Patriots (65 page)

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.

On October 1, 1777, eight days after their quarrel, Arnold wrote again to Gates, repeating that he had been badly treated and
not sufficiently consulted. He couldn’t resist appealing to Gates once more to launch an immediate offensive. If they sat idly for another two weeks, Arnold was sure the Americans would lose four thousand men to sickness and desertion. That would also give Burgoyne time either to reinforce his position heavily or to stage a successful retreat. “
I hope you will not impute this hint to a wish to command the army, or to outshine you,” Arnold concluded, “when I assure you it proceeds from my zeal for the cause of my country, in which I expect to rise or fall.”

Gates read John Burgoyne and his intentions differently. Burgoyne could not stay where he was. With his men already on half rations, it was his troops, not the Americans, who were suffering from disease and desertion. Sir Henry Clinton was reportedly pushing up from New York with reinforcements, but Burgoyne probably couldn’t hold out long enough for them to reach Albany. As Arnold kept warning, it was certainly possible that Burgoyne would admit failure and retreat to Ticonderoga. But Gates doubted it. “
He is an old gambler,” he said. “Despair may dictate to him to risk all upon one throw.”

General Gates would do what came naturally to him: wait behind his barricades and let John Burgoyne take up the dice.

General Burgoyne surrenders at Saratoga, October17, 1777

YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY

A
T 11 A.M.
on Tuesday, October 7, 1777, General Burgoyne disregarded the advice of his generals and led out a reconnaissance force of fifteen hundred of his best men. He wanted to locate the position of the American line in the woods around Freeman’s Farm. If the Americans looked vulnerable on their left, Burgoyne intended to return the next day with the rest of his men—the forty-five
hundred he had left in camp. The British could then run roughshod over the Americans and break free for Albany. As his soldiers moved through a field of uncut wheat, Burgoyne climbed onto a cabin roof for a better look at Gates’s defenses. With the British position so badly exposed, he couldn’t advance farther. While his officers continued to estimate the placement of the American
left flank, some British soldiers ventured out to cut down wheat for bread. The rest formed double ranks in the field and sat down to await instructions.

On Bemis Heights, General Gates had been watching the activity through spyglasses. When a scout returned to headquarters, Gates asked him to describe the terrain and give his opinion about launching an attack. The British front was entirely open, the scout said. One flank bordered the woods and might be attacked from among the trees. On the right they were hemmed in by a high slope. Since the British seemed to be offering themselves so obligingly, the scout concluded,
“I would indulge them.”

With those odds, even Gates was willing to risk sending men outside his fortress. “Well, then,” he said, “order Morgan to begin the game.”

—

General Burgoyne’s reconnaissance party had been lingering in the open field for an hour and a half when the Americans struck in three simultaneous assaults—right, left and straight ahead. Daniel Morgan had taken his hunters through the wooded rise on the British right and from there poured down torrents of fire. Gates’s first instinct was to send only Morgan’s riflemen, and he brushed away Benedict Arnold when he argued for a larger force: “General Arnold, I have nothing for you to do. You have no business here.”

But General Lincoln persuaded Gates to send at least three regiments. In the end, he committed troops lavishly, holding back fewer than one thousand men to secure his base. When the battle was at its height, the Americans outnumbered the British and German soldiers six to one. Each of Burgoyne’s men was determined to save only himself, and the entire British left wing charged into the brush.

For an hour, Benedict Arnold sat on a bay charger, seething that the assault was going forward without him. When he finally could stand it no longer, he spurred his horse toward the sound of gunfire. He knew Gates would again send an aide to order him back, but Arnold outrode him. At about 4
P.M.
he arrived at the scene and spotted a British brigadier general, Simon Fraser, attempting to round up his men and lead them back to fight. Arnold pointed him out to Dan Morgan, who nodded and rode to a group of his riflemen. “
That gallant officer is General Fraser,” Morgan
told them. “I admire him, but it is necessary that he should die. Do your duty.”

Tim Murphy was renowned from his days as an Indian fighter, and he climbed a tree and took aim. His first shot cut the crupper of Fraser’s horse, a second grazed its mane behind the ears. Fraser’s men were calling to him to fall back out of range when a third bullet struck his heart. Two men led him back to his tent, still slumped over his horse. General Fraser asked a surgeon who was dressing his wounds,
“Must I die?” The young doctor said yes, he would not live another day.

Fraser was taken to the house of a Hessian general’s wife, who had been expecting him as a guest at dinner. Amid his dying groans, she heard Fraser call for his wife and then cry out, “
Poor General Burgoyne! Oh, fatal ambition!”

As Fraser lay dying, Benedict Arnold was galloping across the lines so boldly that the troops were sure he was drunk. He made one wild thrust with his sword and struck an American infantry captain. The captain raised his musket and was going to demand an apology, but Arnold was already far across the field, charging into battle with a different company. With his former troops from Connecticut shouting encouragement, Arnold seemed to be dashing everywhere with commands for everyone. He dared one unit to overwhelm a Hessian redoubt, which was easily accomplished because the Germans hated their autocratic commander and shot him dead during the attack. Then a wounded German soldier on the ground raised his rifle and shot Arnold’s charger as it was riding down on him. The horse stumbled and rolled over, and Arnold’s leg was broken again, as it had been at Quebec. An American was about to strike the German with his bayonet, but Benedict Arnold stopped him. “
Don’t hurt him! He is a fine fellow! He only did his duty!”

A surgeon looked at Arnold’s leg and said it might have to be amputated. “
Damned nonsense,” said Arnold. If that was all the doctors could do for him, they should hoist him back on another horse so that he could watch the battle end. As dusk fell on the field, Arnold was carried back to headquarters on a litter.

Horatio Gates sent down orders that overnight the Americans were to hold the ground they had taken. In the morning, during brisk exchanges of gunfire, Gates moved out enough men to keep the British trapped with the Hudson River at their backs. Burgoyne’s
decisive battle had come and gone the day before he had expected it. At sunset, as quiet in defeat as George Washington, Burgoyne buried Simon Fraser, struck the British tents, left his campfires burning and slipped north on the road away from Albany. He abandoned his field hospital and three hundred wounded men. By withdrawing in two stages, he came to rest in the hills above Saratoga. Burgoyne could have sunk his baggage and cannon and led a forced march to safety on Lake George. Instead, he gambled on digging in and waiting for an attack in which he would have the advantage of defending a raised position.

But General Gates was also content to wait. If Henry Clinton was coming up from New York, Gates didn’t want to leave the American rear undefended. Burgoyne seemed to have lost half his men in the last engagement and had limited rations for the survivors. Gates dispatched artillery and marksmen to annoy the British but went on postponing a battle that was beginning to seem avoidable. By October 14, Burgoyne’s army was surrounded, and he had provisions for only the next twenty-four hours. Oxen and horses had already died of starvation. The air over Saratoga was thick with the stench of their carcasses. By now it was too late even to jettison the artillery and break for Lake George.

Burgoyne convened his generals and put the question to them: Did national dignity and military honor ever justify an army of thirty-five hundred fighting men, who were well provided with artillery, in capitulating? His generals, British and German alike, agreed to offer their lives once more if Burgoyne saw an opportunity to attack. But if such a sacrifice would lead to nothing, it was wiser to conserve Britain’s manpower and capitulate on honorable terms.

When the council adjourned, a British soldier carrying a flag of truce stepped from the tall pines along the American lines. He had come to say that Lieutenant General Burgoyne wanted to send a field officer to meet with Major General Gates “
on a matter of high moment to both armies.” What time tomorrow morning would the general be available? Gates pondered his response into the evening. Then he sent word that his aide would receive the British emissary at the American advance post the next morning at ten.