God Save Benedict Arnold, page 19
The Germans came on “with great vigor.” At the same time, Pausch’s guns “directed a murderous grapeshot fire against the enemy.” The Englishmen, who had teetered on the verge of defeat, now “bellowed one hurrah after another.”
Caught in the middle, the Americans on the right quickly fell back. Exhausted men, their faces blackened from gunpowder, stumbled across a field descending into darkness. Some of the Americans turned to fire the last of their ammunition at faintly perceived targets in the gloom. They sought the safety of the woods, leaving the British to occupy the open ground. The shooting subsided—a tremulous calm descended on the place of battle.
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AS SOON AS the sun slipped out of sight, the field assumed the coolness of an autumn evening. Men who had sweated for hours felt a sudden chill. Most American troops staggered back to their encampment. Colonel Scammell’s men stayed out observing the enemy until almost midnight.
On both sides, officers tallied the casualties. Officially, 100 Americans had been killed, 325 wounded. British losses were 160 killed, 364 wounded. The real toll was not counted in numbers but in the loss of friends, relatives, comrades known intimately, faces never to be seen again.
According to the standards of war, the British had “won” the battle. They held the contested field while the Americans retreated. But it was, as British lieutenant Digby observed, a “dear bought victory.” General Burgoyne would soon admit that “no fruits, honour excepted, were attained with the preceding victory.”
His men had it hardest that night. Lacking food and tents, they formed in ranks and lay down on the ground, each man clutching his musket. If the Americans launched an attack in the dark, they would be ready to respond instantly. “We remained in our ranks,” Lieutenant Digby recorded, “and though we heard the groans of our wounded and dying at a small distance, yet could not assist them till morning.”
Their sleep was hardly restful. The temperature dropped below freezing. In the black of night, the zone of battle became a replica of hell. Some of the dead had been hurriedly dragged into mass graves, but bodies and parts of bodies still littered the ground. The stench of spilled blood and disemboweled men turned the air septic. The groans, wails, and calls for help seemed to seep up from the stubbled ground itself. Spectral figures—wives searching for missing husbands, camp followers taking the opportunity to loot dead bodies—flitted through the shadows. Wolves, attracted by the prospect of fresh carrion, skulked down from the hills.
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AND SO, ON a day in September, by the strange alchemy of war, an event at a tiny clearing in an obscure woodland along the Hudson River had shaped the history of America. The outcome, so favorable to the patriots, was largely the result of the aggressive energy of Benedict Arnold and the men he led.
The war, even the struggle at Saratoga, was far from over. But those on both sides would not think of the conflict in the same way again. A shadow passed over British prospects for victory—the hearts of American patriots glowed with renewed hope.
14
Now or Never
“The courage and obstinacy with which the Americans fought were the astonishment of everyone,” wrote British lieutenant Thomas Anbury after the battle that Benedict Arnold led on September 19. He concluded, “They are not that contemptible enemy we had hitherto imagined them.”
A German soldier would marvel about the patriots, “I question whether any war has ever witnessed regular troops withstand hostile fire so courageously and stubbornly as these farmers and burghers.” American general John Glover suggested the reason: The patriots were fighting “for their all.”
When the sun rose on September 20, both sides waited nervously for a renewal of combat. General Gates preferred to suspend fighting until he was able to replenish his supply of gunpowder from Albany, which he did a day later. General Burgoyne hoped that a rapid attack would crack the enemy line, but the sheer exhaustion of his troops required that he too wait a day to reorganize. By the following day, he had his own reason to delay.
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GENERAL WILLIAM HOWE, the overall British commander in America, had decided to strike Philadelphia. His thinking was that a threat to the American capital would require George Washington to commit his army to a climactic battle. A British victory would win the war. Washington was puzzled. Why didn’t Howe make the more obvious move and attack northward along the Hudson River to support Burgoyne and split the colonies?
After weeks of preparation and hesitation, Howe loaded fifteen thousand troops onto ships at New York City and headed for the Chesapeake Bay. At the end of August, he landed his army fifty miles from the rebel capital. Congress made a hasty retreat into the Pennsylvania hinterlands. On September 11, 1777, Howe fought Washington’s army at Chadds Ford on Brandywine Creek and defeated the patriots with heavy casualties. He would capture Philadelphia on September 26. His success made it even more crucial that patriots hold the line at Bemis Heights.
Howe left Sir Henry Clinton, a glum, quarrelsome officer with little enthusiasm for the war in America, to maintain the British position in New York City. He gave Clinton vague instructions to make a move “in favor of General Burgoyne’s approaching Albany,” once more troops from England reinforced New York.
Acknowledging Burgoyne’s pleas for help, Clinton had written to him: “You know my good-will and are not ignorant of my poverty. If you think 2000 men can assist you effectively, I will make a push … in about ten days.” The push he referred to was an attack on the American forts guarding the Hudson Highlands. If he could get past them, he could sail on up to Albany to cooperate with Burgoyne, or perhaps draw some of Gates’s troops south. The encrypted message, sent on September 11, arrived at Burgoyne’s camp on the twenty-first, two days after the fighting at Freeman’s Farm. Although Clinton’s tone was hardly optimistic, Burgoyne decided to await the hoped-for reinforcements.
Both sides hurried to fortify their positions on Bemis Heights. Men cut down trees and drove spades into the clay-thick earth to build protective barriers. For the next fifteen days, the armies would maintain a tense standoff barely two miles apart, so close that each could hear the enemy’s drumrolls and the boom of their morning cannon. Soldiers from both sides would man their barricades before dawn, grip their muskets, and stare into the thick morning mist for an attack that did not come.
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THE MAIN BRITISH position was a fortified camp stretching from their base on the river up to the highlands. In front of these works, just south of the Great Ravine, Burgoyne established a long line of breastworks facing the American position. To prevent the Americans from circling around Freeman’s Farm and attacking eastward into his camp, he had his men build two large field fortifications. The first, known as the Balcarres Redoubt, was a log-and-earth wall twelve feet high that ran across high ground nearly a quarter mile north to south, enclosing the western end of Freeman’s Farm and incorporating the Freeman house and barn. It bristled with eight cannon. Two small outworks on nearby knolls offered extra protection.
A quarter mile to the northwest of this fort, Burgoyne established Breymann’s Redoubt. This fortified camp, manned by German grenadiers, comprised two zigzag walls of timber seven feet high. Cannon stared menacingly from embrasures. The camp behind it was protected by earthen breastworks. Canadian volunteers stood guard in two reinforced log cabins to protect the lowland between these major redoubts.
The Americans, who had already begun extensive fortifications, kept improving them until they had built a solid line from the river up onto Bemis Heights. Every day, the American soldiers struck their tents and prepared for battle. But General Gates was not content to simply wait for an enemy attack. He ordered a campaign of harassment intended to speed the erosion of British fighting strength.
Daniel Morgan and Henry Dearborn had their men in the field almost continuously, ranging around the outskirts of the enemy positions, sniping at British sentries and ambushing forage parties. Other regiments sent out scouts, groups of sixty to a hundred men, to keep an eye on the enemy and suppress British patrols. These forces would venture as far as Saratoga Lake, six miles to the west. One mission went all the way to the village of Saratoga, which lay on the Hudson River ten miles north of the British lines. They destroyed a bridge there to hamper any attempt by the enemy to retreat. A British soldier complained that “picquets and advanced parties were almost continually firing and skirmishing, so much so that the officers and men refreshed and slept exposed to the enemy’s fire.”
Good news kept American morale high. Within a week of the battle, three thousand militiamen came into camp from New York and New England, men eager to join a force poised for victory. Abraham Ten Broeck, one of the wealthiest men in the region, brought 1,300 soldiers of the Albany militia—practically every able-bodied man in the area. These troops, although green, were eager to protect their homes only thirty miles away.
Altogether, six thousand militiamen arrived, bringing Gates’s total number of rank-and-file troops to more than twelve thousand. And more kept coming. A hundred Oneida tribesmen volunteered. They ranged around the British camp; during one night they captured twenty-nine prisoners.
The days grew shorter, the nights colder; the hardwood trees flamed out in vermillion and gold. Burgoyne’s prospects of success seemed dimmer every day. Waiting only compounded his problems. Desertion plagued the British Army. The daily password often had to be changed in the middle of the day because of the danger that deserters would reveal it to the Americans.
Conditions for his troops were steadily deteriorating. A portion of his men occupied the Freeman battlefield. After the fighting, heavy rains opened the shallow graves, and the stench of rotting corpses reminded the living soldiers of their possible fate. Worn-out British tents were letting in water. Provisions for the men—salted beef and flour—were steadily dwindling. Just as alarming was the lack of fodder for the thousand horses on which the army’s movement depended. Twenty tons of grass and hay were needed daily. Without it, the animals, already emaciated, would starve.
“Our grass was ate up and many horses dying for want,” a British soldier wrote. That meant that hundreds of foragers had to go out regularly to gather feed. A large force of armed troops was needed to protect these laborers from rebel patrols. The longer the army stayed in one place, the scarcer the fodder became. Burgoyne ordered a new bridge of boats built so that he could send foraging expeditions to the east side of the river. These missions were menaced by General Lincoln’s militiamen, who were camped on that bank.
General Gates’s situation was promising but his duties were daunting. His camp soon took on the proportions of the fourth largest city in America. Every day he had to oversee the incorporation of new troops into his units, the assignment of camping areas, the maintenance of sanitary facilities, the distribution of provisions. He enforced military justice. He drew up orders for a steady flow of raids, probes, and patrols into no-man’s-land. Meanwhile, he continued to evaluate intelligence from spies, scouts, and deserters and kept up a high level of security around the camp.
It was the type of organizational work at which Gates excelled. Burgoyne had created many of his own problems, but the trap he found himself in had been carefully planned by Horatio Gates. His defensive strategy, combined with Arnold’s stunning action at Freeman’s Farm, was working.
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THE SOLUTION TO one potentially damaging problem eluded Gates. For two weeks after the Freeman’s Farm battle, he and Benedict Arnold engaged in a heated feud that generated discord within the American command. It began with the report of the Freeman’s Farm battle that Gates sent to Congress on September 22. In it, he lauded the good behavior of the troops and wrote that “to discriminate in praise of the Officers would be Injustice, as they all deserve the honour and applause of Congress.” He singled out for special mention the two lieutenant colonels who had been killed in the fight.
Arnold was told of this letter by one of his aides, probably Richard Varick. Reveling in his first independent field command, Gates had been stingy with the glory. His narrative suggested that Gates himself had initiated all the troop movements.
Such after-action accounts followed a pattern that routinely highlighted the role of key subordinates. Because Arnold’s division had carried most of the action, he should have received more credit. To him, Gates’s letter was demeaning. To emphasize the snub, Gates issued an order after the battle that put Morgan’s and Dearborn’s regiments under his own command rather than Arnold’s.
It didn’t take long for the touchy Arnold to work himself into a lather. The same day that Gates’s report went out, Arnold proceeded the half mile from his cabin, burst into Gates’s headquarters, and set off a heated argument with his superior. He started by saying he wanted justice done to his division “as well as particular Regiments and Persons.”
The tone went downhill from there. “High words and gross language” ensued. Gates erupted in anger. Knowing exactly what would most irritate Arnold, he mentioned the imminent return to camp of General Lincoln, one of the officers who had been promoted over Arnold in February. In the heat of the moment, Gates said that he knew nothing about Arnold being a major general, since Arnold had resigned his commission before the military crisis had begun. In fact, he went on, Arnold had no command in the army at all. Gates would himself take over the American left wing and Lincoln could manage the right.
A furious Arnold demanded a pass that would allow him to proceed to Philadelphia. He was determined to find a situation where he would be appreciated. To his surprise, Gates agreed to let him go. With the enemy only minutes away and another attack imminent, it seemed preposterous that the commander of the northern army was dismissing his most valuable fighting general.
Arnold stomped back to his quarters and wrote out a long letter summarizing the disagreement. Some of his complaints were puerile. He had “been received with the greatest coolness at headquarters,” he wrote. Such treatment would “mortify a person with less pride than I have.” He said he still wanted to serve his country, “though I am thought of no consequence in this department.”
When word got out that Arnold might quit the army, General Enoch Poor was alarmed. He suggested that the American officers sign an “address” to thank Arnold “for his past services, and particularly for his conduct during the late action,” while “requesting him to stay in camp.” Eventually the petition was signed by every general officer in camp except Lincoln and Gates.
The dynamics of this unfolding drama involved two emotional officers manipulated by those around them. Arnold was ill-served by the young men, protégés of Philip Schuyler, whom he had taken on as aides. Henry Brockholst Livingston, twenty years old, and Varick, twenty-four, sent headquarters gossip to Schuyler and deliberately cultivated Arnold’s animus toward Schuyler’s enemy, Gates. James Wilkinson, also twenty, played a similar role as General Gates’s Iago, at one point referring to Arnold in writing as “a certain pompous little fellow.” Eventually Livingston and Varick were pressured by senior officers to leave camp and did.
By September 26, four days after the blowup, Arnold had decided to stay in service. The busy General Gates, amiable by nature, had also cooled off. Arnold sent his commander one last written salvo on October 1. Although he accused Gates of “jealousy,” he assured him that he was not trying to “command the army, or to outshine you.” He was, he wrote, willing to “sacrifice my feelings” for the cause.
The dispute, although potentially dangerous, had few lasting consequences. It revealed Gates’s tendency toward pettiness and bureaucratic maneuvering and Arnold’s oversensitivity to slights and insults. Both men had been under tremendous stress for a month even before the cataclysmic battle on the nineteenth, and it was hardly surprising that they were subject to emotional outbursts and frayed nerves.
“The fatigue of body, and mind,” Gates wrote to his wife, Elizabeth, during the ordeal, “is too much for my age and constitution.” He added that “a general of an American army must be everything, and that is being more than one man can long sustain.”
The dispute was detailed in letters composed by the aides who were busy fomenting it in the first place. The extensive written record they left behind cemented the controversy in the historical record. While the quarrel did no credit to the reputation of either Gates or Arnold, its importance was negligible. None of the other American officers who left behind accounts of the Saratoga campaign even mentioned the dispute. By the first week in October the friction had smoothed—Arnold and Gates were back on speaking terms and eating dinner together.
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COLONEL ALEXANDER SCAMMELL wrote a letter to a friend on September 26, using as a return address Camp Now or Never. He reported that “we expect another severe Battle every Hour.”
With the coming of October, everyone who was gathered on the heights above Bemis Tavern sensed that a crisis was approaching. No “officer or soldier ever slept during that interval without his cloaths,” Burgoyne wrote. No general or regimental commander “passed a single night without being upon his legs occasionally at different hours, and constantly an hour before daylight.”
On October 3, Burgoyne ordered that the food ration for each of his soldiers be cut by a third, to a single pound of bread or flour. The clock was ticking, and whether he advanced or retreated, the British general would have to do so before his dwindling provisions ran out.
That same day, in his general orders, he noted that “there is reason to be assured that other powerful Armies of the King are actually in cooperation with these Troops.” He was referring to the battalions of General Clinton. Burgoyne could not easily communicate with Clinton—his messages were almost always intercepted during their long journey through enemy territory. He may have fabricated the hopeful information purely to raise morale in his army. Or Burgoyne may have been interpreting Clinton’s tentative proposal to help him as a promise of redemption for his beleaguered army.
