Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (17 page)

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.
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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.

* * *

With growing impatience, Benedict Arnold had been listening to the sounds of the pitched fight. “I am afraid to trust you, Arnold,” Gates had told him.
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Although he held no official position in Gates’s army, Arnold could no longer restrain himself. He jumped astride his horse and
galloped out of the American fortifications. Gates sent an officer to recall him. Arnold spurred his horse onward, and “behaved more like a madman than a cool and discreet officer.”
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With Morgan routing the light infantry on the British right and Poor decimating the grenadiers on their left, the Brunswick troops who formed the enemy center were exposed. General Ebenezer Learned’s Massachusetts Continentals were forming to attack them when Arnold arrived on the scene. Arnold rode to the head of the advancing troops. In a joint command with Learned, he led three regiments against the German line. They failed to break through, but kept up a steady fire that drove the enemy back.

On the other side of the field, General Simon Fraser, the most gifted of Burgoyne’s lieutenants, tried to rally his troops to stop the British collapse. He rode up and down the lines, giving orders and shouting encouragement. Squinting through the smoke, Daniel Morgan recognized that Fraser was stiffening the resistance in front of his riflemen. According to an often repeated story, he ordered an illiterate young Pennsylvania sergeant named Timothy Murphy to kill the scarlet-clad general. An expert marksman, Murphy climbed a tree and took aim at the officer from several hundred yards away. He fired a ball into Fraser’s stomach. As the general slumped, the British position began to crumble. The loss of Fraser “helped to turn the fate of the day,” a British officer later admitted.
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Arnold, meanwhile, “rushed into the thickest of the fight with his usual recklessness.”
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As the Germans and British maneuvered back toward their fortifications, Arnold, in his blue and buff uniform, rode headlong across the field, through fire from both sides, to again take charge of Learned’s brigade. He led them toward a British redoubt. When that fortification proved too solid, he charged on. Along with Morgan and Dearborn, he attacked another, larger fort blocking access to the British rear.

Brunswicker colonel Heinrich von Breymann, whose men Seth Warner’s Green Mountain Boys had roughed up at Bennington, commanded the troops who defended this fortified rise. The Americans came on from all sides. Arnold, intoxicated by the fighting, spurred his horse through an opening into the midst of the redoubt. The Americans followed him. All through the fighting, Arnold had possessed a charm that had protected him from flying lead. Now a musket ball tore through his leg and smashed his thigh bone. His horse collapsed. Arnold was out of the fight.

If he had not been wounded, Arnold might have rallied the Americans to rush into the British rear, capture their supplies, and end the campaign in an hour. As it was, the enemy mounted an unsuccessful attempt to
retake the Breymann redoubt before darkness brought the curtain down on the day’s fighting.

* * *

Burgoyne, his army battered and exposed, saw that his options had run out. Britons must now retreat. In the middle of the night, the army pulled back from Bemis Heights and assumed a defensive position near the river. He had lost almost 900 men killed, wounded, or captured. American casualties were less than 150. The guns that Burgoyne had dragged onto the field had been lost. The next day, he continued his withdrawal, leaving behind a hospital crowded with men too badly injured to travel. They did not include General Fraser, who sighed, “Oh, fatal ambition!” and died at eight o’clock on the morning after the battle.

It was not only the British who were dismayed. American artillery captain John Henry, the twenty-year-old son of Virginia governor Patrick Henry, had distinguished himself in the battle. After the cataclysm died down, he wandered the field, staring at the faces, the blue lips, dead staring eyes, and glistening teeth, of men he had known. The sight unhinged him. He broke his sword in half and went “raving mad.” He disappeared for months and never fought again.
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The British commander still imagined he could make a stand to the north at Fort Edward. Harassed by Morgan’s riflemen, his army limped the few miles back to the village of Saratoga, which would give the whole bloody affair its name. The next day, it rained.

Burgoyne, the dashing cosmopolitan who had mocked the rebels and plotted their demise, who had given stretch to murderous Indians, who had slogged through the wilderness with wagons loaded down by his glad rags and intoxicants, now grew rattled and indecisive. He still hoped that General Clinton would appear to distract the Continental Army that was moving in for the kill. He still hoped he could move his own army, even his remaining artillery, out of harm’s way.

He hoped against hope. Among those who tightened the noose was John Stark. The hero of Bennington led a thousand fresh New Hampshire recruits across the Hudson into the enemy’s rear and blocked the road with field guns. John Burgoyne had run out of options.

* * *

On a sunny, chilly Friday, October 17, 1777, British soldiers marched out of their camp and laid their arms down in a meadow. General Gates, wary of the sudden appearance of Clinton in his rear, had offered generous terms. To spare British feelings, the surrender would be termed a “convention,” as
if it were the conclusion of a business deal. The Americans were to allow Burgoyne’s troops to return home under a promise not to fight again. Congress would find plenty of excuses to avoid ever doing so.

Burgoyne donned his best dress uniform and rode with his generals and staff to meet Gates. The man in scarlet and gold braid cut a fine figure compared to the smaller American, who wore a plain blue coat, no wig, and wire-rimmed spectacles. The men dined in Gates’s quarters, hardly more than a shack.

The British troops marched into captivity along a road lined on either side by American soldiers. The ragged, motley victors observed strict silence. Their discipline impressed the men they had defeated. An American band struck up “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” a tune that a British surgeon had written during the French and Indian War to mock the pretension of the provincials.