BY MY conveyance of these stores, the army was the richer by a month’s supply; and the bridge of boats being thrown across Hudson’s River two miles above the village of Saratoga, on the 13th and 14th of September 1777 we crossed and encamped on Saratoga plain. Here the country was exceedingly beautiful but utterly deserted by its inhabitants. We of the Light Infantry formed the vanguard and, following down the opposing bank, soon came upon a delightful stream, the Fishkill Creek, peopled with exotic wildfowl, broken into artificial cascades, and trained around several tiny islands planted with unusual flowering shrubs. Beyond, a broad green lawn sloped easily down to the water’s edge, and at its head stood General Philip Schuyler’s spacious mansion, with a row of noble pillars extending its entire length from ground to roof. The mansion at Skenesborough had been very well, for so remote a place, but it was by comparison with this but a large and well-appointed block-house. This had both elegance and maturity and we saw clearly that the spirit of subordination, rather than that of ‘Liberty, Liberty, Liberty’ animated the General’s artisans and tenantry, whose cottages could be seen in the distance clustered around a good-looking church.
The transition from the hideous and unkempt country about Fort Edward to this European paradise was striking. We found ourselves treading with humility and soberness, as we flanked the lawn in order to search the house, avoiding to violate the well-tended flower-beds and the neat borders of the gravelled paths, and stopping delicately between the rows of cabbages. It might almost have been Castle Belan, near Timolin, which I had visited as a recruit on my march to Waterford; but that here painted wood was generally employed instead of bricks and stucco. The house was embellished within, as we had expected, with solid and beautiful furniture, rich hangings and carpets, china and silver in glass-fronted cupboards, of which but little appeared to have been moved. In the dining-room we observed two or three lifelike portraits of General Schuyler’s ancestors who were notable Dutchmen, and a fine equestrian portrait of His Majesty King George. Out of respect for the decency of these surroundings we abstained from plundering the least thing, but searched the attics, cellars, and outhouses, discovered nothing and passed on; but left a guard against the depredations of our Indian allies. The solid grist-mill, saw-mill, barns, and other buildings were also found clear of the enemy.
There was but one road in the neighbourhood, following the course of Hudson’s River down to Albany, thirty miles away: it was flanked by forests, commanded in many places by rocky heights and often separated from the broad flood of the river only by a precipice. This was the road we must take, and many tributary creeks and thick forests lay between us and our destination; and, as a half-way obstacle, the deep and rapid Mohawk River. The enemy was encamped ten miles from us, at Stillwater, in a strongly entrenched position known as Bemis Heights. Our communications with Canada were long and exposed; we had with us but a month’s provisions; most of our Indian allies had left us; and what with the losses at Bennington and elsewhere, we were reduced to less than six thousand troops, including Germans and American Loyalists, against perhaps fourteen thousand of the enemy. The odds against us were increased by the greater discount that must be made in our case for men necessarily employed on other services than that of fighting: such as baggage and ammunition guards, and attendants upon the sick and wounded. Not three thousand of our men, of whom something better than two thousand were British, could be put into action at any given time; whereas the American fighting strength fell short of their total forces by far less. We did not, however, allow ourselves to consider the possibility of a check. Being ordered to attain Albany, there to join hands with our Southern army under General Howe, which was to advance up Hudson’s River, we were resolved at all hazards to reach this rendezvous before our supplies failed: where we would be once more provided with all necessaries.
A very disagreeable circumstance was that a diversion of ours, to the westward, had signally failed. This was made by Colonel St Leger, who had gone by way of Lake Ontario and taken with him a battalion of American Loyalists, a few regulars and a thousand Indians of the Six Nations, led by Thayendanegea, under the guidance of Colonel Guy Johnson’s brother, Sir John Johnson, Bt. Colonel St Leger routed and killed General Herkimer in a stubborn battle – though Thayendanegea was disappointed of his neighbour’s scalp – and besieged an American force at Fort Stanwix, which seemed upon the point of surrender; he hoped soon to possess himself of the whole valley of the Mohawk River, a place well known for the number of settlers who remained loyal to King George. But General Benedict Arnold upset all his plans by a cunning stratagem. He prevailed upon a half-witted Dutchman, Hon Yost Schuyler, whom the Indians, because of his peculiar ways, held in a sort of religious awe, to go among the Indians and announce with excitement the approach of an enormous army of Americans under General Arnold. This he did. The Indians were alarmed and inclined to believe this tale, for Hon Yost – who performed this cheat in order to save from the gallows his Tory brother, whom General Arnold held – displayed a coat riddled with what he said were British bullet-holes. Sir John and Thayendanegea pooh-poohed the tale, but it was confirmed by an Indian in Arnold’s pay who came up shortly afterwards; he, when asked, ‘Are the Americans few or numerous?’ pointed above his head at the leaves of the forest. After him came another Indian, whose lie was that General Burgoyne’s army was cut in pieces and General Arnold hurrying to Fort Stanwix by forced marches. Indians, though not cowards, have always sedulously avoided pitched battles, preferring to harry the flank and rear of an advancing foe. These tribesmen now, persuaded by The Cornplanter of the Senecas, immediately decamped, in spite of all the persuasive eloquence and rum that Sir John offered them; the Loyalists followed, and Colonel St Leger, left with only his few regulars, had no alternative but to break off the siege and retire too. Most of the Loyalists had flung away their arms in terror; so that the Indians, balked of other scalps, took a few of theirs in disgust of such cowardice. Among Indians, to lose even an arrow was considered unwarrior-like, and for the like misdoing or mischance a man was flogged on the bare back by his women folk. Sir John and the Colonel each blamed the other for the common misfortune and drew their swords upon each other. Murder would have been done had Thayendanegea not interposed and recalled them to their duty as Christians.
From the Schuyler mansion we followed the road for three miles between forest land and continuous fields of fine wheat and Indian corn, half a mile broad. Of these, some had been harvested; some burned by Vrouw Schuyler, the General’s wife, as she quitted her home at our approach; but a great deal left standing. The harvest was very welcome to our Commissaries, and men were instantly set to work to garner, thresh, and grind the wheat, at the mill, into flour. The maize was cut as forage for our beasts. Still we encounted no enemy, and the whole army moved forward on the following day, September 15th, encamping that night at a place called Devaco – or Dovegat, or Dovacote, or as you please – which lay on a crooked inlet of the river, where the cornfields ended. Beyond this place innumerable obstacles were encountered, such as felled trees, broken bridges over the numerous streams and rivulets which fed the river, and the road itself was cut away wherever it ran at the edge of a height. The army halted for two days while engineers and pioneers repaired this damage, and our Indians went forward as scouts to note the enemy’s disposition. We then advanced to within three miles of the enemy’s position, halted, and sent forward the repair-parties once more. On September 18th our engineers were obstructed by the enemy in their task of rebuilding a bridge, and we guessed that on the next day we would come to grips.
All this time it had rained heavily, which made our advance the slower, but our people’s greatest wish was that the bad weather would continue, for rain spoilt musket-fire, by wetting the priming-pan, as effectively as it had hindered archers in the ancient days by slackening their bowstrings. If it came to push of bayonet, we believed ourselves the victors. We had, moreover, confidence in our own steadiness under fire, in the experience of our officers, and in the comradely unity that bound us all together, barring only some regiments of the Germans.
The American fortifications on Bemis Heights, a hill contiguous to the river, had been laid out by the same engineer, the Polish patriot Kosciusko, who had planned those at Ticonderoga; and were executed in the same swift and solid way by American labourers. But, as at Ticonderoga, the Americans had omitted to hold or fortify a hill, lying a short distance away, which overlooked their stronghold. General Burgoyne was aware that General Gates, in the lobbies of Congress, had presented the yielding of Ticon deroga as a very heinous offence. He therefore hoped that this other fortress would be held by General Gates with the stubbornness wanting in General St Clair; and that, even when it was raked by our guns from the commanding hill on the left, the whole American force would be kept cooped up in it. If this happened, great slaughter would be done. We could encircle the Heights by working round through the woods, and cut the road behind, whereupon any man who attempted to escape must either face our volleys from the woods that surrounded the fortress, or swim the river.
On the next day, September 19th, battle was joined. General Phillips, with the Germans and the heavy artillery, pushed up the road which ran close along the river. General Burgoyne with four battalions, of which The Ninth formed the reserve, and four light guns, took the centre; while General Fraser, with the Grenadiers and ourselves (the Light Infantry battalion), a battalion of American Loyalists, one regular battalion, the rest of the artillery and a few score Indians, was sent to make a wide circuit through the woods on the right. Our task was to seize the hill aforementioned which was the key to victory, while the other columns provided a diversion. A combined assault through broken and thickly wooded country is always difficult to achieve in unison, unless signals be given by bonfire, mirror-flash, or signal-gun. It was therefore well that a signal had been arranged, for the centre and left could not have foreseen how long a time would be spent by us in arriving at our agreed position, which was abreast of them at two miles’ distance from Bemis Heights. The ground we had to traverse was a frightful tangle of rocks, thickets, ravines, bog-holes, briar-patches, standing trees, and trees overset by a hurricane of some years before. An occasional relief to this wilderness was found in what the country people termed ‘clever meadows’, namely unexpected grass-grown clearings; the flocks and cattle that came by devious paths to graze on them belonged to the farmstead of one Freeman, built on a hill near by, which formed our centre.
It was late in the morning before we were able to fire our signal-gun, in default of a mirror-flash, the sun being obscured, to which General Burgoyne and General Phillips replied with other guns; and then forward we went. It appears that General Gates had no notion but to do just as General Burgoyne had hoped – to stay snug in his trenches and tamely permit himself to be surprised and raked from the hill. But, unfortunately for ourselves, General Arnold was in a position to challenge and dispute this inept method of waging war. He had recently, after all, been raised by Congress to major-general’s rank; as a reward for opposing a British landing on the Connecticut coast, where he happened to be on a short visit to his sister, and, though our people succeeded in destroying the important magazine of Danbury, taking tithes of their forces as they retired. His conduct on this occasion, where again he was foremost in attack and hindmost in retreat and but narrowly escaped death, had commended him so highly to the army that General Gates came to hate him very deeply.
Now General Arnold demanded, with eyes that seemed to shoot out fire, permission to lead out at least a part of his own Division in the direction from which the first signal-gun had been heard, in order to prevent our outflanking the Heights. General Gates refused this request, with a demand to General Arnold to mind his own business; but to one angry man was joined another, the same Colonel Dan Morgan of the Virginian Riflemen who had come so near to storming Quebec two years previously. Colonel Morgan, having been exchanged against a British colonel captured by the Americans, had re-formed and trained his regiment until it was the most formidable in their whole army. The marksmen it contained were now for the most part not Virginian backwoodsmen but Presbyterian Ulstermen settled in Pennsylvania, and some Pennsylvanian Germans. They could march forty miles in a day, subsist on jerked beef and maize-porridge, and for mere sport would often shoot apples off one another’s heads, taking turns, at sixty paces. Both Arnold and Morgan had been drinking hard liquor all that morning, in a manner to make them reckless of what they said or did, yet not so as to destroy their judgment of what needed saying or doing. They railed at their Commander in so contumacious a manner that he was terrified for his own safety: for General Arnold kept clapping a hand to his pistol and swearing terribly. Finally General Arnold declared that if he could not go with permission he would go without, and at the head of his entire command; whereupon General Gates yielded sulkily, saying that he might take Colonel Morgan’s riflemen and half a brigade of New England militia, but no more.
These forces came out against us about noon, on a front of two miles, and drove in our screen of Indians. The Loyalists and Canadians could not hold their ground either, but ran through our ranks. There ensued a very confusing skirmish, in which the Americans advanced with too great impetuosity, running in two’s and three’s against our leading platoons. We caught them with well-directed volleys, killed a number and took twenty prisoners. But they were far swifter of foot than we, and avoided the bayonet. The one failing of the rifle-gun, as against the musket, which it enormously outranged, was the difficulty of reloading. Towards the end of the war, little use was made of these weapons of precision, since it was found that delay between shots more than counterbalanced the advantages of their exactness.
It happened that our company under Captain Sweetenham was heavily engaged in this onset; he and I, with ten others, found ourselves separated and surrounded by a large number of riflemen who were dressed in Indian fashion, with no covering at all but leggins and breechclout. The Captain was soon wounded in the shoulder and the foot, four other men fell and the remainder of us had no choice but to retire, plunging into a ravine choked with tall reeds and escaping through a cedar thicket. It fell to me to cover the retreat, for the others went off in a hurry, forgetting that the Captain was able to proceed but slowly. A bullet carried off my cap, another grazed my side, a third broke the lock of my fusil, which I was forced to abandon. A company of The Fourteenth coming up in support, the fire grew very hot, but the Americans broke off the fight when the cry of a wild turkey, many times repeated, sounded through the woods: it was Colonel Morgan’s rallying-cry, which they instantly obeyed.
After attending to Captain Sweetenham’s wound, I sent him off under Mad Johnny Maguire’s escort to the general hospital in the rear; and felt content that I had in a manner made amends for the trick that I had once played on him in forging his signature. Then I returned to the scene of the combat, intending to rearm myself with a musket of one of our dead or an American rifle-gun and the necessary ammunition. I was proceeding cautiously back through the cedar thicket when I heard the voices of two men passing my front, and crouched behind a bush. It was a large, heavy rifleman driving a disarmed British non-commissioned officer before him with the muzzle and butt of his piece; the prisoner pleading for mercy.
‘Now, my wee lad,’ cried the rifleman in a thick Ulster brogue, which I will not attempt to reproduce in writing, ‘Sit you down, for we must have a clack together.’
Richard Harlowe – he it was – had lately been raised to corporal’s rank and detached to our company to take the place of another who had fallen sick. He sat down, as bidden, on a tree-stump within view of my lurking-place, and the rifleman stood over him in a threatening posture.
‘Don’t think I do not know your bonny face, Ralph Pearce, or exult in having you here in my power at last; though be sure I should be glad enough to have Colonel Pearce, your father, sitting next to you, who drove me from my house and trade in Lurgan town, and forced me to sail here across the black ocean. Come now, Ralph Pearce, you who married my little sister Molly against your father’s wish and mine; and who threw her off when he threatened to disinherit you; and who afterwards cheated at the cards and was dismissed from your regiment; and trafficked with the Pretender; and went back to poor Molly, to rob her of the jewels you had given her, and broke her heart: tell me now, Ralph Pearce, for I am curious to know – will you die with an easy heart?’
Richard Harlowe, or Ralph Pearce, made a sobbing noise in his throat, begging for his life to be spared. ‘No, Alexander Bridie,’ he said, ‘no, I am not fit to die. Spare me, in Christ’s name, for I am not fit to die.’
‘I have lived a rough life,’ continued Alexander Bridie, ‘I have taken life in revenge for one-twentieth less of injury than I have suffered at the hand of the Pearces; and when we have taken life, we folk at the head of the Susquehannah River, we take the scalp too. With you, my charming Ralph, I shall reverse the procedure: first your scalp, and afterwards your life.’ He drew out a long Albany knife and whetted it across his palm.
I was struck with confusion by this recital. Should I hazard my own life for the sake of this scoundrel Harlowe, rushing unarmed to his rescue, when by his death I should so greatly profit? Yet if I left him to his fate, would not my conscience ever afterwards reproach me for having not only seduced the wife of a comrade-in-arms, but stood idly by while he was mutilated and murdered?
My better feelings prevailed. I ran forward, halloing, with a rotten stick grasped in my hand as my only weapon; which seeing, Harlowe somersetted backwards over the stump, dodged among the bushes and was free.
Alexander Bridie brought his piece to his shoulder, aiming at me, and I gave myself up for dead. But suddenly he himself staggered and fell down dead, as a flying tomahawk fetched the back of his head and cleft his skull almost in two.
As I stood staring, a lithe figure came mincing from behind the cedars and with giggles and squeaks, squatting upon his hams, took up the rifleman’s fallen knife and with it excoriated the accustomed trophy. It was the Mohican bardash, Sweet Yellow Head, and after him appeared the majestic form of my friend Thayendanegea, with three new scalps swinging at his girdle.
Thayendanegea clasped me to him, embracing me fondly and calling me ‘my son Otetiani’.
He took me apart into the thicket and said: ‘I have news for you, dear Otetiani. This expedition has failed, as did the other expedition we made two months ago against Fort Stanwix; when Arnold, the Dark Eagle, tricked us. I am now about to fetch the Red Men home. I have explained to General Burgoyne my decision and urged him to retire while there is yet hope. But he will not listen. He is infatuated.’
I asked, ‘Thayendanegea, what has occurred?’
He replied, ‘Nothing has occurred. That is the devil of it.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The Southern army was a hundred miles distant from Albany when the campaign began. Now it is not half this distance away – no, it is twice that distance. For General Howe has transported twelve thousand troops to the mouth of the Delaware River and is advancing against Philadelphia, as though he had no interest in us and were waging a private war of his own. General Washington opposes him. The few thousand men that remain in New York, under General Clinton, are insufficient to come to our help up Hudson’s River.’
‘But the Eastern Army that was also to converge upon Albany from Rhode Island?’
‘It has not started. It will not start. General Burgoyne has been sent out on a fool’s errand. Now also, my allies report that a strong division of Americans under General Lincoln is advancing against Ticonderoga to cut off your communications with Canada; already, I think, they will have done so. I told General Burgoyne: “I must now take my nation home. If we stay, your people and mine, yours will be captured as being white men, but ours will be massacred as being red. Why do you stay?” He replied, “I cannot believe that General Howe, or Lord George Germaine, would so deceive me. It is a fiction, is it not, confess, brave Thayendanegea, to excuse your departure?”’
‘And did he credit you in the end, my Father?’
‘He did, and, to his honour, bade me depart in peace and take all my nation with me. You are enrolled in my nation, dear Otetiani. Come with me, since I have permission for you to come. Come, and reside with us again. We love you dearly, my son. According to the Christian law, Mistress Kate is the wife of another; nevertheless, you will be accounted as married to her according to Mohican law, if you acknowledge her child as yours. She is now at our town of Genisee, her heart consumed with love for you.’
‘She has positively assured me, Father, that she will never again speak to me.’
‘She tells me this: she gives you now another chance to rejoin her. We will take off the little one from the Quaker’s hut and find a wet-nurse for her from among our own nation. It is ill that a white child should drink the milk of a black woman. You will be happy with your wife and daughter. You will fight in our battles, and be revenged upon the American rebels, and assist in winning back America for King George.’
Almost he tempted me, but since I had clung to my way of duty before, I resolved not to swerve from it now, our cause being in such straits. I showed him my deep gratitude for his concern in my behalf, but declared that I could not so stretch my good conscience as to decamp from my post in the hour of danger. I would rather perish nobly in good company than live with Kate and bear the disgraceful name of deserter.
He told me, after a long silence: ‘Dear son, you have chosen right.’ He embraced me, and departed.
Meanwhile, the aspect of the battle had changed. General Arnold with three thousand men had counter-marched from the flank to the centre, where he attacked General Burgoyne, who was holding the house and the paddock of Freeman’s Farm with eight hundred regular British troops. Here the action was very heavy, with shot for shot and bayonet against clubbed rifle, for nearly four hours. The American marksmen climbed into the tops of high trees and there took popping shots at our officers, for twenty of whom they accounted. General Burgoyne himself was nearly taken off, a rifleman wounding his aide-de-camp (who rode in fine furniture) in mistake for him. Three subalterns of The Twentieth, none of whom had exceeded the age of seventeen, fell, and were buried that night in a common grave. Our battery of four brass guns was several times taken and retaken, but the Americans could make no use of them, for so often as they were lost, our gunners, of whom but a quarter remained unwounded, carried away the linstocks – to fetch them back once more when the guns were recovered. Had General Gates reinforced Arnold, as he was constantly urged to do, the line would have given way, for The Twentieth were near breaking. But he did nothing, and we were saved by General Phillips who, towards evening, brought up some field-guns at a trot and treated the enemy to a great shower of grape. Behind him came General Riedesel’s Brunswickers to take the enemy in flank. General Phillips himself rallied The Twentieth, who had lost half their number in killed and wounded, the Minden veterans acclaiming him with a hoarse shout. The Americans fell back. Though General Arnold, on foot now and pistol in hand, urged them to a crowning effort, they were exhausted and could do no more. In the gathering darkness he led them round in safety behind the impenetrable thicket which covered the American centre. So the battle ended, but for slight encounters as a few Americans, lost in the forest, tried to regain their lines through our posts. By midnight all was silent.
We lay upon our arms that night and at daybreak moved forward to within cannon-shot of the enemy, where we strengthened our camp by cutting down large trees, which served for breastworks. We threw our dead together into wide, shallow pits, and scarcely covered them with clay; the only tribute of respect allowed to fallen officers was to bury them apart from their men. Among the Massachusetts dead were found one or two young women, who, from the fact of one of them having a cartridge clasped in her hand, had no doubt accompanied their husbands or brothers on service in order to load spare firelocks for them in the line of battle. General Fraser shook his head when this circumstance was brought to his notice. ‘When women are brought into this damned business,’ he said, ‘it argues a resolution that will take some beating down.’
Taking all the results of this battle, our advantages from it were few indeed. We kept the field, but the possession of it was all that we could boast, for we were so much weakened that we could not at present press the attack. The Loyalists had nearly all gone off with the Indians. Their disappearance left us at a loss, from their having evinced a wide knowledge of this district and served us in the capacity of guides. Such levies are always precarious assistants to regular troops; they shrink from blows and scanty subsistence and their untrained condition gives them a temper easily dispirited by reverse. It needs the training of years and the tradition of former battles before a regiment can gain that cool presence of mind which will carry it forward unguardedly, to destroy itself if necessary in the cause to which it is devoted.
Two days later a letter reached General Burgoyne from Sir Henry Clinton at New York, confirming Thayendanegea’s ill news. This was the first messenger from the South that had arrived since the campaign began in earnest, nor had a single one of General Burgoyne’s own ten messengers succeeded in passing safe through hostile territory. The letter, written in cipher, ran merely: ‘You know my poverty; but if with 2,000 men, which is all that I can spare from this important post, I can do anything to facilitate your operations, I will make an attack upon Fort Montgomery: if you will let me know your wishes.’ Fort Montgomery, on Hudson’s River, lay eighty miles to the south of Albany.
This placed General Burgoyne in a predicament. Now, if he decided to extricate our army from the difficult position in which it was caught and, disobeying orders, retired to Canada, he would be behaving very shabbily towards General Clinton, who counted on him to advance. Yet the longer he waited, the more insecure his position. He had that very day been informed that the American General, Lincoln, had successfully attacked our posts and depots about Ticonderoga and the northern end of Lake George; and that he had captured nearly three hundred of our men, several gunboats and the whole of our remaining batteaux, with their crews, rescued a thousand prisoners and possessed himself of Mount Defiance, Mount Hope, and other outworks of the fortress. We were thus cut off from Canada.
General Burgoyne sent the same messenger instantly back to General Clinton, with a reply written small on thin paper, and screwed inside a silver bullet. The messenger reached Fort Montgomery, which, by General Burgoyne’s account, he expected to kind in British hands, and there inquired of two soldiers, whom he took to be Loyalists, for General Clinton. Such incredibly ill luck attended this expedition that the person before whom he was taken was not Sir Henry Clinton, but a distant relative of Sir Henry’s in the American service, who was then Governor of the State of New York. No sooner had the messenger discovered his error than he turned aside and swallowed the silver bullet: which was, however, recovered by means of an emetic. Upon its being unscrewed, the message was found and General Burgoyne’s intentions discovered: which were to hold General Gates in play while Sir Henry made a diversion below Albany to draw away his troops. But General Burgoyne revealed that our supplies would not last beyond October 12th.
The messenger was immediately hanged as a spy. ‘Out of thine own mouth shalt thou be condemned’, was the jest that hurried him into eternity.
We kept within our fortifications for the next few days, not having sufficient strength to attack the Americans, but being most averse from retreat. We hoped also that our continued presence at Saratoga would serve the obscure and perplexing strategy that had fixed us in our present situation, at least by preventing General Gates from marching with his fourteen thousand men to the aid of General Washington. General Burgoyne could not have guessed that he was the victim of a monstrous blunder; but it was so. The story is as follows. Lord George Germaine had in May drafted a dispatch to General Howe, ordering him to march up Hudson’s River. This dispatch was in reply to one from General Howe, who did not agree to the plan for co-operating with General Burgoyne in this manner, but favoured instead an attack upon Philadelphia, as the enemy’s capital city. However, upon calling at the War Office one morning, on his way to Sussex for a holiday, and funding the draft not yet copied fairly out, Lord George Germaine could not wait to sign it, but continued on his journey. The dispatch was therefore not signed, and therefore not sent, and his Lordship either clean forgot about it or assumed that it would take care of itself. Unfortunately, in another dispatch Lord George had, it seems, approved of the attack upon Philadelphia as a subsidiary enterprise; and General Howe was therefore unaware that he was still expected to assist in the attack upon Albany, or that our army had already set forth single-handed upon this project.
The American General, Charles Lee, who often hit the right nail upon the head, remarked of General Howe, not altogether unkindly: ‘He shut his eyes, fought his battles, drank his bottle, had his little whore, received his orders from North and Germaine (one more absurd than the other), shut his eyes, and fought again.’
Though we did not yet know it, the battle had brought out much bad blood in the American camp. General Gates, ‘that man-midwife’, as General Burgoyne privately named him for his sneaking and unctuous ways, made no mention whatever, in his report to Congress, of General Arnold’s presence upon the held of battle; and the chief colonel of his staff spread the absurd story that General Arnold had avoided the fight and spent the whole day in camp, drinking. By this means the single person who prevented us from storming the Heights and breaking through to Albany, and who had therefore saved General Gates’s reputation, if not his life, was teased and provoked into mutinous rage. He resigned his command. Every Northern general but one, General Lincoln, then signed a memorial entreating General Arnold to remain with them for one more fight at least; but General Gates withdrew his command from him, and allowed him to remain in the camp only in the capacity of a private person.
The war-like feeling of New England was intense at this time, largely because of the indignation and alarm that had been inculcated in the various provinces by reports of Indian savagery. The militia mustered in enormous numbers and for once paid attention to their officers; deserters were whipped and returned to duty by the Selectmen of their townships – one father even sent back his two recreant sons in chains to the General commanding a Provincial division with the Roman request, ‘Deal with them as they deserve.’