Authors:
Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
October 1997 | Volume 48, Issue 6
Authors:
Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)
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 Horatio Gates had ordered them all withdrawn so they could not witness the enemy’s humiliation—the experience was too much for some; a number of angry foot soldiers smashed the butts of their muskets.
In the rebel camp across Fish Creek, Gates’s troops lined up on both sides of the river road that led to Coveville and on to the battlefield. Early in the day the British commander, Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, put on the gorgeous scarlet coat with gleaming gold braid that he had planned to wear at his triumphal entry into Albany, and about noon he and his top generals forded the swollen Fish Creek and rode past the blackened remains of the house of the American general Philip Schuyler, which had been burned by the British during their retreat. Half a mile from here was the American headquarters,