He began the war as a colonel in the New Jersey militia, and in 1776 was appointed brigadier general and captured in the fighting on Long Island. Once an exchange was worked out for Montfort Browne, the governor of Nassau in the Bahamas captured in a naval action, Stirling rejoined the colonial effort and served with Washington at Trenton. Hessian von Heeringen, who set eyes on Alexander after his capture in 1776, seemed unimpressed with the man: “My Lord Stirling himself is only an echappe de famille, and does not pass for a lord in England. He looks as much like my Lord Granby as one egg does like another.”1 Despite outward appearances, Lord Stirling, wrote one historian of the campaign year of 1777, “emerged as one of the hardest fighters in the army. He had also earned a reputation as one of its hardest drinkers, but no one ever accused him of being drunk in combat.”²

John Armstrong, born in 1717 in Ireland, was educated as a civil engineer and immigrated to Pennsylvania to serve as a surveyor for the Penn family. In this role, he laid out the town of Carlisle and became the surveyor of Cumberland County. During the French and Indian War, he commanded the Pennsylvania contingent on the 1758 Forbes Expedition to capture Fort Duquesne in western Pennsylvania, and knew Washington at the time. When the Revolution broke out, he was initially sent to Charleston to help lay out the defensive works there. However, he returned home to take command of the Pennsylvania militia, a rough job he would learn anew along the banks of the Brandywine.

A native of Lancashire, John Burgoyne was born in 1722 and received his education at Westminster School. His military career began in the dragoons, but he was best known as a commander of light cavalry in North America. Burgoyne saw service in Portugal, became a member of Parliament in 1761, and made colonel with a command in the 16th Light Dragoons two years later. By the eve of the Revolution he was a major general—with a literary and acting career to boot. In 1775, the ambitious soldier got his first taste of warfare in America under Thomas Gage in Boston, and found himself a subordinate to Guy Carleton in Canada the following year. Burgoyne would eventually scheme and charm his way into command of the British column that would move south from Canada into upstate New York in 1777 to its fate at Saratoga.