The Glorious Cause, page 47
Burgoyne may have appeared “Pomposo” to clever men like Walpole, but to his soldiers he was a commander who combined flair with professional competence. He showed his professional side to his soldiers with the laconic injunction to rely on the bayonet, for “the bayonet in the hands of the Valiant is irresistible.”19 It was an order often tested and often proved.
The expedition of irresistibles set out on June 20 from Cumberland Head on Lake Champlain and sailed to Crown Point, eight miles north of Ticonderoga. There Burgoyne established a magazine, set up a hospital, and issued stores. A week later he was on the move again, and by the end of the month his troops were within striking distance of Fort Ticonderoga.20
The fort lay on both sides of the lake, but its principal works, in sad repair, were on the west side. Across the lake to the east there were defensive works on Mount Independence, a quarter of a mile away. A floating bridge connected Ticonderoga and Independence. Burgoyne, resolved to strike both sides, divided his forces: the British regulars on the west bank of the lake, the Germans under Riedesel on the east.
A little more than a mile to the west of Ticonderoga, heavily forested, Sugar Loaf Hill rose to a height of 750 feet and clearly commanded the fort. It took Burgoyne’s men until July 5 to cut through the maple and pine on Sugar Loaf and emplace cannon on its summit. When the guns on the hill spoke that day, General Arthur St. Clair, commander of Fort Ticonderoga, knew he would have to abandon the fort. In the darkness of the next morning he marched his men, around two thousand effectives, across the bridge to Mount Independence. Before he made this move, he loaded his sick and as many supplies as he could get aboard into bateaux. From Independence he marched his army to Hubbardton, some twenty-four miles to the southeast.21
The British learned of this evacuation almost immediately and set out in pursuit. The pursuers, an advance party of about 850 men, were led by General Simon Fraser, an able and hardened officer. Around five o’clock the next morning, July 7, Fraser’s command ran into the American rear guard, around 1000 strong, under Colonel Seth Warner. St. Clair with the main body had advanced six miles farther to Castleton. Surprised though they were, Warner’s men “behaved” as the British commander of light infantry, the Earl of Balcarres, later said, “with great gallantry.”22 The battle was vicious, with neither side fully aware of where the enemy was and with the lines consequently scrambled. At the end of three hours, Warner’s men were gaining the upper hand. Fraser, who had begun his pursuit the day before without waiting for Riedesel, now yearned for the sight of his German colleague—and in a stroke of good luck Riedesel, with a chasseur company and around eighty grenadiers, appeared. Their firepower and weight broke Warner’s resistance, and within a few more minutes the Americans were in flight.23
Flight approached rout in the next week. Burgoyne, who sailed up the lake to Skenesboro, almost caught the bateaux that had carried the sick from Ticonderoga. Ashore the British took Fort Anne, but no army could keep up with St. Clair, who reached Fort Edward on the Hudson on July 12. The worst of the campaign—though not the fighting—was now over for the Americans. For the British it was really just beginning.
Burgoyne’s problem in July was how to move from Skenesboro near the head of Champlain to Fort Edward on the Hudson. The best method, one which Burgoyne himself had approved while still in England, was to return to Ticonderoga, shift his boats into Lake George, and sail to the head of that lake. There he would find Fort George, a convenient base from which to follow a road already cut to the Hudson, a distance of about ten miles. Sensible though this plan was, Burgoyne discarded it; his reasons cannot be fathomed. Two years after the campaign he offered an explanation of sorts: the morale of his army concerned him, and morale would have been very much impaired by “a retrograde motion.” Besides, had he pulled back, his enemy would have remained at Fort George, as their retreat could not have been cut off. The only way in that situation to dislodge the Americans would have been to “open trenches”—besiege them, in other words—an operation which would have delayed his advance even more. Then, too, marching overland from Fort Anne to Fort Edward “improved” the troops in “wood service,” a justification Burgoyne apparently presented with a straight face.24
Whether or not the troops were “improved” in “wood service,” they got their bellies full of it between Skenesboro and Fort Edward. Their way ran along Wood Creek, an aptly named stream, which twisted erratically down a valley covered with large hemlocks and even larger pines. The road crossed the stream in no fewer than forty places, many of them deep ravines spanned by long bridges. General Schuyler knew this country and saw his opportunity.25
Burgoyne did not strike out from Skenesboro immediately. He was short of oxen and horses to draw his wagons, and he was not traveling light. He had brought his mistress; and Baron von Riedesel had allowed his wife and three daughters to accompany him. Nor had the officers of lesser rank stripped down excess baggage: a good deal of unessential weight was being carried. Part of this weight, of course, was in servants and the inevitable camp followers.
When the army did resume its advance, it faced formidable obstacles—the trees across the road, the ruins of bridges, boulders in Wood Creek, and rough ground made rougher by the Americans. There was, however, no American opposition, Schuyler having withdrawn “deliberately,” as a British officer remarked, and with his 4500 intact. By August 3 Schuyler had reached Stillwater on the Hudson, twelve miles below Saratoga. And from there he moved another twelve miles, close to the mouth of the Mohawk River. On August 4 orders went out: Gates was to replace Schuyler as commander of the Northern Department. The army, its number dwindling as the soldiers indulged in the American propensity to desert, rejoiced in the change. No one knew it, but the days of retreat in the face of Burgoyne’s expedition were over.26
Just before the change in the American command, Burgoyne’s advance party made its way on July 30 into Fort Edward. His men were not cheered by the ruins of the fort, though they had at last reached the Hudson. The drive from Skenesboro had consumed three weeks and exhausted them all, their animals, and their supplies.
Confronted by shortages of all sorts, except ammunition, Burgoyne listened to Riedesel’s proposal to send an expedition as far east as the Connecticut River to forage for cattle and horses. Riedesel recommended that a large party be sent out in the expectation that it would return with meat for the troops and mounts for his horseless Brunswick dragoons. These Germans had found the march to Fort Edward a torture. Burgoyne probably did not feel much sympathy for the Brunswickers but he needed food, and he knew that bringing it from Ticonderoga would be almost impossible.27
Lt. Colonel Baum was detached to lead the raid and given some 600 soldiers. Baum, who spoke no English, was instructed to enlist the support of the citizens he encountered. Burgoyne’s orders contained references to Baum’s expedition as “secret,” and it was given a German band to, in the historian Christopher Ward’s sardonic phrase, “help preserve its secrecy.” This expedition departed on August 11. On the 15th near Bennington Baum’s party was surrounded by a force twice its size, led by Brig. General John Stark, and virtually destroyed. Later a relief party, which had been dispatched on August 14, was also chewed up in a day by Stark’s militia.28
News of this “disaster,” as one of Burgoyne’s officers called it, reached the main army on the night of August 17. Burgoyne reacted with uncharacteristic speed and had the troops instructed at 2:00 A.M. to be “in readiness to turn out at a moment’s warning.” Not quite two weeks later, more unhappy news arrived. Lt. Colonel Barry St. Leger had given up the siege of Fort Stanwix. Commanders who had been feeling lonely now began to sense just how isolated the expedition was.29
The British were not isolated, whatever else they felt about their situation. But they were at a critical juncture and Burgoyne knew it. He had about a month’s supply of food and his troops were in fairly good shape. They were far from the magazine on Lake Champlain, however, and with rather short supplies and lacking winter quarters they could not remain where they were—on the east side of the Hudson far from Champlain and not close to Albany. Burgoyne might have pulled back to Ticonderoga, but he was averse to withdrawal, which everyone would have considered an admission of defeat. So he boldly and bravely decided to continue his drive to Albany.30
Burgoyne decided at the same time that he must cross the Hudson to the west side. He might have remained on the east side and marched virtually unopposed to a point across the river from Albany. Crossing the Hudson at Albany would have been immensely difficult, however, for not only was the river wider there but the Americans would have concentrated their forces to oppose his crossing. Therefore he threw a bridge of bateaux across to Saratoga and on September 13 began sending his troops to the west bank. Two days later his army was safely over.
The American enemy had not been inactive while this movement took place. Gates had reached the army at Albany almost four weeks before, on August 19, and he had moved his forces northward. Gates’s command had grown in this period to 6000 or 7000 men. The day before Burgoyne began to put his troops over to the west side, Gates undertook to fortify Bemis Heights, three miles north of Stillwater.
This stretch of the Hudson saw the river forced through a narrow defile by high bluffs 200 to 300 feet above its surface. Bemis Heights, around 200 feet above the water, was separated from nearby slopes by ravines cut by creeks which flowed into the Hudson. Much of the ground from the river to the slopes was covered by thick stands of oak, pine, and maple.
Gates’s brilliant subordinate, Benedict Arnold, may have chosen Bemis Heights as the position for defense. Arnold and Colonel Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Polish engineer, drew the lines of fortification, which extended from Bemis’s Tavern near the river up the bluff to the top of the Heights. There a three-sided breastworks of earth and logs, each side about three-fourths of a mile in length, was put up. The south side, presumably the farthest from the advancing British, was left unprotected, though a ravine there afforded some protection. At the midpoint of each side of the breastworks the Americans dug a redoubt where they emplaced artillery. In most respects the Americans had built wisely, but they had left virtually unoccupied a high slope less than a mile to the west. Should the British drag artillery to this height they would command Bemis Heights.31
Burgoyne had crossed the Hudson about ten miles above Bemis Heights and spent the next two days crawling southward groping for his enemy. On that march with three loose columns, Riedesel on the left along the river, Brig. General James Hamilton in the center on the road (hardly more than wagon ruts), and Fraser on the right to the west in the woods, Burgoyne managed to cover six miles. On September 18 an American patrol roughed up a small foraging party, and Burgoyne discovered something of his enemy’s dispositions. The next morning, in sunshine, he sent his three columns forward with the aim of rolling up the American left and rear. His plan called for Fraser to swing to the west, take the high ground, and then turn to the east and eventually pin the Americans on the river, where they would be chewed to pieces. The battle began at 10:00 A.M. with a cannon firing the signal to start the advance. This coordinated opening marked just about the only coordination Burgoyne’s forces attained that day. The right wing under Fraser contained ten companies of light infantry and ten of grenadiers, Brunswick riflemen of company size, seven artillery pieces, a few Tories, and the battalion company of the 24th Regiment. All together they numbered around 2000 men. Hamilton led the center composed of 1100 men, four regiments, and six light field-pieces. General Riedesel and Phillips, with about the same number, were on the right, with three Brunswick regiments and eight fieldpieces.32
When the cannon fire set these three wings in motion, the Americans were sitting behind their breastworks—Continentals on the right overlooking the river with Gates in charge, Massachusetts and New York Continentals under Brig. General Ebenezer Learned at the center, and a mixture of militia and regulars on the left under Arnold. Gates did not respond when told of the British movement toward his position. Arnold did, urging his chief to send a force out to meet the enemy so as to avoid being battered and trapped within the breastworks on the Heights. Sitting still, the Americans were vulnerable, Arnold argued; on the move in the woods, they would deprive Burgoyne of the advantage his artillery gave him. Gates remained unmoved by this argument for almost three hours, though his scouts perched high in the trees kept him informed of the flash and glitter of the advancing redcoats with their bayonets unsheathed.33
Around noon Gates gave way to Arnold’s argument and sent Colonel Daniel Morgan and his Virginia riflemen forward on the left. Morgan, soon followed by Henry Dearborn’s light infantry and then much of Arnold’s force, met the British center near Freeman’s Farm about a mile north of Bemis Heights. There, in a clearing about 350 yards long, the battle was fought. For most of the afternoon until early darkness the central wing of Burgoyne’s army under General Hamilton’s command held the northern edge of the clearing. The Americans under Arnold maintained a rough line along the southern fringe. There is no way of establishing how many times the two sides surged across the open space and into the enemy’s woods. Hamilton’s regulars apparently first attempted to rely on the bayonet, perhaps expecting that Morgan’s men and the others would run rather than stand. But stand they did, and the long rifles cut down redcoated infantry before the heavy mass could close. Neither Arnold nor Morgan believed in static defense or in absorbing blows before delivering them. Arnold in particular loved the assault and he led his troops over the clearing into the British line. The American charge swept the British regulars back and drove artillerymen from their guns. But then the British returned under officers fully as brave as Arnold and Morgan. By late afternoon, with bodies stacked up in the clearing and the woods, British volleys began to lose their power. The troops under Hamilton had taken terrible losses, and they had probably begun the battle slightly outnumbered. The 62nd had, in particular, received extraordinarily heavy American fire, with the result that at the end of the day of its 350 men only sixty remained. British officers who had fought in Europe in the Seven Years War remarked later that they had never experienced heavier fire. Burgoyne was with them, and his bravery undoubtedly helped keep spirits up. But Fraser had not been able to enter the battle; he in fact still struggled to find his way to the high ground in the west. Not until the center was about to collapse did Riedesel’s troops force their way up the bluff from the river. Their coming prevented the disintegration of Hamilton’s command, and as darkness fell it was Arnold’s men, not their enemies, who fell back. The British held the field at Freeman’s Farm, but they had taken casualties they could not replace. In all, 556 British regulars died or were wounded.34
Arnold believed that he might have completely destroyed the enemy that day had Gates acceded to his plea for reinforcements while the battle went on. Gates did not commit reinforcements, however; he, like his enemy, had not brought concentrated power to bear. Burgoyne had not because of his initial dispositions—three separate, indeed isolated, commands, groping in a maze of green woods, ravines, and steep slopes. Gates had not for reasons known only to himself. Undoubtedly what seems so clear today—that the side that successfully concentrated its forces would vanquish the other—seemed only obscure in the September sunlight. Gates may have had a clearer idea of where his enemy was than Burgoyne had, but he could not be certain that those three forces would not succeed in pinching in on Bemis Heights. A more perceptive man might have grasped the disadvantages that Burgoyne had imposed upon himself, and a bolder one surely would have poured his men into the center. If Hamilton could have been broken, Riedesel stumbling through ravines along the river’s edge would have been isolated and vulnerable. As it was, both sides absorbed heavy losses, but Gates could replace his whereas Burgoyne could not.
Separated from one another by about a mile, the two armies nursed their wounded and sent out patrols which sniped at one another incessantly. Burgoyne did not yet see his situation as desperate, and two days after the battle he received a letter from Henry Clinton in New York which he read in a most unrealistic frame of mind. Clinton’s letter, written on September 11, promised “a push at Montgomery in about ten days,” a drive against the forts on the Hudson, Montgomery, and Fort Clinton, about forty miles above the city. Clinton considered this attack as a diversion on Burgoyne’s behalf. He did not expect to reach Albany. What Burgoyne thought is not completely known, but he evidently expected much from this push, and, as he declared two years afterward, he had no reason not to expect further cooperation from General Howe. Unfortunately for him, he had no reason to expect cooperation either.35
Henry Clinton proved as good as his word. Reinforced by regulars from home, he sent a large contingent of his 7000-man garrison against the forts up the Hudson River and captured them on October 4. The next day he cut through the chevaux de frise, boom and chain, which the Americans had placed to block passage up the Hudson. But Clinton did no more and went no farther.36
Burgoyne’s hopes that Clinton’s operations would force Gates to deplete his army in order to strengthen his rear soon collapsed. Not only did Gates hold firm on Bemis Heights, but he also received so many fresh troops, attracted by the “victory” at Freeman’s Farm, that his army soon reached 11,000. Burgoyne of course received no reinforcements and sat in the rain watching his troops lose their spirit as his wounded suffered and died.
