Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
October 1997 | Volume 48, Issue 6
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
October 1997 | Volume 48, Issue 6
In those days Schuylerville was known as Saratoga, from the Indian word meaning “place of swift water,” and the two battles that precipitated the surrender here were fought eight miles down the Hudson, at places with the ordinary-sounding names of Freeman’s Farm and Barber’s wheat field, Bemis Heights, and the Neilson Farm. The silent fields beyond the hills and ravines hardly suggest that on a single day Burgoyne’s force lost in killed, wounded, and captured more than half the total number engaged. Here is the spot where Benedict Arnold was badly wounded, there is where the Brunswick lieutenant colonel Heinrich Breymann was shot (some said by his own men), here where Simon Fraser, Burgoyne’s ablest general, breathed his last. To pull it all together for you are maps and exhibits in the visitors’ center, interpretive markers on the battlefield, and a network of roads and walking trails connecting it all.
On the day of the surrender, above that little field in eighteenth-century Saratoga, the proud regiments of the British line—9th, 20th, 21st, 24th, and 62d —marched out of camp, colors flying, fifes and drums 1 playing, followed by the Royal Artillery. Then came a procession of blue-uniformed runswickers—the Rhetz, Riedesel, and Specht regiments, dragoons and grenadiers—plus green-clad Hesse-Hanau infantrymen and artillery, moving in precise formation toward the flat field by the river, where scores of horses lay dead and the intolerable stench of decaying bodies added to the mortifying task that engaged the troops. Even though no American soldier was there —Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates had ordered them all withdrawn so they could not witness the enemy’s humiliation—the experience was too much for some; a number of angry foot soldiers smashed