The surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga, though not, perhaps, properly classed among battles, is, nevertheless, properly classed among events momentous in their influence upon the destinies of nations. Looking upon the American Revolution as a whole and from a dispassionate distance, Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga is seen to be the fateful turning of the tide which rolled from crest-wave English victory back to slow but sure English discomfiture and ultimate defeat.

As a result of the Colonial victory at Saratoga came recognition of the Independent United States of America, first from France, later from Spain, and still later from Holland. Confidence was established; untried troops had stood breast to breast against veterans of the British army, against skilled Grenadiers, and these untried troops had won; they had caused the proud British general to retreat from place to place, they had surrounded him at last on Saratoga Heights and forced him to capitulate. The independence of the thirteen original states and all evolutionary Republican America lay potential in the victory of Generals Gates and Arnold over Burgoyne and his veterans at Saratoga.

Plan.

Burgoyne’s plan was good; and had not General St. Leger failed to capture Fort Stanwix and then to proceed along the Mohawk to its confluence with the Hudson and there join his force to that of Burgoyne; and had not General Baum failed to win the battle of Bennington and so secure the magazines of provisions so sorely needed by the British army; and had not Lord Howe considered it more advantageous to cross over to the Delaware and attack Philadelphia, rather than remain at New York ready for emergency; and had not General Clinton been retarded in his victorious advance up from Albany; if all, or perhaps any one of these conditions had been the reverse of what they were, why, history might be the reverse of what it is.

Momentous little things—so seeming trifling, inconsequential, negligible—and yet potential of cataclysmic calamity! An insect bores into the heart of an oak, and the forest monarch falls: a tiny trickling rill freezes in the rock and the mountain is rent asunder; a pine twig breaks under its weight of snow and the awful avalanche comes crashing down. In the moral world, too, the results seem altogether out of proportion to the cause: a glance of suspicion and the bloom of perfect trust is gone from the heart forever; an unkind word and love withers, a deed—it dies; one lie, one little wormy lie, and the fair integrity of character has in it the boring insect with which it may, indeed, flourish full foliage for a season, but by which, in the end, it must, being hollow hearted, succumb to the storm and fall and die.

Perhaps when Burgoyne sent for the Indians and made them part of his fighting force, he then admitted into his moral makeup, as well as his military, the mighty little thing which should silently yet forcefully work disaster. For many men who were irresolute as to which side to join, being indeed loyal at heart to the mother country and hesitating to strike against her, boldly threw in their fortunes with the Colonists when they heard that the Red Man formed part of the force of the advancing army. They knew what savage warfare meant even better than Burgoyne knew. Many are inclined to excuse Burgoyne on the plea that he knew nothing of the horrible atrocities of the Indians when intoxicated with the blood of battle: but fate did not excuse him. His Indians never knew the intoxication of victorious battle—thanks to the stern resolution of men who fought in defence of mothers, sisters, wives, and children shuddering in nearby homes: and as defeat came and ignominious retreat from post to post before the enraged advance of a conquering foe, the Indians deserted the army and slunk away through the western wilds back to their native tribes.

Benedict Arnold.

Strange that history remembers only Arnold the Traitor and not Arnold the hero of Ticonderoga, Quebec, and Saratoga. Too bad he didn’t die in that brilliant charge upon Burgoyne’s intrenchments, where after overcoming all obstacles and apparently just on the point of victory he was wounded in the same leg that had been painfully injured in the assault on Quebec—and carried fainting and profusely bleeding from the field. To be twice wounded for a cause and then to betray it—perverse human heart, who shall know its depths of perversity!

And yet the events since that time, which Arnold could not foresee or foreknow, rather than the concomitant circumstances of that time, which Arnold saw and knew, have proclaimed him Traitor. And had the results been otherwise, had not his own mad efforts helped turn the tide at Saratoga, Arnold might now be known as a shrewdly diplomatic young officer who, influenced by a beautiful Tory wife and seeing the cause of the Colonists desperate, had timely transferred his allegiance to the British army and bravely helped along the conquering cause of the mother country.

And Major Andre sleeps in honored rest in old Westminster Abbey; while the man twice wounded in battle, the hero of Ticonderoga, Quebec, and Saratoga sleeps in an unhonored grave having as epitaph indelibly traced upon surrounding air and earth and water and sky—Arnold the Traitor.

General Frazer.

General Frazer was mortally wounded in the engagement which took place October 7th. He died in camp the following day. The Italian historian Botta gives the following account of his burial. “Toward midnight, the body of General Frazer was buried in the British camp. His brother officers assembled sadly around while the funeral service was read over the remains of their brave comrade, and his body was committed to the hostile earth. The ceremony, always mournful and solemn of itself, was rendered even terrible by the sense of recent losses, of present and future dangers, and of regret for the deceased. Meanwhile, the blaze and roar of the American artillery amid the natural darkness and stillness of the night came on the senses with startling awe. The grave had been dug within range of the enemy’s batteries; and while the service was proceeding, a cannon ball struck the ground close to the coffin, and spattered earth over the face of the officiating chaplain.”

There is something painfully pathetic in the scene thus presented to the imagination. War has no respect for the rights of the living or the dying or the dead.

Surrender.

On the 13th of October, 1777, General Burgoyne, besieged by overpowering numbers on the heights of Saratoga and seeing that his army was facing disease and famine, and being unable to establish communication either with Lord Howe or with General Clinton—opened negotiations with General Gates as to conditions of surrender.

At first General Gates demanded that the royal army should surrender themselves prisoners of war. Burgoyne refused.

It was later agreed upon that “the troops under General Burgoyne were to march out of their camp with the honors of war, and the artillery—of the entrenchments, to the verge of the river, where the arms and the artillery were to be left. The arms to be piled by word of command from their own officers. A free passage was to be granted to the army under Lieutenant General Burgoyne to Great Britain upon condition of not serving again in North America during the present contest.”

These conditions having been formally accepted, an army of weak and wounded men laboriously descended the heights and marched out to the place appointed for the laying down of arms. General Gates was on this occasion extremely courteous, and the Colonial troops were soon fraternizing with the English soldiers and striving in every way to supply their many needs and wants.

General Clinton, who was but fifty miles down the river with supplies and men, heard with dismay of Burgoyne’s surrender. Lord Howe’s plans were all broken up by this sudden change of fortune. And the far away, sleepily stubborn British Parliament felt the first cold intimation that it might possibly be wrong and Burke might possibly be right in their respective estimates of the rebel children in the wide awake, wonderful New World.

And so the failure of the New York plans, culminating in Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, proved to be one of the mighty little things potential of results that change the destinies of nations.