The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [101]
Granger felt an enormous sense of satisfaction in the scene. He wrote, “Having seen a large and well-equipped British army of about eight thousand surrender as prisoners of war and leaving on the field the finest and largest park of artillery that ever was seen in America, with all their carts, timbrels, and vehicles for the conveyance of their ammunition, was a great and pleasing novelty indeed.”
The British troops could not believe what had happened to them. Perhaps nothing explained their demoralized feelings better than British Lieutenant William Digby’s droll recollection of his army’s bands, which played one of the Empire’s most famous military songs, “The Grenadiers’ March,” as the troops surrendered. “We marched out with drums beating . . . but the drums seemed to have lost their inspiring sound.”23
News of the surrender caused jubilant celebrations throughout America. In Boston, Harvard College and dozens of homes were illuminated and thousands gathered around a huge bonfire to cheer the army. Soldiers throughout the army, from Washington’s division in Philadelphia to the militia at Bennington to Gates’s remaining men at Albany, rejoiced, too, in the astounding turn of events symbolized by the capture of Burgoyne’s army in what British historian Sir Edward Creasy, writing nearly one hundred years later, called one of the fifteen most decisive battles in the history of the world.24
It was put best by Dr. James Thacher, who treated the wounded from Saratoga at the army’s two-story hospital in Albany. “We witness the incalculable reverse of fortune, and the extraordinary vicissitudes of military events, as ordained by Divine Providence . . . the [news] of these events to the British government must affect them like the shock of a thunderbolt, and demonstrate to them the invincibility of a people united in the noble cause of liberty and the rights of man.”25
The victory at Saratoga had international and historic implications. It made a hero out of Gates, a moderately skilled commander who would soon be talked about as a replacement for George Washington. It stirred up false hopes in most Americans that the war would soon end. Most importantly, though, the victory convinced the French government that the Americans might be able, in time, to defeat the British. The French decided right after Saratoga to conclude treaties with the Americans, recognizing American independence, which led them to come into the war on the American side.
For Private Ebenezer Wild and the men of the First Massachusetts, though, the day after the Saratoga surrender was just another day in the army. There was a false rumor that Sir Henry Clinton was going to attack Albany and Wild’s regiment was sent on a grueling one-day, forty-mile march toward that city. As usual, the officers read maps the wrong way and the company became lost, wandering through the woods for an entire day. When they made it to Albany they were told the clothes they expected were not there and the men were given hand-me-down shirts from the Pennsylvania troops. The wagons with their supplies arrived hours late. On the following day it rained heavily and Wild could not sleep because small rivers of water ran through his tent, soaking his clothes.
And on the day after that the men received orders to move out. General Washington had commanded them to spend the winter with his army on a large plateau twenty-three miles from Philadelphia near a small ironworks called Valley Forge.
VALLEY FORGE
Chapter Eighteen
THE HARSH ROAD TO A WINTER CAMP
The War
In the summer of 1777, General William Howe decided to capture Philadelphia—the new American capital city, home of the Continental Congress, and a major port. He was certain that the occupation of that city would be a major military victory that might just cripple the rebels’ willingness to continue the war. Howe took a force of fifteen thousand