldiers, with their supply wagons and train of cannon, sought a camp for the coming winter while Horatio Gates’s northern army remained in Albany. Pennsylvania officials insisted that Washington’s army establish winter quarters near the Valley Forge, northwest of Philadelphia on the banks of the Schuylkill River. They wanted the army there to protect southeastern Pennsylvania from any British attack. Several generals recommended Wilmington, Delaware, towns in Pennsylvania, and communities in New Jersey. Washington, under intense political pressure from the politicians, chose Valley Forge.

  There was no housing at Valley Forge and the soldiers were faced with the challenge of building a large city on meadows that could, when completed, house all fourteen thousand men, two thousand horses, several slaughterhouses, cattle pens, granaries, offices, parade grounds, privies, stables, wagon barns, blacksmith shops, and several hospitals. To house his men, Washington ordered the construction of log huts, sixteen by fourteen feet in size. Twelve enlisted men would live in each. Every hut had bunk beds for sleeping and a small fireplace in the rear. More spacious huts were built for officers. The cabins were built along neatly planned dirt lanes with soldiers from each state grouped together in their own neighborhoods. The encampment was so large that, in population, it
was the fourth largest city in the United States.

  The hut city was plagued with problems from the day the army arrived. The misery that the troops encountered there would test their endurance and courage like no other time in the Revolution and, perhaps, no other time in American history.

  Sergeant Ebenezer Wild’s journey to Valley Forge was ominous. The trip from Morristown, New Jersey, was filled with all of the myriad problems that had plagued the army from the first days of the war. That included a court-martial, mixed up orders, poor intelligence, overly long marches, mismanagement, snowstorms, rain deluges, cold weather, and a lack of both food and supplies. If any soldier’s route served as a truly representative preamble for the tangled troubles that would nearly overwhelm the army at Valley Forge, it was Wild’s.

  The march of Wild’s regiment, the First Massachusetts, began in Albany on October 30, just three weeks after the battle of Saratoga. The trek would cover a total of more than two hundred fifty miles and take the soldiers through mountain ranges in northern New Jersey, flat sandy terrain in the central and southern part of the state, and then through the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania. The First Massachusetts traveled to Morristown, camped there for several weeks, and then moved south on Friday, November 21, on a narrow dirt highway to Basking Ridge, a tiny village in the foothills of the Watchung Mountains. There, in a brief note that would symbolize much that lay ahead that winter, Wild scribbled in his journal, “Unsettled weather.”

  Two days later, on November 23, the army camped just outside of Princeton, where it had achieved a stunning victory ten months earlier. Again, in a line that would foreshadow the treacherous months ahead, Wild wrote that the field where they set up their tents was “very full of briers.” The prickly brier bushes that dotted the fields and woods around Basking Ridge would be the least of the troubles that the men from Massachusetts would encounter that winter.