CHAPTER 3
The Year of the Hangman
As 1777 began, British leaders in London took deep breaths and vowed that the war in America would end that year. The Americans had survived thanks to two trifling victories by General George Washington in the final days of 1776. The British remained confident that they could eliminate him in the next twelve months and, to finish the task, were committing not one but two armies to the struggle. General John Burgoyne would descend from Canada at the head of almost 11,000 troops—a figure that included several hundred Indians. General William Howe’s 25,000-man army would ascend the Hudson and complete the task of separating New England from the rest of the rebel confederation and smashing the defiant descendants of the Puritans with the thoroughness and savagery the British had displayed in subduing Ireland and Scotland. Then they would join forces and defeat Washington in a general action that would end the war. As the plan became public knowledge, excited loyalists in New York City began calling 1777 the “Year of the Hangman.” They saw the three sevens as symbolic gibbets from which guilty rebels would soon dangle.
Almost immediately, this strategy started to go awry. The two generals, rivals for the king’s favor and the glory of ending the war, had no enthusiasm for a joint effort. Burgoyne wrote a breezy letter assuring London he did not need Howe’s help. Howe never had any desire to offer it. He had another strategy in mind: behead the rebellion by capturing the enemy capital, Philadelphia. Washington would feel obliged to stand and fight or solidify his reputation as the much-derided commander in chief who had been driven from Long Island and New York while half his army ran away. Howe intended to consummate the general action that would end the war long before General Burgoyne got his troops halfway to Albany.
WASHINGTON HAD spent the winter at Morristown worrying about whether recruiters in the various states would bring him a new army. Congress had authorized sixteen additional battalions of infantry, four regiments of artillery, and 3,000 cavalrymen. As spring advanced, men began to arrive. But Congress—and Washington—soon perceived that these soldiers differed greatly from the enthusiastic volunteers who had enlisted in 1776, when the defiant patriotism generated by Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill was paramount in most hearts and minds. Only about 1,000 of the veterans of 1776 had reenlisted. In the spring of 1777, when it became obvious that volunteers were few, Washington had bluntly recommended a draft. “Coercive measures” were necessary, he told Congress. Soon each state had a quota that it could fill by offering bounties or, in a last resort, implementing a draft.
Few of these new recruits resembled the minutemen and fellow militiamen who had fought so well on April 19, 1775. Almost all were young, landless, and poor. They were eager for the bounty that the various states paid to fill their quotas. By May Washington had 9,000 of these mostly new soldiers.1
GENERAL HOWE vowed to make this revival of revolutionary fervor very temporary. On April 13, he attacked the American outpost at Bound Brook, with 4,000 men under the command of Lord Cornwallis. The American garrison of five hundred men made a helter-skelter retreat, losing several cannons and the personal papers of the general in command, Benjamin Lincoln. The British seemed to see it as a muscle-flexing operation. They stayed in Bound Brook only a few hours and fell back to their main base at New Brunswick.
In early June General Howe led 18,000 men into central New Jersey, ostensibly marching toward Philadelphia. He soon discovered that Washington had anticipated him and moved most of his army from Morristown to a protected valley at Middlebrook, about twenty miles south of his winter camp. A brigade under General John Sullivan headed for Princeton, where it could block a sudden push toward Philadelphia. Behind Middlebrook loomed the Watchung Mountains, where any attack on Washington would entail great cost.
Howe marched from New Brunswick toward Somerset Court House. Washington’s light infantry skirmished on his flanks, making clear that any attempt to continue to Philadelphia would expose him to a devastating attack. When Howe wheeled to confront Washington, the American commander in chief retreated toward the Watchung Mountains. Meanwhile, Washington’s well-funded intelligence operation was sending him interesting news. The British had left all their heavy baggage at New Brunswick. This included boats and bridging equipment, without which any attempt to cross the Delaware River would be ruinous. Washington quickly concluded that General Howe’s main interest in New Jersey was enticing him into a general action.
When General Howe retreated toward New Brunswick, Washington followed cautiously. Soldiers from General Nathanael Greene’s division skirmished briskly with the British rear guard. General Howe retreated all the way to Amboy, on the shore of Raritan Bay. Washington pursued and ordered his troops to entrench in new positions near Metuchen. On June 26, the British army abruptly surged into New Jersey, again in two columns.
Howe apparently hoped to encircle the camp at Metuchen and force Washington to fight a general action to rescue it. Washington declined to accept a collision on “disadvantageous terms.” The British managed to capture three cannons and forced the Metuchen troops to retreat in something close to disorder. But the Americans soon found themselves within the protection of the main army, which Washington led in a fighting retreat to Middlebrook. The British ruefully realized they were back where they had started, with no prospect of that general engagement they wanted so badly.
Fascinating evidence that General Washington knew exactly what he was doing surfaces in a letter that one of his aides, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, wrote to a prominent New York politician, Robert R. Livingston, on June 28, 1777. A recent arrival on the general’s staff, Hamilton had attracted Washington’s attention with his performance as captain of an artillery company in 1776. Washington soon discovered the energetic twenty-two-year-old had written several impressive pamphlets defending the Revolution before he turned artillerist. Washington was constantly on the lookout for aides with literary talent who could communicate with important civilians in his name, saving him time and trouble.
Hamilton described the Continental Army’s maneuvers in New Jersey in lively terms. As the British retired to Amboy for a second time, “We had parties hanging about them.” Losses on both sides were “inconsiderable,” but Hamilton was confident that British casualties were higher. He told Livingston it was “not unlikely they [the British] will soon be out of the Jersies; where they will go next is mere matter of conjecture, for as you observe their conduct is so eccentric as to leave no certain grounds on which to form a judgment.”
Then Hamilton got to the point of his letter. “I know the comments that some people will make on our Fabian conduct. It will be imputed either to cowardice or to weakness: but the more discerning, I trust, will not find it difficult to conceive that it proceeds from the truest policy.… The liberties of America are an infinite stake. We should not play a desperate game for it or put it upon the issue of a single cast of the die. The loss of one general engagement may effectually ruin us, and it would certainly be folly to hazard it, unless our resources for keeping up an army were at an end, and some decisive blow was absolutely necessary, or our strength was so great as to give certainty of success. Neither is the case.”2
THE MOST important word in this letter is “Fabian.” Hamilton was looking back more than 2,000 years to the struggle of ancient Rome with its chief Mediterranean rival, the North African city of Carthage. In 215 BC, the gifted young Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy by marching over the Pyrenees and the Alps with a 60,000-man army. He quickly won three stunning victories. The third triumph annihilated Rome’s two best legions. The shocked Romans turned to an aristocrat named Quintus Fabius Maximus.
Rome’s allies in other parts of Italy were wavering toward submission to Carthage. Needing to raise and train a new army, Fabius decided Rome’s best hope was to avoid an all-out battle until Hannibal’s men grew weary of endless skirmishing and marching. Fabius also attacked their foraging parties and scorched the earth in their path to make it difficult for them to find sustenance. This cautious strategy was not popular with most people in Rome. They began to call Fabius “Cunctator,” meaning “the Delayer” or, worse, “the Dawdler.” Eventually Fabius was forced to resign his command.
A new general took over the Roman army and challenged Hannibal near the town of Cannae in southeastern Italy. At first the battle looked like a total victory for the Romans. Hannibal’s center gave way, and he began a seemingly panicky retreat. Both wings of the Roman army joined the pursuit. Hannibal counterattacked with forces concealed on both flanks, and suddenly the Romans were encircled and trapped. Hannibal had achieved a double envelopment, one of the most difficult feats of generalship. Almost the entire Roman army of 88,000 men was slaughtered.
The frantic Romans turned again to Fabius for their salvation. He kept his legendary composure and patched together another army strong enough to resume his tactics of delay and attrition. Eventually a discouraged Hannibal abandoned Italy and retreated to Carthage, where he suffered defeat in a climactic battle with a younger Roman general, Scipio Africanus. Looking back, the Romans realized that Fabius had saved their city.3
COLONEL HAMILTON assured Robert R. Livingston that if General Washington continued to fight the war Fabian style, victory was more than possible—it was even probable. Only intelligence that the British were about to receive large reinforcements, necessitating an attack before they became too strong to resist, would justify a change in policy. But the news from abroad “contradicts this,” Hamilton assured him.
Most European powers hoped for a British defeat in America. They disliked Britain’s arrogant displays of power on sea and land around the world. There were rumors of certain countries giving America “more effectual aid.” Without naming a specific nation, Hamilton mentioned that the Americans had just received a shipment of the latest artillery, which had slipped through the British blockade and was being rushed to the army.
By the end of the summer, Hamilton predicted, the British would begin to “dwindle away,” and Washington could attack with considerable hope of success. In the meantime, Hamilton urged Livingston to circulate the thinking behind the Fabian policy to “take off disagreeable impressions our caution may make.”4
This letter would prove much too optimistic. Two ships, carrying cannons, thousands of muskets, and tons of gunpowder had reached New England—products of a clandestine operation put together by the French, with ample room for the government to deny any and all responsibility. But the Americans heard nothing more from Paris for the next twelve months—while military developments teetered toward disaster. Recruiting for the new army became more and more difficult. Voluntarism dwindled away almost completely. General Nathanael Greene wrote to his wife, Caty, in Rhode Island, “We have got together a small force… by no means equal to our expectations.”5
MEANWHILE BAD news arrived like random thunderclaps from the northern front. The first shock threw everyone into dismay. Fort Ticonderoga, looming between Lake Champlain and Lake George in northern New York, was considered “the Gibraltar of America.” Others called it “the key to the continent.” Many Americans had been confident that it would keep General Burgoyne from reaching Albany. Now they learned that the troops garrisoned there had abandoned the great bastion with scarcely a shot fired in its defense.
Militia from New York and New England, intimidated by the news, were not turning out to oppose the oncoming British. It was a replay of Washington’s 1776 retreat through New Jersey, where there had been no army to look the enemy in the face. General Burgoyne exultantly issued proclamations calling on soldiers and civilians in his path to surrender without a fight.
General Washington remained in close contact with the war north of Albany. He did not rely on stories drifting into his headquarters. He had already dispatched two major generals to help deal with the deteriorating situation: Benedict Arnold of Connecticut and Benjamin Lincoln of Massachusetts. The fat, affable Lincoln was adept at persuading reluctant militia to join the fighting. The fiery Arnold had proven himself a first-class battlefield leader during the 1775 invasion of Canada. Washington hoped his tactical prowess would supplement the northern commander, General Philip Schuyler, who excelled more at organizing and supplying an army than leading it on the battlefield.
On August 16, 1777, Washington wrote a revealing letter to New York governor George Clinton, commander of the state’s militia. Washington told him he had seen a letter from General Lincoln to General Schuyler telling him that they planned to “unite all the militia and Continental troops in one body.” The commander in chief made it clear that this was no longer an acceptable policy. He called it “a very ineligible plan.”6
The militia should perform another important task: it should make “Mr. Bourgoigne anxious for his rear,” forcing him to advance “circumspectly and to leave such strong posts behind that must make his main body very weak, and extremely capable of being repulsed by the force we shall have in front.”
This letter marked another step in Washington’s evolving use of militias. He had said harsh things about the amateur soldiers in 1776. But the limited availability of recruits for his regular or Continental Army was forcing him to realize that he still needed the militias as partners in fighting the war, even if he could not expect them to face British regulars face-to-face in a battle line. With Burgoyne, their task was to constantly render the British general concerned for his “convoys” of supplies from his rear.
At the same time, concerned that the Northern Army have as many Continentals as possible, Washington told Clinton that he had ordered two regiments guarding the Hudson Highlands to join up with it as soon as possible. Also on his way from Washington’s army was Colonel Daniel Morgan of Virginia, with his corps of six hundred frontier riflemen. At this point in his career, Morgan was known largely for his reckless courage—a trait he had exhibited repeatedly during Congress’s ill-judged 1775 invasion of Canada. His bravery had not saved him from being trapped in the winding streets of Quebec City and forced to surrender. Like many other officers in the Continental Army, he was still learning the art of revolutionary leadership. After six months in a Quebec prison, he was paroled and, in the fall of 1776, exchanged for a British prisoner of equal rank.
ON JUNE 17, 1777, the adjutant general of the Northern Army of the United States had presented Major General Arthur St. Clair with a “return” of the ten Continental regiments under his command. It made dolorous reading. Only twenty-three men in Colonel Seth Warner’s regiment had bayonets. Colonel Nathan Hale’s New Hampshire regiment was minus 264 powder horns and 334 priming wires. All the regiments were pathetically understrength. Warner had only 173 men instead of 640; another regiment had dwindled to 85. Companies comprised as few as 41 men. Overall, the regiments were short 3,506 rank and file and proportionate numbers of officers.
With barely 1,576 Continentals and two regiments of militia—about 900 men—St. Clair, newly arrived for three months’ duty, was supposed to defend not only Fort Ticonderoga but an even more extensive, unfinished work, Fort Independence, on a height across the narrow neck of water connecting the two parts of Lake Champlain. If he put every man in his army on the lines, he would have only one soldier per yard of front—and not a musket in reserve. Worse, he would have to abandon a number of outlying redoubts covering Ticonderoga’s exposed northwest flank.
The Scottish-born forty-year-old St. Clair (pronounced Sinclair), a former British lieutenant who had distinguished himself in the French and Indian War, had arrived at the fort on June 12. He replaced Major General Horatio Gates, who had retreated to Philadelphia to persuade his numerous New England friends in Congress to dismiss General Schuyler and give him command of the northern department.
St. Clair was aware that he was dealing with soldiers burdened by defeat. The British had driven the Northern Army from Canada in 1776 with humiliating ease. St. Clair had participated as a colonel in the ignominious rout at Trois-Rivières, in which a 2,000-man American force had disintegrated into fleeing fragments, making headlong retreat from the fourteenth colony inevitable. Only desperate defensive fighting on Lake Champlain by an impromptu fleet commanded by General Benedict Arnold—and the onset of winter—had prevented the British from taking Ticonderoga in late 1776.
Descending onto Lake Champlain as St. Clair nervously read his returns was a British army of 7,586 fighting men, backed by a fleet of gunboats and pinnaces manned by 700 Royal Navy sailors. In command was Major General Burgoyne, a soldier who had made his reputation as a daring cavalryman in Europe. His men called him “Gentleman Johnny,” a term of respect and affection because he treated them well. In canoes beside the 260 batteaux carrying the royal rank and file paddled several hundred war-painted Indians eager to collect a bonanza in American scalps.7
Incredibly, no one in the American army—or Congress, for that matter—knew that Burgoyne had orders to invade America with this imposing force. The screen of Indians spread by the British along the border had frustrated American attempts to scout into Canada. The Americans remained convinced that the main British army of 25,000 men under Sir William Howe would soon sally from New York to attack Philadelphia and that Burgoyne, who they knew was in Canada, would assemble every man the defense of that colony could spare and sail south to join him.
Even when Burgoyne’s fleet and army appeared in full view from Ticonderoga’s ramparts on June 30, 1777, St. Clair refused to take them seriously, believing the display of armed might a feint. Not until his pickets clashed with a British patrol and captured a drunken Irish soldier, who told them in convincing detail about the size of the British host, did the Americans realize they were in imminent danger of annihilation.
St. Clair spent the next three days in an agony of indecision. In memoirs written decades later, Assistant Adjutant General James Wilkinson said he “lacked the resolution to give up the place, or in other words to sacrifice his character for the public good.” The remark pithily, if heartlessly, summed up St. Clair’s dilemma. Acutely aware that his reputation would probably never recover if he retreated, he also understood that the Continentals under his command were precious, irreplaceable assets.
As the British began surrounding him, St. Clair convinced himself that they planned an immediate assault. He toyed with the possibility of replicating Bunker Hill here in the northern woods. But he also remembered the disastrous fate of the 3,000 Continentals who tried to restage Bunker Hill at Fort Washington on Manhattan in the fall of 1776.
General Burgoyne, an appalled spectator of the mistakes made at the original battle of Bunker Hill, had no intention of repeating them. On July 4, his engineering officer, a lieutenant named Twiss, slogged to the top of an outlying hill called Sugar Loaf. Several American engineers had urged previous commanders of Ticonderoga to fortify it, because from its 750-foot-high crest cannons could fire into both forts. But shortages of men and equipment—and the complacent assumption that no one could manhandle a cannon up its steep, forested slope—had left it exposed to an enterprising enemy.
By July 5, Twiss had two twelve-pounders on top of Sugar Loaf, firing at vessels in the narrows between the two forts. St. Clair took one look and said, in the stilted style of Wilkinson’s memoirs, “We must away from this because our situation has become desperate.” We can be fairly sure this professional soldier’s real words were a lot more graphic. In a hastily convened council of war, his brigadier generals agreed unanimously that retreat was the only option.
The painful decision revealed that all had learned a fundamental lesson that Washington had gleaned from the disasters of 1776. They were no longer fighting a “war of posts.” They should sacrifice forts, even cities, to the all-important task of preserving an army to look the enemy in the face.
PILING AMMUNITION and stores, along with numerous sick, into a fleet of two hundred batteaux and sloops, six hundred Continentals sailed that night for Skenesborough, now Whitehall, at the narrow southern end of Lake Champlain. The militia and the rest of the Continentals retreated with St. Clair down a rough road cut through the forest toward the same destination. In the confusion, they almost left behind 1,000 men in Fort Independence, largely because their brigadier, a French volunteer named Roche de Formoy, got drunk and forgot to pass along the evacuation order.
The Continental rank and file, most of them New Englanders, remained confirmed Bunker Hillists. They wanted to fight it out on Fort Ti’s ramparts. “Such a retreat was never heard of since the creation of the world,” wrote one fuming New Hampshire soldier. “I could scarcely believe my informant was in earnest,” recalled Dr. James Thacher of Massachusetts, who was awakened at midnight with the news that it was time to flee.8
In Ticonderoga St. Clair left four artillerymen manning a battery of guns loaded with grapeshot, trained on the bridge between the two forts. These ambushers had orders to fire the guns and run when a sufficient number of British went to work on repairing the bridge, into which the Americans had hastily chopped some large holes. The British methodically replanked the bridge without a shot fired. Mounting Ticonderoga’s ramparts, they found the four heroic gunners dead drunk beside a case of madeira.
No wonder British confidence soared. Burgoyne immediately ordered the 850-man British light infantry battalion, commanded by another enterprising soldier, forty-eight-year-old Brigadier Simon Fraser, to pursue the retreating Americans. In hot humid weather, they marched at a killing pace from 4:00 A.M. until 4:00 P.M. on July 6. Not far behind them slogged 1,280 German troops under portly, aggressive Major General Baron Friedrich Adolf von Riedesel. The British scooped up another twenty drunkards and numerous other stragglers along the rutted road. From them they got a good idea of the size of the American rear guard, which consisted of Colonel Ebenezer Francis’s 11th Massachusetts Regiment, reinforced by selected companies from the rest of St. Clair’s army.
The Americans retreated at a frantic pace. One man said they “hurled thro’ the woods at 35 miles a day… oblidged to kill oxen belonging to the inhabitants wherever we got them; before they were half-skinned every soldier was oblidged to take a bit and roast it over the fire, then before half done oblidged to march.” In Hubbardton, a “town” consisting of exactly two houses, St. Clair paused to let Francis catch up with him. When the colonel did not materialize, he left Colonel Seth Warner and his regiment with orders to reinforce Francis and join the main army at Castleton, six miles down the road. When Francis finally showed up, he had with him over five hundred stragglers, guarded by Colonel Nathan Hale’s New Hampshire regiment. Recently recovered from the measles, the sick men were utterly spent by the pace of the retreat. As the senior officer, Warner decided to spend the night in Hubbardton.
Although they knew the British were pursuing them, Hale’s men, who camped closest to the enemy, posted only one sentry. Arising at 3:00 A.M. on July 7, Fraser’s light infantry reached the American camp at dawn and routed Hale’s regiment and the invalids as they were cooking breakfast. But Warner’s and Francis’s Continentals gave them a very different reception. A big, brawny New Hampshireman, Warner had commanded the rear guard on the retreat from Canada in 1776 and knew his business. Posting most of his men behind log barricades on high ground, he cut down twenty-one attackers as they came up the steep slope, including a British major who made the mistake of climbing up on a fallen tree to reconnoiter the position.
A ferocious firefight erupted along a half-mile front. Fraser expertly shifted men to the right to envelope the American left flank. Francis promptly demonstrated that the Continentals had learned some tactics in two years of warfare by attacking the British left. For a little while the battle seesawed, with muskets crashing, gun smoke billowing through the woods, and men falling fast on both sides.
In Castleton, the gunfire made St. Clair wonder if he should march to Warner’s rescue. He found no enthusiasm for the idea among his brigadiers. He contented himself with dispatching two aides to order his two militia regiments, camped several miles closer to Hubbardton, to support the embattled rear guard. The aides met the militiamen on the road and barely avoided being trampled in the amateurs’ mad rush to put as much distance as possible between them and the shooting.
On the battlefield, the British were growing panicky in the face of the ferocious American resistance. Suddenly through the booming musketry came the astonishing sound of a military band. Baron von Riedesel had arrived with a 180-man advance guard; he struck up the band to make the Americans think he was leading a brigade. Some one hundred of his men were jaegers armed with short, accurate rifles and the training to counter the Americans’ woodland tactics.
The Germans swiftly enveloped Francis’s flank and, when the Yankee colonel tried to rally his men, cut him down with a bullet to the heart. His shaken soldiers scattered into the woods, and a chagrinned Warner ordered his New Hampshiremen to do likewise as their left flank became more and more indefensible. Colonel Hale, still trying to protect his invalids, surrendered with 270 of them soon after the firing ceased.
The two-hour brawl temporarily ended British thoughts of hot pursuit by land. Fraser had lost 50 killed and 134 wounded, roughly 21 percent of his light infantry. The small German detachment, in action only a few minutes, had lost 13 percent. American casualties were 41 dead and 91 wounded, plus 324 captured, most of them invalids. Lieutenant Thomas Hadden of the Royal Artillery confided to his journal that the light infantry had discovered that “neither were they invincible nor the rebels all poltroons. On the contrary, many of them acknowledged that the enemy had behaved well and looked upon General Riedesel’s fortunate arrival as a matter of absolute necessity.” It deserves noting that Hubbardton was fought entirely by Continentals.
The pursuers soon learned their army had achieved a sensational success on the water the previous day. The American fleet had cruised down Lake Champlain, enjoying band music and a bit of tippling, secure in the illusion that a massive chain across the narrows blocked the entrance to the lower part of the lake. British sailors broke the chain with a few well-placed cannon balls. They descended on the dismayed Americans at Skenesborough, capturing most of their fleet and forcing them to abandon all their cannons and staggering amounts of flour and salted meats.
With the road through Skenesborough blocked, the mortified St. Clair had to lead his men on a seven-day detour into the wilderness east of Lake George to reach Fort Edward on the Hudson River. Along the way he discharged his two militia regiments for fear that their panic and insubordination would contaminate his Continentals. At Fort Edward, he found a distraught General Philip Schuyler with a paltry 700 Continentals and 1,400 jittery militia—the sum total of the Northern Army’s reserve.
THE FALL of Ticonderoga, the apparent rout at Hubbardton, and the debacle at Skenesborough sent shockwaves of panic and consternation throughout northern New York and New England—and the rest of America. “No event could be more unexpected nor more severely felt throughout our army and our country,” Dr. Thacher morosely admitted in his journal. George Washington got the news from Schuyler, along with a chilling portrait of the Northern Army’s prospects. The enemy, Schuyler wrote, was “flushed with victory, plentifully provided with provisions, cannon and every warlike store,” while the Americans were “dispirited, naked… without camp equipage, with little ammunition and not a single cannon.”
At dilapidated Fort Edward, the disgruntled Ticonderoga fugitives had no sooner arrived than they began accusing Generals Schuyler and St. Clair of treason. They filled the mails with letters home, claiming the British had fired “silver balls” from their cannon into Ticonderoga to bribe them. “The Indignation and distrust [of Schuyler] that prevails here are extream,” James Warren wrote from Boston to John Adams in Philadelphia. “The want of confidence in your commanders [is] such, that if it be not removed by Lincolns being sent there to command, the militia will very much impede our reinforcements.”9
Simultaneously, General Horatio Gates trumpeted his detestation of Schuyler to New England delegates in Congress. Schuyler owned huge swaths of land along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers and found it hard to practice the rude and often crude democracy favored by the New Englanders. In military matters Schuyler tended to be a martinet, often showing up at outposts in the dawn to make sure sentries were on the job—another trait that failed to endear him to the men in the ranks. But few men made a larger contribution to the American cause. His skillful diplomacy kept most of the Iroquois neutral for the first years of the war. Without his talents for organization and supply, the Northern Army would have collapsed long before.
SCHUYLER SOON reported more bad news to Washington. “A very great proportion of the [local] inhabitants are taking protection from General Burgoyne.” Copying a leaf from Howe’s book, Burgoyne had issued an orotund proclamation, warning the Americans in his path that if their “Phrenzy of hostility should remain,” he would execute “the Vengeance of the State against the wilful outcast.”10 Worse, another British army was headed for Albany. Some 1,800 regulars, Indians, and Tories under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Barry St. Leger had sailed across Lake Ontario and debouched toward Fort Stanwix, the bastion that guarded the Mohawk River valley. The mere threat made it impossible to raise any militia from this populous region to defend the Hudson River valley from Burgoyne. The news could have been much worse. Thanks to Schuyler’s foresight, Stanwix had been rebuilt earlier in the year and garrisoned with 650 Continentals, who defiantly declined St. Leger’s invitation to surrender.
IN NEW Jersey, General Washington continued to worry about General Howe’s army. Scouts brought him news that they were boarding ships off Amboy. Was Howe about to ascend the Hudson River and join Burgoyne in an all-out assault on New England? In that case the main Continental Army would be expected to join the battle. Washington ordered General Sullivan to march his men to a place called The Clove in the Ramapo Mountains, overlooking the Hudson River. It was close enough to make General Howe nervous about attempting an ascent of the Hudson.
On July 23 Washington heard truly startling news: the British fleet of more than 270 ships was heading out to sea—and turning south. Washington decided that Howe was planning to attack Philadelphia by landing at some convenient place on the Delaware River. In the heat of summer he ordered his men on a forced march to the nation’s capital. When they reached the Delaware, he gave his weary troops two days to recuperate on its banks. Washington himself rode ahead to confer with congressmen and Pennsylvania state officials about the best way to defend Philadelphia.
Washington had barely arrived when he heard even more startling news. The British fleet had paused at the mouth of the Delaware River—then headed out to sea again and disappeared. What had happened? An unexpected intrusion of good luck had rescued the Americans from a possibly ruinous situation. The British captain of the frigate HMS Roebuck informed General Howe that the Delaware was so heavily fortified with cannon on its banks that attempting to penetrate it would be almost suicidal.
This report exaggerated more than a little. Only two forts blocked the ascent of the Delaware. They may have fired briskly on the Roebuck, but Admiral Howe’s battle fleet backed by General Howe’s 18,000-man army could have eliminated both forts rather quickly. Instead General Howe decided on an alternate plan that had its own advantages—to sail south and ascend Chesapeake Bay. From its northern banks he would be within an easy march of Philadelphia, with no costly obstacles like the Delaware River forts to clear.
Washington still wondered if the whole maneuver might be a ruse to wear out his army with marching and countermarching. After more days of uncertainty, he finally led the Continental Army to a camp on Neshaminy Creek, twenty miles north of Philadelphia. Meanwhile the British army was undergoing an ordeal at sea. It sat becalmed on the sweltering Atlantic. Horses died, and men sickened from spoiled food. Not until August 24, after drifting helplessly for most of thirty-two days, did Howe’s men stumble ashore on the northern banks of Chesapeake Bay. American resistance was negligible. A few dozen militiamen fired a cannon and their muskets at the 18,000 redcoats and their German confederates, then hastily dispersed.
Confident in his safety from attack, General Howe allowed his men to rest and recuperate from their enervating voyage. He still hoped that Washington would fight to defend Philadelphia and give him the all-out battle he needed to end the war. The American commander in chief said he had every intention of fighting to defend his nation’s capital. He knew he had to make the attempt if he hoped to retain the support of Congress.
Washington chose to make a stand at Brandywine Creek, a winding stream twenty-six miles from Philadelphia. He positioned his 12,000-man army—3,000 of them militia—along the Brandywine’s banks. The waterway was traversable only at several fords. In an ironic echo of the battle of Long Island, a loyalist told General Howe of two unguarded fords far out on the American left flank. Aware of these, Washington had asked General Sullivan, who was in command on this flank, to watch for a British attempt to use them. Neither Sullivan nor the cavalry colonel to whom he delegated this responsibility performed well.
Meanwhile about a third of the British army, mostly the German troops, began a demonstration at Chadds Ford. They blasted cannons and muskets at the Americans and gave every evidence of launching an all-out attack. Not deceived, Washington planned a counterstroke that would smash up this pseudo-assault. Before he could issue the order, a messenger from General Sullivan informed him that the British were advancing on the left flank in ominous numbers. General Howe and half his army had crossed the unguarded fords without a shot fired at them.
Accompanied by the Marquis de Lafayette, Washington galloped toward the sound of the guns. They met Sullivan’s men falling back in disarray. Lafayette sprang off his horse and tried to rally them. He took a bullet in the leg and accomplished little except to display his reckless courage. Back at Chadds Ford, the Germans attacked across the Brandywine. Washington decided it was time to retreat.
Unlike the battle of Long Island, it was not a panicky rout. Washington’s rear guard fell back from one patch of woods to the next, fighting hard until the oncoming British drove them out. Howe’s men soon showed signs of weariness; already weakened by their ordeal aboard ship, they had marched more than seventeen miles before going into action. Without cavalry because so many of his horses had died on the voyage to the Chesapeake, Howe abandoned the pursuit as darkness fell.
FOR THE next month Washington and Howe maneuvered through the web of rivers and creeks around Philadelphia. The British commander repeatedly tried to trap the American army or some part of it. He succeeded only once, on September 21, when he caught an American division commanded by Major General Anthony Wayne camped near Paoli. Washington had detached Wayne and two other division commanders with orders to attack Howe’s flanks and rear. Wayne moved too close to Howe’s camp, under the illusion that the British were not aware of his presence. In a night attack, bayonet-wielding British light infantry killed or wounded more than three hundred men.11 Most of the time Washington, marching and countermarching his ragged soldiers more than one hundred miles, skillfully zigzagged west. This not only gave him ample room to keep retreating but kept his army between the British and Reading, a main American supply depot.
Finally, in the last week of September, Howe abandoned hope of an all-out battle and marched into undefended Philadelphia. Congress fled to York, Pennsylvania. An angry John Adams, more and more disillusioned with his army’s commander in chief, raved about the need for a general of “active masterly capacity” who would “save this country.” He clearly had no clue about Washington’s Fabian strategy.
Washington kept his army within an easy march of the capital. He had no intention of letting the campaign end on such a sour note. Spies soon informed the commander in chief of an opportunity for a “stroke.” General Howe had camped 8,000 men in the village of Germantown outside Philadelphia. Washington concocted one of his most daring battle plans. He divided his army into four columns and hurled them at the British in a dawn attack on October 4, 1777.
The Americans came whooping out of a dense fog and routed British outposts. The Continentals in the two center columns drove 1,000 yards and seemed on their way to tearing the British apart. But the fog that had concealed their advance became a fatal disadvantage. American units began to fire on each other, and many regiments lost contact with their commanding officers. Six British companies under a fighting colonel named Musgrave turned a large stone house owned by loyalist Benjamin Chew into a fortress that distracted and disrupted the American rear. Several regiments stopped to assail it instead of maintaining the momentum of the general attack.
General Sullivan’s division ran out of ammunition. Soon confusion turned to panic in many regiments. Howe in the meantime had summoned 3,000 reinforcements from Philadelphia. Washington again decided to retreat. The battered British, with more than five hundred men dead or wounded, made no attempt to pursue.
The battle of Germantown, though a military failure, put an end to British hope of fulfilling the vengeful prophecy of the Year of the Hangman. In northern New York, the American army confronting General Burgoyne, strengthened by Washington’s reinforcements, was ready to write an even more final coda to the fading British expectation of a swift victory.
AT THIS point in the drama, Congress intervened by firing Generals Schuyler and St. Clair and appointing Horatio Gates commander of everything north of Albany. Gates was one of the few generals on the American side who understood the tangled British psychology that had so much to do with unraveling the Year of the Hangman. Nothing else explains the eagerness with which he sought the seemingly thankless job of commanding the Northern Army despite its history of headlong retreat.
Grey-haired and ruddy-faced, with thick spectacles that often slid down his long, pointed nose to give him an old-womanish look, the fifty-year-old Gates was an ambitious man, even if he did not look like one. The son of a duke’s housekeeper, he had risen to the rank of major in the British army thanks to his talents as a staff officer. As the American army’s first adjutant general, he had proven himself a valuable organizer and administrator in 1775.
Gates’s combat experience was almost zero—he fought for about fifteen minutes in the 1755 debacle known as Braddock’s Defeat, before being struck down by an Indian bullet. In the attack on Trenton on Christmas night of 1776, Washington had offered him command of the right wing. He had excused himself for reasons of “health” and rushed to Baltimore to lobby Congress for command of the Northern Army.
Gates’s New England admirers ignored his shortcomings and attributed to him near miraculous powers. One declared that his mere arrival in Albany lifted them from “this miserable state of despondency and terror.” Unquestionably, just getting rid of Schuyler and St. Clair eliminated the rampant paranoia in the New England Continental regiments. Gates also benefited from Burgoyne’s decision to rebuild a twenty-three-mile road through the forest from Skenesborough to Fort Edward on the east bank of the Hudson, a task that consumed three weeks and gave the rattled Americans time to regroup.
Schuyler had skillfully impeded Burgoyne’s progress with tactics that the original Fabius Maximus would have warmly approved. A thousand axmen felled huge pines and hemlocks in the British path. They also destroyed some forty bridges over the numerous creeks and ravines. Burgoyne dispatched neither his Indians nor his light infantry to deal with this scorched-earth policy. Relaxing in the fine stone house of William Skene, the principle citizen of Skenesborough, Gentleman Johnny enjoyed a new mistress, the wife of his commissary, and remained euphoric over the easy capture of Ticonderoga.
Gates also benefited from the first good news the Northern Army had received in a long time. On the left flank, eight hundred Mohawk Valley militia marching to bolster Fort Stanwix had fought a bloody drawn battle with St. Leger’s army at Oriskany, inflicting heavy casualties on his Indian allies. On the right flank, New Hampshire militia under Colonel John Stark and Continentals led by Seth Warner had attacked and virtually destroyed a 1,500-man force of Germans that Burgoyne had dispatched to Bennington to seize stores and horses.
By the time Gates took command of the Northern Army, Schuyler had retreated to Van Schaick’s Island, at the mouth of the Mohawk River, nine miles north of Albany. There he was able to block the main road and stay in touch with operations in the vital Mohawk Valley. New England officers told Gates that Schuyler’s constant retreating had disgusted the men. Gates decided that a march north “to meet the enemy” would be good for morale. Some say Major General Benedict Arnold had not a little to do with urging this move on Gates.
Starting on September 8, the army marched thirteen miles north to Bemis Heights, rugged country overlooking the Hudson and named for a tavern on the riverbank. There, Polish engineering officer Thaddeus Kosciuszko constructed an elaborate array of field fortifications on the one-hundred-foot-high bluffs and the five-hundred-foot-wide strip of level ground along the Hudson. To the west, should the British try to outflank rather than storm the position, the ground was thickly forested, broken by occasional clearings, and cut by deep east–west ravines—ideal terrain for American light infantry maneuvers.
If Arnold was responsible for this move, it was the last advice Gates took from his fellow major general. An intriguer himself, Gates saw conspiracies everywhere. He had rudely excluded Schuyler from his early war councils in Albany. When it came to touchiness, Arnold was in a class by himself. As Gates began excluding him from staff meetings, the stocky ex-apothecary grew surly and obnoxious in return.
General Burgoyne had no idea where the Americans were. Crossing the Hudson on September 13 on a bridge of boats near Saratoga (present-day Schuylerville), the British commander groped southward in slow, cautious marches. Not until September 18, when an American patrol fired on a group of his soldiers digging up potatoes on an abandoned farm, killing and wounding twenty of them, did he realize the rebels were close. Although he still had only the dimmest idea of the American position on Bemis Heights, Burgoyne decided to attack it the next day.
In the ensuing battles of Saratoga, the officers that General Washington had sent to the northern front played crucial roles. General Arnold commanded a wing of the American army and demonstrated brilliant tactical ability. Rather than staying on the defensive, as was General Gates’s preference, Arnold led his men in fierce attacks on the oncoming British. Samuel Downing, a soldier who followed him across the bullet-thick battlefields, said, “There wasn’t any waste timber in him, and a bloody fellow he was. He didn’t care for nothing; he’d ride right in. It was ‘Come on boys’——’t wasn’t ‘go boys’. He was as brave a man as ever lived.”
At the climax of the second battle Arnold led a charge that seized a key redoubt overlooking the British camp. As he joined his men in swarming over the walls, a bullet smashed the leg already shattered once in the assault on Québec in 1775. It ended his career as an active soldier.
At West Point, in the Old Cadet Chapel, there are memorials to America’s revolutionary leaders. Benedict Arnold’s plaque has no name. It simply reads, “Major General, born 1740.” On the Saratoga battlefield, another memorial is a stone carving of a man’s booted leg. Both pay silent tribute to the sacrifice Arnold made to win this crucial victory.
Almost as important was General Benjamin Lincoln’s role. He more than fulfilled the words George Washington wrote to the anxious New York Council of Safety on the loss of Fort Ticonderoga. He told them he was sending “very valuable officers”: Lincoln and Arnold—“particularly the former, than whom, there is, perhaps, no man from the state of Massachusetts, who enjoys more universal esteem and popularity.” Lincoln played a crucial role in raising and organizing a body of militia that operated on Burgoyne’s left flank and in his rear. He wrote letters to officials in Massachusetts, telling them to forward newly requisitioned militia, with an emphasis on men who had performed “partisan duty” led by officers “able, active and experienced.” Setting up headquarters in Manchester, Vermont, Lincoln soon had 2,500 men under his command.
In the middle of September, as Burgoyne clashed with the main army, Lincoln sent his men out in groups of five hundred. One group, led by Colonel John Brown, assaulted the British post on Lake George, captured four hundred British soldiers, released one hundred American prisoners, and seized “a vast quantity of plunder.” Another group tested the defenses of Fort Ticonderoga. These moves by mostly militia bands unnerved Burgoyne and his top commanders. They saw their supply line to Canada severed—and cut a half pound of bread and a half pound of meat from their soldiers’ daily rations.12
Meanwhile, Daniel Morgan and his five hundred riflemen were joining Benedict Arnold in challenging the British on the main battlefield. Again and again their deadly guns turned British advances into panicky retreats. At the climax of the second battle of Saratoga, when a desperate Burgoyne had committed every soldier in his battered army to an all-or-nothing gamble of another frontal assault, his light infantry commander, Simon Fraser, did a superb job of rallying the red-coated foot soldiers. General Arnold rode up to Morgan and pointed to Fraser. “That man on the grey horse is a host unto himself and must be disposed of,” he shouted. Morgan passed the order to a half dozen of his best sharpshooters, who soon put a bullet through Fraser’s belly. The brigadier’s fall consumed what little heart was left in the British attack, and the survivors ran for the protection of their fortified camp.
Burgoyne’s situation rapidly grew hopeless. While rations dwindled and horses starved to death, the surrounding Americans sniped by day and bombarded by night. By this time, Lincoln had joined the main army with his militia. Gates’s army swelled to 14,000 men, 8,000 of them militia. The British could not tell the difference between a militiaman and a Continental. Each had a gun in his hand. Desertions multiplied among Burgoyne’s dispirited men. Finally Gentleman Johnny asked Gates for surrender terms.
On October 17, Burgoyne’s men marched out and stacked their arms in a meadow north of Fishkill Creek. The gleeful Gates wrote to his wife, “Burgoyne and his great army have laid down their arms to me and my Yankees.” With New England’s politicians behind him in Congress, Gates thought he was now in a position to supplant George Washington as the American commander in chief.
It has become traditional to point to Saratoga as a historic turning point that transformed the war by persuading France to become America’s public ally. The victory unquestionably contributed to the French decision. But Louis XVI and his ministers were equally impressed by Washington’s skill at keeping the main American army intact outside Philadelphia, aggressively staring the enemy in the face. His ferocious attack on Howe’s army at Germantown on October 4, only three weeks after the defeat at Brandywine, provided explosive proof that Britain’s 1777 campaign had failed on all fronts.
Meanwhile, the militia marched home to spread fabulous tales of how they had bagged Johnny Burgoyne—a tradition that still lingers in not a few history books, which portray Saratoga as a triumph of American farmers à la Lexington and Concord over another British professional army. The Continentals, if they heard such hot air, dismissed it. They knew who had beaten Burgoyne. Some of them also knew that they now had a strategy for victory—if they had the perseverance and courage to make it work.