Battles of Saratoga

In the autumn of 1777, a British army marching south from Canada was halted, beaten and finally forced to surrender in the Hudson valley of upstate New York. Two battles, fought on 19 September and 7 October over the same ground south of Saratoga, ended with General John Burgoyne handing over his entire army to the American general Horatio Gates on 17 October. The victory persuaded France to enter the war on the American side, making it one of the turning points of the American Revolution.

British commanders hoped to cut New England off from the other colonies, which they believed were more loyal. Burgoyne would push south from the province of Quebec to Albany, a second force under Barry St. Leger would advance from the west along the Mohawk valley, and troops from New York City would move up the Hudson. The plan unravelled. Burgoyne took Fort Ticonderoga in July, but supply problems slowed him, nearly 1,000 of his men were killed or captured at Bennington in August, and St. Leger turned back. General William Howe, meanwhile, took his army by sea to attack Philadelphia instead of heading north.

The American army, by contrast, kept growing as militia flocked to it. Gates took command in August, and George Washington sent him reinforcements, including the aggressive Benedict Arnold and Daniel Morgan's corps of riflemen. The Americans dug in on Bemis Heights, a position laid out by the Polish engineer Tadeusz Kościuszko that blocked the road to Albany.

Burgoyne crossed the Hudson in mid-September and advanced in three columns. On 19 September his troops collided with Morgan's riflemen at a clearing belonging to a Loyalist farmer, John Freeman. The fighting swung back and forth through the afternoon, with American marksmen picking off British officers and gunners. Late in the day German troops under Baron Riedesel reached the American flank, and at nightfall the Americans withdrew to their lines. Burgoyne held the field but had lost nearly 600 men, while the Americans counted close to 300 killed and badly wounded.

Burgoyne dug in and waited, hoping that Sir Henry Clinton would come up from New York. In the American camp, Gates and Arnold quarrelled bitterly after Gates left Arnold out of his report, and Arnold lost his command. Each day more militia arrived, and by early October Gates had more than 12,000 men. Burgoyne put his army on short rations on 3 October and decided to risk a reconnaissance in force against the American left.

On 7 October a column of British and German troops advanced into a wheat field. American brigades struck both flanks; the grenadiers were routed and General Simon Fraser was mortally wounded. Arnold, without a command, rode onto the field and led attacks on the fortified British camp. One redoubt held, but another was stormed, its commander Heinrich von Breymann was killed, and Arnold was badly wounded in the leg.

Burgoyne had now lost more than 1,000 men in the two battles and was outnumbered about three to one. He fell back towards Saratoga, where he was surrounded. After several days of talks, he signed a convention and on 17 October surrendered an army that different counts put at between about 5,800 and 6,200 men. The agreement promised their passage back to Europe, but Congress later revoked it and the troops remained prisoners until the end of the war. Clinton's push up the Hudson, which captured two forts on 6 October, came too late.

News of the surrender led Louis XVI to open negotiations, and the Kingdom of France formally allied itself with the Americans and entered the war. Britain now had to fight in the West Indies and Europe as well as in America. Arnold, honoured for his part, later turned traitor, and the Saratoga Monument still has an empty niche where his statue might have stood.

Our 1783 map shows the United States after independence, with the former province of Quebec remaining part of the British Empire to the north.