On 19 October 1781, General Lord Cornwallis, with no hope either of reinforcements or of evacuation, surrendered his surrounded and out-numbered army to a combined force of French and Continental troops. Four years later, at Yorktown, the alliance between the colonials and France would prove decisive. This Continental victory, uneven though it was, was decisive in finally bringing France into the war against England. Saratoga was a turning point in the American Revolution. There, without supplies or hope of relief, the British general finally surrendered on 17 October, 1777. On the night after the battle, Burgoyne retreated the remnants of his army back to Saratoga. His army, now numbering barely 5,000 men, attacked Gates’ force, which by the time of this second battle, had swelled to over 11,000.įortunately for the future of the American Revolution, even a general as lethargic and ungifted as Gates, given the excellence of his defensive ground, and his greater than two-to-one advantage in manpower, would have been hard-pressed to lose such an uneven contest, and he didn’t. This second battle, known as the Battle of Bemis Heights, was a desperate "throw of the dice" for Burgoyne, and he knew it. Getting ever shorter on supplies, and apprised of the steady influx of Continental regulars and militiamen arriving daily in the American camp, the British attacked again on 7 October, 1777. Although Gates’ conduct of the battle was so bad as to border on incompetence, the Americans managed to hold their main positions throughout the engagement. This clash, known as the Battle of Freeman’s Farm, ended in a costly but indecisive victory for Burgoyne. On 17 September, the British attacked the American left in an effort to force Gates to retire. A Continental army of some 7,000 men, under the command of Major General Horatio Gates, was entrenched on the elevated ground of Bemis Heights directly in Burgoyne’s path. There Burgoyne’s force, now reduced to 6,000 effectives, encountered its first serious resistance. In September, the English army crossed the Hudson and slowly advanced south of Saratoga. Nonetheless, despite these ongoing reversals, the British general stubbornly held to his original plan. Even worse, large numbers of militiamen from New Hampshire and Vermont, already incensed at the cruelty of Burgoyne’s former Indian allies, also joined the local militias in harassing and attacking any British detachments that ventured too far away from the main column. Moreover, all of the livestock in his path was driven off, and the settlers’ crops and food stores were either carried away or burned so as to deny his army supplies. To add to Burgoyne’s problems, local militiamen and Continentals destroyed bridges and felled trees across his route of march.
When the British general castigated his Indian Allies for their savage depredations against the local colonists, they responded to his eccentric demand that they observe the European “rules of war” by deserting en mass. Slowed down by too many heavy cannon and insufficient transport for his large baggage train, Burgoyne’s force of 7,200 men was both road-bound and slow. Only General Johnnie Burgoyne continued with his offensive, but poor planning and bad luck plagued the British commander from the very beginning. Colonel, after being repulsed in an attempt to capture Fort Stanwix from the rebels, abandoned his drive and began a retreat back to his starting point on Lake Ontario. Leger, who had started his expedition from Fort Oswego with a force of 1,700 men, initially held to the plan of campaign. Lord Howe, for reasons that are still unclear, abandoned the plan at the outset and launched an invasion into Pennsylvania instead of marching from his base at New York towards Albany. Leger and a third under Lord Howe would advance against Continental forces and ultimately converge on Albany. Three separate columns: one under Major General John Burgoyne one under Lt. In June, 1777, the British embarked on an audacious plan of campaign intended to bring the war against the rebellious American Colonies to a successful end. Dunnigan, and published in 1972 by Simulations Publications, Incorporated (SPI). THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION was designed by James F.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: 1775-1783 is a grand-tactical level simulation of the campaigns waged between the Continentals and the British in North America during the War for Independence, 1775-1783.
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