Burgoyne and the Saratoga Campaign: His Papers by Douglas R. Cubbison, and: The Saratoga Campaign: Uncovering an Embattled Landscape by William A. Griswold, Donald W

Reviewed by: Burgoyne and the Saratoga Campaign: His Papers by Douglas R. Cubbison, and: The Saratoga Campaign: Uncovering an Embattled Landscape by William A. Griswold, Donald W Woody Holton Burgoyne and the Saratoga Campaign: His Papers. By Douglas R. Cubbison, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. The Saratoga Campaign: Uncovering an Embattled Landscape. By William A. Griswold and Donald W. Linebaugh, Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2016. Historians of John Burgoyne’s invasion of New York during the American War of Independence have traditionally held that by October 7, 1777, the day of the climactic Second Battle of Freeman’s Farm, Continental commander Major General Horatio Gates and one of his generals, Benedict Arnold, were so angry at each other that they were barely speaking. But a letter discovered in 2016 revealed surprisingly cordial cooperation between the two. Coming ten years before the sestercentennial of American independence, the discovery serves as a reminder that even such iconic events as Burgoyne’s expedition remain subject to revision. A similar message emerges from two recent books on Burgoyne, The Saratoga Campaign: Uncovering an Embattled Landscape, edited by William A. Griswold and Donald W. Linebaugh, and Douglas R. Cubbison’s Burgoyne and the Saratoga Campaign. These are very different works. Cubbison transcribes and annotates more than a hundred Burgoyne documents, bookending them with 131 pages of his own analysis. Griswold and Linebaugh bring together ten authors representing a variety of disciplines, from archeology and preservation to history. Yet the two books have one thing in common: both brim with revisionist insight. Among the scholars who will want to revisit their previous work in light of these authors’ findings are an earlier round of revisionists, those [End Page 165] who half-rehabilitated Arnold by asserting that before he became a traitor, he was a hero. Several of the authors under review assert that Arnold has been given too much credit, both for winning Second Freeman’s Farm and for halting an earlier British invasion from Canada. The new books offer numerous other revisionist insights as well. Textbooks and university lecturers routinely describe how, on October 7, 1777, Arnold failed to capture Lord Balcarres’s redoubt (fort) but managed to overrun the nearby redoubt manned by the troops of Heinrich von Breymann; Griswold and Linebaugh’s archeologists provide the startling revelation that neither Balcarres’s nor Breymann’s “redoubt” was actually anything more than a “breastwork”: a lone wall rather than an enclosure. The Saratoga Campaign authors take on other Saratoga conundrums as well. It has long been thought that American infantrymen won the first Battle of Freeman’s Farm on September 19 partly by targeting British officers. However, Eric H. Schnitzer, a historian and ranger at Saratoga National Historical Park, demonstrates that nearly as many American as British officers became casualties on September 19, “and it was the Americans who lost officers of much higher rank” (56). Among the most attractive features of The Saratoga Campaign are the two dozen eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century, and modern maps. It is impossible to understand Burgoyne’s defeat without grasping the battlefield’s geography, and there is no better place to do that than with this volume. Especially intriguing are the full-color and finely-detailed battle maps produced by one of Burgoyne’s officers, Lt. William Cumberland Wilkinson, which are so accurate that archeologists have used them (along with aerial photographs, ground-penetrating radar, and even probes into woodchuck holes) to decide where to excavate. Archeologists studying Burgoyne’s expedition must contend with an unusual array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century soil disruptions, not only by the expected plowmen and builders but also by canal-diggers, soldiers on maneuvers, and misguided investigators of earlier eras. Moreover, the American and Anglo-German armies only spent about a month in the region, so inevitably most of its artifacts come from earlier or later occupants, and investigators can say more about its social history than its iconic battles. That is not such a bad thing, but even evidence about everyday life is sparse. For example, the Philip Schuyler house, the [End Page 166] subject of one of David R. Starbuck’s two contributions to The Saratoga...

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