The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [100]
The First Massachusetts’s commander, Colonel Joseph Vose, ordered the men to disperse as the cannon in front of them erupted, and managed to escape death when his horse was shot out from under him as a cannonball exploded underneath him. The men fled through the woods, regrouped, and moved to Lake Saratoga to form part of a western barrier to prevent a British escape.
Again, on October 10, the First Massachusetts chased the British as they tried to move northward. “We marched within a half mile of the enemy and camped in the woods,” wrote Wild. “There was a considerable firing on both sides.” On the following day, the First Massachusetts and other regiments tightened the noose around Burgoyne. Now Wild’s regiment had advanced to Schuyler’s Creek where they engaged in yet another firefight, this time capturing an officer and thirty-six men. On October 12, Wild wrote that there was “considerable smart cannonading the biggest part of the day on both sides, and we fortified against the enemy considerable on the hills all around us.” Then again, on the thirteenth, there were more fights. “There was considerable firing on both sides all day. We continue still here in the woods,” Wild wrote.
Burgoyne had nowhere to turn and the next day agreed to surrender, accepted a cease-fire, and spent several days negotiating terms. On October 17, Gates ordered all of his men to line the route that the British would take to walk into the American camp to lay down their arms. The morning was dark and foggy, but by noon the sun had risen and bathed the Saratoga area with warmth for a historic event; the total surrender of an entire British army.
“We marched round the meeting house and came to a halt,” wrote Wild. By sheer fortune, their spot on the route gave them a front-row seat to the drama. It also offered them an unobstructed view of the size of the British army, with its six thousand men, cannon, camp followers, bands, and wagons. The parade into camp that Wild and his comrades assumed would take an hour or so dragged on all afternoon as company after company of rather grim looking Redcoats walked past their American conquerors.
Wild added, “General Burgoyne and his chief officers rode by us there, and then we marched further down the road and grounded our arms and rested there. At half after three o’clock, General Burgoyne’s army began to pass us, and they continued passing ’til sunset.”
Private Dan Granger, one of the militia volunteers who had hurried toward the battle, also had a good view of the historic moment. He and his company did not reach Saratoga in time for the final struggle, and on the day of the surrender they were on the other side of the Hudson, near the pontoon bridge that crossed it. They saw the American courier race away from the English camp with the surrender and watched over the river as the American celebration began. Disregarding orders to remain on the west bank of the river, the men in the company ran across the bridge.
“Soon we saw them coming,” Granger wrote. “General Gates’s troops were arranged on both sides of the road, drums and fifes playing ‘Yankee Doodle,’ cannon roaring in all quarters and the whole world seemed to be in motion. Officers lost command over the soldiers. I got as near to General Gates’s marquee tent as I could for the crowd and saw General Burgoyne and his suite ride up, and dismount and go into General Gates’s marquee and soon the van of the prisoners made their appearances. The Hessian troops came first with their baggage on horses that were mere skeletons, not able apparently to bear the weight of their own carcasses. These troops had some women, who wore short petticoats, bare-footed and bare-legged, with huge packs on their