Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (16 page)

Wayne’s men had not forgotten the Paoli battle and “took Ample Vengeance for the Night’s work,” Wayne later wrote to his wife. “The Rage and fury of the Soldiers, were not to be Restrained.”
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Then fog, smoke, confusion, lack of ammunition, tangled communications, and friendly fire combined to cancel the victory. Suddenly, it was the Americans who were retreating.

Critical mistakes let the chance slip. Some British infantrymen had taken refuge in the stone house of Benjamin Chew on the north end of Germantown. Henry Knox, ill served on this occasion by his voluminous military reading, remembered that a commander should never leave a castle manned in his rear. The pointless fighting around the Chew house delayed the reserves needed for the actual battle up front.

General Adam Stephen, marching with Greene’s division, heard the commotion at the Chew House and veered off without orders. Coming on Wayne’s brigade in “thickest fog known in the memory of man,” his troops opened fire on their own men. The clash broke the cohesion of both groups and accelerated the retreat. Stephen was blamed for the debacle and cashiered, although he was not, as accused, drunk during the battle. His military career had begun fighting beside Washington at Jumonville Glen. It ended at Germantown.

“A
windmill
attack was made upon a house,” Wayne later stated, referring to the futile assault that wasted time at the Chew mansion. “Confusion ensued and we ran away from the arms of victory open to receive us.”
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Yet for all their mistakes, the Americans remained upbeat. The thrill of watching the best army in Europe run before them in a pitched battle softened the regret of having to “leave the ground to a conquered foe.”

Thomas Paine, who breakfasted with Washington the day after the battle, correctly observed that the Americans could only acquire the art of war “by practice and by degrees.” They could “feel themselves more important,” he said, as they trudged into winter quarters.
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The Continentals had not pulled off another Trenton, but Washington’s audacious plan had come breathtakingly close to succeeding. His soldiers, Washington reported to Congress, had “gained what all young troops gain by being in actions.”
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They were learning.

Twelve

Something More at Stake

1777

Facing increasing dangers as he edged southward, British general John Burgoyne would have preferred General Howe to have come up the Hudson to bring him aid rather than travel south to attack Philadelphia. But the flamboyant Burgoyne remained confident of reaching Albany. “Britons never retreat,” he told his men.
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He still thought of his army as an irresistible force.

Horatio Gates hardly gave the impression of an immovable object. His receding chin, thin gray hair, and spectacles suggested a counting house clerk rather than a military hero. But following the fall of Ticonderoga, Congress had had enough of General Philip Schuyler. They wanted a man who could inspire militia and who knew how to fight. They gave Gates, the former British major, his long-sought independent command.

Under Schuyler, the American troops had fallen back all the way to the juncture of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers, barely ten miles north of Albany. Gates arrived there on August 19. He scorned advice from a disappointed Schuyler, who wrote, “I have done all that could be done . . . it is left to you, General, to reap the fruits of my labors.”
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In fact, neither general had played a role in the serious check that John Stark’s men had delivered Burgoyne’s forces at Bennington three days earlier.

The new commander sent Schuyler to Albany to attend to the army’s supply problems. In camp, Gates found troops who had endured nothing
but defeat and backward movement. His arrival, a soldier said, “raised us, as if by magic. We began to hope and then to act.”
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More help came. Daniel Morgan, released from captivity, had rejoined the army in January 1777, and Congress had promoted him to colonel. Washington, impressed with Morgan’s grit, wanted him to lead an entire regiment of mobile fighters. His men would dress in hunting shirts, carry rifles, and intimidate their enemies by “screaming and yelling as the Indians do.” Residents of northern New York wanted these hardy soldiers in particular to help neutralize the scourge of Burgoyne’s Indians. “Oh for some Virginia rifle-men!” cried a citizen of Albany. Washington hurried Morgan north. “I know of no Corps so likely to check their progress,” he wrote to Morgan, “as the one you Command. I have great dependence on you, your Officers and Men.”
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Another, more problematic, fighter came to Gates’s aid as well. During the summer, Benedict Arnold had rushed westward to help stop a second arm of the enemy invasion force. British general Barry St. Leger had brought a force of regulars, loyalists, and Indians down the Mohawk Valley from Lake Ontario to reinforce Burgoyne. A bloody battle with local militiamen at Oriskany and a ruse cooked up by Arnold had prompted the Indians to depart and forced St. Leger’s retreat.

Gates quickly ordered Arnold to rejoin the main army. The two had worked together the year before, but even then Gates had recognized “the warmth of General Arnold’s temper.” Now Arnold was on edge because Congressional politicians had refused to make him a major general in the February round of promotions, during which they had also passed over John Stark. Although they got around to raising Arnold in May, seniority left him suffocated under less experienced officers. He had gone so far as to tender his resignation, then suspended the action to attend to the current crisis. Arnold’s friendship with Schuyler made Gates wary. Arnold found himself welcomed at headquarters “with the greatest coolness” and quickly took offense. His prickly, presumptuous personality rubbed his commander the wrong way. Trouble was brewing.

Gates put Arnold in charge of the army’s left wing, giving him Morgan’s elite corps. Additional Continentals arrived from the south. New York and New England militiamen responded to Gates’s call. He took advantage of events like the Jenny McCrea murder to boost recruitment. He tightened discipline and improved conditions in camp. On September 8, Gates ordered his troops to advance rather than retreat for the first time that summer. A sense of exhilaration shot through the men as they stepped off to march twelve miles to the north.

At the village of Stillwater, Gates found the river plain too wide for easy defense. He decided to proceed a bit farther to a mostly wooded plateau known as Bemis Heights. From there he could train guns on the river road, along which Burgoyne’s force would have to pass. The men spent the next week digging. The Polish volunteer Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a genius of engineering, directed the construction of fortifications stretching west more than a mile up the slope from the riverbank and across the plateau. Having attended military academies in both Poland and France, “Kos,” as American officers called him, designed as effective a defense as was possible to throw up in a short time.

Gates reinforced Morgan’s regiment with three hundred fighters chosen for their ability and under the command of Major Henry Dearborn. The muskets and bayonets of these troops would add another lethal weapon to Morgan’s arsenal. Morgan’s riflemen ranged in front of the works, gathering intelligence and keeping Burgoyne’s scouts from discovering the Americans’ intentions. They terrorized the Indians, until none of the braves could be “brought within the sound of a rifle shot.”

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Fellow officers knew Horatio Gates as a worldly, convivial soldier, fond of jokes that went “beyond the nice limits of dignity,” and given to swearing in a way that made “a New Englandman’s hair almost stand on end.” He was, a biographer wrote, “a good hand at cards, a jolly drinking partner.”
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Gates’s primary talent was for organization, for staff work rather than battlefield command. After being seriously wounded at Braddock’s Monongahela disaster, Gates had seen little additional action in the Seven Years’ War. His career, like those of many officers, had stalled with the peace. In 1773, he sold his commission and retired to a small Virginia estate, bringing with him his wife, Elizabeth, and teenage son Robert. Enamored of the republican ideals percolating in America, he embraced the cause of independence early.

Gates scrupulously looked after his men’s welfare. Samuel Adams, a Gates booster, noted that his men loved him because “he always shares with them in fatigue and danger.”
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Gates was careful not to squander lives for glory. Militiamen responded to his call because they knew he would promptly send them home when they were no longer needed.

Having taken his stand, Gates waited to see what Burgoyne would do. The enemy army had camped ten miles to the north, on the east side of the river opposite the village of Saratoga. Burgoyne’s hope of supplies from Bennington and of reinforcements down the Mohawk had been
dashed. But his army was still dangerous. He commanded six thousand professional killers and more than fifty field cannon.

Dangerous and desperate. British food supplies would run out in less than a month. Burgoyne’s two options were clear. He could prudently pull back to Fort Ticonderoga before winter and hope to complete his mission the following year. Or he could push toward Albany. To get there he would have to follow the road across the river and fight his way past the rebels.

On September 13, American scouts reported British activity. Burgoyne marched his army across the Hudson on a pontoon bridge in a showy manner “reminding one of a grand parade in the midst of peace.” Once over, his men dismantled the bridge, severing their supply line back to Canada. Five days later, the British army was camped along the river four miles north of the American position. The men from both armies could hear the drums of the enemy pounding signals within their camps. A violent confrontation was now imminent.

* * *

Increasingly at odds with each other, Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold disagreed about whether the Americans should adopt a strategy of defense or offense. Gates was content to wait inside his fortifications and let Burgoyne attack him. Arnold yearned to go out and fall on the British before they reached the American lines.

Personality dictated their positions: Gates cautious, Arnold impetuous. Each had reason on his side. Why waste men and risk his army in a pitched battle, Gates figured. Far better to remain behind breastworks against which Burgoyne would wear out his troops. From long experience, Gates respected British fighting ability. So far, he had read Burgoyne’s intentions perfectly. His opponent, he knew, was an “Old Gamester.” He observed that it was clear “the General’s Design is to Risque all upon one Rash Stroke.”
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Arnold argued that it was in the woods that American fighters excelled. If the British overpowered them there, they would still have the option of pulling back to their fortifications. If they waited, the enemy might drag up heavy guns and demolish their hasty earthworks.

Gates, wearied of the paperwork of staff positions, had fixed his sights on fame and honor. Arnold, already a blazing comet in the American firmament, was determined to show an ungrateful Congress its error in denying him the laurels he deserved. Each man saw the pending battle as an opportunity to fulfill his deepest need. Meanwhile, the “awful expectation and suspense” mounted.

* * *

The tension peaked on the dank morning of September 19. American scouts reported redcoats moving out of their camp and mounting Bemis Heights. By eleven, the sun had burned off the early fog. The boom of a British signal cannon broke the silence. The American soldiers, still inside their fortified line, nervously gripped their weapons.

Gates held to his defensive plan. His only concession was to allow Arnold to send Morgan and his regiment to the north and west to see what the enemy was up to. The riflemen hurried forward through the woods. They took up a position on a farm once owned by a man named Freeman, one of the few areas of cleared fields on the heights. A British picket force came into view on the north side of the clearing. Morgan’s men fired. So accurate was their aim that all the British officers but one fell dead in an instant. The rest of the advance party fled in panic.

The Americans, their blood up, sprinted after them. They collided squarely with a heavy force of British infantry. A ripping volley stopped the patriot riflemen cold and scattered them. Morgan lost touch with his men during the charge and assumed the worst. He was reported to have wept with frustration at the setback. But his turkey call signal soon drew the men back into formation.

With a fight on, Arnold ordered the rest of his regiments into action to support Morgan. The battle concentrated on the farm clearing. General Enoch Poor’s brigade of nine hundred New Hampshire Continentals, backed by additional militia, came into line with Morgan’s men. The explosion of their fire echoed for miles through woods that had never known such a roar. The British fell back, the Americans rushed ahead to capture enemy guns. Burgoyne ordered his grenadiers to charge with bayonets.

Here the patriots had no trenches or breastworks to protect them. A flat-out slugging match raged in the open field. The Continentals, now with two years of experience behind them, faced the cold steel of Britain’s largest and fiercest soldiers. The rebels did not break. They leveled their muskets and fired. Their volley stunned the grenadiers and made them recoil.

Poor, a forty-three-year-old merchant, later remembered that “the blaze from the artillery and small arms was incessant and sounded like the roll of the drum. By turns the British and Americans drove each other, taking and retaking the fieldpieces . . . often mingling in a hand to hand wrestle and fight.”
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The brawl became a scene of utter mayhem, a wild confusion of fire and smoke. “Senior officers who had witnessed the hardest fighting of the Seven Years’ War declared that they had never experienced so long and hot a fire.”
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The death of many British officers was “attributed to the great execution of the riflemen, who directed their fire against them in particular.”
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Arnold tried frantically to coordinate the action. One of Dearborn’s men remembered Arnold “riding in front of the lines, his eyes flashing.” It was a sight that “electrified the line.”
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The battle went on and on. Late in the afternoon, it seemed the Americans were on the verge of defeating what was clearly Burgoyne’s effort to smash the rebel army. The fighting had reduced the British regiment at the center from 350 men to a mere 60 still firing. Morgan’s riflemen had picked off two-thirds of the enemy gunners. Arnold, who “seemed inspired with the fury of a demon,” galloped back to headquarters, two miles from the action, where Gates had remained throughout the day.
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He begged for more troops to finish off Burgoyne then and there. Gates “deemed it prudent not to weaken” his lines.
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Prudence prevailed.

As day slipped toward evening, the Americans heard a noise on their right. A cannon blasted their ranks from barely a hundred yards. Fresh troops, the Brunswick forces of General Friedrich von Riedesel, came rushing straight at the Americans, drums beating, German throats howling. The surprise took the wind out of the American attack. Arnold pulled his troops back. The British occupied the farm clearing, now strewn with dead and wounded men. The fight was over.

Burgoyne tried to put a positive face on the battle, calling it “a smart and very honorable action,” a victory even.
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Although he occupied the field, the rebels looming in the dark made it too dangerous even to gather his wounded. The screams of fallen men cut through the chill night. Six hundred British soldiers had been killed or injured or taken prisoner. The Americans had lost three hundred. The rebels had gotten the better of the best army in the world.

“They are not that contemptible enemy we had hitherto imagined them,” a British officer admitted of the Americans. The reason, Henry Dearborn suggested, was that in contrast to the enemy “we . . . had Something more at Stake than fighting for six Pence Pr Day.”
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