Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought

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the saratoga campaign 299

contrast to Baum’s and Breymann’s regulars. In fact, New Hampshire

and Vermont were major recruiting areas in the French and Indian

Wars and many men were former rangers or Provincials.”

Once the

defenses had been breached, hand-to-hand fighting followed: “For a

few seconds . . . The bayonet, the butt of the rifle, the saber, the pike,

were in full play, and men fell, as they rarely fall in modern war, under

the direct blows of the war.”

This was classic partisan warfare, so

rarely encountered in the formal volley battles of European theaters of

the eighteenth century. Baum was killed, and most of his command

either became casualties or were captured.

Colonel Heinrich Breymann’s relief column arrived just in time to

be overwhelmed in its turn by Stark and Seth Warner’s Green Mountain

Boys. Breymann was wounded but managed to escape. In this one action

Burgoyne had lost 15 percent of his total force (almost 700 captured and

200 killed). Horatio Gates, on the other hand, would enjoy not only the

addition of Arnold’s returned force and Morgan’s elite riflemen sent up

from Pennsylvania, but also a healthy influx of militia carried into his

army on the crest of enthusiasm created by the great victory at Bennington.

Burgoyne would ruefully report to Germain, “Wherever the King’s forces

point, militia to the amount of three or four thousand assemble in twenty-

four hours.”

After Hubbardton and Stanwix, Bennington was the most

crushing blow to Burgoyne’s ambitions, and one from which he never

recovered. He could hear the third witch cackling offstage.

By the end of August Burgoyne was seriously rattled and already

beginning to cast about for excuses in case of failure. Writing to Germain

on 20 August, he lined up four. First, the number of insurgents: “The

Hampshire Grants [Vermont] . . . a country unpeopled and almost

unknown in the last war, now abounds in the most active and rebellious

race of the continent.” Second, the scorched-earth policy: “In all parts

the industry and management in driving cattle and removing corn are

indefatigable and certain.” Third, the failure of Howe to support him:

“Another most embarrassing circumstance is the want of communication

with Sir William Howe . . . No operation, my Lord, has yet been

undertaken in my favour.” Fourth, the unreasonable restrictions of his

patriot battles 300

orders: “Had I latitude in my orders, I should think it my duty to wait

in this position, or perhaps go back as far as Fort Edward . . . but my

orders being positive to ‘force a junction with Sir William Howe,’ I

apprehend I am not at liberty to remain inactive.” He ended, somewhat

ominously, “Whatever may be my fate my Lord, I submit my actions to

the breast of the King, and to the candid judgment of my profession.”

It sounded like the last words of a condemned man.

As to Burgoyne’s fourth point, no eighteenth-century commander

3,500 miles away could be held to the letter of his orders when it took

months for communications to go back and forth to London. There was,

of necessity, a great degree of autonomy, because it was impossible for

London to micromanage the American war (although generals complained

of micromanagement nevertheless). Germain, on receiving Burgoyne’s

letter, was understandably taken aback: “What alarms me most is that

he thinks his orders to go to Albany to force a junction with Sir William

Howe are so positive that he must attempt at all events the obeying them,

tho’ at the same time he acquaints me that Sir William Howe has sent

him word that he has gone to Philadelphia, and indeed nothing that Sir

William says could give him reason to hope that any effort would be made

in his favour.” As if to underscore the issue of time lag, Burgoyne’s army

would already be in the bag when Germain received the letter.

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Horatio Gates chose his ground well. Having first established his

headquarters at Stillwater, he moved three miles north onto the bluffs

above the west bank of the Hudson. Stillwater lay in flat land that

would lend itself advantageously to the massed volley and artillery

tactics of the Anglo-German army. On the other hand, the heavily

wooded terrain of his new location, slashed with deep ravines, would

disrupt troop deployment in solid masses and favor the more irregular

tactics of the patriot army. Perched high above the river and the river

road to Albany, he enjoyed a commanding advantage that was further

reinforced by the skillful fortification engineering of Polish-born and

French-trained Thaddeus Kosciuszko.

the saratoga campaign 301

American

British

American movements

British movements

Freeman’s

Farm

19 September 1777

MILES

/2 1

Arnold

Poor

Von Riedesel

BURGOYNE

Hamilton

BURGOYNE’S

Fraser

Learned

Patterson

Glover

GATES’S

Bemis Heights

FREEMAN’S

FARM

Sword House

Morgan

Arnold

Dearborn

Learned

Bemis’s

Tavern

On 13 September Burgoyne crossed over to the western side of the

Hudson. His choices were limited. There was no adequate road down

the eastern shore, and even if there had been, he would eventually

have been forced to make an opposed crossing of the river to get to

Albany—not something to be relished. The Americans had to be

tackled sooner or later; they could not simply be bypassed.

Gates had

about 7,000 men, Burgoyne about 4,600 regulars plus another 1,000 in

assorted Canadians, bateaux-men, and Indians; but one crucial factor

separated them. Burgoyne’s losses could not be replaced, whereas

Gates was receiving a steady stream of reinforcements. The odds, as

patriot battles 302

Burgoyne was about to discover, were heavily stacked in favor of the

house.

Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkinson, Gates’s deputy adjutant

general, described the strength of the American positions.

General Gates’s right occupied the brow of a hill near the river,

with which it was connected by a deep intrenchment . . . his front

was covered from the right to the left of the centre, by a sharp ravine

running parallel with his line and closely wooded; from thence to

the knoll on the extreme left, the ground was level and had been

partially cleared . . . beyond which in front of his left flank, and

extending to the enemy’s right, there were several small fields in

very imperfect cultivation, the surface broken and obstructed with

stumps and fallen timber . . . The right was almost impracticable

[to be attacked]; the left difficult of approach.

On the right wing, Gates had Benjamin Lincoln commanding John

Glover’s brigade (approximately 1,600 men), John Nixon’s brigade

(approximately 1,300), and John Paterson’s brigade (about 1,240). On

the left, Gates had the formidable if impossible (from Gates’s point of

view) Benedict Arnold commanding Enoch Poor’s 1,300 men. Ebenezer

Learned’s brigade was about 1,400 all told. In addition, Arnold had Daniel

Morgan’s 374 riflemen, certainly ranked among the finest light infantry

of the day, and Henry Dearborn’s 300 light infantry. Gates could also call

on an artillery train of twenty-two pieces.

Burgoyne knew that Gates’s defenses were too strong to allow

him to blow open the river road. He had to probe inland and see

if he could work his way around the patriot left flank, perhaps by

exploiting the high ground to the west. He divided his force into

three columns. The left wing (approximately 1,100 men) under von

Riedesel would move down the river road and hold in place the

American right wing. The right column (2,000 strong) under Simon

Fraser went the farthest inland. It was made up of the crack units of

Burgoyne’s army: ten companies of light infantry under Major Lord

Balcarres, and ten companies of grenadiers under the hard-drinking

the saratoga campaign 303

Major John Dyke Acland. The battalion companies of the 24th

Foot (Fraser’s own regiment) were also attached, as were about 150

Loyalists, 50 Indians, and 100 or so British and German marksmen.

The center column (about 1,100 men) was commanded by Lieutenant

Colonel James Inglis Hamilton. He had the battalion companies of

the 9th, 20th, 21st, and 62nd Foot as well as the Royal Artillery under

Captain Thomas Jones. Burgoyne accompanied the center column.

Separated by distance and rough terrain, Burgoyne’s three columns

would never be properly coordinated. In total there were about 4,200

British and German troops in the field. Gates could muster something

close to 9,000 men.

Hamilton entered the Great Ravine, which ran parallel to the

American lines, and waited there until Fraser’s force had reached the

high ground farther west.

Back in American headquarters Arnold stormed and raged at

Gates. Rather than sitting behind their defenses, Arnold urged his

commander to use the wooded terrain to best advantage and make a

preemptive strike. To wait would be to invite a flanking attack. Gates

eventually agreed to release Morgan and Dearborn on the left.

At about 12:30 pm elements of Hamilton’s advance guard (9th

Foot) moved across the roughly cleared field of Freeman’s Farm and

were hit by Morgan’s rifles firing from the cover of the woodland on

the southern fringe of the clearing. The effect was devastating, “every

officer being killed or wounded,” recorded Lieutenant William Digby

of the 53rd Foot. The surviving advance guard ran back to the safety

of the main body. Morgan’s men, unable to contain their elation, chased

after them and were counterattacked by units from Fraser’s light

infantry, which advanced with disciplined and coordinated volley fire.

For a while things quietened.

After a good deal of acrimonious wrangling between Gates and

Arnold, Gates ordered 900 men from Enoch Poor’s brigade (primarily

Colonel Joseph Cilley’s 1st New Hampshires and Colonel Alexander

Scammell’s 3rd New Hampshires) to support Morgan and Dearborn.

The British lined the northern edge of the Freeman’s Farm clearing

with the 21st Foot on the right, the 62nd in the center, and the 20th

patriot battles 304

on the left. The 9th was kept back in reserve. Burgoyne and his staff

positioned themselves immediately behind the center troops.

It was about 1:30 pm when the center exploded. Arnold attempted to

drive a wedge between Hamilton’s and Fraser’s forces but was beaten off

with heavy losses. Arnold was in the thick of it, as a man from Dearborn’s

corps recorded, “riding in front of the lines, his eyes flashing . . . a voice

that rang as clear as a trumpet.”

Burgoyne too, in sharp contrast to

Gates (whom Colonel Richard Varick said spent the battle “in Dr Pott’s

tent backbiting his neighbours”),

did not flinch when the bullets were

flying. Sergeant Roger Lamb remembered: “General Burgoyne, during

this conflict behaved with great personal bravery. He shunned no danger;

his presence and conduct animated the troops, for they greatly loved the

General. He delivered his orders with precision and coolness, and in the

heat, danger, and fury of the fight, maintained the true characteristics of

the soldier—serenity, fortitude, and undaunted intrepidity.”

The battle for the center raged back and forth for over three hours.

(Scammell called it “the hottest Fire of Canon and Musquetry” that

he ever heard in his life.) “The British artillery,” recorded Wilkinson,

“fell into our possession at every charge but we could neither turn the

pieces upon the enemy, not bring them off; the wood prevented the

last, and the want of a match the first, as the lint stock was invariably

carried off, and the rapidity of the transitions did not allow us time to

provide one.”

The 62nd Foot, fired on from its front and both flanks,

took a terrible beating, losing 83 percent of its original complement

of 350, including 35 officers and two lieutenant colonels.

Of the

approximately 800 men engaged in the three center British regiments,

about 350 (44 percent) became casualties.

The British gunners were

also hammered. Lieutenant James Hadden was the only artillery

officer serving with the center column not to be hit. Thirty-six out

of 48 artillerymen (75 percent) became casualties. Fraser, out on the

British right, had been all but neutralized by Morgan and Dearborn,

and Burgoyne had not yet called in von Riedesel. Arnold was being

sucked into the center, but Burgoyne could not, did not, organize his

wings to move in and crush him.

Von Riedesel was an astute soldier. Realizing that the British center

the saratoga campaign 305

was perilously close to collapse, he organized a defensive force of 800

men under Brigadier General Johann Specht and set off with about

500 men of his own regiment plus two companies of the Regiment

Rhetz, and two 6-pounders commanded by Captain Georg Pausch. It

was now around 5:30 pm. Von Riedesel’s intervention was critical, for

when he arrived he found the battle “raging its fiercest. The Americans

far superior in numbers . . . The three brave English regiments had

been . . . thinned down to one-half, and now formed a small band

surrounded by heaps of dead and wounded.”

The Germans charged

into Arnold’s right flank “on the double quick,” with Pausch opening

up at close range with deadly volleys of canister. As at Hubbardton, von

Riedesel had saved the British bacon.

Arnold again went to Gates for more men, and Gates (who never

laid eyes on the front lines) reluctantly agreed to commit Learned’s

brigade to the critical battle for the center. One more push, pleaded

Arnold, and the battered British regiments would cave. Learned’s

brigade, however, lost its way and wandered off to attack Fraser on

the British right, where it was easily repulsed and failed to make any

impact on the outcome.

Mutual exhaustion and encroaching darkness ended what would

prove to be one of the pivotal battles of history. Technically the British

had “won” because they remained in possession of the battlefield, but

in reality they were finished. The British lieutenant Thomas Anburey

viewed the carnage and the plight of the wounded: “Some of them

begged they might lie and die, some upon the least movement were put

in the most horrid tortures, and all had near a mile to be conveyed to the

hospitals.”

The Anglo-German forces had suffered 524 casualties, 160

killed and 364 wounded. The Americans suffered around 300 casualties,

of whom 80 were killed in action.

Lieutenant Digby’s journal gives some insight into the tactical prob-

lem the terrain posed the British: “From the situation of the ground, and

their being perfectly acquainted with it, the whole of our troops could not

be brought to engage together, which was a very material disadvantage.”

For an army that was trained to lay down concentrations of volley fire,

this was obviously a huge problem. For the patriots, on the other hand,

patriot battles 306

the broken and wooded ground played to their strong suit. An Ameri-

can, Captain E. Wakefield, recalled that Morgan “astonished the English

and Germans with the deadly fire of his rifles.” After the battle, Bur

goyne (perhaps remembering what he had seen at Bunker’s Hill) stressed

that the bayonet alone could break the tactical impasse: “The impetuos

ity and uncertain aim of the British Troops in giving their fire, and the

mistake they are still under, in preferring it to the Baynotte, is much to be

lamented.”

The problem, however, was much better appreciated by the

poor old infantryman who, in order to get within bayonet-point range,

would have to receive fire without being able to return it, an act of self-

sacrifice that took courage, discipline, and training of a very high order. It

was not that these qualities were lacking, but the understandable tempta

tion was to try to keep the enemy at a distance with volley fire, no matter

how inefficient it turned out to be.

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After Freeman’s Farm Burgoyne’s instinct was to attack the next

morning. Perhaps he was dissuaded by Simon Fraser, who begged

for time to rest the exhausted troops. Perhaps it was the message from

Henry Clinton that arrived on the twenty-first, informing him of an

imminent attack on the Hudson forts. Would it not be wise, given Gates’s

numerical superiority, to wait and see if Clinton’s intervention might

draw off a significant chunk of the patriot army? Burgoyne informed

Clinton that he could hang on until 12 October, but no later. The school

of “what ifs,” on the other hand, points out that the Americans were

also exhausted and in chaos after Freeman’s Farm. A quick strike

might have broken open the way to Albany. In any event, Burgoyne

chose to dig in, and for over two weeks there was an uneasy standoff.

The Americans constantly probed and harassed Burgoyne’s exhausted

army so that no “officer or soldier ever slept during the interval without

his clothes,” and no officer “passed a single night without being upon

his legs occasionally at different hours.”

Burgoyne’s options were strictly limited, but desperation or his old

cavalry officer’s aggressive instinct led him on. Against von Riedesel’s

the saratoga campaign 307

counsel (which favored a retreat back to the Batten Kill on the eastern

shore of the Hudson, preparatory to a full-scale retreat), he decided to

make a reconnaissance in force to again test the American left. But as von

Riedesel feared, it was to be neither fish nor fowl. Burgoyne did not have

the manpower to deal with the now considerable weight of Gates’s army

of perhaps 10,000 to 13,000 men against Burgoyne’s 4,000 effectives. The

1,500-man force Burgoyne took out on 7 October was a forlorn hope.

Once more there were three columns. Fraser was again on the

right with the light infantry (under Lord Balcarres) and his own 24th

Arnold wounded

Fraser

shot

Great

Redoubt

Canadians

Balcarres

Lincoln

Bemis Heights

7 October 1777

ATES’S

URGOYNE’S

Bemis’s

Tavern

Arnold

FRASER

Poor

Learned

Morgan

B RITISH

RETREAT

MILES

/2 1

Breymann’s

Redoubt

Balcarres’s

Redoubt

Freeman’s Farm

Acland

Riedesel

American

British

American movements

British movements

patriot battles 308

Foot. Von Riedesel was in the center, and on the left were Acland’s

grenadiers. At around 1:00 pm Fraser reached Barber’s wheat field, a

mile or so to the west of Freeman’s Farm, and sent out a foraging party.

Von Riedesel was not happy with the disposition. The flanks were in

woods, which offered cover to attackers, and off on the British right

flank was a hill, which would serve the patriots very nicely as a platform

for enfilading fire.

Once more Arnold and Gates locked horns. If Gates did not move

his complacent rump, Arnold railed, there was a real danger of his left

wing being rolled up. Gates suggested Morgan and Dearborn make

a modest excursion around the British right flank, and when Arnold

lost his temper at what he thought was a pusillanimous response, Gates

promptly sacked him. Benjamin Lincoln prevailed on Gates to unleash

a coordinated attack with Poor targeting the British left (Acland’s

grenadiers) while Morgan circled around and came down off the hill to

hit Fraser. Learned would take on von Riedesel in the center when both

the flank attacks were in place.

At about 3:00 pm Poor’s 1st, 2nd, and 3rd New Hampshire

Continentals hit Acland’s grenadiers like a wrecking ball. Acland was

shot through both legs and was about to be finished off by an enthusiastic

teenage patriot when he was saved by the timely arrival of James

Wilkinson. (Acland would die, years later, from a chill caught while

fighting a duel.) At the same time Morgan’s riflemen “poured down like

a torrent from the hill” and struck Balcarres’s light infantry in its front

and right flank. As Balcarres tried to maneuver to the right to fend off

the attack, Dearborn’s light infantry attacked his rear. Von Riedesel’s

misgivings were well-founded, as Lieutenant Digby described: “Our

heavy guns began to play, but the wood around being thick, and their

exact knowledge of our small force, caused them to advance in great

numbers, pouring in a superiority of fire from Detachments ordered to

hang about our flanks.”

The British ranks broke and made a run to

Balcarres’s Redoubt, a substantial log-and-earth fort on the old Freeman

Farm battlefield.

Arnold, perhaps “exhilarated” with a dipper or two of rum,

charged into the battle, behaving “more like a madman than a cool and