Saratoga

I skipped tonight’s conference-organized social activities (a chi-chi dinner and the New York City Ballet) in favor of a little drive down to the Saratoga battle site, which is just a few miles southeast of town. (My friend Rob recommended this outing, but I initially thought I wouldn’t have enough time. I was as wrong about that as Burgoyne was wrong about Clinton’s reinforcements in 1777.)

On the way out of town, I picked up a sandwich at a streetcorner deli in one of Saratoga Springs’ quiet residential neighborhoods. As I stood here, waiting for my cappicola hero, I realized that I had absentmindedly started watching the horserace feed on the TV. And that I was driving a car with New Jersey plates. Suddenly I was a character in the lamest Sopranos episode, the one about the grantwriter who orders a cappicola hero and watches a horserace on TV. Nothing else happens.

Soon enough, I was in Schuylerville, a little burg on the Hudson, due east of Saratoga Springs. There, I found the amazing Saratoga Monument, which commemorates the spot where British General John Burgoyne surrendered his army to the colonials in October 1777, ending Britain’s effort to split the rebellion into northern and southern halves.

The monument looks a lot like the Washington Monument, which was put up around the same time, and has four niches for statues of the heroes of the Battle of Saratoga: General Horatio Gates, General Philip Schuyler, Colonel Daniel Morgan, and General Benedict Arnold. Through Arnold was arguably the most important American commander at the battle, his niche is empty, owing to his treason in 1780.

Arnold’s niche faces south, toward the battlefield itself. Though I missed the cutoff time for the driving tour of the battlefield, I did spend a few minutes at the entrance to the park from the present-day highway. When Burgoyne came south from Canada to capture Albany, he tried to squeeze through this very gap between the Hudson on the east and the rougher, hilly terrain on the west – hills occupied by an American force that included artillery which commanded the river and the floodplain.

Burgoyne didn’t make it, being halted in September by American troops. He encamped here and waited weeks for reinforcements that he hoped had been sent up the river from New York by British Governor Sir Henry Clinton. Those troops never came, and Burgoyne’s men – mostly British troops, but also many Germans, some Indians, and quite a few women and children – ran out of supplies in the meantime. Finally, he ordered them to try to find the American lines and precipitate a battle that would allow him to move south again. But Burgoyne’s troops were now outnumbered by the Americans, who routed them on October 7. Retreating, Burgoyne led his men north, but bad weather and weakness slowed them, and they made it only as far as present-day Schuylerville, where American forces surrounded him and where he surrendered. The destruction of Britain’s main army in the north emboldened the Continental Army and induced Louis XVI to ally France with the American rebels, making the war into a global conflict and dramatically improving the military and political strength of the rebels.