No Turning Point: The Saratoga Campaign in Perspective by Theodore Corbett

Book Reviews 505 No Turning Point: The Saratoga Campaign in Perspective. By Theodore Corbett. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. 448 pages,. $39.95 Cloth. Reviewed by Sebastian H. Lukasik, Air Command and Staff College On October 17, 1777, in a field overlooking the Hudson River near the hitherto-obscure Saratoga Plantation, Major General John Burgoyne formally surrendered his combined force of British regulars, German mercenaries , Loyalist and Canadien militia, and Native American allies to a Patriot army commanded by Horatio Gates. Today, this dramatic historical event, combined with the complex military campaign that preceded it, forms a crucial component of the historical master narrative of the American War of Independence. As generations of undergraduates can attest, Saratoga’s significance was twofold. First, its outcome persuaded the British government that attempts to subdue the northern colonies were futile, thus furnishing the impetus for a reorientation of Britain’s war effort to Georgia and the Carolinas. Second, the colonists’s defeat of a British army demonstrated the viability of the Revolution to European powers, thus convincing France to grant the American rebels formal diplomatic recognition and provide them with material assistance that proved crucial to the war’s ultimate outcome. In No Turning Point: The Saratoga Campaign in Perspective, Theodore Corbett advances an alternative interpretation of the campaign’s historical significance. Corbett, a public historian whose previous publications have focused on the social, economic, and military history of the HudsonChamplain Valley, argues that while the campaign’s outcome may have had profound strategic consequences at the national and international level, its impact on the Revolutionary War’s local dynamics was limited. Corbett’s conclusions are grounded in the nuanced contextual foundation that underpins his analysis. Unlike earlier historians, who stress the campaign’s place in the war’s larger strategic framework, Corbett examines Burgoyne’s defeat and its aftermath through the prism of the unique dynamics of the Hudson-Champlain backcountry. Beginning in the early 1760s, when the first Euro-American settlers began to move into the area following the Treaty of Paris, unrest and low-intensity violence related to disputes over 506 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY land ownership became the defining attribute of the region’s socio-economic and political life. Tenant farmers contested the manorial privileges of patricians like the Schuylers, the Van Rensselaers, and the Johnsons. New Yorkers clashed with the “Green Mountain Boys” over their rights to settle The Grants of New Hampshire. Exacerbating such tensions were the ethnic and denominational antagonisms between the diverse communities in the area: Irish Methodists, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, New England Congregationalists, and Catholic Highlanders. The continued presence of vibrant Native American communities, including the powerful Iroquois League of Six Nations, along with a significant population of black slaves, rounded out the area’s social and political complexity. When the thirteen colonies rebelled against the British Crown, these long-simmering tensions broke out into a civil war that could not be categorized simply as a struggle between Patriots and Loyalists. The alignments that characterized that conflict had more to do with pre-Revolutionary clashes over land ownership than with the ideological battle-lines dividing rebellious colonists from the ministry in London. It was these local animosities , Corbett argues, that shaped the actions of British and American commanders and their armies as they confronted each other in the region during 1777. Both sides sought to establish control, over and attract the allegiance of, local communities; both succeeded only in so far as local settler ’s perceived submission to one or the other as beneficial to themselves in the context of the regional strife that predated and outlasted the War of Independence. For, as Corbett makes clear, the complex civil war that served as the backdrop to the Saratoga Campaign continued into the 1780s, culminating with debtor upheavals in Vermont and western Massachusetts such as Shays’s Rebellion (1786–1787). Viewed in this light, Burgoyne’s surrender, significant though it may have been in a larger strategic sense, appears to have had a relatively limited long-term impact on the Hudson-Champlain Valley. The civil war continued unabated, while the British retained the strategic initiative in the New York-New England backcountry for the...

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