The First American Army (30 page)

In addition to the immediate crisis at hand, all of the residents of the Hudson Valley had learned through newspapers that weeks before several of Burgoyne’s Indians had murdered a white woman, Jane McCrea.
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They wanted revenge. By the time ten days had elapsed, Gates’s force of seven thousand at Saratoga had swelled to over eleven thousand armed and angry colonists.

The tension between Gates and Arnold had simmered throughout the day on September 19 and reached the boiling point in late afternoon, when Arnold’s leadership of the left flank resulted in halting the British advance. Arnold’s tough, bold leadership had once more won the admiration of his men. Gates waited three days and then reassigned Morgan’s riflemen, the heroes of the battle and among the most reliable troops in the army, away from Arnold’s command without even telling him. He had also sent a report to General Washington and Congress about the September 19 battle and took all the credit for pushing the British army back; he never mentioned Arnold’s bravery and never even wrote that he had joined in the fighting. The deliberate insults had the result that Gates knew they would—Arnold stormed into his headquarters, limping as always, and demanded his men back plus a formal apology.

What followed in the large marquee tent that Gates used as his field headquarters at Saratoga was one of the most heated arguments between two generals during the war. Gates not only refused to give Arnold back his men, but told him that his services during the September 19 battle had been inconsequential and that he had, in fact, added nothing to the overall campaign. Gates’s aide, James Wilkinson, who was an eyewitness to the argument, wrote that Arnold “was ridiculed by General Gates; high words and gross language ensued.”

Gates was relentless in his condemnation of his second in command. He brusquely told him that he had been discussing Arnold’s demotion with members of Congress and that he had warned delegates that Arnold should never have been promoted to a major general. He had failed in his invasion of Canada, lost the battle of Quebec, led a chaotic retreat southward into New York in which hundreds of men died, and had a naval fleet under his command destroyed on the waters of Lake Champlain. Looking straight at him, Gates then told Arnold that not only would he continue at Saratoga without a command, but he would be replaced by General Lincoln as soon as he arrived. He did not want Arnold in the army at all, he finished, and suggested he resign and simply go home to Connecticut. Gates said that he would write him a pass on the spot. Enraged by the scathing denunciation, Arnold told Gates he would leave all right, but he would ride to Pennsylvania and report the entire matter to George Washington. Gates sneered and told him to go right ahead and offered to write him a pass to Pennsylvania to see the commander in chief, too.

Benedict Arnold turned and hurried from Gates’s tent. Later, he sent Gates a blistering note that Gates ignored. Arnold sent another note that Gates returned with the type of common traveling pass he would issue to any private going home on furlough so that Arnold could leave the army. The hatred between them was so great, one officer wrote, that he was certain that while Burgoyne sat in his camp pondering defeat the two leading American generals at Saratoga would kill each other in a duel.
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The British officers and men knew nothing about the dispute between Arnold and Gates. They had their own troubles. There was nothing but anxiety behind the British lines as the American forces grew each day. The Redcoats were running out of supplies. One messenger informed Burgoyne of Barry St. Leger’s retreat back to Canada and another explained that none of the couriers he sent riding off to Henry Clinton, each carrying a plea more desperate than the last for more troops, reached the one man who could save them; all were arrested.

Those days were filled with worry for Wild and the troops waiting for something to happen. “Very dark and foggy this morning,” wrote Wild in his diary the day after the September 19 engagement, fearful that the British would attack, aided by the poor visibility. They did not.

The next few days were nerve-racking as Wild and the men in his regiment awaited a British assault. They were constantly moved from one position to another. “Marched off to the earthworks on our right wing,” he wrote on the morning of September 20. That night he scribbled, sarcastically, “At sundown the regiment returned and pitched our tents on the same ground they were on before.”

Wild’s regiment was moved about camp constantly, occupying a hill to their right one day and a wooded area to the left the next. Alarms were sounded after pickets with spyglasses spotted any minor British movement. On September 22, Wild wrote, attack alarms were sounded at 8 a.m. and at 11 a.m. On September 28 there were alarms at 10 a.m., 2 p.m., and 8 p.m.

Wild almost lost his life on September 25. He was ordered to join a scouting party shortly before dawn to check on the latest British troop positions. “We marched within a quarter of a mile of [enemy]. The fog and darkness of the morning prevented our going any further ’til after daylight, when we rushed on the guard and a very hot fire ensued for the space of two or three minutes. The guard ran into their lines as fast as they could. We killed and wounded eight of them and took one prisoner and returned to our camp again about sunrise.” He noted that four men in his party were lost in the engagement.

The success of the operation encouraged a commanding officer to send out another scouting party, again including Wild, on a three-day journey around the British encampment to ascertain its strength and its access to forage in the area. On October 1, after a lengthy trip through forests around Saratoga Lake, the men came upon a mill that had fallen into the hands of the British. It was previously owned by General Philip Schuyler.

“We marched upon a rising ground above the mill and ground our arms and a party of us, with axes, went cutting away Schuyler’s bridge. After we had destroyed it with axes as much as time would admit of, we set fire to it. We stopped till it got well a-fire and then marched off in a different road.”

The next day, again, Wild feared for his life. Under orders to burn buildings that contained grain or other supplies that could help the British, his superior officer ordered an attack on a second mill that was surrounded by several buildings. British soldiers guarded it. To Wild’s relief, they surrendered without firing a shot. The buildings, full of grain, were torched and Wild and his comrades marched back to Gates’s camp with ten prisoners, three of them officers, twelve horses, and eighteen cattle.

On October 6, Gates was certain Burgoyne would attack. The First Massachusetts, five hundred men including Wild, was sent out as an advance guard. Nothing happened.

The much-feared attack finally came on October 7, two weeks after the first battle. Burgoyne decided that he might be able to flank the American left wing and move south. The British struck, but despite all of their preparation the First Massachusetts did not engage in the furious fighting.

Benedict Arnold did. The general, still seething from being relieved of his command earlier, had decided to remain in camp. He was with Gates and others at 3 p.m. on the afternoon of October 7 when they heard the sudden sound of cannon. A messenger burst into the tent to announce that the British were attacking.

Arnold leaped up from his chair. “Shall I go out and see what is the matter?” he asked Gates, who told him to go. Benedict Arnold leaped on to a nearby horse and galloped toward the fighting. A man who saw him ride through the woods said that he looked like a “madman.” Gates had a change of heart just a few moments after Arnold left his tent. Arnold had been relieved of command and should not be given any now. Gates shouted at an officer to mount a horse, chase down Arnold, and bring him back before he reached the fighting. The aide did so, but never caught up to the galloping Arnold, hell-bent to defeat the British.

Arnold reached the battle between the American left flank and Burgoyne’s army a few moments later and started to rally the troops, shouting as loudly as he could over the din of the battle. He told Morgan to ask a sharpshooter to fire at General Fraser, leading his men in the battle while astride a large, gray horse. The man braced himself, aimed carefully, and killed Fraser. Fraser’s fall from his horse sent his men into confusion.

The animated Arnold then led a charge on horseback toward a wellfortified redoubt that had just been constructed behind the left flank of the British lines, exhorting his men to follow him as fast as they could. As he approached, he could hear the pounding of his horse’s hooves. He shouted for it to gallop faster. Men ran behind him, firing at the enemy. Arnold encountered a thunderstorm of musket fire from the Hessians in and around the redoubt. They sensed they were about to be overrun and rallied for one last defense. General Arnold continued to yell commands and look over his shoulder at the men following him. Suddenly, he was shot in the leg, the same leg that had been hit in the attack on Quebec. His horse had also been shot and fell on top of Arnold’s wounded limb, breaking it. The firing around him intensified.

Gates may have hated him but the men and many officers in the fight loved Benedict Arnold. “A bloody fellow he was,” wrote private Samuel Downing of New Hampshire. “He didn’t care for nothing. He’d ride right in. It was ‘come on, boys,’ not ‘go, boys.’ . . . There wasn’t any wasted timber in him.” An officer, Captain E. Wakefield, agreed. He wrote, “Nothing could exceed the bravery of Arnold on this day; he seemed the very genius of war . . . he seemed inspired with the fury of a demon.”
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His men, inspired perhaps by Arnold’s wounding, took the redoubt a few minutes later, killing or routing the Hessians inside it. As darkness fell, the entire American line advanced quickly, forcing the English and German soldiers to flee. The Americans suffered remarkably few losses.

Burgoyne had failed again, once more defeated by men led by the energetic Benedict Arnold. He did not see any other way to advance as evening began and ordered a general retreat, hoping that Clinton had somehow received his messages. The entire army pulled back. It would march north and then halt. This procedure was followed for a few days. As they retreated, the British also burned down the home of General Schuyler. Burgoyne possessed no intelligence concerning American outposts around his new position. He waited and did nothing. “The greatest misery and utmost disorder prevailed in the army,” wrote the Baroness von Riedesel of those days after October 7. She added that her husband wanted a hasty and immediate retreat northward to save the army, but that Burgoyne seemed immobilized. The British “lost everything by his loitering,” she added.
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As it turned out, Sir Henry Clinton
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send the troops that Burgoyne had begged him to transport north. He ordered three thousand soldiers to sail up the Hudson to meet Burgoyne at Saratoga, but the voyage went slowly. They received no messages from Burgoyne and dawdled. The ships stopped to bombard and burn Kingston, New York, an easy target. Then the captain in charge of the fleet decided that he did not want to sail any farther north without explicit orders and headed back to New York, leaving Burgoyne without reinforcements.

The one hundred plus wounded American soldiers were transported south to an army hospital in Albany. Their gruesome wounds stunned veteran doctors there. One surgeon wrote of “mutilated bodies, mangled limbs, incurable wounds.” One man, he noted, was shot through the face with a musket ball that knocked out some of his teeth and tore off half of his tongue. Another had his face and half his throat blown open by a cannonball. A third was shot in the head with a musket ball and lay on the bed, bleeding profusely. He told the doctor the ball had apparently fallen out of his head and asked him to fix the wound. The doctor examined him and found that the ball was still in his skull, prevented from killing him by a thick bone in which it had lodged. The doctor sat back, told the man what had happened, and joked that it was a good thing that American foot soldiers had skulls too thick for shots to penetrate.
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Gates had been busy during the time between the first battle on September 19 and the second on October 7. Using information gleaned from reports from scouting parties such as Wild’s, he had moved militia, one unit with eleven hundred men, into positions north of Burgoyne to prevent him from escaping. With the main American army to the south, militia to the north, thick forests to the west, and the Hudson on the east—and supplies dwindling—the British had nowhere to go.

That must have been apparent to Burgoyne on the day after the second battle, October 8, when his camp came under assault from various cannon batteries that surrounded it. The house that General von Riedesel occupied alone was hit with eleven cannonballs.

One of the regiments continually harassing the Redcoats was Wild’s. On the morning after the battle, the First Massachusetts was ordered to scout the enemy as well as they could. They marched toward their camp only to find that the Redcoats had moved further north, leaving some cannon and infantry behind to protect them. The First Massachusetts met them head on. Wild wrote, “The enemy had retreated to some works they had in their rear, where they fired from and did us some damage. As we were marching through their [former] lines they fired a number of cannon at us.”

The First Massachusetts’s commander, Colonel Joseph Vose, ordered the men to disperse as the cannon in front of them erupted, and managed to escape death when his horse was shot out from under him as a cannonball exploded underneath him. The men fled through the woods, regrouped, and moved to Lake Saratoga to form part of a western barrier to prevent a British escape.

Again, on October 10, the First Massachusetts chased the British as they tried to move northward. “We marched within a half mile of the enemy and camped in the woods,” wrote Wild. “There was a considerable firing on both sides.” On the following day, the First Massachusetts and other regiments tightened the noose around Burgoyne. Now Wild’s regiment had advanced to Schuyler’s Creek where they engaged in yet another firefight, this time capturing an officer and thirty-six men. On October 12, Wild wrote that there was “considerable smart cannonading the biggest part of the day on both sides, and we fortified against the enemy considerable on the hills all around us.” Then again, on the thirteenth, there were more fights. “There was considerable firing on both sides all day. We continue still here in the woods,” Wild wrote.