Turning Points

This is a view from the north, taken a few days ago (by Barbara Conner) of the 1890s Dix Bridge, which spans the main channel of the Hudson River north of Schuylerville, NY. It is where "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne's British and Hessian army crossed what was then known as the North River (as Schuylerville was known as Saratoga), on September 13-14, 1777.

Burgoyne already knew his campaign was going wrong. He was short of supplies, troops and horses. The western wing of the larger British campaign had been repelled from Fort Stanwix, and Burgoyne's own troops had been defeated at the Battle of Bennington the month before. Yet he crossed the river, to the same side as General Horatio Gates' waiting American army, because the road to Albany was on the western side. If the Civil War's turning point came in early May 1863, the Revolutionary War seems to have been decided by this unopposed crossing.

Burgoyne did not yet know that Gates' chief engineering officer, Col. Tadeusz Kosciuszko, was establishing an excellent defensive position at Bemis Heights, eight miles south of Saratoga (i.e. modern Schuylerville). But he knew he had uncertain prospects of reinforcement from the British base of New York City. The overall British commander, Gen. William Howe, had embarked from New York on a campaign against Philadelphia, the American capital. Howe had already won, unknown to Burgoyne, a victory at Brandywine. But Howe's subsequent capture of Philadelphia would in no way compensate for the British surrender at Saratoga.

In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (like Solzhenitsyn, a former soldier) lays out a theory that history works out its own ends, irrespective of the actions of human participants. It is not entirely convincing, but seems to apply here. If Burgoyne had retreated, instead of crossing the river, he probably would have saved his army, and with it the possibility of British victory in the war. But retreat would have been an admission of defeat. Instead, inevitably perhaps, he pressed on toward disaster.

Grant, in 1863, like Burgoyne in 1777, plunged riskily onward into the heart of enemy territory -- with a very different result.