A Man to Remember

Monday, Jul. 06, 1953

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The tide of war had begun to turn at Saratoga in the autumn of 1777, when Britain's grand plan to take the Hudson River Valley and thus split the colonies came abruptly to grief. General John Burgoyne, with 8,000 British and Hessian troops, came south from Canada almost unopposed. But General Howe, who was to go north to meet him, sailed away to take Philadelphia instead. An American army under General Horatio Gates blocked Burgoyne on high ground on the west bank of the river. Soon it did more: Benedict Arnold, the most daring, most ambitious, most feared of Washington's generals,** violated Gates's cautious orders and led two attacks, the second after his jealous superior had stripped him of his command. Burgoyne, trapped between a horde of fast-arriving militiamen and the northern wilderness, surrendered his 5,800 men, his guns, his stores, his wagons. "Turned Upside Down." It was a great victory. It accented objections by England's Whigs (notably Edmund Burke) to the war. it prompted France to contribute money, men and seapower, it enlisted the active sympathy of Spain and Holland to the American cause.

But the Revolution seemed lost many times in the four years of fighting which remained. The Americans endured Valley Forge, were stalemated in the north, almost deprived of the south by Cornwallis' campaigns in the Carolinas. The Continental currency depreciated almost to worthlessness, and leagues of countryside were swept by hungry foragers.