Saratoga 1777, Benedict Arnold's Leg and the Turn of the Revolution

By the autumn of seventeen seventy-seven, the war was not going well. The Continental Army had lost New York City, lost Philadelphia, lost most of what it had tried to hold. The British general John Burgoyne had marched south from Canada with an army of nearly eight thousand men, a plan, and a deadline. The plan was to split the colonies in two by controlling the Hudson River Valley. The deadline was set by logistics: he had to reach Albany before winter.

He did not reach Albany.

The two battles that stopped him were fought on the high ground above the Hudson River near the village of Saratoga in Saratoga County, in September and October of seventeen seventy-seven. The first battle, on September nineteenth, cost Burgoyne roughly six hundred men and gave him nothing. The second battle, on October seventh, broke his army.

The second battle turned on a charge that had no business succeeding, led by a man who had no business being on the field at all. Benedict Arnold had been stripped of his field command by General Horatio Gates for insubordination. He had no military authority. He watched the battle from the American camp for hours before he could not stand it any longer. He rode onto the field, rallied a faltering assault on the Breymann Redoubt, and took the position. In the final moments of the charge, he was shot through the left leg by a Hessian soldier whose redoubt he had just captured.

The wound shattered his leg. It ended his battlefield effectiveness. He lay in a hospital bed while the army he had saved completed its victory. Burgoyne surrendered on October seventeenth, seventeen seventy-seven, with nearly six thousand men. Five months later, on February sixth, seventeen seventy-eight, France signed a formal treaty of alliance with the United States. The war, which had been losing, became winnable.

Whether the leg wound set in motion what came later, the treason at West Point in seventeen eighty, the defection to the British, cannot be proved. What is settled is the sequence: he was wounded saving a revolution that did not save him.