Who won the Battle of Saratoga?
The Americans won the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. Under Horatio Gates, with Benedict Arnold leading the decisive attack, they checked John Burgoyne's British army at Freeman's Farm on 19 September and beat it at Bemis Heights on 7 October. Burgoyne surrendered about 6,000 men on 17 October 1777, and the victory convinced France to ally with the United States.1
In the autumn of 1777, a British army came down out of the north woods expecting to cut the rebellious colonies in two, and instead marched into the fight that would decide the war. Along the wooded bluffs above the Hudson River in upper New York, General John Burgoyne met an American army that would not break. Over three weeks of skirmishes, waiting, and two savage battles, the invasion that was meant to end the rebellion was surrounded and swallowed. What happened there turned a distant colonial uprising into a cause that a great European power was finally willing to fight for.2
Part of The greatest battles of the American Revolution · Before: Battle of Germantown · Next: The Battle of Monmouth
The battle from both sides
Two perspectivesSaratoga was the turning point of the American Revolution. As Burgoyne's British army pushed south from Canada to split the colonies along the Hudson, American forces gathered in growing numbers to block and surround it. In two sharp battles at Freeman's Farm and Bemis Heights, sharpshooters and hard fighting, with Benedict Arnold prominent, halted the British and bled them badly. Cut off, outnumbered and with no relief coming, Burgoyne surrendered his whole army in October 1777. The victory convinced France that the American cause could win, bringing it into the war as an ally, the decisive shift that made independence possible.
Burgoyne's plan sent a British army south from Canada down the Hudson to isolate rebellious New England, expecting to link with forces from New York. But the supporting moves never came, the wilderness slowed the advance, and American militia turned out in unexpected strength to hem the column in. Two costly battles around Saratoga stopped the British and thinned their ranks, while their supply and escape routes closed behind them. Surrounded and unsupported, Burgoyne surrendered an entire army, a stunning blow. Worse than the loss itself was the consequence: the defeat brought France openly into the war, turning a colonial rebellion into a global conflict Britain could not easily win.
Burgoyne's plan to split the colonies
The British strategy for 1777 was bold on paper. General John Burgoyne would lead an army south from Canada down the Lake Champlain corridor toward Albany, driving a wedge along the Hudson River that would sever New England from the rest of the colonies. Early in the campaign it seemed to work, as the fall of Fort Ticonderoga sent a thrill of alarm through the American cause.
But the deeper Burgoyne pushed into the wilderness, the harder the country fought back. Roads had to be hacked through forest, supply lines stretched thin, and the promised support from other British columns never fully arrived. By September his army of around 7,000 to 8,000 men was tired, hungry, and far from help, closing on an American force gathering on the high ground near Saratoga.3
The armies at Saratoga: how many men fought?
Burgoyne marched south with about 7,500 men. Gates had about 8,500 in mid-September, and militia reinforcements swelled the American army to roughly 17,000 to 20,000 by the surrender, depending on the source. National Park Service figures give the British nearly 600 losses on 19 September and over 630 on 7 October, against about 320 and about 150 Americans.4
Burgoyne's army had already been bled before it reached Saratoga. On 16 August 1777, New England militia under John Stark crushed a German foraging force at Bennington, and Burgoyne lost about 800 men, most of them Germans, along with four bronze cannon.5
In the Mohawk Valley, Barry St. Leger's column of about 1,600 Loyalists and Iroquois warriors besieged Fort Stanwix, held by about 500 men under Peter Gansevoort, and fought the bloody ambush at Oriskany on 6 August. When word came that a relief force under Benedict Arnold was on its way, St. Leger's Native allies left and the expedition fell apart. The push north from New York that the whole plan depended on never arrived.6 › Battle of Wyoming, 1778
Numbers at Saratoga itself depend on the date and on the source. Burgoyne started south with about 7,500 men. On 19 September he advanced in three columns: about 3,000 men under Simon Fraser on the right, about 1,700 under James Hamilton in the center with Burgoyne himself, and about 2,700 Germans under Friedrich von Riedesel on the river road, trailed by more than 1,000 non-combatants.7
Horatio Gates, who had replaced Philip Schuyler at the head of the Northern Department on 19 August, had about 8,500 men ready in mid-September. Then the militia kept coming. After about 4,000 more arrived between the two battles, Burgoyne was outnumbered roughly two to one. By the surrender the American army is put at about 17,000 in one National Park Service account and about 20,000 in an older one.8
Gates had picked strong ground, on the advice of the Polish engineer Tadeusz Kosciuszko. On Bemis Heights, where the bluffs closed in on the river and left the Albany road only a narrow passage along the river plain, Kosciuszko laid out a line shaped like the arc of a great circle.9
Batteries stood on the edge of the bluff, a fortified barn on John Neilson's farm formed the apex, and most of the line was a breastwork of felled trees, logs and rails. The army had a train of 22 cannon. Gates kept the brigades of Nixon, Paterson and Glover on the right, by the river. Arnold led the other division: the brigades of Poor and Learned plus Daniel Morgan's corps of about 500 Virginia riflemen and 300 light infantry under Henry Dearborn.10
What happened at the Battle of Saratoga?
At Saratoga in the autumn of 1777, an American army under Horatio Gates stopped and trapped a British invasion from Canada led by John Burgoyne. It was really two battles a few weeks apart. Burgoyne held the field at Freeman's Farm on 19 September but lost heavily, was beaten at Bemis Heights on 7 October, where Benedict Arnold led the decisive attack, retreated north and surrendered his whole army on 17 October.
The campaign ran in clear phases. Burgoyne crossed to the west bank of the Hudson on 13 to 15 September, putting the river between himself and Canada, and camped about three miles north of the American lines on 17 September. Two days later came Freeman's Farm. Nearly three weeks of entrenched waiting followed, while Burgoyne hoped for help from New York and Gates gathered militia.11
On 7 October Burgoyne's reconnaissance in force was routed, and that night most of his army pulled back toward the river. The retreat north began the next day and stalled in cold, hard rain near Saratoga, the village renamed Schuylerville in 1831. On the heights above it, in today's village of Victory, the British were surrounded and finally laid down their arms.12
Freeman's Farm, 19 September
The first battle broke open on 19 September 1777 in the fields and woods of Freeman's Farm. Rather than wait passively behind their lines, aggressive American commanders pushed forward to meet the advancing British in the trees, where the redcoats' discipline in open order counted for less. Daniel Morgan's riflemen, deadly marksmen firing from cover, picked off officers and gunners and unsettled the British advance. Benedict Arnold, serving under the American commander General Horatio Gates, directed the American attack and kept up the pressure on the British center.13
The British held the field by nightfall, but at a heavy cost in men they could not replace, while the Americans fell back in good order, stronger in spirit than before. Burgoyne had won the ground and lost the momentum, and every day that followed tightened the trap around him.14
The clash began about half past twelve, when a detachment of Morgan's riflemen ran into the advance guard of the British center in a 15-acre clearing on Freeman's farm. Scattered, they regrouped in the woods, Morgan, according to tradition, calling them back with a turkey call. Arnold fed regiment after regiment into the fight, while Gates, worried about Riedesel's column on the river road, refused to send him more.15
The main fighting lasted about four hours, and a contemporary called it perhaps the hottest action ever fought in America. Near dusk Riedesel arrived with about 750 fresh men and the Americans withdrew. The British lost nearly 600 men, the Americans about 320. The Park Service's old handbook judged that but for Riedesel's arrival, the campaign might have been decided there.16
Bemis Heights, 7 October
For nearly three weeks Burgoyne waited, his position growing weaker as American numbers swelled and his own supplies dwindled. On 7 October 1777 he probed forward again toward the fortified American lines at Bemis Heights, and this time the counterblow was decisive. The American troops surged out against the exposed British force, and Benedict Arnold, riding into the thick of the action, pressed the assault against the British defenses until the line gave way. Burgoyne's men were driven back into their camps, their attack shattered. With his army bloodied, encircled, and cut off from any rescue, the British general had run out of options in the cold Hudson valley.17
Benedict Arnold, Simon Fraser and the Boot Monument
Freeman's Farm also opened a feud inside the American camp. In his report to Congress, Gates left Arnold's name out, and the two generals had a furious exchange. Benjamin Lincoln, who outranked Arnold, became Gates's second in command, and Arnold threatened to leave the army, staying only because fellow officers urged him to. On 7 October he held no command at all. He begged Gates for troops, "Let me have men & we will have some Fun with them Before Sun Set", and Gates, wary that Arnold might bring on a general battle, finally let him go. Cheers ran along the American line as he rode out.18
As Simon Fraser rode among his men trying to re-form the British line, one of Morgan's riflemen shot him in the stomach. Fraser died during the night and, as he had asked, was buried in the Great Redoubt on the evening of 8 October. Popular history names the marksman as Timothy Murphy. That name first appears in print in 1845, 68 years after the battle and long after Murphy's death in 1818, and the historian Hugh T. Harrington found no contemporary evidence for it.19
The Balcarres Redoubt on Freeman's farm held against repeated assaults, but the Breymann Redoubt on the far western flank fell, and its commander, Heinrich Breymann, was killed. In under an hour Burgoyne lost eight cannon and more than 400 men. Arnold, riding into the German camp as it fell, was shot in the left leg. Over the whole day the British suffered over 630 casualties and the Americans about 150.20
That wound produced one of the strangest memorials in America. Arnold was exposed as a traitor at West Point in 1780, so the monument at stop 7 of the battlefield tour road never names him. It shows a boot and a major general's two-star epaulet draped over a howitzer barrel, and its inscription honors "the most brilliant soldier of the Continental Army". On the Saratoga Monument at Victory, three niches hold statues of Gates, Schuyler and Morgan. The fourth, which stands for Arnold, is empty. The rest of his story is told in our profile of Benedict Arnold.21
Surrender day and the fate of the Convention Army
Hemmed in and out of supplies, Burgoyne surrendered his army of around 6,000 men on 17 October 1777.22
The retreat after Bemis Heights did not get far. On 10 October British troops burned Philip Schuyler's country house at Saratoga, and for about a week Burgoyne's men held a cramped camp on the heights, surrounded, starving and outnumbered about three to one. Henry Clinton had at last moved up the Hudson from New York, taking the Highlands forts on 6 October and reaching Esopus, now Kingston, on 16 October. It was too little and too late.23
On 17 October Burgoyne rode out to meet Gates near the Dutch Reformed Church, the two parties dined under awnings on a hilltop, and around three in the afternoon the British, German, Loyalist and Canadian troops marched out while fifes and drums played "Yankee Doodle". Burgoyne handed Gates his sword, and Gates gave it back. It was the first time a British army had surrendered in the field during the war.24
The Park Service counts about 6,300 British and German officers and men who surrendered, with about 600 women and children, while about 500 Loyalists, Canadiens and others were allowed to leave for Canada. An older Park Service estimate puts the men who stacked their arms at about 5,800.25
The agreement was known as the Convention of Saratoga, and Burgoyne drafted its basic terms himself. His army was to get free passage to Britain on condition that it did not serve again in North America during the war. On 27 December 1777 Congress suspended the agreement until London gave an explicit ratification. None came, so the Convention Army became prisoners of war in all but name. At the barracks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, desertion cut the British contingent, counting women and children, from about 3,800 people in October to 3,050 by late January 1778.26
In November 1778 the Convention Army was marched about 700 miles south to the Albemarle Barracks near Charlottesville, Virginia. Later the British were moved to Maryland and then to York, Pennsylvania, while the Germans went to Lancaster. Release came only after Congress ratified the provisional peace in April 1783, by which time about one in six of the original army remained. Thousands had slipped back to British lines, and thousands more stayed and built new lives in America. Burgoyne and some of his officers, by contrast, were allowed home to Europe on parole.27
Why did the British lose at Saratoga?
The British lost at Saratoga because Burgoyne's army ended up alone, outnumbered and cut off deep in hostile country. The plan depended on General William Howe pushing north from New York to meet him at Albany, but Howe instead launched a campaign to take Philadelphia. Burgoyne's long, slow advance from Canada left his army short of supplies, a detachment sent to seize supplies was beaten at Bennington, and Barry St. Leger's western column turned back from Fort Stanwix. Meanwhile militia kept pouring into Gates's camp until the Americans outnumbered Burgoyne roughly two to one, and Henry Clinton's push up the Hudson from New York came too late to save him.28
Which battle convinced France to help America?
The American victory at Saratoga in 1777 convinced France to ally with the United States. News of Burgoyne's surrender reached Paris in December 1777 and persuaded the court of King Louis XVI that the Americans could hold their own against the British army. On 6 February 1778 Benjamin Franklin and his fellow commissioners signed the Treaty of Alliance and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France. Of the battles usually offered as answers, Trenton and Brandywine came earlier, and Yorktown in 1781 was won with the French help that Saratoga had secured.29
Franklin's part was diplomatic. Congress sent him to France in late 1776 at the head of a small group of commissioners charged with winning an alliance, and according to the State Department's Office of the Historian his popularity with the French public strengthened support for the American cause. Saratoga gave him the military proof that France had been waiting for.30
The news landed like a thunderclap in the courts of Europe. For France, watching the American struggle and eager to strike at its old British rival, Saratoga was the proof it had waited for that the rebels could actually win. In early 1778 France entered the war openly as an American ally, soon followed by Spain, bringing money, a fleet, professional soldiers, and the weight of a global power.31
Historians widely regard Saratoga as the turning point of the American Revolution, the moment a colonial rebellion became a war Britain could no longer expect to win alone. See how it ranks beside the other decisive clashes in our guide to the greatest battles of all time.32
The treaties of 6 February 1778: what Saratoga won in Paris
News of Burgoyne's surrender reached the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, in December 1777, and it moved him to offer the United States an open alliance. On 6 February 1778, in Paris, Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee signed two treaties with Conrad Alexandre Gérard, acting for the French king. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce recognized the United States as an independent nation and opened trade between the two countries. The Treaty of Alliance was formally defensive. It would come into force if France and Britain went to war while the American war was still going on, and the two allies would then fight Britain together.33
The clause that mattered most was Article 8. Neither ally could make a truce or peace with Britain without the formal consent of the other, and neither would lay down its arms until American independence was secured. A secret clause left room for Spain, which entered the war against Britain on 21 June 1779. Between 1778 and 1782 France sent supplies, arms, ammunition, uniforms, troops and naval support, along with loans. That help proved crucial at Yorktown in 1781, where a second British army surrendered. The line from the Hudson valley in 1777 to the York River four years later is the real meaning of the phrase "turning point".34
Saratoga National Historical Park today
The ground is preserved as Saratoga National Historical Park, in two parts about seven miles apart. The battlefield unit near Stillwater has the visitor center, with a 20-minute orientation film and a fiber-optic light map of the campaign, and a tour road with interpretive stops. At stop 2, on Neilson's farm, white posts with blue tops trace the outline of the American fortifications of 1777, and the Neilson house survives because Arnold and Enoch Poor lived and worked in it. The Boot Monument stands at stop 7. Walkers can take the 4.2-mile Wilkinson Trail loop through the fields, woods and hills of the northern battlefield.35
The Old Saratoga unit, around Schuylerville and Victory, tells the end of the story. The 155-foot Saratoga Monument rises on the bluff where Burgoyne's army dug in during its last days. Its cornerstone was laid on 17 October 1877, the centennial of the surrender, and sixteen bronze reliefs inside show scenes of the Revolution. Nearby are the Schuyler House, which Schuyler rebuilt within weeks of the surrender partly with the labor of captured British soldiers, the 22 acres of Victory Woods, where the British army spent its final days, and the surrender site where the regiments grounded their arms.36
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