Turning the Tides

The British captured New York in 1776 by concentrating their forces there, but the United States was vast and would not be defeated by the loss of one or two cities. More devastating would be the loss of Gen. George Washington’s main army or the more dispersed army led by Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler, whose troops had retreated from the fight for Canada but retained possession of Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain and other strongholds on Lake George and the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers. 

In early 1777, British Lt. Gen. John Burgoyne, who had helped beat back the American invasion of Canada, proposed challenging those forces. He wanted to seize Fort Ticonderoga and link up in Albany with a detachment crossing New York State from Lake Ontario as well as troops sailing up the Hudson from New York City under Maj. Gen. William Howe. Their combined forces might overwhelm Schuyler’s troops and take control of the strategic corridor separating New York from New England, the cradle of the rebellion.

Howe, the British commander in chief in America, had separately developed his own plan to target Philadelphia that summer, which he hoped would draw Washington’s army into a decisive battle.

Burgoyne’s campaign began with a flourish in June when most of his army embarked from Québec and entered near the northernmost end of Lake Champlain.  

His forces included:  

Meanwhile:  

On June 30, Burgoyne’s forces landed near Fort Ticonderoga, situated where water streaming from Lake George enters Lake Champlain. Burgoyne warned his men of trials ahead and declared: “This army must never retreat.”

By July 5, they had placed heavy artillery on a hill overlooking the fort. Its commander, Maj. Gen. Arthur St. Clair, knew he would be severely criticized if he retreated, but his soldiers were outnumbered nearly three to one and poorly armed. He chose to risk his reputation and ordered the fort abandoned while his troops could still escape. Some fled by boat to the southern end of Lake Champlain. Most marched with St. Clair toward Hubbardton in what would become the state of Vermont, pursued by British Brig. Gen. Simon Fraser’s corps.  

On July 7, Fraser attacked and routed St. Clair’s rear guard, but the soldiers rallied and held out until Hessians entered the battle, prompting those Americans still standing to flee. The American forces left behind more than 350 men killed, wounded, or captured, but they stymied the British pursuit of St. Clair, who led troops safely to Fort Edward, Schuyler’s base on the east bank of the upper Hudson River. 

From Lake Champlain, Burgoyne proceeded overland to Fort Edward—slowed by rebel obstructions like felled trees and destroyed bridges. Before he arrived, the revolutionaries withdrew southward, and Burgoyne occupied the fort uncontested. But his troops were running short of provisions, and Americans made it hard for them to live off their farmland. One German lieutenant noted that “all the fields of standing corn were laid waste, the cattle driven away.”  

On August 11, Burgoyne sent nearly 800 men, including Hessian dragoons seeking horses they could ride as cavalry, to forage in Vermont around Bennington. They were unaware that 1,500 New Hampshire militiamen had recently arrived there under Brig. Gen. John Stark, hailed for repelling British charges at Bunker Hill. Stark surrounded the British forces west of town and overwhelmed them. Reinforcements arrived too late and were thrashed by Stark’s men, who suffered 70 casualties while killing over 200 men and capturing 750.

Following the British disaster at Bennington, Burgoyne learned that Lt. Col. Barrimore “Barry” St. Leger’s forces had turned back after advancing with Brant’s Haudenosaunee—including Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga—to Fort Schuyler, near the source of the Mohawk River. St. Leger had besieged the fort but could not breach its walls. Meanwhile, militiamen led by Brig. Gen. Nicholas Herkimer gathered at Fort Dayton, 30 miles away, and marched up the Mohawk River with American-allied Oneida warriors to challenge St. Leger.

On August 6, Brant and his soldiers set out to ambush Herkimer near the Oneida village of Oriska, later called Oriskany. During the attack, Herkimer was wounded in the leg and later died from an infection following an amputation, and at least 400 militiamen were killed, wounded, or captured. Fewer of their assailants died, but among them were several Haudenosaunee chiefs, whose followers lost heart when they returned from battle to find that raiders from Fort Schuyler had torched their camps. They left when they learned that nearly a thousand soldiers sent by Schuyler under the recently promoted Maj. Gen. Benedict Arnold were approaching. St. Leger then ended his siege of Fort Schuyler and withdrew with his men.

As Burgoyne’s numbers diminished, America’s Northern Army expanded under a new commander, Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates. He owed his promotion partly to New Englanders who resented Schuyler and other New York landlords for seeking to evict them from property granted to them in Vermont. Burgoyne described settlers around Vermont as “the most active and rebellious race on the continent,” whose militiamen menaced his army “like a gathering storm.” 

Gates sought their support by publicizing a letter he wrote accusing Burgoyne of paying Indigenous people for scalps taken from civilians, including one Jane McCrea, described as “mangled in the most shocking manner.” Burgoyne denied provoking such attacks, which he had tried to discourage. But the accusation that she was scalped may have increased militia support for Gates, who was also reinforced by battle-tested Continental troops, including Virginia riflemen.  

Burgoyne could not count on help from Howe, who had declared that “my intention is for Pennsylvania,” where he expected to confront Washington. Forging ahead nonetheless, Burgoyne crossed in mid-September with Fraser to the Hudson’s west bank. That put him on a road south from Saratoga to Albany, but he could not proceed without confronting Gates, who held a strong position prepared by the astute Polish engineer Col. Thaddeus Kościuszko on Bemis Heights, overlooking the road and nearby river. Local ravines left Burgoyne little favorable ground for an attack except across fields at John Freeman’s farm. 

On September 19 the British emerged from the woods there and came under withering fire from Virginia riflemen, who rashly pursued the redcoats until Fraser’s corps outflanked and repulsed them. British troops were also stoutly opposed by rebel forces under Benedict Arnold and by riflemen who regrouped and targeted officers and gunners with deadly precision. Fighting surged back and forth until Burgoyne summoned the Hessians, whose attack gave him possession of the field. Burgoyne hoped to renew battle until he learned the extent of his casualties exceeded 550 men. Gates, who had declined Arnold’s request for more troops and sustained fewer than 350 casualties, retained a larger army than Burgoyne.

Having severed his supply line when he crossed the Hudson, Burgoyne welcomed a message he received on September 21 from the now Lt. Gen. Henry Clinton, left in command at New York City when Howe departed. Clinton offered to lead troops up the Hudson against Fort Montgomery, where British ships were blocked from sailing up the river.  

“Do it, my dear friend, directly,” Burgoyne replied.  

But communication between distant British commanders in America was slow and perilous, conducted by couriers in plain clothes who risked being executed if caught. It took more than a week for Burgoyne’s reply to reach Clinton, who embarked up the Hudson on October 3 with 3,000 men escorted by warships. His forces soon succeeded in capturing Fort Montgomery and other American strongholds on the Hudson. But they were still far from Burgoyne, who no longer waited to act. His men were on two-thirds rations, and so many were deserting that bounties were offered to guards who captured or shot them.

After meeting in council with his generals, who argued against his plan to risk most of his diminished army by attacking Gates, Burgoyne accepted a compromise proposal for a reconnaissance in force, which, if successful, would be followed by a concerted assault. Meanwhile, Gates nearly lost the services of the temperamental but indispensable Arnold, who was furious when Gates’s report to the Congress of the recent Battle at Freeman’s Farm made no mention of him. He offered his resignation, but Gates ignored it. 

On October 7, Burgoyne and Fraser launched a 1,500-man reconnaissance that proceeded haltingly, enabling some troops to harvest wheat in fields along the way to supply their hungry encampment. Gates soon learned of their approach and attacked; in the fray, Fraser was mortally wounded by a rifleman. Burgoyne’s outnumbered troops fell back to Freeman’s Farm, where Arnold appeared on horseback late in the day and led attacks like a man possessed until he was shot in the leg and carried off. Still, Arnold had secured a decisive victory for the Northern Army.

Burgoyne lingered long enough at the site of his defeat to honor Fraser, whose formal funeral ceremony contrasted with the hasty burials of lower ranking soldiers who were laid in graves too shallow to keep wolves away. Burgoyne withdrew up the west bank of the Hudson toward the town of Saratoga. However, he left behind hundreds of sick and wounded men. According to Connecticut militiaman Ambrose Collins, some men were “terribly mangled” and “lying on straw on the ground” as British surgeons extracted bullets and performed amputations. 

Pursued and overtaken in Saratoga, Burgoyne surrendered his army to Gates on October 17, a stunning outcome that sent shock waves across the Atlantic and altered the course of the Revolutionary War. 

Washington had contributed to the victory at Saratoga by sending the Virginia riflemen and other troops from his own army to Gates. He was able to spare them because Congress had raised enough troops to enlarge both the Northern Army and Washington’s forces, whose task that summer of 1777 was to guard against an attack by Howe on Philadelphia, where Congress presided. While Burgoyne was traveling southward from Fort Ticonderoga, Howe embarked from New York City in mid-July with almost 16,000 men and was escorted by his brother Admiral Howe. In Philadelphia, militia units swelled Washington’s army there to 14,000 men. General Howe did not approach that city by landing along the lower Delaware, as planned, because he received a report exaggerating American strength there. The fleet sailed farther down the coast, then up Chesapeake Bay, wracked by storms.  

When General Howe’s troops arrived at the mouth of the Elk River in northeastern Maryland in late August, Washington moved to block their advance on Philadelphia by intercepting them at Chadd’s Ford on Brandywine Creek in southeastern Pennsylvania. Seeing an opportunity to vanquish his foe, Howe crossed the creek upstream from that ford on September 11 with Maj. Gen. Charles Cornwallis and more than 8,000 troops, bearing down on Washington as a 5,000-strong British and Hessian force confronted the revolutionaries head-on at the ford. 

To withstand the onslaught, Washington called on Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, who delayed Howe’s advance long enough to enable Washington to extract most of his forces.

At least 1,200 of Washington’s men were killed, wounded, or captured. Howe’s casualties were half that, but he lost what proved to be his last chance to crush Washington’s army—a feat that would have overshadowed the American victory at Saratoga and been far more significant than capturing Philadelphia.  

On his way to Philadelphia, Howe sent forces to raid an American camp at Paoli, where they struck late at night and attacked with bayonets, killing or wounding about 150 Americans. He then crossed the Schuylkill River and entered Philadelphia on September 26. It was not the prize he hoped for. Congress had fled to York, Pennsylvania, and American forts on the lower Delaware kept British ships from reaching the city for some time.

As 1777 came to a close,Washington’s troops faced an ordeal even deadlier than the battles they had endured: a harrowing winter at Valley Forge, their camp northwest of Philadelphia, where hunger, exposure, and disease claimed the lives of at least 2,000 of the 11,000 men there. Nearly 3,000 of them, Washington reported in December, were “barefoot and otherwise naked,” so ragged that their flesh was exposed to the bitter cold. Frostbite cost some men their toes. 

Some who fell ill were sent to hospitals, but many remained in camp, tended by fellow soldiers or by women who followed the army and aided it in various ways. Most were wives of soldiers, like Mary Geyer, who washed and mended clothes for men of the 13th Pennsylvania Regiment while nursing her husband, Peter Geyer, wounded at Germantown, and their 11-year-old son, John, a drummer boy shot in that same battle.

Some women were paid to serve as cooks or launderers. Washington was joined by his wife, Martha, in February 1778 while he was working to prevent starvation in camp. Congress had recently given him authority to confiscate provisions from civilians, some of whom preferred to sell food to the British in Philadelphia.  

Troops healthy enough to march were drilled expertly at Valley Forge by Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a former Prussian officer under Frederick the Great. Von Steuben arrived with a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin in Paris, who had just concluded an alliance of utmost importance for the embattled United States. 

When news reached Paris in December 1777 that Howe’s army had entered Philadelphia, an acquaintance consoled Franklin for the loss of his country’s capital. Howe had not taken Philadelphia, Franklin replied. “Philadelphia has taken Howe.” He could speak lightly of the matter because word arrived simultaneously that American forces had captured Burgoyne’s army, which helped Franklin achieve what he had been seeking for the past year as the top American diplomat in Paris: a treaty that would draw France into the war against its old enemy, Britain.

He had received little encouragement initially from the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, the Comte de Vergennes, who, like King Louis XVI, was glad to goad Britain by aiding the United States but reluctant to officially join the struggle. Franklin knew that patience and persistence would make a stronger impression than urgent appeals for help. While awaiting events on the battlefield that might encourage an alliance, he endeared himself to Parisians by wearing a fur hat and dressing simply, befitting their image of the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack, whose homespun epigrams had been translated into French. 

Franklin followed Poor Richard’s advice to “make haste slowly” until news of Burgoyne’s surrender caused Vergennes and the king to fear that Britain would come to terms with the United States and forge an alliance against France. Defeat at Saratoga had in fact prompted another British attempt to make peace, conveyed by Paul Wentworth, a British secret agent who met with Franklin in Paris in January 1778 and offered Americans no taxation by Parliament and other concessions if they rejoined the British Empire. Franklin politely dismissed the offer as too late. 

It was almost certainly also too little to satisfy him and other Americans bent on freedom from Britain. He had agreed to the meeting because he was confident that French police trailing the agent would inform authorities intent on keeping Britain and America apart. The last barrier to an alliance was removed when Franklin pledged that Congress would “reject firmly all propositions made to them of peace from England” that did not promise America independence. Two agreements that Franklin concluded with France on February 6, 1778, the Treaty of Amity and Commerce and the Treaty of Alliance, linked the United States to an empire that rivaled Britain in might. The crucial Treaty of Alliance offered them not only military support but also explicit recognition by a great power of the liberty, sovereignty, and “absolute and unlimited” independence of the United States.