The water was mirror-calm, reflecting the trees, now lush green in the rays of the early sun, at the edge of the forest on the shore. The cloudless morning sky, sharply framing the mountains to the east, was brilliant.1
Apart from the signs of high summer, the scene was a repeat performance of Carleton’s advance up the lake, then roughened by a northeasterly, the previous fall: the same little gunboats manned by the Hessian gunners; the same bateaux filled, as Lieutenant Thomas Anburey pictured it, with “the mass of British scarlet and German dark blue, the green of the Jagers and the light blue of the dragoons” the same ships that had fought at Valcour.
Ahead lay Ticonderoga, fashioned by nature as a brilliant defense position where the waters of the miles-wide lake suddenly narrowed to only 400 yards as though giant fingers had pinched the land together, and then twisted to form an S bend. As if this were not enough, it was there through a tiny channel that the waters of Lake George tumbled over 3 miles of rocks and falls to join those of Lake Champlain.
The two lakes reached south through the forests in the form of a V toward the Hudson.
These rugged cliff-bordered narrows formed a gateway from New York to Canada and on both sides were dominated by strong fortifications: on the west by a fort constructed in local blue stone by the French twenty years before; on the east by a big star-shaped redoubt on the peak of a hill that the rebels had named Mount Independence. Across the strip of water between them was a bridge boom, made of chain and timber, supported by anchored gunships.
It was this bastion, which Carleton had hesitated to attack in October, that Burgoyne was now leading his army to storm.
He had learned caution from the clash with the hidden Arnold at Valcour the previous year. This time, as he moved his army along the lake from St. Johns, he was taking no chances of sudden attack by an enemy skilled at exploiting the forest. The forward corps was advancing a day ahead of the main army, preparing the camps, clearing surrounding brush to give the sentries a view of the approaches and, where necessary, building minor fortifications.
At the Bouquet River, they had been joined by 400 Indians, whom the general had welcomed on behalf of “The Great King, our common Father” with the formal ceremony they enjoyed.
“Etow! Etow! Etow!” they had roared in acknowledgment. Then, after praising the tribes, Burgoyne warned: “I positively forbid bloodshed when you are not opposed in arms. Aged men, women, children and prisoners must be held sacred from the knife or hatchet . . .”—an order which soon earned the mockery of Edmund Burke in the House of Commons, who said this would have the same effect as telling captive wild animals not to hurt anyone, then opening the doors of their cages. Indeed within three days, according to the Hessian General von Riedesel, Indians had ignored Burgoyne’s order and scalped ten prisoners from a rebel reconnaissance detachment.
The use of “savages,” bitterly criticized by the Whigs in London, even though they had been employed in previous major conflicts in North America, was regarded by Burgoyne and his officers as essential to forest operations. They had a big talent for scouting and could move through thick forest, judging their direction from the tops of the taller trees whose foliage was worn by the prevailing winds from the north. Their highly developed sense of smell could detect the smoke of enemy fires at great distances, and they could read the tracks on a woodland path with an exactness Burgoyne’s Loyalist woodsmen could not approach.
However, they were soon to be a great embarrassment to the commander. Their brutality was often impossible to control, and very frequently they were drunk.
At Crown Point, where Arnold had beached and burned his vessels nine months before, Burgoyne assembled his army, waiting for the stragglers who had been delayed in their voyage up the lake by thunderstorms.
Meanwhile, his forward detachments were probing the approaches to Ticonderoga, assessing the defenses, seizing prisoners to discover the size and nature of the garrison, which they soon found out was held by nearly 4,000 men—mostly New Englanders.
As he waited at Crown Point, with the rebel reconnaissance boats on the lake keeping just out of cannon-shot but watching his movements, Burgoyne was optimistic; his army was not as large as he had originally hoped, but it consisted primarily of professional soldiers and was led by competent and experienced senior officers.
In command of the 3,000 Hessians who formed nearly half his army was thirty-nine-year-old Major General von Riedesel, a tubby, cheerful German whose battle record in Europe was outstanding. All winter in Canada Von Riedesel had been training his men in forest fighting and in long-range firing because he “perceived that the American riflemen always shot further than our forces.”
The British units were led by Major General William Phillips, a fat veteran artillery officer, now serving as a general officer. Phillips was Clinton’s closest friend, and like him, a professional military snob arrogantly proud of the fact that he had acquired his early battle experience in Germany.
From Burgoyne’s viewpoint, however, he was a strong asset—a competent, hard-driving, blood-and-guts general. In his enthusiasm as artillery commander at the Battle of Minden, according to one story, he broke fifteen canes over the backs of his horse teams as he galloped the guns onto the field.
At the head of the advance corps, which included the Indians, was forty-eight-year-old Brigadier Simon Fraser, a Scot who had served under Wolfe in the Seven Years’ War and taken part in the sieges of Quebec and Louisburg. Burgoyne, who had fought with him before, had specially requested that he should join his army.
But though his combat troops gave him confidence, Burgoyne had substantial problems. Even if in London he had not known about Howe’s plans for Philadelphia, he was in no doubt about them now. A letter to Carleton from New York reached Quebec only two days after he did: All he could expect in the way of support from the south was a limited movement against the New York highlands. Not that this appeared to give the new commander in chief much anxiety; later he claimed he assumed Germain would order Howe to revise his strategy, but if this was the case, it was an assumption he kept to himself. And the extrovert Burgoyne was not normally a man to keep silent on so basic an issue.
Far more important than the junction with the army from New York was the critical situation of his supply and transport arrangements—a factor vital to any force operating, as Burgoyne’s would be, with very long lines of communication. Yet this appears to have been strangely low down his list of priorities; only after he had been in Canada a month did he suddenly seem to realize that although he had ample trains of cannon and equipment, he had only limited means of moving them, at least overland. Hurriedly he formally demanded that Carleton issue supply contracts for 500 wagons, together with 1,000 horses to pull them, and another 400 animals to make up his gun teams. Even if these were ready by the start of his campaign in a few weeks’ time, which was expecting a lot, he knew they would be inadequate to his needs, but he planned to commandeer more on the march. Finally, he had been unable to raise Canadian labor in anything like the numbers he had expected.
As a result, Burgoyne was about to advance hundreds of miles through rugged country into America without enough carts, horses or men to drive them. He was relying mainly on lakes and rivers to transport most of his equipment; but there were considerable land gaps between the stretches of water, and he did not have enough boats. By now he was only too conscious of the weakness of his supply system and knew that his men would have to live off the land to a greater extent than armies normally did.
As Burgoyne prepared his first big strike against the rebels from Lake Champlain, his subplan was already in motion. A detachment of several hundred men was on its way up the St. Lawrence under Colonel Barry St. Leger to Oswego, on the south bank of Lake Ontario, where it would rendezvous with 1,000 Indians under the famous chief Thayendanegea, as well as two corps of bitter Loyalists, before sweeping down the Mohawk River to approach the Hudson from the west.
It was, in fact, part of a three-pronged attack plan, for Burgoyne intended to send other troops to make a feint at Vermont while his main force advanced south.
The rebels, faced with actual attacks from the west and north and a threatened drive east for New England, would be forced to spread their very limited forces and thus weaken themselves on the route to Albany, where Burgoyne would launch his main weight.
On June 30, at Crown Point, Burgoyne’s army was ready for the assault on Ticonderoga. In his cabin aboard the Royal George, he wrote his general orders with his dramatist’s sense of occasion and an eye on posterity: “The Army,” he declared, “embarks tomorrow to approach the enemy. . . . During our progress, occasions may occur, in which nor difficulty, nor labor, nor life are to be regarded. This army must not retreat.”
At five the next morning3 the troops boarded the flatboats. The ships weighed anchor. The flotilla progressed slowly along the 10-mile stretch of water, narrowing all the time, toward Ticonderoga. The boats carrying the British under General Phillips hugged the west bank, the shore they would land on to take the old French fort, while the Germans under Von Riedesel, who were to storm Mount Independence, stayed close to the east bank.
The bigger vessels sailed steadily south in the main channel.
The whole expanse of the lake, which was three miles wide at Crown Point, “was covered with boats or bateaux . . . ,” recorded Lieutenant James Hadden, “the music and drums of the different regiments were continually playing. . . .”
By noon troops were ashore on both banks, three miles from their objectives. Burgoyne’s ships were anchored just out of range of the rebel cannon. A bridge of flatboats was set up across the water so that he could switch his troops easily from bank to bank as the situation demanded.
For three days the general, who from his HQ on the Royal George had a clear view of the operations on both wings, ordered little in the way of serious action. Fraser’s men of the advance corps, operating with overexcited and drunken Indians, attacked an outpost on the west bank and forced its defenders back to the main rebel lines. They threatened a highly vulnerable rebel outpost on a hill that dominated the approach waters of Lake George. Isolated, the Americans set fire to their blockhouses and evacuated the hill.
Meanwhile, on the east bank, Von Riedesel’s Germans were working closer to the three rows of fortifications below the redoubt on Mount Independence. Reconnaissance parties were reaching around the rear of the hill.
Two gunboats, their oars cutting foam in the still waters of the lake, moved out from the anchorage to explore the possibility of shooting a big enough hole in the rebels’ bridge boom for the ships to break through—an operation that would put British cannon on the south. But as they moved within range the rebel guns opened up from both sides, the successive crashes of their explosions echoing between the cliffs that bordered the narrows. Shot splashed all around the gunboats. Their commanders decided that their test mission was impossible and put about and made back to the anchorage.
Burgoyne, as the rebels surely realized, was merely setting up the scene, feeling for the weak points in the defense, tidying up the outposts in preparation for the main action. All night on July 3, possibly because they feared an attack in darkness, the rebel cannon bombarded the British lines on both banks.
By then Fraser’s reconnaissance parties had crossed the water that gushed into Champlain from Lake George and were probing south to Sugar Loaf Hill—a rugged square-shaped height, 800 feet above the water, with almost sheer, heavily timbered sides. It was not defended, which was surprising because it overlooked the rebel forts on both sides of the narrows. Presumably, Burgoyne concluded when the facts were reported to him, the American general had assumed it was so steep that it was impassable. He ordered Lieutenant William Twiss, his chief engineer, to explore the possibility of manhandling cannon to the summit.
After careful study of the hill, Twiss reported his view that Burgoyne’s proposal was practical. Once the battery was established, the guns would look down onto Fort Ticonderoga from a range of 1,400 yards; even the redoubt on the elevated summit of Mount Independence would only be 1,500 yards away and 400 feet below them.
The rebels’ error was of colossal proportions—so fundamental that it convinced Burgoyne, as he was to write home a few days later, “that they have no men of military science.” And he was about to exploit the opening they had left him.
All the next day working parties under the vigorous personal driving of General Phillips cut a track for the gun carriages up the steep mountainside, which was thick with maples and evergreens and obstructed by huge boulders. “Where a goat can go, a man can go,” Phillips had declaimed jubilantly when he heard Twiss’ report, “and where a man can go he can drag a gun.”
This was not quite true. For at parts of the track where presumably the men could “go,” they had to dismantle the cannon and sling them forward from the branches of the trees. By sunset, however, two 12-pounders were being set up on the summit of Sugar Loaf Hill.4 From their high position, the gun crews could select their targets within the walls of Fort Ticonderoga.
It was over—without a siege, without even a charge. One of the world’s supreme natural defense positions, which the rebels had spent a year fortifying and Arnold had given them nine months to strengthen by holding Carleton at Valcour, was no longer defendable. It was abcnit to fall to Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne without his agile gunners even firing a salvo from their new position. And the all-important psychological effect of the news—both on rebel morale and on the complex maneuvering in Paris and Madrid—was to be greater even than that of Trenton.
According to Horace Walpole, George III rushed into the Queen’s apartment shouting: “I have beat them, I have beat all the Americans.” In the House of Commons, Lord George Germain announced the capture of the famous fort as though it were the deathblow of the revolt.
At Ticonderoga on the afternoon of July 5, with his guns on Sugar Loaf Hill, Burgoyne was planning the climax. Von Riedesel’s divisions were trying to work their way around a big swamp to block the garrison’s escape route by land—the road that led from Mount Independence to Castleton to the east. But darkness fell before they could gain it.
There was another avenue of retreat for the rebel garrison—by water down the lake. But Burgoyne was relying on his ships to deal with that one.
All that night the rebel cannon were firing, causing the waiting men of Burgoyne’s army to wonder whether they were merely taking precautions against a night attack or planning a desperate assault. For flames had suddenly appeared within the old fort, illuminating the blue stone walls, spreading through the log barracks.
As the dawnlight began to streak the sky, three rebel deserters came through the British lines. The garrison, they said, had evacuated both forts. From Mount Independence on the far bank they were retreating down the Castleton road; others from Fort Ticonderoga had already left by boat for Skenesborough, 15 miles south along Lake Champlain.
Carefully, on guard against treachery, the soldiers from the outposts moved through the rebel lines into the old fort, which was now deserted and smoldering. Symbolically they hauled down the striped rebel flag from the masthead and ran up the British colors.
As soon as Burgoyne on the Royal George received the news of the evacuation, he ordered Fraser to cross the narrows with his advance corps in pursuit of the retreating rebels on the Castleton road, to the east of Mount Independence. Hurriedly the troops ran across the bridge boom the Americans had constructed across the water, designed to serve also as a barrier to Burgoyne’s ships.
The rebel general had anticipated this and had left four men at a gun position to hold the bridge. With grapeshot they could have made it uncrossable, but there was no sign of opposition. The reason soon became clear. “We found them,” recorded Lieutenant Anburey, “lying dead drunk by a case of Madeira.”
During that hot, sultry day, Fraser’s troops, marching light, chased the retreating rebels along a wagon track that curved over a range of short, steep, timbered hills toward Castleton, 20 miles from Ticonderoga. Following more slowly behind him were Von Riedesel and his Hessians, slowed down by their heavy equipment.
Meanwhile, the gunboats had blasted a gap in the bridge boom, and the British vessels were running before a northerly breeze into the southern section of Lake Champlain in close pursuit of those rebels who were attempting escape by water.
By three o’clock in the afternoon the British ships were nearing Skenesborough, a little timbered village near the southern tip of the lake, where the Americans had already landed. From here a narrow road cut south through the forest to Fort Ann and on via Fort Edward to Albany.
The rebels were not far ahead, and cannily hoping to intercept them, Burgoyne landed three regiments a little way up the shore north of Skenesborough with orders to get between the retreating rebels and Fort Ann. Then his ships moved on south along the lake to attack the stockaded village and the American ships that were anchored there.
It was a very short action fought by the American rear guard, merely to delay Burgoyne. The rebels set fire to three of their vessels and to Skenesborough. Flames licked upward from the roofs of the houses on the waterfront and spread fast to the surrounding forest.
Burgoyne wasted no time. He sent a detachment of 200 men up the road to Fort Ann after the rebels, whose retreat, he hoped, would by now be cut off by the regiments he had landed earlier.
His plan did not work quite as he had intended. For the country had proved too rugged for the soldiers to reach the Fort Ann road in time to check the Americans. Colonel John Hill, in command of the small unit advancing along the road toward Fort Ann, did not realize he was unsupported—at least not until too late when he was outnumbered by five to one.
Burgoyne managed to rescue the unit, but only just. They were held down on the top of a hill, their ammunition exhausted, when a Tory commanding an advance party of Indians saw the rebels closing on them.
The Indians refused to obey his order to attack. Unable to do anything more aggressive, he fell back on pretense and hollered out a war whoop.
The rebels, believing British reinforcements were close, checked, giving Hill a chance to extricate his men. By the time the Americans realized that they had been fooled reinforcements had in fact come up to cover the retreat.
By then Fraser had caught up with those rebels retreating down the Castleton road. His men, too, had a near escape in a short and violent battle in which they suddenly found themselves severely outnumbered. They were saved only by the precipitate arrival of Von Riedesel’s Hessians, advancing in column, with their drums pounding, lustily bellowing a German marching hymn.
It changed the course of the action. The rebels fell back once more into retreat.
Burgoyne, however, needed a breathing space. He allowed the Americans to remain unchallenged at Fort Ann and formed a 10-mile line, stretching from Skenesborough to Castleton, where as part of his feint plan, he ordered Von Riedesel to concentrate his forces in such a way as to suggest he was going to strike into New England.
So far the advance of the northern army, now some 120 miles south of St. Johns in Canada, had been so spectacular that it had exceeded even Burgoyne’s optimistic expectations. But the horses and the transport he had ordered in June had not yet arrived at the front. While he had supplies in boats on the lake, he had no way of getting them to his soldiers in the line. “A great part of the troops have wanted provisions for two days,” he wrote Germain from his HQ at Skenesborough, “and the whole lot of them have been without tents or baggage.”
So Burgoyne was forced to wait. Not that the delay was all that unpleasant; like Howe, Burgoyne had taken a mistress, who was the wife of one of his officers. He dined well and even sent several cases of claret and port over to Von Riedesel in Castleton, apologizing both for the quality and the quantity.
Burgoyne was worried that he had been forced to spare from his army, already well below strength, enough men to garrison Ticonderoga. From Skenesborough, he wrote to Carleton requesting him to send down from Canada enough soldiers to defend the fort.
During those few days while Burgoyne was waiting, another conflict was being fought beyond the edge of the forest. As he had recognized from the start, the attitude of the inhabitants of the country, many of whom he had been assured were Loyalists, was vital—not only because of the army’s need for food and forage but because they were the source of the militia. And the militia had to form the main part of any opposition that the rebels presented to check Burgoyne’s advance to Albany.
As Howe had forecast when he planned his strike to the south, Washington had sent up very few troops from the Continental Army to Philip Schuyler, rebel commander in the north; he needed every man he had to shadow the main British force. Howe had not yet activated his secret plan to drive for Philadelphia, but his columns were on the march in Jersey. Schuyler’s only hope, therefore, was to rally enough men from upper New York and New England to hold off Burgoyne—just as the Tories became vital to Gentleman Johnny, if he was to stop him.
Burgoyne was very confident, with reason. His army of professionals was more than double the size of the force, mainly amateurs, Schuyler so far had to oppose him. His easy, bloodless capture of the almost impregnable Ticonderoga had made an immense impact on the local Americans; his swift advance had spread terror not only among the farms of upper New York but also in New England. Loyalists were streaming into his camp at Skenesborough with offers to fight; deserters from the rebel army, dazed and demoralized by the fall of the famous fort, were joining him every day. In the towns beyond the forest, Tories were acting as his recruiting agents, as well as his quartermasters.
Schuyler was attempting to counter the efforts of the Tories by demanding a scorched earth policy in the name of revolutionary patriotism. Farmers were being pressured to leave their homes, ordered to take their cattle with them and to destroy all crops and fodder they had to leave behind. By proclamation, the rebel general warned that “to give aid and comfort to the enemy would be punished as treason to the United States.”
At Manchester, 30 miles south of Castleton, the rebel Colonel Seth Warner had set up a rallying point, aimed at boosting local morale and calling men to fight from New England. His troops scoured the countryside, ensuring that Schuyler’s destruction policy was carried out, threatening farmers to join Warner and attacking Loyalists in bitter, brutal raids.
Von Riedesel soon realized that the 400 men who streamed into Castleton from outlying districts to swear the oath of allegiance to the King were not all ardent Loyalists. They included observers who were taking careful notes. “No sooner had Colonel Warner had the report of these spies,” he recorded, “than he at once advanced, plundered the Loyalists, took away their cattle and even carried off the men themselves.”
The fight between the Tories and the rebels for the loyalty of local Americans was at a critical stage. The British decision, urged strongly from the distant offices in Whitehall, to use the “savages” had already backlashed. Anyone living near Indian country could not help feeling uneasy about any power that employed them. Even Burgoyne, who had favored their use, wrote Germain that if left to themselves, they would commit “enormities too horrid to think of.”
It was now, at this delicate and critical stage in the war for public opinion, that Jane McCrea, the pretty young fiancee of one of Burgoyne’s American Tory officers, was murdered. She lived in country occupied by the rebels, and thinking she would be safer with the army, her husband-to-be sent two Indians to fetch her. She was almost at the British camp when, according to Burgoyne, the two men quarreled over which of them should claim the promised reward for her safe-conduct, and one settled the argument promptly by killing her with his hatchet.5
The crime appalled the army and the rebels and, more significant at the moment, the countryside for miles around. The futile, childish murder underlined only too vividly what could happen and drove many borderline Loyalists into the ranks of the rebels.
Furious, Burgoyne demanded that the tribe should hand over the murderer for trial and execution, but St. Luc Le Corne, the Frenchman in charge of the Indians, warned him that if he insisted, they would go on an angry rampage—a prospect, the general reluctantly was forced to concede, far more evil than leaving the crime unpunished.
The Indians were seething with discontent. Burgoyne maintained this was because he had curbed the cruelties they enjoyed, but Le Corne claimed later that the general’s arrogant handling of them was unsubtle and demeaning. “Burgoyne . . . ,” he asserted with Gallic scorn, “is as heavy as a German.”
Meanwhile, at Castleton, Von Riedesel had realized the necessity of protecting the Loyalists from Warner’s brutalities and asked Burgoyne’s permission to “attack the traitors.” A foraging detachment did force the rebel colonel to drop back from Manchester to Arlington, but Burgoyne refused to authorize a movement in force. For he was about to order the advance of the whole army.
His overwhelming success had placed him in a position on the southern section of Lake Champlain where he had never planned to be. From the start, his intended communication route and the line of advance of his army had been along Lake Champlain to Ticonderoga, by land around the three miles of rapids to Lake George and by water to Fort George at its southern tip. From there the Hudson at Fort Edward was only 14 miles along a fairly easy wagon track.
He had advanced to Skenesborough only because of the unexpected chance to cut off the escaping garrison from the fort. To execute his original plan, he would have to withdraw his troops to Ticonderoga in order to get them on to Lake George, a “retrograde movement” as Burgoyne described it, which at that precise stage in the psychological conflict in the townships of New York and New England, might carry a damaging odor of retreat.
Instead, he now planned to strike south straight through the forest to Fort Edward. It was only 23 miles and had the important strategical advantage of forcing the rebels to abandon Fort George—his vital supply point at the southern tip of Lake George, which they now held in force—if they did not want to risk being cut off from Schuyler’s main force.
This was a major change in policy. Although the distance was not great, it meant taking an army of more than 7,000 men along a narrow trail that wound through giant pines and hemlocks growing closely together on hilly ground interlaced with creeks and. marshes. Under any circumstances, the march with equipment in the damp heat of high summer would have been extremely arduous; as it was, informed of the plan by their spies, the rebels had done everything they could to harass the operation.
Hundreds of rebel axmen had felled trees to block the trail, dropping them from both sides so they fell across each other. As Sergeant Roger Lamb, a surgeon’s mate, recorded, they had destroyed “no less than forty bridges” that crossed the streams and marshes, “one of which was over a morass two miles in extent.” They rolled giant boulders into Wood Creek, to prevent Burgoyne from bringing up his equipment along the waterway that covered most of the first leg of the journey to Fort Ann. Every day Philip Schuyler could delay the British army was vital because it gave him more time to rally the militia and to enforce his scorched earth policy on the countryside. If Burgoyne’s troops could not live off the country, then he would have to halt—as he had been forced to already—until food and forage could be brought down from the north.
In fact, the blocking of the trail did not delay Burgoyne more than a few days, since he was held up anyway by his supply problems, but clearing it required enormous effort. It took his huge working parties, operating under the orders of his engineers, the best part of two weeks to clear the obstructions and rebuild the bridges. The heat was intense. Swarms of mosquitoes, known as “punkies” by the local inhabitants, attacked the sweating, heaving soldiers. The labor added its toll to men already suffering from the diseases of the swamp. “By now,” recorded Von Riedesel, “many of the troops were suffering from Dysentery.”
On July 25, nearly three weeks after he had blasted his way into Skenesborough, the northern army began its slow advance through the forest track. It took the men four long days, but by the twenty-ninth they were through the forest and “encamped,” as Lieutenant Digby put it, “on a beautiful situation from whence you saw the most romantic prospect of Hudson’s River, interspersed with many small islands.”
Albany lay before them, only 30 miles away through easy marching country with a river as a transport route. The rebel force, weighted heavily with untrained farmers and still greatly inferior to the British army, had dropped back to Saratoga, 20 miles down the Hudson. It could hardly have withstood an attack, but it could retreat. And Burgoyne dared not order an advance— not yet, not until supplies had been brought up to the river along the track from Fort George on the lake.
By now there was encouraging news from St. Leger in the west. On August 3, four days after Burgoyne’s army broke through the forest by the Hudson, the Mohawk River detachment that had advanced from Oswego on Lake Ontario arrived at Fort Stanwix, an old ruined fortification that the rebels had hurriedly repaired and garrisoned.
St. Leger’s force now totaled 1,700 men, including the Royal Greens, a corps of tough and bitter Loyalists under the command of Colonel John Butler, and 1,000 Indians led by Thayendanegea, the Mohawk chief.
The fort had to be taken before St. Leger could proceed down the river valley to the Hudson to cooperate with Burgoyne. So far the post was still under siege, but in a dramatic ambush in the rugged Oriskany Gorge a few miles from Stanwix, St. Leger’s Loyalists and Indians had attacked a rebel relief column on its way from Fort Dayton to the south. According to the British colonel, his men had killed 400 rebels and captured another 200. What remained of the relief column had fled.
The victory had been marked by only one minor adverse fact. During the battle, while their besiegers were reduced by detachments to Oriskany, the Stanwix garrison had sallied out of the fort and raided St. Leger’s baggage. More significant, they had taken the Indians’ blankets. When compared with the stark figures of the rebel casualties, the raid did not seem to be of much moment at the time. Later, however, it was to prove of vital importance.
The news of Oriskany, with its implication that Fort Stanwix would soon be captured, was welcome to Burgoyne at Fort Edward. For despite his success, he had much cause for anxiety. Of the 1,400 horses contracted for in June in Canada, only 500 had arrived. Many of his wagons had been constructed hurriedly with unseasoned timber and were already breaking up. He needed to transport his flatboats from Lake George to the Hudson, as well as his equipment and his cannon. Gradually, with his limited haulage capacity—he had even commandeered some oxen—he was making progress, but it was far too slow.
And every day Schuyler’s force at Saratoga was increasing. He still only had 4,500 men, nearly all from the militia, but the British margin of superiority was being continually narrowed. Burgoyne had just heard from Carleton, who refused his request to garrison Fort Ticonderoga, since his orders, which Burgoyne had helped frame, specifically limited his operational area to within the borders of Canada. This meant that the British general would have to leave at Ticonderoga men he suspected he was going to need, as, indeed, he was going to need St. Leger’s force.
In addition, Schuyler’s scorched earth policy was giving Burgoyne foraging problems, though he tried to shrug them off bravely. “The perseverance of the enemy in driving both people and cattle before them as they retreat,” he wrote Germain, “seems to me an act of desperation or folly. The only purpose is to retard me for a time, which it certainly does. But it cannot finally injure me.”
But time was now of the essence. Because of the delays, the junction with Howe at Albany, which in Canada and even at Skenesborough had not seemed overly vital, had now become an absolute necessity. “I have no news of Sir William Howe,” Burgoyne wrote Germain anxiously on July 30. “I have employed the most enterprising characters and offered very promising rewards but, of ten messengers sent at different times and by different routes, not one is returned to me. . . .”
He did not have to wait much longer. Three days later an express arrived from Howe, but the news it contained disturbed Burgoyne so much he did not even mention it to Von Riedesel, who commanded half his army. Now there was no question any longer of Germain’s canceling Howe’s plans to go to Philadelphia. He was already on his way. No British troops would be at Albany to meet Burgoyne—unless Washington marched there with the main rebel army. “If he goes to the northward . . . ,” wrote Howe, “be assured I will soon be after him to relieve you . . . success be ever with you.”
By August 3, when Burgoyne read the letter in his headquarters near Fort Edward, Howe’s army had been aboard a fleet of more than 260 vessels, sailing south, for two weeks.