eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
In transcending traditional military history, Corbett examines the roles not only of enlisted Patriot and Redcoat soldiers but also of landowners, tenant farmers, townspeople, American Indians, Loyalists, and African Americans. He begins the story in the 1760s, when the first large influx of white settlers arrived in the New York and New England backcountry. Ethnic and religious strife marked relations among the colonists from the outset. Conflicting claims issued by New York and New Hampshire to the area that eventually became Vermont turned the skirmishes into a veritable civil war.
These pre-Revolution conflicts—which determined allegiances during the Revolution—were not affected by the military outcome of the Battle of Saratoga. After Burgoyne’s defeat, the British retained control of the upper Hudson-Champlain valley and mobilized Loyalists and Native allies to continue successful raids there even after the Revolution. The civil strife among the colonists continued into the 1780s, as the American victory gave way to violent strife amounting to class warfare. Corbett ends his story with conflicts over debt in Vermont, New Hampshire, and finally Massachusetts, where the sack of Stockbridge—part of Shays’s Rebellion in 1787—was the last of the civil disruptions that had roiled the landscape for the previous twenty years.
No Turning Point complicates and enriches our understanding of the difficult birth of the United States as a nation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806147291 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 11/05/2014 |
| Series: | Campaigns and Commanders Series , #32 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
No Turning Point
The Saratoga Campaign in Perspective
By Theodore Corbett
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4729-1
CHAPTER 1
SETTLEMENT IN THE HUDSON-CHAMPLAIN VALLEY
The Hudson-Champlain region, through which Burgoyne would travel, extended from the British base at Ile aux Noix on the Richelieu River in the north to the environs of the Hudson River city of Albany, famous for its Dutch fur-trading oligarchy. North of Albany, the Saratoga area would become the critical site of Burgoyne's final defeat. The region included eastern New York, western Vermont, western Massachusetts, and the Montreal area of Canada. By 1777 this region was no longer the wilderness it had been during the colonial wars. Much of it was being cleared and farmed and becoming populated by a prosperous class of yeomen farmers and a few plantation owners. Most of the land along water courses was settled, and only the areas most distant from streams lacked cultivated open spaces. As this agricultural hinterland expanded, the small city of Albany became less influential, vastly outnumbered by the population in the surrounding countryside on which it depended for its market produce, foodstuffs, and exportable staples like lumber and wheat. Thus Burgoyne found the Saratoga area developed, so that for a while his army could supplement their own supplies with food taken from the land. It was also a countryside worthy of being pacified to support the king's cause.
When Burgoyne's army appeared at the Hudson River in Kingsbury, the officers noted that the level area along the river was settled and thriving with crops. Between Fort Ann and Fort Edward, as German surgeon's mate, J. F. Wasmus commented, they "had the pleasure of seeing the first rye fields in America; they almost were like those in Germany. We passed several settlements, whose inhabitants had all fled. The houses were built in German [log cabin] style and covered with shingles. The farther we advanced, the more pleasant was the countryside; the one today was the most beautiful we have seen in America. The main road seemed to be quite passable. We have not been used to marching on such a road." At Fort Edward, British lieutenant William Digby wrote: "On the whole, the country thereabout wore a very different appearance from any we had seen since our leaving Canada ... the land improves much, and no doubt in a little time will be thickly settled."
Below Fort Edward in early August, Wasmus continued to rhapsodize, although the farms were apparently abandoned:
We found both sides of the river settled with rather well built houses ... which were all empty; the families had fled into the wilderness with all their belongings just for fear of the Germans. The beautiful wheat and rye fields were going to ruin; they were all ripe. We passed several bridges and places where the enemy had camped. We also saw grapes, although not ripe, as well as many [blueberries], raspberries and blackberries on both sides of the well laid-out military road. It was noon when we entered the camp at Fort Miller.... On a height on our left, one saw a magnificent building [William Duer's house], several respectable houses, as well as various saw mills and gristmills, which were all empty.
Below Fort Edward, another German, Brig. Gen. Johann Friedrich Specht, was more concise, noting, "This region is quite well settled with habitations and the corn in most fields is ready for the harvest."
Landlord Philip Schuyler's plantation at Saratoga was immortalized by the nineteenth-century German-American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze as a center of productivity that could have fallen into the hands of the British. To prevent this, the artist portrayed Mrs. Philip Schuyler as burning the wheat fields around the house—an incident that in reality never took place. Thus in both fact and fiction the area along the region's rivers was renowned as farmed and bountiful.
Below Schuyler's Saratoga plantation, on September 15, two days before the Battle of Freeman's Farm, the luxuriant farms continued to impress the foreigners. A German corps "landed in a mown field where large sheaves of wheat and rye provide camp straw for almost the entire army.... Fields of considerable size were planted in [corn], that were as productive as any farmer could wish." The observers were seeing the best farms along the Hudson River, but even inland, the clearings of less developed farms were causing the forest to recede. Away from the Hudson on the New York–Vermont border, historian Philip Lord, who has steeped himself in the land use and settlement pattern, has rated the farms caught in the midst of the Battle of Walloomsac in August 1777 as being a step above the lowest hardscrabble type. This last type of farm had only a few acres of field cleared, where crops grew among the tree stumps and a tiny log cabin with some minimal rail fencing completed it. Instead, the three farms at the Walloomsac bridge had fifty acres or more in fields, some for pasture, some for cultivation, and some in the process of being cleared. An original log cabin had been expanded, and a log barn now housed the livestock so they wouldn't wander. A well was a necessity, and a variety of fences surrounded the entire property. This more advanced type of farm dominated the Saratoga area.
The Battles at Saratoga on September 19 and October 7 involved cultivated locations, Freeman's Farm and the Barber wheat field, a sign of this development. John Freeman, Sr., who held a 150-acre farm on lease forever from landlord Philip Schuyler, had settled in 1766, and by the time of the war he had cleared 50 to 60 acres and had erected a frame house and barn. One British soldier concluded that fighting at Freeman's Farm caused "a plantation, with large crops of several sorts of grain, thriving and beautiful in the morning," to be "before night reduced to a scene of distress and poverty!"
THE FLOW OF MIGRATION
How did the Hudson-Champlain region become a populous and rich farming area by the time of Burgoyne's invasion? The settling of the lands above Albany had been delayed because the region was exposed to hostile Native American and Canadian forays during King George's and the Seven Years' Wars. Before the 1740s and 1750s, settlement was limited to the Saratoga plantation at the mouth of Fish Creek and the Hoosic Valley, where Albany and Schenectady Dutch families had gathered. With the Peace of Paris in 1763, most of the earlier settlers returned to the region, and Albany County became more populated than ever. True, the Schaghticoke Indians never returned to their Hoosic Valley reserve, but this indicated that Native Americans could not cohabit with the growing number of settlers.
The flow of migration to the Upper Hudson region came from two directions. From the south it began in New York City, where immigrants from the British Isles or German states landed and stayed before moving to the middle areas of the Hudson Valley. The colony's immigrants were mainly Scots-Irish and Scottish—chiefly Presbyterians—and Quakers or German Palatine and Brunswick settlers. The religious sectarianism of many of these ethnic groups contributed to their desire to move, as they sought to establish a godly community in the wilderness. The process of their movement to the region north of Albany might take a decade or more and involve a second generation that was born in New York. Also involved in settlement was a new generation of the Albany, Schenectady, and Kingston Dutch, whose families had previously attempted to settle the area but had been expelled during the colonial wars.
A second wave of settlers came to New York from the east—that is New England—originating chiefly in Connecticut and Massachusetts. These migrants would settle in the New Hampshire Grants but also spill over into New York as they moved further west. They came as result of overpopulation and diminishing resources in eastern and southern New England. As the eighteenth century wore on, it had become increasingly difficult for fathers to have enough acreage to provide each son with sufficient land for a farm. This was not as disastrous as it sounds—in fact, it was an act of renewal. Ignoring primogeniture and partible inheritance, parents chose to provide their children according to abilities and needs, often before a will ever was made. As one of the chief options, children, especially mature sons, were provided with the wherewithal to move to a new settlement where land was cheaper and society more fluid. Early destinations were the western townships of Connecticut or Massachusetts, but by the 1770s New York and the New Hampshire Grants were favored. Thus, the pressure of population growth on limited resources in Connecticut and Massachusetts spearheaded the movement of New Englanders into the region.
Religious motives also led New Englanders to migrate to the region in groups. The covenanted Congregational Church was the established church of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and that powerful church would even appear in New York at Stillwater and Granville. But not all New Englanders were Congregationalists. Viable Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches appeared in New England by the mid-eighteenth century, and their communicants looked upon New York and the New Hampshire Grants as places where they could practice their faith without the restraints of the established Congregational Church.
As a result of these two distinct waves of immigration, Albany County more than doubled its population, the census of 1771 showing 38,829 white and 3,877 black persons. This was about one-quarter of New York colony's entire population—much larger than New York City, by far the colony's most populous political unit.
THE INSIGNIFICANT POPULATION OF CITIES
By 1777 only three very small cities existed, and none of them held newly arrived immigrants for long because they were attracted to farming in the countryside. Albany was clearly the dominant community, but with less than 3,000 inhabitants within its stockade, it was no more than an overgrown village. The other sizable places, Schenectady and Kingston, had only about 500 residents each. All three were commercial centers, having once been fur trading posts, and had made the transition to dealing in lumber and foodstuffs, clearly depending on their hinterlands for these products. While they had a need for craftsmen, servants, stevedores, and laborers, most of these positions were held by black slaves and existing freemen, whom the patrician oligarchs favored over immigrants. Hence, while an immigrant might look for work in Albany, once he had a little money his chief goal was to find a suitable farm. Thus the cities were at best temporary magnets for growth, instead serving as a source of migrants and development for the countryside, conditions that blunted their own influence and population size.
ALBANY PATRICIANS LEAD IN RESETTLING THE REGION
Traditional histories of the colonies point out that New York's land was full of manors, supposedly vestiges of the European Middle Ages that forced new settlers to become tenants and retarded settlement because they could not own land in fee simple. This view is based on later Jeffersonian ideas about the virtue of independent farmers, not the actual mentality of eighteenth-century settlers. Most migrants to New York sought not the outright landownership that impressed New Englanders but rather favorable terms from a landlord, especially a lease of long duration, ninety-nine years being ideal. They also wanted to be paid for their improvements when the lease ended or they sold the lease. Newcomers chose such an alternative to fee simple because it was closer to what they had experienced in Europe and offered them a greater degree of security. In turn, landlords were to be indulgent about collecting rents and also provide benefits such as seed, tools, housing, and amenities during the first years of establishing a farm. European immigrants, at least, regarded New York as an attractive place to settle because of the competing offers of the various landlords. Thus, capitalistic rivalry in developing estates and plantations, not the conditions of the medieval manor, spurred settlement in New York.
The great patrician families of Albany had extensive country houses that were not centers of leisure or academic gardening but rather engines for the settlement of the hinterland. The houses, in fact, were centers of plantations and seats of enterprise that required considerable management. Country houses were built to provide the city with dairy and foodstuffs and to support the wheat or lumber trade down the Hudson to New York City. The urban commercial interests of Albany were driven by their ability to settle and develop the countryside around their houses.
THE VAN RENSSELAER FAMILY AND THE MANOR
The Van Rensselaer family had inherited the largest manorial grant in New York colony, which came to be the Manor of Rensselaerswyck. Rensselaerswyck dated from a seventeenth-century Dutch grant that was confirmed by English authorities like the Duke of York in 1678 and Governor Thomas Dongan seven years later. The boundaries comprised most of present-day Albany and Rensselaer Counties, as well as large tracts around Claverack in Columbia County. The manor's vast acreage actually surrounded the city of Albany, which made developing land immediately beyond the city difficult, because of the manorial obligations.
The manor founder, Killian Van Rensselaer, was born in 1663 and brought up in Albany. He had political influence because he represented the manor, which had its own seat in the New York Assembly, and he was a member of the Governor's Council and a commissioner of Indian affairs. But despite his advantages, he was never an entrepreneur but rather a landed squire, who preferred to rest on his political laurels. Before his death in 1718, he did take the honorary title of "patroon" or fatherly landlord, which would continue in the family into the nineteenth century.
Not all the branches of the Van Rensselaer family were rich like the patroon. Killian's younger brother, Henry, had modest manorial property on the east side of the Hudson and to the south, at Claverack. Yet, until his death in 1740, he scarcely visited his Claverack holdings. Like his brother, he preferred to be a gentleman, living alternatively in his Greenbush country home, Crailo, and a townhouse in Albany. Henry's youngest son, Killian, was born in 1717 and inherited an even more modest estate in Greenbush, across from Albany on the east side of the river. He could not provide much of an inheritance for the next generation, but he could use the illustrious family name to find wealthy husbands for his daughters: William Ludlow, of a New York City merchant house; Abraham Lansing, of a rising Albany shipping family; and Leonard Gansevoort, of one of Albany's patrician families. Killian's sons were also urged to marry women with wealth: Killian, Jr., married his cousin Margaret, who was an heir of Scotia's Sanders family and Philip took as his wife Maria, the daughter of merchant Robert Sanders of Albany. Through intermarriage with Albany patricians and their connections, the Van Rensselaers formed alliances that perpetuated their influence in Albany as well as the city's expansive hinterland. Killian's sons would also make names for themselves as rebel officers in the War of Independence.
In 1714, after eighty years of existence, Rensselaerswyck had only 82 tenants. Subsequently, however, the manor grew moderately, and with the end of the Seven Years' War it boomed, reaching about 1,000 tenants by 1779. The first major influx of German Protestant refugees, the Palatines, dated from 1710, when 2,500 arrived in New York City, after a perilous voyage in which many perished. Initially most were settled on Livingston Manor, where they were engaged in the production of naval stores, especially pitch. At first they lived in camps, not really prospering until the 1730s, when they left the Livingstons and dispersed, some going to the Schoharie and Mohawk Valleys, while others moved north into Rensselaerswyck's east manor.
A decade later, additional German immigrants came and named their east manor hamlet Brunswick, after Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, who commanded British troops in the Seven Years' War. It is likely that some of the Germans were veterans of Brunswick's command. By 1757 these immigrants had erected a log structure, which became the first Gilead Lutheran Church. At the same time, Germans settled as tenants within the jurisdiction of Rensselaerswyck on the west side of the Hudson River in the Coeymans Patent. This was the case of the farming and slave-holding family of Johannes Waltermyer, who spoke German and would become a legendary Loyalist in the War of Independence.
As noted, the Van Rensselaers were not interested in the detailed management of their manors. To overcome this deficiency in the 1760s and 1770s, Abraham Ten Broeck was brought in, to become the most industrious and well-connected figure in the management of their manors. Related to both the Van Rensselaers and Livingstons, he was a political leader of the Albany patricians. Born in 1734, as a youth Ten Broeck was sent to New York City to work in the counting house of his brother-in-law, Philip Livingston. The Livingstons, lords of the Hudson Valley manor south of Rensselaerswyck, were already related to important families like the Schuylers. When Abraham's father, Dirck Ten Broeck, died, seventeen-year-old Abraham was sent to Europe to learn international trade and gain polish. After a year he returned to Albany, residing with his widowed mother, Margarita, in the family homestead.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from No Turning Point by Theodore Corbett. Copyright © 2012 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface and Acknowledgments,
Prologue,
I. Setting the Scene,
1. Settlement in the Hudson-Champlain Valley,
2. Settlement of the Grants: A Cause of Discord with New York,
II. Civil Conflict in the Making,
3. New Alliances as the War of Independence Begins,
4. Guy Carleton and the Rebel Retreat from Canada,
5. Promoting Loyalism among Native Americans,
III. The Saratoga Campaign,
6. British Success: Ticonderoga, Hubbardton, Skenesborough, Fort Ann,
7. Degrees of Loyalism,
8. In Vermont, Taking an Oath of Allegiance to the King,
9. Seeking Native American Support,
10. Foray to the Walloomsac,
IV. The Battles of Saratoga,
11. Burgoyne Outnumbered,
12: To Retreat, Escape, or Surrender,
V. After Saratoga,
13. Intensifying Civil Conflict,
14. The Loyalist Diaspora,
15. Haldimand's Forays,
16. Discord among the Rebels: The Need for Protection in Eastern New York,
17. Haldimand and the Arlington Junta,
VI. Enjoying the Peace,
18. Haldimand Forges a New Canada,
19. Debtor Upheavals: A Challenge of the Postwar Era,
Affirmations,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,