Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  In the meantime, the war must be won. By the time the Congress moved back to Philadelphia in March 1777, Adams was actively promoting the fortunes of a middle-aged major general, Horatio Gates.

  Gates, the general who had not joined George Washington in his assault on Trenton, was the son of a duke’s housekeeper in England. He had volunteered to fight with Braddock in the French and Indian War but had been badly wounded on his first day in battle. When the war ended, Gates had found that his lack of money and connections kept him from advancing in the British Army. He had retired and seemed destined to spend his days drinking and gambling. But his exposure to America had kindled a sympathy with the patriots’ cause. In 1772 he wrote to George Washington, whom he knew from the Braddock campaign, about buying an estate in Virginia. The next year Gates purchased a plantation he called Traveller’s Rest. But when the Revolution began, he saw a chance to revive his military career. Stooped and gray, approaching fifty and looking older, he had become a valuable administrative aide to Washington in Cambridge during the first days of organizing the army. Gates was inclined to be cautious at strategy meetings and had recommended against seizing Dorchester Heights. His soldiers watched him move through camp with his spectacles perched low on his nose and called him “Granny Gates.”

  Samuel Adams detected a toughness in Gates’s zeal for the patriot cause and had been impatiently trying, for months, to put him in charge of the Northern Army. The Congress had the power to make the highest appointments, and until the spring of 1777 members had continued to keep Philip Schuyler, the wealthy gentleman from Albany who had served as a delegate from New York at the first session, in charge of the Northern command. At one point, Gates had been sent north to lead the American retreat from the Canadian offensive, but he and Schuyler had wrangled over whose authority was greater, and the Congress had upheld Schuyler. Gates had stayed on to help rebuild an army shattered by defeat and devastated by smallpox. He chose Benedict Arnold to prepare American ships for fighting along Lake Champlain, and together they held off a British assault and held Fort Ticonderoga. While Washington was in his winter quarters, after the campaigns of Trenton and Princeton, Gates commanded the troops in Philadelphia, but when he was sent back to Ticonderoga in March 1777 he resumed his feud with Philip Schuyler. In July, British General John Burgoyne seized a peak named Mount Defiance above Ticonderoga, pointed his cannon down into the fort, and forced the Americans to evacuate without a fight. Schuyler had ignored Gates’s repeated warnings about how vulnerable Defiance made Fort Ti. As a result, Congress finally replaced Schuyler with Gates as commander of the Northern Army and set the scene for a showdown between Granny Gates and Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne.

  Both Adamses were pleased to see Schuyler removed. Samuel Adams had found his reports weak and contemptible, even though their pessimism was not much different from George Washington’s own. John Adams wrote home that the only way to stiffen the army’s spine was for the Congress to order that a losing general should be shot.

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  The year 1777 was proving no more successful for General Washington than for Philip Schuyler. William Howe had waited for reinforcements from Britain and delayed his campaign until September. Then, at Brandywine Creek southwest of Philadelphia, Howe and Washington restaged the battles of New York, with the same result. Washington had split his army in two, one unit under his own command, the other under John Sullivan. Washington again neglected the proper reconnaissance, and again the British, this time led by Cornwallis, marched upstream and almost succeeded in taking Sullivan’s men from behind. Washington eluded the trap with some gallant rear-guard action and led an orderly retreat to Chester. Congress asked that John Sullivan be recalled, but Washington was opposed to punishing a general for his defeats and declined to take action. Howe marched at last on Philadelphia, and the Congress met for a day in Lancaster before moving to York, a small farming community across the Susquehanna River.

  Howe met little opposition as he rode into Philadelphia on September 26, 1777. He had ignored the arguments against concentrating so much of his army in Pennsylvania, and in London Lord Germain supported him. Britain’s colonial secretary believed that the nation’s honor would not be redeemed until the British flag flew over Independence Hall. Punishing that seat of the Congress, Germain told Howe, would please the king and discourage the rebels. But as Howe’s troops marched into Philadelphia, they were greeted not by despair but by the glee of those loyalists who had stayed behind. John Adams already held a low opinion of the Quakers who had settled in Pennsylvania, and he had expected no better of them now. He wrote to Abigail Adams that Quakers were as dull as beetles, “a kind of neutral tribe, or the race of the insipids.” Thomas Paine urged patriots to raise up barricades and fight the British from house to house, but instead they followed the Congress into exile.

  General Howe had returned successfully to his past strategy, and George Washington tried to do the same. Borrowing from his own tactics at Trenton, Washington sent out John Sullivan and Nathanael Greene at the head of columns of Continentals and militia, hoping to surprise the British forces north of Philadelphia at Germantown. But Washington also incorporated the worst aspect of his previous plans by depending on intricate coordination. The militia columns never reached the battle site, and although the British were unprepared for the attack, their officers were not recovering from nights of heavy drinking. By 9 A.M. they had formed their lines and routed the challenge. After that, Howe settled his men in Philadelphia, and George Washington looked around Pennsylvania for his own winter quarters.

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  When Lieutenant General Sir John Burgoyne returned to America from England for the 1777 campaign, he was ready to win a bet he had made the previous Christmas Day at Brooks’s Club in London. There he had sworn an even rasher oath than Banastre Tarleton’s threat to cut off Charles Lee’s head. Burgoyne had gone to England to deal with personal affairs and take his seat in Parliament, but once there he had worked to ingratiate himself with the king, and his success was confirmed when George III took him riding in Hyde Park. During his stay, Burgoyne had also persuaded the Ministry to authorize one conclusive blow to end the war. When he met an opposition leader, Charles Fox, at Brooks’s, he predicted, “Within a year I shall return from America victorious.” The two men wagered fifty guineas, and the bet was recorded in the club’s book.

  Burgoyne’s plan had sounded plausible in London and, even better, cheap. Throughout 1776, George Germain had become increasingly annoyed by William Howe’s requests for more manpower. He bore a grudge against Howe that dated back to a military expedition nearly twenty years earlier, and he was not inclined to oblige him now. When Germain responded to Howe’s call for reinforcements, he included every wounded soldier, deserter and prisoner as part of Howe’s troop strength. And as a professional soldier, Howe resented having to take orders from George Germain. It was widely known that during the battle of Minden, in 1759, Germain had disregarded repeated orders to bring his cavalry into action. His disobedience smacked of cowardice and might have got him shot. Instead, he was court-martialed and cashiered from the army. Lord North had overlooked his past disgrace when he put Germain in charge of the war in America.

  In theory, Britain’s master strategy still called for its two armies to join at Albany—one from Montreal, the other from New York. The armies would set up a chain of forts from the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic that would cut off New England from the other colonies. But William Howe seemed content to conserve his men in Philadelphia, and Burgoyne had convinced Germain that he could hold Albany with only Britain’s Northern forces while Howe kept George Washington tied down in Pennsylvania. Burgoyne’s orders, however, were ambiguously written. He was “to force his way to Albany” and turn his troops over to William Howe. He was given latitude to act on his own “as exigencies may require.” Was Germain insisting that Albany be taken at any cost? The imprecision scarcely mattered to Burgoyne. He knew he could take Albany, which would
end the rebellion, win his wager with Charles Fox and earn him a place in British history. For John Burgoyne—rumored to be illegitimate, rumored to be a little sharp at cards, known to be socially ambitious and badly in debt—the gamble was irresistible.

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  Back in America, Burgoyne soon found that hacking his way south from Ticonderoga was harder than he had expected. He suffered eight hundred casualties—a seventh of his army—when his men were attacked at Bennington in the New Hampshire Grants by a troop of American farmers led by General John Stark. Now the British survivors were marching little more than a mile a day. Along their route, Americans whom Burgoyne had expected to be loyalists were proving hostile. And, despite what the Congress might believe, Philip Schuyler’s retreat had been a courageous one. His men had scorched the crops and scattered the cattle, which delayed Burgoyne’s advance. And yet Horatio Gates did not invite Schuyler to attend his first council of war in Albany. He did include Benedict Arnold, however, even though Arnold was known to be Schuyler’s close ally.

  Gates’s arrival on August 19 had inspired his army. New Englanders had despised Schuyler for opposing them during the contest over the New Hampshire Grants and accused him of every wickedness: Schuyler embezzled funds and had taken a bribe to let the British capture Ticonderoga; the fort, they charged, had been won with silver bullets. Horatio Gates was a warmer man, less the autocratic disciplinarian.

  Before Gates took command, the Americans had built their camp on flat land at the mouth of the Mohawk River. He insisted on another site sixteen miles north, on a high plateau above the Hudson. Gates didn’t know how thoroughly committed John Burgoyne was to taking Albany, and he speculated about whether the British commander intended to fall back and entrench himself at Ticonderoga. That would be the sensible course, especially since Howe’s troops were far away in Philadelphia. But to Burgoyne anything less than charging forward would be ignominious. Even before his easy defeat of Schuyler at Ticonderoga, Burgoyne had offered his troops a one-line summary of his strategy: “This army must not retreat.”

  The plateau Gates chose had been named Bemis Heights, after a man who kept the tavern on the road below. Gates installed his seven thousand men there and planned to stop Burgoyne on his march to Albany. He enlisted a young and clever Polish engineer, Colonel Thaddeus Kosciuzko, to lay out his defenses. Kosciuzko fortified the position with strong log breastworks and felled trees with their sharpened branches pointing outward.

  An American reconnaissance party seized prisoners who told Gates that Burgoyne had severed his communication with Canada and seemed determined to take Albany. Since the town lay on the west bank of the Hudson, Burgoyne was forced to cross the river. He ordered a new bridge built and made his crossing into the village of Saratoga.

  By now, Burgoyne’s army had been reduced to less than six thousand—twenty-five hundred British and eighteen hundred German regulars; eleven hundred Canadians and Tory recruits; eighty Indians; and three hundred drivers, sailors and artillerymen. The officers’ ladies were following in carriages one day’s march to the rear. The expedition was exuberant, singing and laughing, eager for the victory at Albany. Burgoyne issued a standing order, however, that guards must be at their posts an hour before daylight and remain there until it was completely dark. His men knew that the enemy was waiting somewhere ahead and began sleeping in their uniforms.

  Burgoyne had no way of knowing where the Americans would attack. He had no dependable information about the size of Gates’s force or how solidly the Americans were entrenched. But since the river lay to one side of the road and dense woods to the other, he saw that he would have to fight his way past any American fortress. On September 15, 1777, Burgoyne marched his troops in a magnificent parade, drums rolling and colors high, down the road toward Bemis Heights. Two days later they encamped only four miles from the American lines.

  On the morning of September 19, scouts arrived at the cramped red house on Bemis Heights that General Gates had made his headquarters. The British had broken camp, they said, and were moving in three swerving columns, all headed toward a fifteen-acre clearing owned by a farmer named Freeman. At the news that the enemy was marching toward them, General Gates and Benedict Arnold began to quarrel over the proper response. With his usual caution, Gates hoped Burgoyne would try to dislodge the Americans from their impregnable stronghold. Spies confirmed that the British had crossed the Hudson with supplies for only one month and would soon collapse from their shortages. Benedict Arnold favored an aggressive response: Go out immediately and attack Burgoyne rather than wait passively for the British to haul up their large and punishing cannon and begin bombarding the fort.

  Despite their differences, Gates had remained friendly with Arnold and had once saved him from a court-martial conviction provoked by his temper. But Gates resented the way Arnold was filling his staff with allies of Philip Schuyler, and he remembered that in a defensive action against the British on Lake Champlain, Arnold had disregarded his orders and engaged the enemy rashly. General Gates had faith in his troops so long as he kept them massed behind barricades; he wasn’t sure how well they would fight in exposed lines down at Freeman’s Farm. But Arnold kept pressing him, and Gates sent out units of riflemen and light infantry into the thick woods to keep the British from getting behind the American position.

  It was past noon when riflemen wearing coonskin caps and led by Dan Morgan of Virginia reached Freeman’s clearing. Morgan’s men struck at a British advance guard and sent them running into the woods. Burgoyne set up battle lines in the pasture and easily repelled the Americans, who scattered during the retreat but regrouped when Morgan signaled with a turkey call, the pipe that hunters used to lure game.

  Horatio Gates believed that a commander’s place was at headquarters, where he could survey an entire operation and coordinate his instructions. Arnold stood at his side as Gates received couriers from the scene who reported troop movements that went back and forth. The engagement seemed headed for a stalemate. As the hours wore on, Benedict Arnold fed more men from his division into the battle—the Connecticut militia, three New Hampshire regiments, New Yorkers, the Massachusetts line. Gates told him that sending any more troops could jeopardize the post itself and insisted that Arnold remain at the headquarters. But when one messenger reported that the action had turned in the Americans’ favor, Benedict Arnold rushed to his horse and shouted, “By God, I will soon put an end to it!”

  Gates sent an aide to order him back to camp. Arnold obeyed, but in a furious temper. He was angrier still when sunset fell and the British still held on Freeman’s Farm, where the fighting had begun. John Burgoyne was claiming that by holding the clearing he had won the day’s victory, but his men knew otherwise. To those who had never fought the Americans before, the rebels had been astonishing. Burgoyne had ridiculed them after Ticonderoga, but on this day the Americans had held their ranks and fought for hours under a hot sun. Burgoyne had suffered two casualties for every American loss. He had lost a third of his forces in a single day and was hardly a step closer to Albany. That first night his men slept on the battlefield, and the next day they buried their dead. Some of the burial parties dug deep, others were slipshod in preparing the common graves and left arms and legs, even heads, above ground. In death, the one distinction accorded a British officer was being jammed into a hole by himself.

  Over the next days, the enemy armies rested only two miles apart. Each night, Gates sent out raiding parties to harass the British and disturb their sleep. During the day, American sharpshooters climbed trees and sniped at any British soldier who came into view. Three days after the battle, as Congress was evacuating Philadelphia, General Gates wrote out an account of his contest on September 19. Even though Benedict Arnold’s strategy and his troops had carried the day, Gates made no mention of Arnold in his dispatch. He wrote that the honors belonged instead entirely to Colonel Morgan, whose men had once been under Arnold’s command but had been transferred lately to Gates�
��s own.

  When Arnold heard of the omission, he burst into Gates’s headquarters and accused his commander of being jealous of his military talents. Gates would not back down. He told Arnold peremptorily to get rid of any aide who had remained loyal to Schuyler and who was hostile to Gates.

  At that, Arnold demanded a pass that would let him join General Washington in Pennsylvania. Gates said he would be pleased to give him one but reminded Arnold that he had already resigned his commission the previous July in an earlier dispute with the Congress over seniority. When George Washington recommended him for the Northern Army, Arnold had tried to suspend that resignation, but his status was not clear. Very possibly, Gates suggested, Arnold no longer held the rank of major general at all. In any event, he would soon be relieved of command of the army’s left wing, because Major General Benjamin Lincoln was arriving and his commission was dated earlier than Arnold’s. Benedict Arnold stormed away and poured out his complaints to aides, who passed along their version to Philip Schuyler in Albany.

  Back in his tent, Arnold hashed over his grievances in a letter to Gates that was half bluster and half a plea for reconciliation. But again he requested a pass. When Gates replied that he had never meant to be insulting, he also reminded Arnold of his threat to resign by enclosing a common pass that would let him go to Philadelphia. It was a pointed gesture. Most of Arnold’s colleagues were sure that Burgoyne was growing weaker every day and that glory awaited the soldiers who defeated him. Benedict Arnold lingered at the camp with his pass in his pocket. Fellow officers circulated a petition entreating him to stay; the only men who refused to sign were those afraid of offending General Gates. With the quarrel now public, Gates looked for a new way to assert himself. On September 26, a civilian arrived at the camp seeking payment of a small bill Arnold had authorized months earlier when he was acting for General Schuyler. Gates refused payment and let Arnold understand that his authority didn’t extend even to signing for fifty dollars.