The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (84 page)

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 fieldpieces. Generals Riedesel and Phillips, with about the same number, were on the right, with three Brunswick regiments and eight fieldpieces.
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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.
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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,

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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 red-coated 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. Nor 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.
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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.

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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 afterwards, he had no reason not to expect further cooperation from General Howe. Unfortunately for him, he had no reason to expect cooperation either.
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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.
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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 reinforce-

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ments and sat in the rain watching his troops lose their spirit as his wounded suffered and died.

By early October, Burgoyne recognized how bad his situation was. He was not yet cut off from Canada, but his soldiers were in no condition to make a rapid retreat: he had many wounded and sick; his transport was short; his supplies, shorter. He decided in the midst of weakness to try to smash through his enemy. On the morning of October 7 Burgoyne sent out from Freeman's Farm a heavy force in reconnaissance to test what he thought was the American left. If weakness was found there, he intended to attack with everything he had. His generals did not enter into this plan with much conviction: Riedesel proposed withdrawal to the Batten Kill, a small stream that fed into the Hudson, and Fraser agreed; Phillips refused to give any advice. Burgoyne detested the thought of withdrawal and persisted in his plan, sending the reconnaissance in three columns supported by ten fieldpieces ranging from six pounders to light howitzers. This party crept forward for threefourths of a mile but discovered nothing. The three columns were then realigned to form a line of about a thousand yards. There the soldiers waited.
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About two-thirty in the afternoon the Americans, whose knowledge of their enemy's dispositions was superior to the British, struck. Poor's brigade, New Hampshire regulars led by Enoch Poor, engaged the British left, and soon after Daniel Morgan swung wide and hit the left and found his way to the British rear. The British line began to give way, as the troops discovered Americans all around them. Burgoyne then sent his aide, Sir Francis Clarke, forward from Freeman's Farm with an order to pull the reconnoitering party back. Clarke received a bullet on the way and died before he could deliver the order.

The battle soon became Benedict Arnold's. That worthy, eager and brave, had no command, had in fact been relieved by Gates several days before and invited to take himself away. Gates despised him, and he had not even mentioned Arnold in his dispatch to Congress telling of the battle of September 19. Arnold understandably did not admire Gates; he had not taken the hint to clear out but had waited around even though he had no command. Once the bullets began to fly, Arnold decided to insert himself into the battle. He did so brilliantly, riding up and down the line and against the enemy's center and right. The troops loved Arnold and followed him in a series of wild assaults.
Arnold

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in battle was more than a little mad, but it was a derangement that led to success. The British line crumbled, then disintegrated; Arnold did not stop to savor success but hit the main entrenchments with the same wild enthusiasm. Before the end of the day, his soldiers occupied a portion of the enemy's works on the extreme right, on the northern edge of Freeman's Farm. Late in the struggle Arnold, wounded, was carried off the field, and something went out of the American attack with him. But the Americans controlled the field, and Burgoyne was left in a dreadful position.
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That night and the next Burgoyne withdrew his army, tired, beaten, and dispirited. The sick and wounded, numbering some three hundred, were left behind in a field hospital. On October 9, the British reached the heights of Saratoga; Gates followed but did not succeed in cutting Burgoyne off until October 12. Burgoyne had delayed too long and, unable to cross the river, had no choice but to ask for terms. Discussions were held; the two leaders met on October 16, and the next day the British regulars marched out and laid down their arms. The surrender under the terms of the "Convention," the agreement each side accepted, provided that the army was to return to England through Boston. Congress, However, disregarded this agreement, fearing that the British would send these men back against America once more. The "Convention Army" eventually was marched to Virginia, where it sat out the war. Altogether some 5800 officers and men with twenty-seven field pieces and 5000 small arms, ammunition, and various sorts of supplies were captured.
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