Saratoga (Freeman'S Farm)

Background

Nearly two years into the American Revolutionary War, British strategists sought to cut New England off from the middle and southern colonies, which they judged to be more sympathetic to the Loyalist cause. To accomplish this, British commanders drew up a scheme for 1777 involving three converging forces. Barry St. Leger would lead the western column out of Ontario, cutting across western New York along the Mohawk River, while a southern force pushed north through the Hudson River valley starting from New York City. A third column would march down from Montreal. All three were meant to converge near Albany, New York, thereby cutting New England away from the rest of the colonies.

Lieutenant General John Burgoyne set his army moving south out of Quebec province in June 1777, aiming to seize the upper Hudson River valley. Though his forces had triumphed at Fort Ticonderoga, the campaign afterward grew mired in complications. Advance units reached the upper Hudson by late July, yet problems with supply lines held the bulk of the army back at Fort Edward. An effort to solve these logistical troubles ended badly when close to 1,000 soldiers were killed or taken prisoner at Bennington on August 16. Compounding matters, word arrived on August 28 that St. Leger's push along the Mohawk had collapsed after the failed siege at Fort Stanwix.

Rather than marching north to link up with Burgoyne, General William Howe had instead loaded his troops onto ships from New York City, bound for an assault on Philadelphia. Meanwhile, most of the Indian allies supporting Burgoyne had abandoned him following the defeat at Bennington, leaving his position increasingly precarious. Faced with the need to secure winter quarters he could hold, Burgoyne weighed a retreat to Ticonderoga against a push forward to Albany, and chose to press on. He severed his lines of communication to the north on purpose, freeing himself from the burden of garrisoning a string of forts back to Ticonderoga, and moved to cross the Hudson while his army still held a favorable position. Baron Riedesel, commanding the army's rear guard, received orders to give up all posts south of Skenesboro, and the army made its crossing of the Hudson just above Saratoga between September 13 and 15.

Since Burgoyne had taken Ticonderoga at the start of July, the Continental Army under Major General Philip Schuyler had been falling back steadily and now sat encamped south of Stillwater, New York. Schuyler's standing had suffered because of the Ticonderoga loss and the retreat that followed, and on August 19 Major General Horatio Gates took over command from him. The two men came from starkly different backgrounds and had clashed before over authority within the Northern Department. Meanwhile the army's ranks swelled, fed by militia answering the call of their governors, buoyed by the victory at Bennington, and driven by fury over the killing of Jane McCrea, a Loyalist officer's fiancée slain by Indians allied with Burgoyne. Militiamen kept streaming in as the fighting unfolded, while Burgoyne had no prospect of any reinforcement at all, a disparity that ultimately doomed his campaign. By the fighting's end, Burgoyne commanded 5,791 men against a colonial force numbering roughly 12,000.

Gates also benefited from choices Washington made at the strategic level. Washington's attention was fixed chiefly on Howe's movements, though he remained mindful of Burgoyne's advance as well, and in July he accepted certain risks to help the northern effort. He dispatched Major General Benedict Arnold, his most combative field officer, along with Major General Benjamin Lincoln, a Massachusetts native respected among New England's militia, to reinforce the north. In August, even before confirming that Howe had truly sailed south, he ordered 750 men drawn from Israel Putnam's garrison defending the New York highlands to join Gates. He further committed some of his finest troops, sending Colonel Daniel Morgan along with the newly organized Provisional Rifle Corps, roughly 500 sharpshooters handpicked from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia for their marksmanship. This unit would become known as Morgan's Riflemen.

On September 7, Gates

First Saratoga: Battle of Freeman's Farm (September 19)

Burgoyne pushed southward after crossing the Hudson, moving with unusual care because the loss of his Native American scouts had left him blind to American movements. By September 18, his lead elements had come within roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) of the American lines north of Saratoga, and small clashes broke out between his advance troops and American scouts.

Trouble had been brewing in the American camp since Arnold came back from Fort Stanwix. Arnold and Gates had managed a workable relationship despite their difficult personalities, but Arnold's decision to bring on Schuyler loyalists as his staff pulled him into the long-running rivalry between Gates and Schuyler, souring his standing with Gates. Matters had not yet exploded by September 19, though that day's events pushed things further. Gates put Arnold in charge of the left side of the American defenses and kept the right for himself, a command technically belonging to General Lincoln, who Gates had sent off in August with troops to strike at British positions behind Burgoyne.

Both commanders recognized how critical the American left, and the high ground there, would be. When the morning mist cleared around ten o'clock, Burgoyne set his army moving in three columns. Baron Riedesel took the river road with the German units and the 47th Foot on the left, hauling the main artillery and protecting the supply boats and baggage. The center column, under General James Inglis Hamilton, held the 9th, 20th, 21st, and 62nd regiments and was tasked with striking the heights directly. On the right, General Simon Fraser commanded the 24th Regiment along with the light infantry and grenadier companies, aiming to swing around the American left through the dense, high woodland west and north of Bemis Heights.

Arnold anticipated this flanking attempt and asked Gates for permission to shift troops off the heights to meet it, banking on American strength in forest fighting. Gates, who favored holding position and waiting for a direct assault, reluctantly agreed to send out a reconnaissance force built around Daniel Morgan's riflemen and Henry Dearborn's light infantry. Morgan's men, upon reaching an open field northwest of Bemis Heights owned by the Loyalist John Freeman, spotted British troops already there. Fraser's column had fallen slightly behind schedule and hadn't yet arrived, while Hamilton's men were still crossing a ravine, pushing through thick woods and rough terrain toward the field from the east. Riedesel's column, though on the road, was slowed by barricades the Americans had placed in its path. Hearing gunfire to the west, he dispatched some artillery down a nearby track toward the sound. The troops Morgan's men had encountered turned out to be an advance company belonging to Hamilton.

Morgan positioned sharpshooters who proceeded to eliminate nearly every officer in that advance company. He and his men then pressed forward, not realizing they were charging straight into Burgoyne's main force. They pushed the advance company back, but Fraser's troops arrived just in time to strike Morgan's flank, sending his men scattering into the trees. James Wilkinson, who had ridden up to check on the fighting, rode back for reinforcements. As the retreating British company fell back on its main column, that column's front line opened fire, accidentally killing several of its own men.

Fighting paused around one o'clock while Hamilton's men organized on the field's northern edge and American reinforcements moved up from the south. Once Gates learned Morgan needed help, he sent the 1st and 3rd New Hampshire regiments, followed by additional units from Enoch Poor's brigade, namely the 2nd and 4th New York, the 1st Canadian, and Connecticut militia. Burgoyne positioned Hamilton's force with the 21st on the right flank, the 20th on the left, the 62nd holding the center, and the 9th kept back in reserve.

What followed was a battle marked by surges of violent combat interrupted by lulls. Morgan's men, having reformed among the trees, targeted officers and gun crews with deadly accuracy, at times thinning British artillery units so badly that American forces briefly seized their cannons, though each time they lost them again to a British counterattack. At one point word spread that Burgoyne himself had fallen to a marksman, though the actual casualty was one of his aides mounted on

Second Saratoga: Battle of Bemis Heights (October 7)

On October 7, Burgoyne commanded a force whose paper strength exceeded what actually stood ready for combat; casualties from previous engagements in the campaign and men slipping away after the September 19 fight had thinned his ranks to roughly 5,000 fit soldiers. General Riedesel counseled a withdrawal instead. Rather than retreat, Burgoyne opted to scout the American left to determine whether an assault was feasible. For this reconnaissance he brought Fraser's Advanced Corps as protection, positioning light infantry and the 24th Foot on the right, massed British grenadiers on the left, and troops pulled from every German regiment in the army holding the center. Major Williams commanded eight British guns, and Captain Pausch had two Hesse-Hanau cannon under his direction. Departing camp sometime between ten and eleven in the morning, the column moved roughly three quarters of a mile to elevated ground at Barber's wheat field overlooking Mill Brook, halting there to study the American lines. Though the open field gave artillery room to operate, the woods pressed uncomfortably close on both flanks.

Command on the American side had shifted after Arnold's removal from field authority; Gates now led the left himself and handed the right to General Lincoln. Once scouts alerted Gates to Burgoyne's advance, he sent Morgan's riflemen far out on the left flank, stationed Poor's brigade (the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd New Hampshire regiments) beside them, placed the 2nd and 4th New York on the right, and filled the center with Learned's 1st New York, the 1st Canadian, and the 2nd, 8th, and 9th Massachusetts regiments alongside militia units. Behind Learned's position, Brigadier General Abraham Ten Broeck kept 1,200 New York militiamen in reserve. Altogether more than 8,000 American soldiers occupied the field that day, a number that grew to include roughly 1,400 men from Lincoln's command once the fighting intensified enough to require them.

Combat opened sometime between two and two thirty in the afternoon, with the British grenadiers firing first. Poor's soldiers withheld their own volleys, and the ground itself blunted the effect of British musketry. Only when Major Acland led the grenadiers forward in a bayonet charge did the Americans open fire at close range. Acland went down with wounds to both legs, and numerous grenadiers fell alongside him. What remained of their formation collapsed entirely, letting Poor's men push forward to seize Acland and Williams as prisoners along with their artillery. Matters proved equally grim for the British on the American left. There, Morgan's riflemen brushed past the Canadians and Native American fighters to close with Fraser's regulars. Despite being outnumbered by a small margin, Morgan repeatedly foiled British efforts to shift westward. General Fraser suffered a mortal wound during this stage of the fighting, though Luzader notes that the popular tale crediting the shot to Timothy Murphy, one of Morgan's riflemen, may actually be an invention from the nineteenth century. Fraser's death combined with the arrival of Ten Broeck's sizable militia brigade, a force roughly matching the entire British reconnaissance party in numbers, shattered British resolve and sent them retreating in disarray back toward their fortified lines. Burgoyne himself narrowly escaped death when one of Morgan's sharpshooters put three rounds into his horse, hat, and waistcoat.

This opening phase of combat, lasting roughly an hour, cost Burgoyne close to 400 casualties, the capture of most of the grenadier leadership, and six of the ten cannon that had accompanied the reconnaissance.

At this juncture an uninvited figure entered the fray. Arnold, described as showing considerable agitation and fury back at camp and possibly under the influence of drink, rode out to join the fighting. Gates dispatched Major Armstrong at once with instructions to bring him back, though Armstrong could not catch up with Arnold until the battle had essentially concluded. A surviving letter from someone present in camp suggests Gates may have actually sanctioned Arnold's involvement.

Two redoubts anchored the defenses guarding the right side of Burgoyne's camp. The Hessian officer Heinrich von Breymann held the outer fortification with about 300 troops, while Lord Balcarres commanded the other. Canadian soldiers held