History

Was the revolution inevitable? Maybe, maybe not. As Thomas Paine pointed out the following year, it is merely common sense to see that an island is not going to rule a continent indefinitely. But even if separation was inevitable, did it have to come when and how it did? Did a series of Parliamentary bungles have to lead to warfare? Who knows? Let’s ask an easier question: What price conspiracy theories?

The American Revolution may be seen as an case-study in how to create what you fear. The British feared loss of political control over the North American colonies. Americans feared a conspiracy to take away their rights as Englishmen and British citizens. Both sides acted on their fears; each validated the fears of the other, and together they brought about a result that nobody planned and perhaps nobody really wanted.

As an illustrative example, look at the first armed clash between the colonists and the empire.

Here’s how the British saw it: After the Boston Tea Party, a series of events deprived the legitimate government of effective control of most of the colony of Massachusetts. (The only sizeable British armed force in Massachusetts – in all 13 colonies, actually – was stationed in the city of Boston.) The crown’s response had been to shut down the colonial government. The rebels had formed an insurgent government, and had established a militia specifically for the purpose of resisting the legitimate government and the army. Could the authorities, in all conscience, allow the insurgents to gather arms and ammunition, including cannon and shot, and wait for an inevitable assault? Would it not be better policy to gather information on where the arms were being stored, and act to confiscate them?

Americans saw it differently: To them, the Boston Tea Party and in fact all the political disturbances of the past dozen years were the result of a series of unprecedented usurpations by the British government, regardless whether the prime mover was Parliament as a whole, or the Tory majority, or the king. Quartering British troops on the people, imposing new taxes, closing the port of Boston – it was evident that they were being coerced, and could either resist or surrender the freedom they had enjoyed for more than a century and a half. The colonists were accustomed to forming and serving in militias. Militias had been their first line of defense against Indians, and then against the French. After Gage dissolved the government, the militia, rather than continuing to be used  under the leadership of the colonial governor, instead were headed by the Massachusetts provincial Congress. In effect, the militia was the armed force of the de facto government.

In February, 1775, with the colony of Massachusetts officially declared to be in a state of rebellion, General Thomas Gage became both military governor and commander-in-chief of 3,000 troops that had been garrisoned in Boston. On April 14, 1775, he received orders from home: disarm the rebels and imprison their leaders. At the top of the list were Samuel Adams and John Hancock. (Note, this was 15 months before Hancock, as President of the Continental Congress, signed in large letters, so that the King could read his name without needing eyeglasses.) On the 18^th, Gage ordered Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith to take 700 men and proceed from Boston to Concord, seizing any military stores.

But the Americans knew of Gage’s instructions from London literally before he did, and Paul Revere had already ridden to Concord with a warning ten days before Smith set out. The stores were removed and distributed among surrounding towns.

What’s more – incredibly – the Americans knew the details of the secret mission of April 19 even though neither the officers nor the rank and file did. On the night of April 18, 1775, Joseph Warren (who had two months to live) sent William Dawes and Paul Revere to warn Lexington that British regulars were coming their way. In Lexington, they met Hancock and Adams and decided that Concord was the main target. Revere, Dawes, and Samuel Prescott set out to warn Concord. Revere and Dawes were captured, but Prescott made it, and his warning triggered a recently developed system of “alarm and muster” that alerted neighboring villages to know to muster their militias because regulars in numbers greater than 500 were leaving Boston. This system used express riders, bells, drums, alarm guns, bonfires, lots of things. So effective was it that people in towns 25 miles from Boston were aware of the British army’s movements while they were still unloading boats in Cambridge!

You know the bare bones of the story from here. The army got to Lexington, a few shots were fired at sunrise, the outnumbered militia saved themselves by falling back (rightly) and the army proceeded to Concord. They didn’t find any supplies to confiscate, but at the old North Bridge three companies found themselves outnumbered and outfought by 500 militiamen. Then, the army had to fight its way all the way back to Boston, as more militia continued to arrive. Reinforcements from Boston saved the expedition, but the militia followed them all the way. All told, of the 700 men sent out, they had lost 73 killed and 174 wounded, with 53 men missing. The Americans had lost 49 killed and 39 wounded. (And 5 missing. One wonders about that.)

The next day, the British were faced with militia numbering 15,000 men, blocking what was then the only land access to the peninsular city. (The back bay would not be filled in for many decades.) The siege of Boston had begun. Bunker Hill would follow, and then Washington would arrive to take command of the Continental army, demonstrating that Boston was not going to be left to face the British alone.

They never dreamed what they would end up doing. They had to make it up as they went along.

The First Continental Congress, which met in Philadelphia during September and October of 1774, had been selected in various ways, all outside the law (necessarily, since there could be no legal basis for such a gathering). Probably the delegates thought of themselves as an extension of the committees of correspondence – in other words, a mechanism for coordinating the opinions and the efforts of the colonies. They wound up petitioning the king for repeal of the Coercive Acts, and coordinating a boycott of British goods, and they agreed to meet again in May.

But when the second congress convened on May 10, 1775, Lexington and Concord were already three weeks in the past, and a long, long step had been taken. Events had a logic of their own, and over time circumstances turned this second congress into a de facto government. As the man said about the dog walking on its hind legs, the wonder wasn’t that he did it so badly, but that he could do it at all.

Granted, the congress had plenty of talent to draw on. Besides holdovers from the previous year, it had newcomers Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson. In addition, July saw the arrival of representatives of the state of Georgia, which had not participated in 1774, thus completing the roster of colonies..

But the problem to be solved was unprecedented, in a way that we, who are the heirs to their solution, have to work to realize.

It wasn’t just that these men had no legal authority to become the government. All rebels have that problem.

Nor was it that they had to overcome staggering disproportions between the means at hand and the work to be done.

Nor that their former protector, now to be their enemy, was the world’s greatest naval power and one of the top two economic powers.

Nor that the colonists themselves were by no means united in their perceptions and goals. (It would take this congress 14 months to achieve unanimity on the need for independence.)

It wasn’t even the problem of converting the colonies into states with a republican form of government: John Adams, out of his vast scholarship and industrious scribbling, would show them how to do that.

No, the problem was greater than any of these, and more intangible. It was this: Although the colonies spoke the same language and shared the same traditions and (more or less) the same grievances, they were thirteen governments, not one. The British Empire had never governed them as one unit. Each was as separate at Bermuda, say, or East and West Florida, or Upper and Lower Canada. None of the colonies was prepared to give up sovereignty, not to another colony and certainly not to a faceless entity that would purport to represent them all.

The key to all the financial and logistical problems of the revolution, and many of the military ones, is to be found right here in e pluribus unum. What history had made plural, imagination and skill would have to find a way to make one. If the colonies continued to act in isolation, Britain would divide them and break them one by one: It wasn’t just the men in the forefront of action who were going to hang together or hang separately; it was the cause of American self-government.

Throughout the war, Congress would be hampered by its inability to assess the new state governments for money or supplies or soldiers. It could determine each state’s assessment; it could plead undoubted necessity; it could beg. But the fact of the matter was, it had no means of compelling them to do so, and no recognized moral authority to act as a general government.

The delegates didn’t yet know it, but time, and the pressure of events, would demonstrate the need for another layer of government above state government, a layer that would concern itself with matters that would affect them all, and matters such as foreign affairs that required them to speak with a single voice, but would nonetheless leave them sovereign within their areas of competence.

The Second Continental Congress was an expedient that kept growing under the pressure of events. It never had the resources or authority it needed, and it often lacked vision. Still, it functioned. In June, it renamed the militia units in the field as the Continental Army and named George Washington to command it. In July, it approved a Declaration of Causes, justifying their resort to arms, and at the same time voted to send what was called the Olive Branch petition to King George. The following May, it would pass a resolution recommending that every colony form a revolutionary government.

And, finally, this congress would have to take it upon itself to declare the colonies independent of Great Britain, because no other authority existed to do it, and, if they were to have a hope of foreign assistance, it had to be done. (Nobody was going to intervene as long as it remained, or seemed to remain, an internecine struggle that might be patched up.)

Declaring independence led, in turn, to the Articles of Confederation, which would bind thirteen states into “a firm league” able to act together. The Confederation government came into effect in 1781, got them through the war and the immediate postwar period, and then gave way to the great federal experiment.

It all came out of this Second Continental Congress, one improvisation upon another. Perhaps it is no wonder that contemporaries saw the hand of divine providence in the events they had lived through.

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams

John Adams came to the Continental Congress convinced that it must vote for independence. But for a long, long time he was in the minority. Offering armed resistance to constituted authority, as had happened at Lexington and Concord a month before the Second Continental Congress convened, was a big step. But even with an army already in the field, an immeasurably greater step would be to state officially that there could be no settlement on any terms but complete rupture of political relations. The delegates hesitated.

Afterward, when everybody knew how it came out, the men who didn’t want to break with England were scorned as timid, or as insufficiently patriotic. But suppose it were today, and you were forced to decide, and to declare, whether your existing government still deserved your trust and support, or by its actions had forfeited your allegiance? A wrong choice might mean confiscation or banishment, conceivably execution. And in any case, how could you know whether what came next would be better or worse?

On the one hand, “a tide in the affairs of men.” On the other hand, “from the frying pan into the fire.” Independence was a big step. Too big? Impracticable? Not even necessary? Even, perhaps, inexcusable?

For that matter, who were they to decide? Chosen in various ways, all necessarily extra-legal, their only legitimacy was, and had to be, that they represented the people of their colony. But who knew what “the people” really wanted? In that day there were no opinion polls, no electronic mass-communications media endlessly reporting fluctuations in the public pulse. At most there were broadsides and newspapers and people meeting wherever people met. In the southern colonies, a tight aristocracy monopolized economic and political power, and so their representatives pretty much knew the opinions of the few whose opinions mattered. New England, the land of near-universal literacy, was also the land of those hottest for independence. But the middle colonies were practically a bedlam of competing voices.

And, no matter how many people a colony’s delegates represented, or how many delegates a colony sent, each colony had one vote. If its delegates divided evenly, the colony was recorded as not voting. If a majority voted one way, the colony’s one vote was recorded as if it were had been unanimous. The delegates had decided that any decision to strike for independence must be unanimous, or at least unopposed, lest one colony wind up fighting to suppress or assist rebellion against the government and wishes of another. Obtaining unanimity took time.

There really ought to be a statue somewhere celebrating the contributions of King George III to the cause of American independence. The colonists initially saw their grievances as stemming from Parliament. Had he concurred, he might have kept the American colonies within the Empire on what later became Dominion status – that is, united under the same king, but with separate governing structures. The difference that would have made is unimaginable. An America whose Tories stayed, rather than fleeing to Canada, would have produced an entirely different balance of power within the various colonial societies. But the king’s vision did not extend that far. In fact, late in 1775 he told Parliament that he was thinking of hiring Hessians to shoot enough recalcitrant colonists to bring them to heel, though he didn’t put it that bluntly.

Events kept pushing in one direction. In January 1776, Common Sense appeared, and began to stir up a huge public debate, leading to much greater support for separation from Great Britain. In February 1776, word arrived of the Prohibitory Act, blockading of American ports and labeling American ships enemy vessels. (Parliament should have a statue, as well.) As Adams pointed out, Parliament had declared America’s independence for it.

But the delegates could not vote for independence unless and until their colony’s governing body allowed them to. It took from April to July to accomplish this, with the middle colonies providing the greatest resistance. We won’t go into the ins and outs of the necessary maneuvering. Suffice it so say that when it came time to vote, only New York still had not provided its delegates revised instructions.

On June 11, Congress had appointed a geographically balanced committee to draft a declaration: Adams and Roger Sherman from New England, Jefferson from the South, Franklin and Robert Livingston from the middle colonies. They agreed roughly on what to say, assigned Jefferson to write the first draft, and on June 28 presented the draft to the full Congress, which spent two days going over it, shortening it by 25%, and, most notably, removing Jefferson’s assertion that Britain had forced slavery on the colonies. On Tuesday, July 2, 1776, acting as a committee of the whole, Congress voted 12-0 for independence, New York’s delegates abstaining rather than voting no. Two days later the Congress finalized the declaration’s wording, and ordered it published.

Don’t skim over the following words, but try to hear them as people in American and Great Britain heard them in 1776.

“We must, therefore … hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

It had taken more than a year (and the unwitting cooperation of king and parliament), but the other delegates had caught up to John Adams. The die was cast.

Actions have consequences, and representatives of nations and states have long memories. The British expelled France from the New World in 1763. Fifteen years later, France was more than ready to do what it could to even the score. Adhering to the usual code of ethics among states, it did so surreptitiously and more-or-less deniably, until Saratoga. Then the French court decided to roll the dice.

Among the consequences of that throw for the French were brief, sweet revenge; bankruptcy; the need to call the Estates General if the state were to levy any new taxes; the French Revolution; the Reign of Terror, Napoleon. In short, 20 years of exsanguination leading to defeat far more complete and irredeemable than it had inflicted on the British in 1783.

It worked out better for the Americans.

(It even worked out better for the British, in a backward sort of way. The defeat, including even temporary loss of command of the sea, was so shocking, and exposed deficiencies in so many aspects of military, naval, financial and general administrative procedures that, for once, sweeping reforms followed. It is argued by historians that without those reforms, England would likely have lost to France in the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that were soon to follow. Thus, the defeat in North America was a blessing in disguise. However, it is unlikely that in 1783 many Englishmen could see the blessing for the disguise.)

People often speak foolishly of friendship among nations. There is no such thing, and cannot be any such thing. Nations do not have friends; they have interests. Nations may have interests that run parallel for dozens, even occasionally for hundreds, of years, but when their interests change, their “traditional historic friendships” will change as well. And It’s worth remembering, in looking at the history of alliances and changes of alliances and accusations of betrayal.

It was in France’s interest to weaken England. Detaching a part of the British empire and helping it to become a powerful seafaring rival (even if it also spoke English and shared long political and cultural traditions) would serve that goal. The only question was, was it feasible? America sent lovable, plausible Ben Franklin to Paris to plead its case. The French adored Franklin. In modern parlance, they “got his act.” But no number of Ben Franklins – even if there had been more than one – would amount to a hill of beans without some evidence that the colonials could stand up to the English on the field of battle. Sniping at them from behind trees and rock walls was well and good, but for the French court to place its bet, it required stronger evidence of valor than Lexington or Concord, more persuasive evidence of America’s staying power  than Washington’s ability to keep his army in the field.

Then came Saratoga. An entire British army outfought, surrounded, and captured. Could there be more convincing evidence that the Americans had a chance?

The French court had already been providing arms and ammunition. (For example, a French private citizen acting at the request of King Louis XVI and his foreign minister set himself up as a Portuguese company, sent gunpowder and ammunition to the neutral Dutch port of Saint Eustatius in the West Indies, and somehow this material wound up being used by the American army. It is easy to imagine the protestations: “But how could that have happened? How regrettable, monsieur. I assure you, the government had no knowledge of any such transaction.” But it was that powder and shot that helped defeat Burgoyne.)

In any case, in the aftermath of Saratoga, the French conferred recognition (on February 6, 1778), signed a military alliance, declared war on Britain (and roped in Spain and the Netherlands as allies) and came across with money, arms and soldiers. They also sent their navy, which after a couple of years managed to be in the right place at the right time (September 5, 1781) to bring about Yorktown (October 19), and the consequent fall of the British Tories and the rise of the Whigs, who were anxious to make a generous peace with the former colonies.

Oh, and about friendship among nations? America and France, in making their alliance,  mutually pledged to make no separate peace. Naturally, each side immediately began worrying that the other side would do just that. The Americans, none of whom had fallen off the turnip truck, were well aware that they were in danger of being hung out to dry by a French court pursuing its own interests. Dr. Franklin and company stole a march on them and came to agreement with the English on their own.

Nations don’t have friends, they have interests.

 

We tend to think of him in connection with Kentucky because of the riflemen, but Daniel Morgan was born in New Jersey and died in Virginia. Between those two events, he turned out to be pretty useful to the American cause. In the north, his riflemen arguably made the difference in defeating Burgoyne’s army at Saratoga. In the south, the slaughter they executed at Cowpens arguably set Cornwallis on the path to defeat at Yorktown. Not bad. Two armies, two surrenders. One the war’s turning point, the other the last straw for England. And before that, in 1775, he led one of the two simultaneous invasions of Canada that might have unrecognizably changed our history if it had succeeded.

So who was he? In 1775, he was 39 years old, and had been living for some time in the Winchester area. He had participated as a civilian in General Braddock’s disastrous campaign against the French at Fort Duquesne (the site that became Pittsburgh) during the French and Indian War, and had been lucky to survive – not because of the French or their Indian allies, but because he corrected a superior officer (that is, he punched him) and received 499 lashes on the back, which usually was enough to kill a man. Morgan survived, and, like young Andrew Jackson, and for more or less the same reason, intensely hated the British Army thereafter. When the Revolutionary War came around, he was not slow to offer his services.

In fact, he didn’t need to. When the Continental Congress asked for rifle companies, Virginia agreed to provide two, and asked Morgan to command one of them, due to his experience with the militia in the years after the French and Indian War. Captain Morgan recruited 96 men in 10 days, and marched them the 600 miles to Boston in three weeks, arriving at the siege on Aug. 6, 1775.

Morgan’s company was one of three that accompanied Colonel Benedict Arnold from Boston to Quebec City, accomplishing the grueling journey in six weeks. On New Year’s Eve, 1775, they attacked the city (jointly with the forces led by Montgomery that had previously captured Montreal), and after Arnold was felled by a bullet in his leg, Morgan took over command. The attack failed, and Morgan was among those captured, and was a prisoner of war until exchanged in January, 1777. How the British must have regretted that exchange, later!

Morgan returned to find himself now a colonel, and was assigned to raise a new regiment, which he did. In June, he was given command of the Provisional Rifle Corps of 500 men. In August Morgan was sent to join General Horatio Gates against Burgoyne in the two battles of Saratoga.

Morgan’s Riflemen were sharpshooters, using rifles that were worlds more accurate than the smoothbore muskets used by the British (and by most of the other Continentals and militia). Morgan took advantage of this accuracy, instructing his men to concentrate on killing British officers, thus leaving that army relatively leaderless, and thus nearly helpless.

At Freeman’s Farm, his regiment killed every officer in the British advance party coming at them, then charged (without orders) and were repulsed, reformed their lines and held the field for the rest of the day. At Bemis Heights, Morgan commanded the left flank against 1,500 advancing British soldiers. At Arnold’s direct order, one of Morgan’s sharpshooters killed British General Fraser while he was trying to rally his lines, and the British fell back. Between the battle of Bemis Heights and Burgoyne’s surrender, Morgan’s man destroyed any British patrols they saw, thus convincing Burgoyne that he couldn’t even retreat. One down.

The eternal and infernal politics of the Continental Congress prevented Morgan’s promotion from Colonel. Between this frustration and the physical results of his injuries sustained in Quebec, Morgan decided he had had enough, and resigned in June, 1779, returning home to Winchester. He was offered service under Gates when Gates was given the Southern Command, but declined. But after Gates took a pasting at Camden, Morgan reconsidered, and rejoined the army in North Carolina.

In October, 1789, he was promoted to brigadier general. In December, he met with Nathanael Greene, the new commander of the southern forces. As we said earlier, Greene split his forces in the face of superior numbers. Morgan was detailed to harass Banastre Tarleton, but not fight him. Morgan fought him anyway, and on January 17, 1781, executed a double envelopment that annihilated Tarleton’s army. Of nearly 1,100 men, Tarleton lost 110 killed and 830 captured (of whom 200 were wounded) and all his supplies and equipment.

The upshot was that Cornwallis lost much of his mobility, and we know what happened after that.

 

Portrait of General Nathanael Greene  by Charles Willson Peale

When the war began in 1775, the British had little military presence outside Boston. Thus, outside of New England, militant patriots quickly sent the royal governors packing, and established new governments. From the British point of view, rebellious forces had overthrown legitimate government and were oppressing loyal British subjects. For the British to govern, they would have to successfully invade and occupy.

Fort Ticonderoga’s cannon and Washington’s army forced the British to retreat from New England to Nova Scotia. Saratoga and the resulting French alliance rendered Howe’s occupation of Philadelphia meaningless and swiftly impossible (as troops were now needed elsewhere), which reduced the British  presence in the middle colonies to the greater New York City area. Could they recoup in the South? Well, they tried, and tried hard.

For the British, the war in the south was a bitter experience. For one thing, their expectations of extensive Loyalist recruitment throughout the area were disappointed. The South Carolina back country was, in fact, largely loyalist. But three years of patriot intimidation and control, had made loyalists chary of coming forward to aid the troops that might (and, in less than three years, did) leave them high and dry, with a choice of persecution or emigration.

Then there were the frustrations of chasing bands such as those of Francis Marion, “the swamp fox,” and other natives who knew every back trail of their native land, and were ideally poised to hit and run away. This was guerrilla warfare, in an age before guerrilla warfare was recognized.

And perhaps more frustrating than anything else was to thoroughly defeat two American generals and win battle after battle, at one time capturing 5,000 men in one operation, and then, facing Nathanael Greene, win victory after victory, with each one leaving you closer to defeat.

British strategy was elementary for a naval power. Use the Navy to capture a port for a secure base, and fan out from there. But after the failure of an attempt to capture Charleston, South Carolina, in June, 1776, they made no new attempt in the Carolinas for three more years.

In December, 1778, 3,500 troops brought down from New York captured Savannah, Georgia. The following month, additional troops joined them, by land, from St. Augustine, Florida. Out of the combined force, 1,000 men were sent to capture Augusta, and took it, but then had to abandon it when General Benjamin Lincoln, who commanded the Continental Army in the south, sent militia from North and South Carolina.

In October 1779, a combined French and Continental Army attack on Savannah failed catastrophically — 901 American and French casualties, as opposed to 54 for the British. Sir Henry Clinton, with Savannah secure, moved against Charleston early in 1780, blockading the harbor, trapping Lincoln was in the city with about 5,000 Army and militia troops, and cutting off supplies. After a siege of several weeks, on May 12, 1780, Lincoln had to surrender, and Clinton had won the greatest British victory of the war. After the fall of Charleston, the American war effort in the state was reduced to partisan warfare such as by Francis Marion, the “swamp fox,” with fewer than 100 men.

Clinton now had the South’s biggest city and seaport. He had numerical superiority, and, for a change, the taste of success. He passed control of the British effort to Lord Cornwallis, and in mid-August Cornwallis decisively defeated General Horatio Gates, who had replaced Lincoln, in the Battle of Camden. So far so good for the British.

But then Washington replaced Gates with always reliable Nathanael Greene.

Greene gave General Daniel Morgan 1,000 men, and Morgan crushed Banastre Tarleton’s troops at the Battle of Cowpens on January 17, 1781.  Then Greene fought “the race to the Dan (River),” a series of skirmishes as the Continental Army retreated northward in the face of superior numbers. The British won every skirmish, but they couldn’t trap or destroy Greene’s army, and every fight cost them casualties — about 2,000 men, in all – that they couldn’t replace.

As the ratio changed, there came a time when Greene felt able to stand against Cornwallis. For the British, the Battle of Guilford Court House was another tactical victory and strategic defeat. Cornwallis held the field, but he took so many casualties that he had to retreat to the coast – Wilmington, North Carolina — for reinforcements and resupply. And at this point, Cornwallis decided to attack Virginia, as that is where most of Greene’s supplies were coming from. Without informing Clinton, who was still his commander, Cornwallis marched from Wilmington into Virginia and joined the army that was already raiding there (that army having as one of its commanders Benedict Arnold).

As soon as Cornwallis abandoned inland North Carolina, Greene began to reconquer South Carolina. By June, 1781, the British presence there had been reduced to Charleston and Savannah.

Meanwhile Cornwallis, as all the world knows, received orders to construct a fortified naval post on the Virginia peninsula. He chose Yorktown, which would have been perfectly safe had the British fleet not been defeated in the Battle of the Chesapeake. Washington came hurrying down from the north, and the Continental Army and their French allies put Yorktown under siege. On October 19, 1781, it was all over. Even though Sir Henry Clinton still commanded a British army in New York, he had no idea what to do with it. Hardly mattered. Yorktown was the last straw. A new ministry decided that Britain would have to get out of the situation it was in. If that meant letting the colonies go, so be it.

The south’s ordeal was over.

When General John Burgoyne surrendered his army at Saratoga, he had the military band play a popular English tune titled “The World Turned Upside Down.” The significance was obvious — to him, to his army, to the colonials who were receiving the surrender. And yet none them, not the most astute, could know the half of it.

What they could see was upside-down-cake enough. An army of British regulars, competently commanded, had been defeated on the field of battle, not once, not twice but (counting Bennington) three times. Two and a half years earlier, at Lexington and Concord, these colonials had been unable to stand up to British regulars in a dress-order fight. And all along the long retreat back to Boston, they had fought in the manner learned from Indians, sniping from cover. Cowardly, the British had thought them.

No more. After the battle, one British office was quoted as follows: “The courage and obstinacy with which the Americans fought were the astonishment of everyone, and we now became fully convinced that they are not that contemptible enemy we had hitherto imagined them, incapable of standing a regular engagement, and that they would only fight behind strong and powerful works.”

Saratoga was actually two battles. We won’t go into military detail. They’re easily available to those interested. But here’s how the surrender happened.

Burgoyne was coming down from Montreal, intending to link up with Howe coming up from New York and St. Leger coming east along the Mohawk River. He easily re-captured Fort Ticonderoga in early July. But things went downhill from there.

In mid-August in the Battle of Bennington, Vermont, Burgoyne lost nearly 1,000 men from a detachment that was trying to capture badly needed supplies. A couple of weeks later, he learned that St. Leger’s army would not be joining his from the west, and that neither would William Howe’s army from the South. (The Tories, in despair at Howe’s dilatory tactics, called him “William Howe, Lord When?)

Nonetheless, he got his army across to the west side of the Hudson just a few miles from Saratoga, on his way to Albany. If he could capture Albany, he would have safe winter quarters for his army. Otherwise, he had no safety south of Montreal, and winter was on its way.

He thought retreat would be shameful; he tried for Albany, instead, and the result was two battles, fought eighteen days apart on the same ground, near Saratoga.

On September 19, 1777,  the first battle, called the Battle of Freeman’s Farm, saw 9,000 American troops fight 7,200 British. It was a murderous fight, with Morgan’s sharpshooters — Kentucky riflemen – picking off British officers and artillerymen all day long. At the end of the day, the British were the victors, in that they held the field, but the battle was ruinous to the British.

Burgoyne thought help was coming. As usual, he got no help from anyone. With supplies short, and the Americans being reinforced continually, the situation could only get worse. He attacked again on October 7, in the battle called Bemis Heights. By this time, losses to casualties and desertions had reduced the British army to 6,600 men, while reinforcements had swelled American numbers to more than 12,000. Valor and professionalism could do only so much, and the last straw, the charge  that broke their position, came under the inspired, reckless, and utterly insubordinate leadership of Benedict Arnold. (Arnold had been relieved of command by General Gates, but couldn’t keep out of the fight.)

This time Burgoyne was forced to retreat. Ten days later, surrounded and outnumbered, short of food and ammunition, with no help coming from any of those who should have been providing it, and surrounded by American forces that had grown to more than 15,000 men, he surrendered.

Casualties of the two battles were small by the standards of our calloused age, but they were high enough — 90 dead and 240 wounded for the Americans, 440 dead and 695 wounded for the British. Besides their heavy casualties, the British of course also lost 6,200 men captured.

More than the fate of a British army had been turned upside down. Saratoga showed the French court that Americans could fight pitched battles and win. The resultant French alliance distracted the British, overtaxed their resources, landed French soldiers on American soil, and overturned British command of the Chesapeake for just long enough to insure the surrender of a second British army and end the war.

Ironically, it may have been alliance with the long-hated French that turned Arnold’s mind to treason. The injury he suffered at Bemis Heights incapacitated him for several months, during which he became heavily involved with the Tory community of Philadelphia, and one thing led to another.

In Bernard Shaw’s play “The Devil’s Disciple,” Burgoyne announces that he will have to surrender, and Shaw has someone ask him what history will say. Shaw’s Burgoyne says, “history will lie about it as usual.” A character delivering lines in a play is not biography, but one can imagine Gentleman Johnny saying them. (He himself, by the way, was a playwright as well as a general.) Burgoyne deserved better treatment than he received – from his fellow generals, his government, his contemporaries, and from history. Nonetheless, it was his hard fate to be the man in command when his military band noted that everything had been upended.