Band of Giants_The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence

by Jack Kelly

  Gates put Arnold in charge of the army’s left wing, giving him Morgan’s elite corps. Additional Continentals arrived from the south. New York and New England militiamen responded to Gates’s call. He took advantage of events like the Jenny McCrea murder to boost recruitment. He tightened discipline and improved conditions in camp. On September 8, Gates ordered his troops to advance rather than retreat for the first time that summer. A sense of exhilaration shot through the men as they stepped off to march twelve miles to the north.

  At the village of Stillwater, Gates found the river plain too wide for easy defense. He decided to proceed a bit farther to a mostly wooded plateau known as Bemis Heights. From there he could train guns on the river road, along which Burgoyne’s force would have to pass. The men spent the next week digging. The Polish volunteer Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a genius of engineering, directed the construction of fortifications stretching west more than a mile up the slope from the riverbank and across the plateau. Having attended military academies in both Poland and France, “Kos,” as American officers called him, designed as effective a defense as was possible to throw up in a short time.

  Gates reinforced Morgan’s regiment with three hundred fighters chosen for their ability and under the command of Major Henry Dearborn. The muskets and bayonets of these troops would add another lethal weapon to Morgan’s arsenal. Morgan’s riflemen ranged in front of the works, gathering intelligence and keeping Burgoyne’s scouts from discovering the Americans’ intentions. They terrorized the Indians, until none of the braves could be “brought within the sound of a rifle shot.”

  * * *

  Fellow officers knew Horatio Gates as a worldly, convivial soldier, fond of jokes that went “beyond the nice limits of dignity,” and given to swearing in a way that made “a New Englandman’s hair almost stand on end.” He was, a biographer wrote, “a good hand at cards, a jolly drinking partner.”5

  Gates’s primary talent was for organization, for staff work rather than battlefield command. After being seriously wounded at Braddock’s Monongahela disaster, Gates had seen little additional action in the Seven Years’ War. His career, like those of many officers, had stalled with the peace. In 1773, he sold his commission and retired to a small Virginia estate, bringing with him his wife, Elizabeth, and teenage son Robert. Enamored of the republican ideals percolating in America, he embraced the cause of independence early.

  Gates scrupulously looked after his men’s welfare. Samuel Adams, a Gates booster, noted that his men loved him because “he always shares with them in fatigue and danger.”6 Gates was careful not to squander lives for glory. Militiamen responded to his call because they knew he would promptly send them home when they were no longer needed.

  Having taken his stand, Gates waited to see what Burgoyne would do. The enemy army had camped ten miles to the north, on the east side of the river opposite the village of Saratoga. Burgoyne’s hope of supplies from Bennington and of reinforcements down the Mohawk had been dashed. But his army was still dangerous. He commanded six thousand professional killers and more than fifty field cannon.

  Dangerous and desperate. British food supplies would run out in less than a month. Burgoyne’s two options were clear. He could prudently pull back to Fort Ticonderoga before winter and hope to complete his mission the following year. Or he could push toward Albany. To get there he would have to follow the road across the river and fight his way past the rebels.

  On September 13, American scouts reported British activity. Burgoyne marched his army across the Hudson on a pontoon bridge in a showy manner “reminding one of a grand parade in the midst of peace.” Once over, his men dismantled the bridge, severing their supply line back to Canada. Five days later, the British army was camped along the river four miles north of the American position. The men from both armies could hear the drums of the enemy pounding signals within their camps. A violent confrontation was now imminent.

  * * *

  Increasingly at odds with each other, Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold disagreed about whether the Americans should adopt a strategy of defense or offense. Gates was content to wait inside his fortifications and let Burgoyne attack him. Arnold yearned to go out and fall on the British before they reached the American lines.

  Personality dictated their positions: Gates cautious, Arnold impetuous. Each had reason on his side. Why waste men and risk his army in a pitched battle, Gates figured. Far better to remain behind breastworks against which Burgoyne would wear out his troops. From long experience, Gates respected British fighting ability. So far, he had read Burgoyne’s intentions perfectly. His opponent, he knew, was an “Old Gamester.” He observed that it was clear “the General’s Design is to Risque all upon one Rash Stroke.”7

  Arnold argued that it was in the woods that American fighters excelled. If the British overpowered them there, they would still have the option of pulling back to their fortifications. If they waited, the enemy might drag up heavy guns and demolish their hasty earthworks.

  Gates, wearied of the paperwork of staff positions, had fixed his sights on fame and honor. Arnold, already a blazing comet in the American firmament, was determined to show an ungrateful Congress its error in denying him the laurels he deserved. Each man saw the pending battle as an opportunity to fulfill his deepest need. Meanwhile, the “awful expectation and suspense” mounted.

  * * *

  The tension peaked on the dank morning of September 19. American scouts reported redcoats moving out of their camp and mounting Bemis Heights. By eleven, the sun had burned off the early fog. The boom of a British signal cannon broke the silence. The American soldiers, still inside their fortified line, nervously gripped their weapons.

  Gates held to his defensive plan. His only concession was to allow Arnold to send Morgan and his regiment to the north and west to see what the enemy was up to. The riflemen hurried forward through the woods. They took up a position on a farm once owned by a man named Freeman, one of the few areas of cleared fields on the heights. A British picket force came into view on the north side of the clearing. Morgan’s men fired. So accurate was their aim that all the British officers but one fell dead in an instant. The rest of the advance party fled in panic.

  The Americans, their blood up, sprinted after them. They collided squarely with a heavy force of British infantry. A ripping volley stopped the patriot riflemen cold and scattered them. Morgan lost touch with his men during the charge and assumed the worst. He was reported to have wept with frustration at the setback. But his turkey call signal soon drew the men back into formation.

  With a fight on, Arnold ordered the rest of his regiments into action to support Morgan. The battle concentrated on the farm clearing. General Enoch Poor’s brigade of nine hundred New Hampshire Continentals, backed by additional militia, came into line with Morgan’s men. The explosion of their fire echoed for miles through woods that had never known such a roar. The British fell back, the Americans rushed ahead to capture enemy guns. Burgoyne ordered his grenadiers to charge with bayonets.

  Here the patriots had no trenches or breastworks to protect them. A flat-out slugging match raged in the open field. The Continentals, now with two years of experience behind them, faced the cold steel of Britain’s largest and fiercest soldiers. The rebels did not break. They leveled their muskets and fired. Their volley stunned the grenadiers and made them recoil.

  Poor, a forty-three-year-old merchant, later remembered that “the blaze from the artillery and small arms was incessant and sounded like the roll of the drum. By turns the British and Americans drove each other, taking and retaking the fieldpieces . . . often mingling in a hand to hand wrestle and fight.”8

  The brawl became a scene of utter mayhem, a wild confusion of fire and smoke. “Senior officers who had witnessed the hardest fighting of the Seven Years’ War declared that they had never experienced so long and hot a fire.”9 The death of many Briti
sh officers was “attributed to the great execution of the riflemen, who directed their fire against them in particular.”10

  Arnold tried frantically to coordinate the action. One of Dearborn’s men remembered Arnold “riding in front of the lines, his eyes flashing.” It was a sight that “electrified the line.”11

  The battle went on and on. Late in the afternoon, it seemed the Americans were on the verge of defeating what was clearly Burgoyne’s effort to smash the rebel army. The fighting had reduced the British regiment at the center from 350 men to a mere 60 still firing. Morgan’s riflemen had picked off two-thirds of the enemy gunners. Arnold, who “seemed inspired with the fury of a demon,” galloped back to headquarters, two miles from the action, where Gates had remained throughout the day.12 He begged for more troops to finish off Burgoyne then and there. Gates “deemed it prudent not to weaken” his lines.13 Prudence prevailed.

  As day slipped toward evening, the Americans heard a noise on their right. A cannon blasted their ranks from barely a hundred yards. Fresh troops, the Brunswick forces of General Friedrich von Riedesel, came rushing straight at the Americans, drums beating, German throats howling. The surprise took the wind out of the American attack. Arnold pulled his troops back. The British occupied the farm clearing, now strewn with dead and wounded men. The fight was over.

  Burgoyne tried to put a positive face on the battle, calling it “a smart and very honorable action,” a victory even.14 Although he occupied the field, the rebels looming in the dark made it too dangerous even to gather his wounded. The screams of fallen men cut through the chill night. Six hundred British soldiers had been killed or injured or taken prisoner. The Americans had lost three hundred. The rebels had gotten the better of the best army in the world.

  “They are not that contemptible enemy we had hitherto imagined them,” a British officer admitted of the Americans. The reason, Henry Dearborn suggested, was that in contrast to the enemy “we . . . had Something more at Stake than fighting for six Pence Pr Day.”15

  * * *

  The fight at Freeman’s farm, which had involved only a portion of the troops on each side, did not decide the matter. The British army was still potent. The Americans had run desperately low on ammunition. But Burgoyne had received a stunning blow. He ordered his men to dig in. They quickly built breastworks behind Freeman’s farm and two substantial redoubts of logs and earth to protect their right flank and rear.

  British general Henry Clinton, who was commanding in New York while General Howe sparred with Washington’s army around Philadelphia, had gotten word through to Burgoyne that he would soon “make a push” up the Hudson and attack the forts guarding the Highlands. If he was successful, he might force Gates to send part of his army south. If that happened, Burgoyne might break through to Albany. If . . .

  An avid gambler, Burgoyne thought the chance was worth the wait. As it happened, Clinton outsmarted Israel Putnam, captured an American fort and sailed a short distance up the Hudson. But thinking of the action as a diversion only, he soon returned to New York. Burgoyne waited in vain.

  The interlude was no pleasant respite for Burgoyne’s troops. Morgan’s riflemen ranged the woods, taking aim at every redcoat they encountered. “Not a night passed without firing,” Burgoyne would later remember. British and German soldiers slept in their clothes for weeks, ready for a surprise attack. Flour and salt pork were running out.

  Gates, elated that his men had severely punished the cream of the British army, smelled victory. From the militiamen streaming into camp he formed a comforting reserve for his Continentals. General Schuyler dutifully procured gunpowder and ammunition to restore the army’s fire power. A rare mood of exhilaration swept the rebel force.

  At this critical juncture, the smoldering rivalry at headquarters burst into flame. Perhaps Gates felt Arnold’s shadow creeping over the glory he was now all but certain of attaining. In his report to Congress about the battle at Freeman’s farm, he failed to mention Arnold’s name or to acknowledge the troops under Arnold’s command, informing the world that the engagement had involved only “a detachment of the army.”16

  To add injury to insult, he weakened Arnold’s left wing by reassigning Morgan’s elite regiment to his own command. Washington, hard pressed around Philadelphia, had asked him to send Morgan’s corps back to Pennsylvania, but Gates had declined. “Your Excellency,” he wrote, “would not wish me to part with the corps the army of General Burgoyne are most afraid of.”17

  By the evening of September 22, three days after battle, Arnold had had enough. He stormed into Gates’s tent “in great warmth” and loudly protested his treatment. Gates became “rather passionate and very assuming.” He fired back that, since Arnold had resigned his commission, he really held no rank in the army. Because General Lincoln would soon return to camp, Arnold was not needed—Gates relieved him of all duty. “High words and gross language ensued,” a witness reported, “and Arnold retired in a rage.”18

  With a still-powerful enemy camped on their front, the American high command was thrown into turmoil. Arnold asked for and received a pass to travel to Philadelphia, where he would join Washington’s army and plead his case. But the situation on Bemis Heights was far too precarious to lose a warrior of Arnold’s caliber. Every general officer in camp signed a petition “requesting him not to quit the service at this critical moment.” Arnold agreed to stay.19

  He continued to browbeat Gates, pushing for an immediate attack. “The army are clamoring for action,” he wrote. Gates stopped inviting him to his staff meetings. Arnold wrote angry notes to Gates complaining of treatment that would mortify “a person with less pride than I have.” Gates refused to placate him.20

  The relentless, urgent demands of war certainly contributed to this clash of personalities. Both Gates and Arnold had oversized egos, but both were also under extraordinary pressure. “The Fatigue of Body & mind, Which I continually undergo,” Gates wrote to his wife the day of his worst altercation with Arnold, “is too much for my Age and Constitution.”21 Arnold had been active in the cause almost continuously for two-and-a-half years. His personal fortune had evaporated, his wife had died, and he had been seriously wounded. He had just finished fighting his third pivotal battle of the war.

  From the battlefield at night, the men heard animals howl. Packs of wolves had come down from the mountains. They were digging up shallow graves, feeding on the decaying flesh of dead men.

  * * *

  Morgan continued to lead the men of his regiment out to scout and harass the enemy. On October 6, he took eight hundred men through the woods into the enemy’s rear. They grabbed seven prisoners. A heavy rain and oncoming night forced Morgan’s men to hunker down where they were rather than risk stumbling into the enemy in the dark.

  With daylight, the rangers returned to the American camp. They gathered around fires to dry off, eat, and rest. About midday, Gates’s aide, James Wilkinson, brought word that British troops had begun to move forward. Gates laconically replied, “Well then, order on Morgan to begin the game.”22

  Having been over the ground repeatedly, Morgan suggested that his men filter through the woods and appear on the British right just as a regiment of Continentals slammed into their left flank. Gates agreed. He sent Enoch Poor’s experienced New Hampshire men to attack Burgoyne directly, while Morgan looped to the west.

  Half an hour later, Poor’s men encountered the British. A reconnaissance force, which included a substantial part of the British army backed by ten field guns, was making a thrust toward the American left. Burgoyne, who led the operation himself, sought clarity. He wanted to see how the enemy forces were aligned, still hoping he could dislodge them from their fortifications. As Poor’s infantrymen climbed a slope toward the enemy, the British grenadiers fired. Their musket and canister shot lacerated the air over the heads of the Americans. The redcoats extended their bayonets in the
sun and charged down the hill, bellowing hoarse war cries. Poor’s men let loose a searing volley of musketry. Then they too charged.

  At almost the same moment, Morgan’s men, who had reached high ground slightly behind the British right, “poured down like a torrent from the hill.” Major Dearborn’s musket men slammed into the enemy from the other side, running and shouting as loudly as they could. The British “Retreated with great Precipitation & Confusion.”23 They tried once to form a line, but could not withstand the onrushing Americans. They sprinted for the closest fortification, a redoubt guarding the west end of the British position.

  Soon afterward, Wilkinson came to the spot where Poor’s men had attacked and beaten the grenadiers. The ground, he later remembered, “presented a scene of complicated horror and exultation.” Lying at his feet were “eighteen grenadiers in the agonies of death,” and three wounded officers. Colonel Joseph Cilley, a forty-three-year-old New Hampshire farmer, had climbed atop the largest of the British field guns to celebrate its capture. The British commander, Major Acland, lay wounded in both legs. Wilkinson rescued him from a thirteen-year-old rebel who was about to fire a musket ball into his head.24

  The first phase of the battle had lasted less than an hour. The reconnaissance had told Burgoyne all he needed to know. Hope of a breakthrough was an illusion. He sent his secretary with a message to the other commanders to call off the probe and pull back, but the fortunes of war intervened. The aide was shot and captured. The battle would continue.