Saratoga, The Fourteen Days That Saved the Revolution

By the autumn of seventeen seventy-seven, the American Revolution was stumbling. Washington had lost New York City. Philadelphia had fallen.

Desertions bled the Continental Army. British strategy called for a three-pronged assault to slice the colonies in half along the Hudson River corridor, separating New England from the south and, in the calculation of London planners, ending the rebellion before winter. The man tasked with driving south from Canada was General John Burgoyne, a playwright and socialite in London, a general who moved with an army of roughly seven thousand British and Hessian troops, along with a train of baggage and camp followers so lavish that contemporaries mocked it.

He crossed Lake Champlain, recaptured Fort Ticonderoga, and marched confidently toward Albany. What he did not account for was the terrain, the militia, and a general named Horatio Gates who had dug his army into the heights above a place called Saratoga. They fought twice.

On September nineteenth the British reached a clearing called Freeman's Farm and were met with withering fire, much of it directed by the fiery Daniel Morgan and his Virginia riflemen, and by the tactical nerve of Benedict Arnold, who at this point was still a hero. The British held the field but bled for it. On October seventh Burgoyne tried again.

Arnold rode out without orders, led a charge into the British redoubt, took a wound in the same leg he had injured before, and broke the line. Ten days later, on October seventeenth, seventeen seventy-seven, Burgoyne surrendered his entire army, roughly six thousand men, to General Gates on a hillside above the Hudson. Word crossed the Atlantic.

King Louis XVI of France, who had been waiting for proof the Americans could actually fight, entered formal alliance with the United States on February sixth, seventeen seventy-eight. French gold, French ships, and ultimately a French army at Yorktown finished what the mud of Saratoga began. Historian Edmund Morgan wrote that Saratoga won for Americans the foreign assistance that was the last element needed for victory.

New York, a state that had been occupied in its largest city and contested everywhere else, had given the Revolution its turning point.