had persuaded Secretary for the Colonies Lord George Germain to approve his strategy to isolate New England with its supply of money and manpower from the rest of the colonies. Their plan required a three- pronged advance on Albany, with the main thrust from almost nine thousand blue-coated Hessians and red- coated British troops under Burgoyne himself heading south for the Hudson Valley. An inveterate gambler, Gentleman Johnny’s confidence in the outcome was clear from an entry in Brooks’s club wagering book: “John Burgoyne wagers Charles Fox one pony [fifty guineas] that he will be home victorious from America by Christmas Day, 1777.”
To everyone, both American and British, it was obvious that the first line of defense would be the fortress of Ticonderoga, which commanded access to Lake George and the Hudson Valley. Gates, therefore, immediately sent Wilkinson to inspect its ability to withstand attack. Wilkinson’s report revealed a near-derelict fortress garrisoned by twenty-five hundred men, poorly led, laid low by illness and lacking in ammunition, uniforms, and morale. He recommended that either it be evacuated or its defense be put in the charge of a senior officer such as Arthur St. Clair, his brigadier at Trenton. But any attempt to prepare the fort for either defense or evacuation was aborted by the political generalship of Congress. At the beginning of June, it abruptly decided that, after all, General Schuyler should have command of the Northern Department, with Gates as his subordinate.
Wilkinson responded furiously. “They have injured themselves, they have insulted you, and by so doing have been guilty of the foulest ingratitude,” he told Gates on June 7. “The perfidy of mankind truly disgusts me with Life, and if the happiness of an amiable lady [Nancy Biddle] was not unfortunately too dependent upon my wretched existence, I should think I had lived long enough, nor would I want to breathe the air with Ingrates, assassins, and double- faced Villains.”
Even before this effusive tribute to their friendship arrived, Gates had rewarded his loyal aide by appointing him deputy adjutant general for the northern army, a post that required even senior officers to obey his commands. Wilkinson was overcome. “I am this day honoured by your affectionate letter with the inclosed commission,” he informed his general. “It wrung my heart and I dropped a tear upon it.”
Congress’s interference froze any decision about the defense of Ticon-deroga until Schuyler was again in charge. Although he confirmed St. Clair’s command, the weeks of inaction made certain that the fortress would fall for virtually nothing at all. In early July, British artillery occupied positions overlooking Ticonderoga, and St. Clair decided to evacuate the doomed position without further delay. Hundreds were captured on the lake and on land, but about two thousand troops escaped. With bleak ineptitude, Congress voted to court- martial both St. Clair and Schuyler for allowing the capture of a position it had rendered indefensible. By default Gates was once more put in charge of the Northern Department, the third change of command in five months.
Unaware of the vital role Congress had played in his victory, Burgoyne paused to celebrate before pushing slowly southward, “flushed with victory,” Schuyler reported, “plentifully provided with provisions, cannon and every warlike store.” His army of almost nine thousand professional soldiers was accompanied by more than fifty cannon and a baggage train of ammunition and food wagons, as well as officers’ wives with their tents, servants, and wardrobes. This was the classic European army, a gigantic concentration of firepower designed to smash an enemy in open ground. Meanwhile, it all had to be transported through forested, often marshy terrain blocked by trees felled by the retreating Americans.
As an advocate of defensive warfare, Gates could not have hoped for more appropriate tactics from his opponent than Burgoyne’s ponderous advance into unknown territory. Gates used the time well. Concentrating his demoralized force—Wilkinson reckoned desertion had reduced its numbers to about thirteen hundred militia and twenty-eight hundred regulars—at Stillwater near where the Mohawk River flowed into the Hudson, Gates set about rebuilding its confidence.
Whatever his weakness in battle, Gates’s organizational skills were superb, and in six weeks of apparent inactivity he transformed the morale of his beaten army. Plentiful supplies of food and ammunition were sent from Albany, and in camp his men had time to recoup their strength. He managed his militia forces with skill, rarely insisting on strict discipline, and dispensing with the flogging that professional soldiers thought essential to discipline— “these Mortals,” he once declared, “must be led and not drove.” Shrewdly, he issued proclamations to remind any militia in New York and New England who still hung back that a British victory would allow the Indians accompanying Burgoyne’s army to seize their land and scalp their families.
Gates’s brand of generalship produced immediate results. From “a miserable state of despondency and terror, Gates’ arrival raised us as if by magic,” Captain Udney Hay of Vermont testified a month after the general took command. “We began to hope and then to act.” Under Schuyler, the citizen-soldiers had been ineffective; under Gates, the Vermont militia delayed a diversionary attack through the Mohawk Valley until Arnold arrived with reinforcements to drive the attackers back, and in late August the New Hampshire militia destroyed a powerful foraging party sent out to find provisions for Burgoyne’s army. From then on Burgoyne would be short of food.
Meanwhile, Gates’s army was reinforced by five Continental regiments sent north by Washington, including Daniel Morgan’s Pennsylvania sharpshooters and Henry Dearborn’s light infantry— two units ideal for harassing the enemy in the forested Hudson Valley. Eventually about twenty-one thousand troops, more than twelve thousand of them militia, would be acting either directly under Gates’s command or supporting him by their harassment of British supply lines. Crucially, too, in the south General William Howe abandoned the strategy of advancing up the Hudson to meet with Burgoyne at Albany and, instead of threatening Gates from the rear, chose to direct his forces toward Philadelphia.
During this period of recuperation at Stillwater, Wilkinson’s role as chief of staff grew increasingly important. In early September, the volcanic Benedict Arnold arrived at headquarters, fresh from his victory in the Mohawk Valley, and anxious to act equally aggressively against Burgoyne’s main army. Gates remained reluctant to move and, confronted by a fractious subordinate and increasingly impatient commanders, found excuses either to leave to inspect militia detachments or to retreat to an inner room in the log cabin that served as his headquarters, where he was rumored to drink heavily. His effervescent young chief of staff, universally known as Wilky, had to act as go-between, smoothing relations among the generals and colonels.
“He has great merit,” commented General St. Clair, one of Wilkinson’s admirers, “and what is in my opinion more valuable, he has a warm, honest heart.” His role was something between jester—“jocose, volatile, convivial,” by his own description—and counselor. He advised Gates on what orders were necessary, then shaped, marketed, and occasionally overrode them, and where necessary filled in the gaps in his general’s laid-back leadership. His charm made his behavior both forgivable and lovable.
“His conduct during that memorable campaign endeared him to me,” Matthew Lyon, then a young colonel in the Vermont militia, remembered. “He seemed to be the life and soul of the head quarters of the army: he, in the capacity of Adjutant-general, governed at head quarters. He was a standing correction of the follies and irregularities, occasioned by the weakness and intemperance of the commanding general.”
According to Wilkinson, he personally took out the reconnaissance party that discovered Burgoyne’s slow advance down the west bank of the Hudson River. In response to his chief of staff’s urging, Gates at last moved north to seize the commanding hills known as Bemis Heights that lay in Burgoyne’s path. Under the direction of the Polish engineer Tadeusz Kosciuszko, trenches were dug and artillery placed so that the southern summit became a strong-point. In mid- September the two armies finally met a few miles below Saratoga, where a great bend in the Hudson changes the river’s direction from east to south. Burgoyne established his camp two miles north of the heights. On September 19, the British general led three columns of troops around the flank of the hills to attack the American position.
The crux of the battle was the part played by the light infantry and the sharpshooters on the left wing of the American army under Arnold’s direct command, who were operating in the woodland that covered the ground at the foot of the hills. Threatened with being outflanked by the British right wing, they responded at about noon with an aggressive attack directed by Arnold. “Such an explosion of fire I had never any idea of before,” William Digby, a British lieutenant, wrote in his journal, “and the heavy artillery joining in like great peals of thunder, assisted by the echoes of the woods, almost deafened us with the noise.” Through the afternoon, Arnold continued to push more of the lightly armed men into the battle, in which they drove back the British right and center columns, but as they reached the open ground known as Freeman’s Farm, they were “in turn obliged to retire,” according to Gates’s official dispatch, by a fierce counterattack.
To discover what was happening, Wilkinson left headquarters and at the base of the hill found apparent confusion. Scattered among the trees, commanders such as Daniel Morgan of the rifle corps and Henry Dearborn had to shout and call—Morgan used a hunter’s turkey call—to keep in touch with their troops. But the forest was bushwhacker terrain, ideal for an individual soldier’s sharpshooting skills. As the British attack overstretched,
